Hell or High Water

by Julie Ann Walker

  As a result, her body was instantly humming. The passion running through her veins, the liquid heat tightening her womb, telling her she wouldn’t last long under his oral assault. And, oh, the sweet, welcome agony of it!

  “Yesssss,” she hissed, burying her fingers in the coolness of his shaggy hair and looking down to see his lips on her, see her leg over his shoulder obscuring part of the tattooed lettering that ran in an arc across his back from shoulder to shoulder. Not All Treasure Is Silver and Gold.

  And ain’t that the truth. Right now, her treasure was the man loving her so well, with so much dedication and passion.

  “You taste amazin’,” he growled. Then he proved he wasn’t lying by vigorously feasting on her like a condemned man devouring his last meal. Her breasts felt heavy, hot. Their tips ached with arousal and thrummed with the pleasure his mouth and teeth and tongue had forced on them. Her clitoris began to buzz, sending tendrils of sensation radiating outward toward her extremities. She would swear she could feel the pleasure throbbing in her toes, her fingertips. The hot coil of delectation wound tighter and tighter. Almost there. Almost there. In fact, if he would just—

  It was like he was reading her mind, because he inserted one long finger inside her. It was nearly enough. She clenched her inner muscles around him and his groan of approval resonated through her. “Leo…” She moaned his name again when he inserted a second digit. He pumped into her once. Twice. Seating himself to the last knuckle each time. His fingers curled slightly in a come-hither motion, and the rough pads of his fingertips caressed her in just. The. Right. Spot.

  She fisted her fingers in his hair, anchoring herself to him as she rode his hand and mouth, as she was flung over the edge and into the dark chasm of physical release. A kaleidoscope of colors exploded behind her lids. Waves upon waves of pleasure rushed over her, through her, until she was reduced to nothing but a mass of pulsing delight.

  She whispered something—his name, maybe?—over and over again, her head limp on her neck, her hands falling listlessly to her sides. He kissed the inside of her quivering thigh before gently lowering her leg and standing. It was a good thing the cabinet was at her back, supporting her, because she was completely boneless. Nothing but a soft, gooey thing in the aftermath of his lovemaking.

  He kissed her exposed throat, sucking on her hammering pulse-point, growling at the feel of her racing heart against his tongue. She didn’t open her eyes. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to see anything even if she did. Cloudbursts of colors were still painting themselves on the backs of her lids.

  She licked her lips, smiling. Languid with release, yet yearning for more. “Your turn,” she promised, panting. “Just as soon as I catch my breath.”

  His deep chuckle rumbled through her chest, knocking against her heart. “You are,” he told her, sucking her earlobe into the wet, hot wonder of his mouth and keeping her blood running wild, “hands down, the sexiest woman on the planet. And I intend to—”

  Whatever he intended to do or say was cut off when a series of pounding steps echoed from the stairs leading down from the living quarters. “Sorry to interrupt! Again!” Bran’s deep voice rolled into the galley.

  Leo growled. A sound of murderous frustration if ever there was one. “I’m seriously goin’ to kill him this time.”

  Olivia opened her eyes to find color riding high on his cheekbones. His eyes were dark with unfulfilled passion. Oh, how she wanted to fulfill that passion, feel him pulse deep inside her, see his jaw clench and his eyes sparkle as he found his own release. “I’ll help,” she groused as she pulled up her bra, yanked down her tank top, and bent to retrieve her panties and shorts.

  Holy shit, I’m dizzy. All the blood in her body was still circulating around her happy bits. She had to blink and shake her head, trying to jog her brain and body out of let’s-get-it-on mode and back into business mode. Easier said than done. Especially with Leo standing so close. The length of his hard-on was a massive wedge beneath his wet suit.

  “Give us a second, will you?” Leo called, turning to make sure she was decent. When her fingers fumbled on the button of her shorts, he gently brushed them away, doing up the fastening himself. A small smile played around the edges of his mouth. That brilliant, brilliant mouth.

  “You’re pretty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He lifted a brow. “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Sh’yeaaah.”

  Now he was grinning in earnest. Men. They give a woman an orgasm, and it’s like they think they split the atom.

