Bachelors In Love

by Jestine Spooner

  She nodded instantly. “And you’re mine.”

  He liked that. He liked it a lot. He thought of the way she’d taken him last night. How much she’d enjoyed it. Enjoyed him. He thought of how many women he hadn’t fit with. Who hadn’t been right for him. And then there was this one, this delicate, golden-voiced little creature who was just it. She was just it for him.

  “Show me,” he growled.

  She cocked her head to one side and he brushed by her, laid himself out on the bed for her. “Show me that I’m yours.”

  Her eyes lit, in just that way that he loved and she was instantly crawling over him. Marcus was on fire, every inch of his skin burned for her, his heart racing toward heaven. Her lips and tongue were dancing up his legs and he tensed, trying to rein himself in. When her mouth closed over him, when she took him inside in one of the most intimate ways, his vision just went black. He was reduced only to feeling as she destroyed him with her mouth.

  “Never like this,” he gasped out. “Never been like this.”

  Those words only served to make her double her efforts and soon Marcus was catapulting toward ecstasy much faster than he’d like. His last grasp at sanity had him planting his hands on her shoulders and dragging her up his body. She was grinning as he took the back of her head and slammed her mouth onto his. He kissed her like it was his last few moments on Earth. He knew he had a hundred things to tell her, that what they really needed was to sit down and tell each other exactly what they felt, exactly what they wanted. But he just couldn’t. Stop. Kissing her.

  What he didn’t know was how loud and clear his message was for her. That she almost wept with the emotions she felt from him in that kiss. Marcus, she had learned, could hold nothing back for her. He was a zero to sixty kind of guy. And now that they were touching one another like this, he was giving her everything.

  Iris smashed herself against his body and marveled at the sheer size of him, the pulse of his muscles, the warmth of his skin. She didn’t think she’d ever get enough.

  It was her that hitched her legs on either side of his hips. It was her that dragged herself along his length making both of them scream. It was her that reared back, digging her nails into his chest. But it was him that speared up and into her.

  And all Iris could do was show him, show him, show him. How she belonged to him and he belonged to her. At first they moved with a perfect, skilled synchronization, as if they were choreographed lovers. But that quickly gave way to the monstrous passion they had for one another. They sweat as she fell over him, her pace becoming loose and greedy. He held her like that for a while, on top but smashed against him, until he needed more leverage.

  Marcus sat straight up and they groaned as she seated herself on him. But even that wasn’t enough. His feet tangled in the sheets as he searched for purchase on the floor, and their only option was a controlled tumble to the floor. They landed with him over top of her, one of her legs thrown over his shoulder. He worked and worked himself against her as they scooted little by little across the floor. Mindful of her back against the carpet, Marcus rolled them, so that he was on his back again, but Iris was suddenly pulling away from him, and rearranging herself on all fours.

  Yes. Yes, please. Marcus was over her in a second. His palms planted themselves on either side of hers on the floor. He took her passionately. Tenderly, even considering the position. When he felt her lose herself to the pleasure, tightening and screaming beneath him, he couldn’t help but clamp his teeth onto her shoulder and hold on for dear life as he followed her over the edge.

  ***

  They woke up nine hours later, the sun just rising in their last day in paradise. They would fly home on the red eye that night. They were naked and tangled in the sheets. Marcus had had just enough energy to move them back off the floor and into the bed last night and then they’d both immediately passed out.

  He was grateful that the only thing they had on the schedule that day was more sitting by the pool, because he was still completely rocked from everything that had happened over the last few days.

  She stretched against him and he wondered if she knew she was humming to herself.

  “What’s that?” he asked, letting his hand trail and nestle into her warm places. “What you’re humming.”

  “Oh,” she blushed. “Just something new I’ve been thinking about.”

  “That song was about me, wasn’t it? The one you sang at the karaoke bar?”

  She blushed more. “Yes.”

  He grinned. “And the one that you’re humming. That’s about me too?”

