Barefoot Bay: Wild on the Rocks (Kindle Worlds)

by Kiersten Hallie Krum

  “This conversation is a massive turn on.”

  “Is it?”

  “Not really.”

  The hand on her ass slipped upward to toy with the tie beneath her shoulders. “The sexy answer is that many of the original boat builders named their seafaring modes of transport after goddesses to curry favor and good fortune for their journeys.”

  “I like answer two better.”

  “Thought you would.”

  “Though, nothing against your thorough education, but Wikipedia probably could’ve told me that much.”

  “Now you’re being nasty.”

  He’d freed the knot at her back and his fingers snaked up toward the tie at her neck when she stopped him.

  “Jasper,” she warned, even as she arched her neck to give him better access when his mouth changed direction and trailed up to the nape of her neck. “I am not about to be your bare-breasted masthead.”

  “I’m gonna mount you, babe, not mount you to the bow.”

  His words sent a shiver to her hardened nipples. “Quit trying to charm me. There are far too many boats out here with far too many eager cell phone cameras. I don’t give free shows.”

  “You don’t give any shows unless they’re for me,” he retorted, but his greedy fingers halted in their quest. “But I get your point.”

  She rewarded him with her mouth and added her tongue as a bonus. “Better cool off, sailor,” she teased against his lips as he tied her straps back up. “Your masthead is getting hungry.”

  “Not as much as me,” he countered and despite the thrill that raced through her mound at that promise, she shoved him off her.

  He stood, unruffled by his prominent erection—though at the sight of it pressing against his UDTs, Quinn rapidly reevaluated her desire for privacy—put one foot on the lip next to Quinn’s head, and launched himself from the boat in a smooth, perfect arch of a dive.

  “Lord, love a duck,” Quinn breathed, watching him cut through the seawater with sharp strokes that within minutes, put him a good distance from the boat.

  An hour later—after Jasper hauled himself back onto the boat so that water sluiced off his body as though he were modeling for a calendar, and it was so hot, Quinn was stunned into complacency until he shook like a dog and splattered it all over her—they reached Pleasure Pointe.

  Quinn slid off the side of the boat into water that reached the top of her chest, but managed to keep head, hat, and beach bag high enough aloft to stay dry. “Should’ve had them attach the dingy,” Jasper muttered, watching her from the boat until she reached shore, at which point he motored back out before dropping anchor and swimming back picnic hamper attached to his wrist in a bag made of waterproof fabric or so Jasper had informed her when she—again—objected to eating wet food.

  Pleasure Pointe wasn’t entirely empty, but there were notably fewer people making use of the small, rocky cove than there had been at Barefoot Bay. Once Jasper had toweled off and, thanks to the cooling air, pulled on a long-sleeved, white shirt that clung to all his arm and chest muscles in a way that made Quinn’s mouth go dry, he led her down the beach to a rocky outcrop, splashing through a tidal pool to get around it and into a pocket of beach out of sight from other beachgoers.

  “From the name, I half expected to find Pleasure Pointe was a nude beach,” Quinn admitted when Jasper stopped next to a large, oblong rock that came up mid-thigh on him and nearly to Quinn’s waist. Without delay, he hoisted her up onto the rock, snatched her hat and bag from her hand and dropped it next to the hamper and waterproof bag he’d stored out of their way on the sand.

  “Wha—” Quinn barely managed before his mouth was on hers.

  “Christ, I thought we’d never get here.”

  “You knew about this cove?”

  “Blind luck,” he admitted. “Making it work for me.”

  It took him less than a minute to get her bikini untied again. He had her nipple in his mouth and his hand down the front of her briefs in the next one. Her hands streaked under his shirt and over the taut muscles of his back and shoulders. He took one hand from her to reach back and yank the shirt up and over his head before he was right back at her breast.

  Quinn arched back on the rock, her legs rising up to hang of the tops of his thighs as he eased a finger inside her and toyed with her clit. “That’s it, baby,” he encouraged her. “Lie back and take me.”