  “Admit the thundering herd,” he called toward the door after she’d smoothed her hair as best she could. There was no hope for the beard burn she knew pinkened her cheeks, or the flush of the skin over her chest that was the telltale sign of her recent orgasm. She’d been caught getting busy with Leo. Yet again. His men must think her the easiest woman on the planet. And the truth? When it came to Leo, she absolutely was.

  “We found it,” Bran said from the doorway, taking in the scene with a leering smirk. “The tangos’ sunken vessel. We’ve dropped anchor and a location buoy.”

  Leo sighed heavily and turned toward her. She wasn’t prepared for the hand he wrapped around the back of her neck. Neither was she prepared for the deep, wet kiss he pressed on her mouth. Instantly her knees were weak…uh…weaker, her womb humming, her head spinning. Then he broke the seal of their lips and leaned his forehead against hers. “To be continued?” he asked, his words as slow and sweet as molasses.

  “You bet your ass,” she told him, smiling.

  “We do seem to have the same conversations over and over again, don’t we?” The question was purely rhetorical, because he released her to turn back to the two men standing by the door. And talk about a couple of voyeurs.

  “Am I the only one who needs a cigarette after that?” Bran mock-whispered to Wolf.

  “It’s almost better than late-night Cinemax.” Wolf chuckled.

  Because she was a firm believer in the If you can’t beat them, join them philosophy, and also because she couldn’t allow them to know she was even the teensiest bit flustered, she called to Bran, “You have the worst timing, you know that? I mean, jeez, cliterference much?”

  “Huh?” Bran asked. “What the heck is cliterference?”

  Olivia grinned and winked at the men in the room. “It’s the female version of cock-blocking. You know, cliterference? Damnit, Bran. It loses its oomph when I have to explain it.”

  Leo threw back his head and laughed. It was a good laugh. Deep and rolling. The kind that made you smile when you heard it. The kind that boomed around the room and inside her heart.

  Chapter Fifteen

  4:31 p.m.…

  The instant Leo’s fins touched the sandy bottom of the Florida Straits, he checked his diver’s watch, then the dive computer beside it. The glowing readout said he was at a depth of 198 feet. Deep. But he’d been deeper. Numerous times. Of course, he’d always had a team of well-trained men swimming beside him.

  He noticed the comfort he usually experienced when wrapped in the arms of Mother Ocean was strangely absent, the sense of solace oddly missing. In fact, as he switched on his headlamp, illuminating the dim water around him, he realized all he felt was…alone. Not scared or panicky, simply…separate.

  Or maybe that’s the gases messin’ with my head. Was he a little dizzy? He checked his mixture, adjusted it a bit, tapped the gauges on his tanks to make sure they were reading correctly, and concentrated on his breathing. The gentle sssskkkk, sssskkkk of his regulator joined the chorus of bubbles that burbled happily as they traveled toward the surface. The water here wasn’t cold…more like cool. A pool on the first day of summer. Still, he was glad for the protection of Maddy’s brother’s wet suit. The exposed skin on his hands and face grew chilled.

  After a bit, he felt more clear-headed, though a twinge of loneliness remained. He supposed that was natural. He was alone. No other human being anywhere aroun
d. In fact, he might as well be on another planet.

  Havin’ yourself a bit of a “Ground control to Major Tom” moment, are you?

  He shook his head at his own whimsy, then lifted his chin, his gaze following the beam of his headlamp as it traveled up the line of the nylon rope that attached him to Wolf and Wolf to the positional buoy they’d launched. He couldn’t see his friend hanging out at the halfway point. The water was too murky at this depth. The minimal sunlight that managed to filter in from above was barely enough for him to see five yards in either direction.

  He jerked on the rope twice. The signal he’d arrived safely on the bottom. Waiting, he counted off the seconds. One. Two. Three. F— A double bump on the loop of rope attached to his weight belt told him Wolf had received his message and was standing by. Good. Even though Wolf was thirty feet above the cutoff point where it was safe to breathe regular oxygen, it was still possible to suffer nitrogen narcosis—what divers referred to as “rapture of the deep.” It made you feel stoned, impairing your reactions and decision-making abilities. But Wolf’s quick response told him the man was A-okay, good to go.