  She buried her face into his shoulder. Even her ears were pink. “Yes.”

  “And all the ones you worked on at the beach house.”

  “Yes, already! They’re all about you!” she screamed, muffled, into his shoulder.

  He grinned even harder before letting out a long, low whistle. “Baby, you got it bad.”

  She scowled at him as she sat up, her hair falling over one eye. “You do too!” she insisted. “You’re the one who makes love to me like you’re going off to war tomorrow. You have it just as bad as I do.”

  “Yeah,” his eyes softened as he stroked her hair out of her face. “I do.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but just then, Iris moved and got a whiff of herself. “Oh my god,” she muttered. “I need a shower.” She was up and out of bed before Marcus could even think twice. He frowned. He was putting way too much thought into this. He just needed to say it. Say it and let her hear it and boom. Everybody could move on from there.

  He heard the shower start and realized that he couldn’t resist the thought of Iris all lathered up and slippery. He joined her there. And because of it, neither of them heard his cell phone ring.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The day was lazy and long and Marcus was glad for it. He figured that Iris deserved some relaxation out of doors before they returned to Ocean City and she got all cooped up in his apartment again. He dreaded returning to Maryland, where it seemed that all he could do was wait for something bad to happen.

  And honestly, he couldn’t un-see this version of Iris. All laid out on a lounge chair, tan and snoozing and laughing with the girls. He loved watching her having a good time. As he watched her stretch, pointing her toes one way and her hands another, a different vision flashed through his head, for just a second. Iris handcuffed to a chair, a black eye and a look on her face like she barely cared what happened to her.

  The thought of it made Marcus’s hand curl tight over the bottle of water he was drinking.

  All he had to do was make it through five more months of his six-month suspension. And then he’d have all of the FBI resources at his fingertips again. He’d be able to know, without a doubt, whether or not his girl was safe.

  His eyes dropped to his hands. And he’d know for certain, because he wouldn’t be out working cases anymore. He’d be riding a desk at the headquarters in Maryland. The thought was both heavy and uplifting at the same moment.

  It was a decision that he’d come to at some point in the middle of the night last night. He’d woken up, bleary and exhausted, sated from their lovemaking and all wrapped up in Iris. And he’d known. Just full on known in his heart that he couldn’t handle being away from her for weeks at a time. Couldn’t handle throwing himself headlong into danger knowing that she’d be worrying herself sick, home and alone. It had been hard enough to put Eli and Jay through all that. But his woman? No way. He couldn’t do it.

  It was his work. His life’s work, and Marcus loved it deeply. But it had also taken a chunk out of him. Worn him down. Put him through the paces and rubbed him raw. He was convinced that the intensity of his job was in large part due to why it had been so hard for him to connect with people aside from Eli and Jay. And he wasn’t going to risk his job making it harder to connect with Iris.

  He’d done his part. Been an active agent for ten years. He thought that he’d be able to find happiness as an investigator. Or
even as a handler. He’d be able to live in Ocean City full time. And he’d probably stop getting put on suspension every other year. He chuckled to himself. That’d be a bonus.

  Marcus looked up and his heart came to grinding halt when he realized that Iris wasn’t in the deck chair she’d been spread across. He rose to his feet instantly, striding over to where her drink still had beads of condensation racing down the side. His eyes scanned the pool deck but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Iris?” Marcus asked Mari and Tia who were laid out on the chairs beside hers.

  “Bathroom,” Mari answered absently as she flipped over, laid a hat over her face.

  Bathroom. Bathroom. Marcus scanned the pool area and his eyes landed on two little cabana-style bathroom stalls. Okay. Cool. She was just in there. Nothing to worry about.

  But even so, the hairs on the back of his neck were rising. Something was setting off his spidey senses and he had absolutely no idea what it was. The pool area butted up between the hotel and the ocean. The resort was lined on one side by another resort and on the other side by a tall, picket-like fence that kept out the steamy, curling jungle. Marcus’s eyes automatically went up to all the hotel windows winking down at them in the bright sunlight, but there was nothing to see there.