  He spent minimal time on foreplay, but Quinn was already almost too eager for him. She watched through heavy-lidded eyes as he shoved his UDTs to his ankles, exposing his impressive erection to the sea air, stripped off her briefs, and took himself in hand until he caught in her notch and thrust inside.

  And then he stopped.

  “Jasper?” Quinn called.

  “Right here.” His big hands slid under her bum, lifting her farther up onto the slab until he could plant a knee and climb on top of her. Her hands found his ass and felt it flex as he thrust deep again and then, again, stopped.

  She opened her eyes to find his waiting for her. He covered the length of her, the hair on his chest rasping her erect nipples until shivers prickled over her skin. The soles of her feet found the backs of his calves, and she braced them there so she could push up and meet his next thrust, but it never came. Instead, his eyes glowed in the few streams of sunlight that conquered the rocky outcropping to light the cove. “Last night, you said you loved me.”

  Quinn’s heart stuttered and then sped on in so fierce a rhythm, she wondered it didn’t burst. “You said it first.” He didn’t reply but for once, she thought she understood what he was waiting for her to say—what he needed her to say.

  She stroked his face almost reverently. “In my life, no one has ever loved me. My parents sure didn’t. If you love her, you don’t offer your daughter to a pedophile with a God complex. I thought a life without love would be my path, and that was okay by me. Until I met you.” She pushed his drying hair back so she could see clearly the sharp bones of his face, as though, knowing how strong Jasper would need to be in life, God had carved his features from granite. “I knew, Jasper. The moment I saw you, I knew you were it for me. And nothing that’s happened since has changed that.”

  Her smile felt a little sad as she admitted, “I can’t unlove you, honey. Believe me, this last year apart from you would’ve gone a helluva lot easier if I could. But I’m not wired that way. I haven’t known enough love in my life to…discard it—discard you—so blithely. Maybe I fell for you too fast, and maybe it was too wild to hold tight when it got tough. But I didn’t fall for you on a whim. I did it forever. I meant us to be forever.”

  He crushed her to him, yanking her up from the slab in an arch that spread her hair out behind her so that it hung off the far edge, dipping the ends in water that crashed against their rock. His hands found hers; interlocked, he laid them on the rock beside her head and powered into her with rapid moves. To the outside eye, it might look at though she was being thoroughly fucked, but Quinn knew it was much more than that. She felt every inch of Jasper against her as he made love to her, skin and hair, muscle and tendon, strength and vulnerability, courage and compassion—all the complex wonder and endless astonishment that made up all that was amazingly Jasper.

  All that made him hers.

  The pleasure built in her, crashing through her limbs and boiling her blood. She hung onto him, arms strangling his neck, the scent of salt and sea and man in her nose where it burrowed in his hair. He chanted her name, shoving his hand between them to get her off so that, for the first time, they plunged into bliss together.

  * * *

  She shifted beneath him and winced. “I’m going to feel this for days.”

  “Should’ve laid a towel down for you.” He muttered the words into her breast, too spent to lift his head from when it’d dropped after he’d finished coming.

  “I think I can forgive you for being so keen to make love to me, you forgot about creature comforts. But, next time, I get the top.”
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  He made himself rouse enough to raise his head and meet her eyes. “You knew?”

  “That we were making love?” He nodded. “Jasper, sometimes, for all your lovely brawn and considerable brains, you can be an adorable dumbass. Yes, I knew,” she said with a sweet smile. “You’re not as impenetrable as you think.”

  He brought their mouths together and decided to ignore the dumbass comment. “I penetrated you.”

  “Yes, baby, your massive battering ram successfully breeched the castle gates.” She bit his bottom lip until he opened for her tongue. “Huzzah.”

  “Hoorah,” he corrected.

  She chuckled mid-kiss, and he decided then and there that he would spend the rest of his life making sure she had a reason to do that every day.

  He was gearing up for another go at her castle gates when the cell phone he’d stashed in the picnic hamper interrupted his plans.

  “You are fucking kidding me,” he growled.

  “I thought Luke cut you loose.”