  Leo puffed out a breath of relief, bubbles emerging from his regulator to trickle over his cheeks and into his hair. He detached the handheld flashlight from his gear belt and flipped on the switch. A thick beam of light blazed through the water, cutting through the gloom like a shooting star through the night sky.

  There. Ten yards away. The rusting hull of the tangos’ sunken boat—it looked like an old recreational trawler—rose like a phantom from the ocean floor. An intruder in this alien world. He swam in its direction, managing his breathing and carefully reeling out the loop of rope attaching him to Wolf as he went.

  The trawler had landed right-side up. A blessing. Because Olivia suspected the only reason the tangos hadn’t been able to get to the capsules before the vessel had sunk was because they’d stored them in the cabin or the engine compartment. And he hadn’t welcomed the thought of having to wiggle his way between the boat and the sand in an effort to access the entrance to either room.

  Olivia… He would swear he could still taste her on his tongue, that salty mix of woman and passion. And the way she smelled…musky and sweet, all health and life and sexual heat. She’d been so wet for him, so swollen for him, so unbelievably soft… And yet, not. The strength of her inner muscles clamping down on his fingers when she’d climaxed had surprised him, left him breathless, anxious to feel those same muscles squeezing the head of his dick when he—

  Oh great. Now I’m hard. In a wet suit. Nearly two hundred feet beneath the surface. In search of three capsules of deadly chemical weapons.

  He blew out a breath of self-disgust and adjusted his goggles. It occurred to him as he hovered above the trawler’s deck that being in love with a spy came with more than its fair share of complications. She was going to disappear on him for weeks, sometimes months, on end. She would keep secrets, tell lies by omission. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to. It was going to be hard. He knew it would be hard. But if there was any man on the planet who would understand, who wouldn’t push for answers, Lord knew it was him. He’d been there. Done that. And he had a Navy SEAL Budweiser pin to prove it.

  Of course, now he just had to convince her to give him, give them a shot. Her body was already his for the taking. There was no mistaking the way she responded to him, with such unabashed longing and desire. The question was how to make her head and heart follow suit. But he suspected he knew where to start.

  He was grinning around his regulator when he pushed open the warped wooden door to the trawler’s main cabin. A plastic cup floated slowly past him, followed by a bright-orange life ring, trailed by a few other pieces of buoyant whatnot. He waited until the debris cleared and then ducked through the door, careful to keep his tanks and hoses from hitting the frame.

  Panning his flashlight around the interior, he looked for the stainless-steel case Olivia had described. About the size of two briefcases stacked atop one another. But there was nothing on the console. Nothing sitting on the floor. Letting out more rope, he swam farther into the cabin. His grin disappeared when he saw the body.

  In the far left corner, beneath a table surrounded on three sides by a cushion-less booth, protruded a pair of hairy legs. The skin over the limbs looked gray and waterlogged. Crabs had already begun to feast on the corpse, and they scuttled away from the beams of his headlamp and flashlight.

  Where there be drowned tangos, there be chemical weapons, he thought in his best pirate’s voice.

  And sure enough, when he swam over, he saw what he was looking for. The case was wedged beneath the table. He tried to pull the tango’s body out so he could get to it, but the corpse seemed to be stuck. He swept his flashlight over the drowned man, trying to figure out what was holding him there. Ah. The dead man’s belt loop was hooked on a rusty screw sticking out from one of the table legs.

  Quickly unhooking the material, Leo grabbed the tango’s waistband and yanked. The body floated from beneath the table, slowly drifting by him. He studiously ignored the gaping black holes that used to be the man’s eyes—the bottom-feeders always went after the most tender parts first—and gently hauled the steel container from its hiding place. He set it atop the table.

  And just to make sure… Because Olivia had insisted he do so.

  He flipped up the latches and lifted the lid. Inside, three canisters about the size of two-liter soda bottles were nestled in a bed of foam, all neatly in a row, all looking completely innocuous. Yet they were anything but…

  The hairs on his arms lifted, and since they were flattened inside his wet suit, the resulting sensation was that of a mass of millipedes crawling over his limbs. The sssskkkk, sssskkkk sound of his breathing increased, and pockets of bubbles gathered in a strange living glob against the ceiling of the cabin. He shuddered at the thought of what could have happened had the terrorists actually found a way to combine and aerosolize the stuff.