  He scanned the pool deck again and saw nothing out of place. Eli and Jay were climbing up the craggy rock waterfall in the pool, preparing to cannonball off. Ryan and Kat were sitting in the shade under an umbrella, splitting a sandwich. The rest of the pool was sparsely populated, but Marcus, with his agent’s eye, recognized all of the people that he did see. He knew some of them to be fellow resort patrons and a few of them to be part of the staff. No one out of place and no one he didn’t recognize.

  Except. One man with unkempt blonde hair and smudges of blue under his eyes. He was standing across the pool and gazing in the direction of the cabana bathrooms. The hairs on Marcus’s arms rose up. The man looked oddly familiar but Marcus couldn’t place him. He had taken two steps toward the man when the door of the bathroom swung open and Iris stepped out. Holding one hand with the other and frowning down.

  Was that? Yes. There was red on her hand. Marcus hopped a deck chair, skirted a group of older women and was at Iris’s side before she could even look up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She glanced up at his voice. “I got a hell of a splinter on this damn cabana thingy.” She presented her hand to him and Marcus winced at the sheer size of the thing. He led her to the bar area of the pool deck and asked for a first aid kit.

  By the time he’d gotten her all patched up, the man he’d seen was gone from the pool area. His senses were still tingling and Marcus had the insane urge to pack her up and go wait at the airport. But that was ridiculous. The sun was out and shining, the pool was a tempting cobalt blue and they had ten hours until they had to be at the airport. He refused to make her life any more mundane than it had to be. He was all hopped up because he had things to tell her about the way he felt and he hadn’t done it yet. That’s what this all was about.

  Jay’s words echoed in Marcus’s head. Tell her everything.

  “Baby,” he murmured a few minutes later as they swirled their feet in the pool.

  “Yeah?”

  “Stay close to me today, okay?”

  “Sure.” She squinted at him. A question in her eyes.

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a funny feeling is all. I just want to make sure we get home safe.”

  She nodded and her eyes landed on something behind him. She squinted for a second and then her eyes widened. Iris pulled herself up from the edge of the pool and started walking away from him.

  “Oh my god,” she muttered. “Marcus, come here.”

  “What is it?” He jogged along behind her, shouldering in front of her as he scanned for whatever she was looking at. “Iris, wait.”

  “It’s—it’s my brother.” She took a step around him and dodged out of the pool area, straight to the fence along the edge of the resort. And sure enough, there was the unkempt blonde man, looking a lot worse for the wear.

  Marcus put the pieces together, although he wasn’t sure if he’d thought the man was familiar because he was famous or because he looked so much like Iris. Either way, Marcus gritted his teeth as Iris launched herself into her twin brother’s arms.

  “O!” She pulled back and squeezed his shoulders. “What the hell are you doing here? Oh god, O. You look terrible. Are you al—?”

  “Iris, you have to leave. I’m in the Bahamas with the Kutros family and they know you’re here.” His voice was deep and trembling with fear and emotion. He didn’t look like the fuck up that Marcus had started to think of him as. He looked like a man completely out of options. He looked like a man about to lose everything. But more than anything, he looked like a man who loved his sister. “They called me here yesterday morning. I didn’t know you were here. I thought you were safe in the states somewhere. I didn’t know that’s why they wanted to meet up here.”

  He took Iris by the shoulders and stared into her eyes, imploring her to hear him. To take him seriously. He looked desperate and terrified.

  “Owen, calm down. They don’t want me. I don’t know anything. The FBI declared me out of harm’s way. They don’t want me.”