  “He did. Which means this has to be Twist.” He glared at the hamper, then dropped his shoulders to meet Quinn’s eyes. “He wouldn’t call for no reason.”

  “Answer it.”

  He slipped from her with a groan of regret and hopped off the rock slab to dig out the phone. When he lifted his head, she was tugging on the long-sleeved, white shirt he’d thrown aside in his impatience to get naked and inside her. Big enough on her that the collar slid off one bare shoulder, it was soaked to near transparency by sea water. He took one look at her breasts outlined in his wet shirt and threw the phone back on top of the hamper.

  Stepping into the shallow water behind the rock, he slipped an arm under her knees, spreading his hand wide over the cool flesh of her thigh. His other hand braced on the slab behind her back so he could bend over her shoulder and cradle Quinn close to his heart.

  His woman.

  One of her lithe arms, toned by years of slinging bottles, curled up until those long fingers gripped the back of his neck. “Jasper,” she said, so sweetly, his heart convulsed. In his life, no one else said his name like that, almost reverent with wonder. Her sibilant words teased his upper cheek as his face dipped, eyes fixed on her hard nipples rising up against the wet, white cotton of his shirt.

  His voice was rough when he told her, “I thought becoming a SEAL would be the best thing to happen in my life. And then I met you.” He tasted her skin at the edge of his shirt’s collar, salt and sea and Quinn. “Nothing in the world holds a candle to you.”

  She shivered in his arms and crooned nonsense against jaw, but her nails dug into the back of his neck, holding strong.

  They didn’t kiss or make love again. Jasper merely held her and it was everything. Water broke up and over the rock beneath them as the tide began to roll in, but he was too completely absorbed in Quinn to notice anything else in this pocket of paradise that was them, together.

  Finally.

  The cell phone rang again, pulling them out of their reverie. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “You better get that,” she suggested quietly, and he hated it, but he knew she was right. Though Jasper couldn’t think of anything in Barefuck Bay that’d be this urgent, Twist wouldn’t be so persistent if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  The call had gone to voice mail by the time he reluctantly released Quinn and retrieved the phone. He didn’t bother listening to the message and instead pushed the button that dialed Twist’s number.

  “Queen, thank God. I was about to steal a boat and come get you.”

  “Sit rep,” Jasper barked. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Quinn jerked upright and start scrambling for her clothes.

  Good call.

  “You gotta get back to Casa Blanca triple time. I’m sorry, brother. I know you’re with Quinn. I wouldn’t do this if there wasn’t extreme shit in the making. You gotta get your ass back to McBain’s office right away.”

  Quinn tossed Jasper his UDTs in an underhand throw. He stepped in and pulled them up while he told Twist, “Gotta take Quinn to her apartment first once we dock. I’ll be in right after.”

  “You’re not getting me, brother. McBain needs to see both of you. Immediately.”

  His eyes shot to Quinn. She froze under his glare and took a step back to brace against the rock as her lips formed the words, Oh shit.

  “We get the wind, we’ll be there in twenty. If I have to motor, it’ll take longer. What can you give me?”

  “Tangos inbound. Quinn’s the target. Shit’s hitting the fan.”

  Jasper flung the phone into the slab, its pieces shattering over the area where minutes earlier, he’d made love to Quinn.

  “What’s happened?” she asked in a small voice that said she knew she was poking the bear.

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her behind him back to the main beach. “You tell me.”

  “Jasper, you’re scaring me.”

  He skidded to a stop in the surf so she collided into his back, splashing salt water over them both, not that he gave a shit. “Wanna tell me why Twist just told me there are tangos in route who are looking for you?”

  “Tangos?”

  “Terrorists. Bad guys, Quinn. Very bad guys.”

  “Oh,” she murmured.

  “Oh? I tell you terrorists are after you and all you can say is fucking ‘oh’?”

  “They’re not so much terrorists as—um—Russian mafia?”

  He took half a step forward and yelled “You are fucking kidding me!”

  “I was going to tell you, Jasp. Today.”