  Carefully closing the lid and securing the latches, he hauled the case from the cabin. He avoided the floating corpse and reeled up the rope attaching him to Wolf. Once he was clear of the boat, with his fins sunk deep into the silt and sand at the bottom of the Straits, he detached a set of bungee cords and carabiners from his gear belt.

  Tying the bungee cords around the case like the ribbons on a Christmas present, he secured the container to the rope with the carabiners. Then he attached two lift-bags to the bungee cords. It took less than ten seconds to inflate them using the compressed CO2 canister he pulled from his belt. And then the case with the chemicals was drifting up the rope, climbing toward Wolf and ultimately the buoy at the surface.

  Leo watched until it was out of sight. Then he dropped his weights, checked his dive computer, and inflated his high-capacity BC—buoyancy controller. The sound of the tube filling with air was a loud hissssss in the water around him. With a subtle kick of his fins, he was headed upward toward the light, toward the woman who turned him inside out and upside down. And around and around!

  All right, so he’d run the gamut from David Bowie to Diana Ross. The pressure and the isolation were obviously getting to him. Or maybe he was just going a little crazy because he’d been seconds away from sinking into Olivia’s wet heat when Bran had interrupted them. Again. The man was just itching for an ass-kicking, no doubt about it.

  However… Leo smiled around his regulator again when he realized there’d be no more interruptions. The radicals were dead. The chemicals were safe. There was nothing left to do but…Olivia.

  Anticipation burned through him as he made his first safety stop, allowing the gases in his tissues and blood to adjust to the lessening pressure. He pictured Olivia laid out on his queen-sized bed back on Wayfarer Island. Her black hair fanned over his pillow. Berry nipples pointing toward the ceiling. Smooth, tan thighs spread wide so that he could see her wet, pink center and—

  Oh, perfect. Now I’m hard again…

 
* * *

  4:43 p.m.…

  “She’s goin’ to wear a hole through the deck.”

  Bran pulled his gaze away from the deep-sea fishing boat passing about a mile and a half off their starboard side to glance over at Olivia. She was pacing back and forth across the yacht’s teakwood swim deck, chewing on her lip and wringing her hands. He’d never seen someone actually do that…wring their hands. Had sort of thought it was just a figure of speech. But Olivia looked close to snapping off a finger.

  He wasn’t in much better shape. His stomach was in knots while he waited for his friends to emerge from the drink, to pop up beside the bright-white positional buoy they’d launched next to the wreck. And, yo, Leo was the most experienced, most intuitive diver Bran had ever seen. Still…accidents happened in the deep. The pressure played havoc on equipment—breaking hoses, causing regulators to wig out, keeping buoyancy compensators from inflating. The list was endless. Not to mention what the inert gases inside a guy’s body could do to him if worse came to worst and proper safety stops couldn’t be observed during an ascent.

  “She’s worried about him,” he told Maddy Powers, who was leaning on the rail next to him. Worried and probably riddled with guilt too. And wasn’t that just peachy? There were too many goddamn recriminations floating around for his tastes, what with Olivia being beside herself because of the catastrophe that had become this pisser of a mission and Leo blaming himself for what the sinking of the Wayfarer meant to their futures. Shit. Bran really wanted a do-over. Where was good ol’ H. G. Wells’s time machine when he needed it?

  “And she should be,” he spat, his bad mood evident in his tone. “A deep dive isn’t a walk in the park, you know?”

  “I do know.” Maddy curled her lip, properly chastised.

  It wasn’t fair for him to vent his spleen on her. After all, she was just an innocent bystander who’d found herself caught up in a bad situation. Considering that, she was holding up remarkably well. No tears or theatrics, no demands to be told what was happening or threats to get a high-priced lawyer involved—though he figured her walls would probably come crumbling down later, after everything she’d experienced finally had a chance to sink in. But fair or not, he was in a bad mood. And some of that was due to her nearness. It made him itchy. Twitchy. Like his skin was too tight.