  “Of course they want you, Iris!” His smudgy exhausted eyes bored into hers. “Over the last year, they’ve all but made their organization untraceable. They don’t work with outside people on anything. Except they made one mistake. Me. They pulled me in as a way of connecting with some unattainable contacts that they really wanted. And then once they had those contacts, decided that they didn’t need me anymore. I- I made some shit up to keep myself alive. Told them I hadn’t been working alone and that if I wound up dead or disappeared, then my partner would go to the feds with everything that I knew. They hacked into my call logs, my email, and the person they kept finding was—”

  “Me,” Iris whispered hollowly. “Owen, you dumbass. You complete and utter dumbass!”

  “I know,” he said vehemently. “There’s no excuse, Iris. I’ve been getting you into trouble since we were kids, but this time, I really didn’t think it would blow back on you. But here we are, and you and I are their last two loose ends and they’re coming for both of us at the same time. I just barely got away.”

  “How long until they’re here?” Marcus barked, instinctively shoving Iris behind him, and scanning the resort. He’d had enough of this family reunion and his senses were going haywire. They were close and he could feel it.

  Owen jumped and frowned at Marcus as if he’d just realized that he was even there. “Who are you?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “A federal agent.”

  Marcus and Iris spoke at the same time.

  “A federal agent.”

  “Her boyfriend.”

  Again, they spoke at the same time.

  “Both!” Marcus finally insisted. “Listen to me. I’ve been protecting Iris for damn near two months now and I need more information. You need to tell me everything you know and then we need to get her the fuck off this island.”

  He cuffed Owen around the shoulder and grabbed Iris by the hand. He needed them out of the open and fast. So he started to drag both of them right off the lawn. He also needed his gun and his phone. Both of which were in his backpack. He could see it poolside, not fifty feet away.

  “I don’t know much,” Owen insisted, gasping against Marcus’s damn near sleeper hold. “All I know is that they knew she was staying here. I just got away maybe half an hour ago. But listen. If you get her out of here, I’ll stay. I’ll be the diversion. They might not chase her if—”

  “No way!” Iris piped up from where she stumbled along behind Marcus. “I’m not leaving you here to be bait, O.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Marcus said, tugging her even faster along behind him. He scanned again and this time he saw, to his chagrin, Eli and Jay walking toward hi
m, concerned looks on their faces. Great. More people he loved in the line of fire.

  “No!” Iris said again, planting her feet and scowling at Marcus. He was forced to pause and look back at her. They were halfway to the pool area now. “I’m serious. I’m not leaving my twin brother to get murdered by the mob and if you make me, I swear to god I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I’d rather you hate me than be dead, Iris,” Marcus hissed.

  “Marcus?” Jay called as he and Eli trotted up. The two men surveyed the look on Marcus’s face. And the strung out blonde man he basically had in a choke hold.

  “What the hell is going on?” Eli asked.

  Marcus tore his gaze from Iris’s stubborn expression and turned to his two best friends. As he gazed at their familiar faces, he realized everything he stood to lose if he didn’t act fast. They were competent men, he reminded himself. And he couldn’t protect everyone. He needed to delegate. They all jogged together to Marcus’s backpack. Four sets of eyes widened as Marcus reached into his bag and tucked his gun into the back waistband of his shorts. Next he flipped out his phone.

  “Fuck,” he growled when he saw that he had eight missed calls from his handler. What the hell was wrong with him? Why the hell hadn’t he been more vigilant? He knew why. He’d been wrapped up in Iris.

  “We don’t have time,” Marcus said as much to himself as he did to his friends. He dialed his phone and held it to his ear while he organized his thoughts. “Look, Jay and Eli. I need you to get our people the fuck out of this resort. Fast. Like, grab your passports and go. Get to the airport and get on the first flight you can out of here. Anywhere but here. Do you understand?”

  Eli and Jay stared at him like he wasn’t speaking English.

  “Do you?” he barked and they both jumped. The phone in Marcus’s ear rang and rang.

  “What are you going to do?” Eli asked, an expression as stubborn as Iris’s lining his usually smiling face.