  “What the hell did you do? No, fuck that, there’s no time.” He shoved her bag and hat plus his shirt into the waterproof bag with the hamper and clipped the cuff to his ankle. “Listen to me carefully. We’re going to quickly wade out into hip-deep water. My hips, not yours. Then you’re going to climb on my back and put your arms around my chest under my armpits. Hold the wrist of your left hand with your right. Don’t put them around my neck or you’ll strangle me, and we’ll both drown.”

  “I may not have seen the ocean until I was twenty-one, but we had a lake on the commune. I knew how to swim before I was six.”

  “Even with deadweight on my back, I’ll be faster than you on your own, and we don’t have the time for me to fuckin’ wait for you again.” Her eyes flared at this reminder, but Jasper was beyond caring. Fucking Russian mobsters were after his woman.

  Jesus, only his Quinn.

  “Okay, Jasp,” she agreed when he expected her to fight for her corner. Without another protest, she waded into the water, following his instructions exactly so that he was helping her climb back into the boat in under ten minutes. She dug her cover-up out of the bag as he motored them out of the harbor. He gave her the rudder while he set the sail and hoisted the jib once he determined they had the wind.

  He’d stretched out their inbound trip, but the actual distance between Pleasure Pointe and the Mimosa Harbor was less than six miles as the crow flies. Jasper radioed ahead so the manager met them at the dock with a couple of boys to put the boat to bed. Once they were secure, Jasper shoved some bills in the manager’s hand, grabbed Quinn’s upper arm, and tugged her along to the resort car he’d borrowed.

  Beyond directing her to move when and how he needed, Jasper didn’t speak a word to Quinn from the moment they left the beach. He only had ugly things to say and strangely wasn’t eager to go back to ladling them out after how far they’d come in two short days. Not as far as he’d thought if she was still hiding some fucking significant shit from him.

  They pulled up to the resort and Jasper barely missed buzzing a middle-aged man in a golf shirt and khakis heading toward the main doors, towing a small, designer golf bag. He slammed the sedan into park and transferred Quinn to a golf cart for the short drive out to the pair of staff bungalows in which McBain had set up his on-campus headquarters.

  Twist checked his diver’s watch when they burst into the bungalow that housed McBain’s private office an
d a conference room/communication hub. “Twenty minutes on the dot. Good to see you’re not slacking.”

  Jasper led Quinn to a nearby leather office chair, but didn’t wait for her to sit before he barked, “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Take a breath, McQueen,” McBain ordered. “We’ll brief you, but you won’t get dick till I’m sure you got a handle on it.”

  Jasper’s chest heaved like a bellows cramp as he paced around the office and fought for control. All his training, all his experience, and a hint of Quinn in danger blew it all to hell.

  “Jasper,” she called softly. She’d risen from the chair. He felt her cautious approach and could guess what it cost her given how he’d manhandled her since Twist’s call. Her hand touched his back lightly, and it was only then Jasper realized he still wore his UDTs and only his UDTs.

  Twist being Twist had already come to correct if uncomfortable conclusions. Clearly at home in McBain’s space, he opened a metal cabinet that stretched from floor to ceiling and tossed over khaki slacks and a white t-shirt. Jasper pulled the shirt over his head, but left the slacks for when he could strip off his wet trunks. He caught the second shirt Twist tossed at him, this one black.

  Turning to Quinn, he took a deep breath, grabbed the reins of his temper in a shaky grip, and tugged her close enough to wrap his girl up in warm, dry cotton.

  “You got a rockin’ bod, babe,” he said, tugging the black shirt past her hips. “But the guys have seen more than enough for my sanity.”

  Relief flashed across her face before she dropped her head to his chest. He was warm and strong and given the option, she’d stay right there till Judgment Day. And if she didn’t, then it’d better be because of something a lot worse than mob hit men or she’d be pissed.

  His arms met at her back. “Hold on, sweetheart,” he whispered into her hair, tucking her close beneath his chin. Jasper’s deep voice coasted over her ear and took root deep in her chest, dropkicking the fear that’d been her constant companion for nearly a week.

  “You got him?” he heard McBain ask.

  “I got him,” Twist acknowledged. “But I think he’s good now.”