Christ, two minutes around her and already she was driving him mad.
And he didn’t need an audience for that madness.
“You’re not being paid to guard that bar stool,” Jasper pointedly reminded his friend.
“Jeez, bring a guy to paradise for a vacation, and all he wants to do is work.”
“Vacation starts after we’re done with this job. A job that has to pay for that vacation given we’re on enforced leave without pay.”
“You’re on what?!” Quinn said, pausing in her drink mixing to gape at him and Twist.
Jasper stifled a wince. Quinn had a rabid curiosity streak and tended to dig in exactly where he didn’t want her. “Leave it.”
“Whoops,” Twist taunted. “Cat’s outta the bag.”
“You can cut that shit out at any time.”
“It’s hardly top-secret intel. Unlike your marriage, apparently.”
Quinn grabbed a bottle of triple sec and shot him a look. “I know, right?!”
Jasper’s head tipped back so he investigated the ceiling. “And now you’re bonding. Spectacular.”
“Hey, pal, you’re the one who went to Vegas, married a superhot chick, and hid it from everyone you know, including me. Inquiring minds wanna know.”
“I wanna know.” Jasper heard the anonymous mutter in his ear piece and realized with embarrassed shock that he and Twist were still on coms. Christ, they were all a bunch of gossiping women.
He ripped the mechanism out of his ear and threw it across the room where it shattered a vase so violently, Twist jumped. “Maybe you could do me a solid and hold off until after I find out how the wife I haven’t seen or heard from since she ran out on me a year ago winds up in Barefuck Bay the exact day we do!”
That brought Quinn’s chin up. “Ex-wife,” she reminded him, unruffled by his uncharacteristic display of temper. “And you left me first.”
Jasper’s hands curled into fists. The gall of the woman! “I was on a mission,” he gritted out between clenched teeth, blood on a fast boil. “For my country.”
“Yeah, well, next time have the courtesy to let your wife know you’re leaving before you disappear for six weeks!”
He set his feet and crossed his arms and practically read her mind when she swept him up in a glance and smirked. The Patented Jasper McQueen Stubborn Stance. “Terrorists aren’t known for giving advanced notice, babe. We go where we’re commanded to go, and when the intel comes in or the embassy is attacked or the hostages are taken, we go fast. And it was eight weeks, which you would know if you had bothered to stick around!”
Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe I would have, sweetheart, if I hadn’t found out from some reluctant secretary at the yard when I called trying to find you that you didn’t even bother to tell the Navy you got married!”
Jasper’s retort was stymied by the beep of his watch alarm marking the hour. He hit the off button and ordered Twist, “Go relieve Rocco.”
“We don’t switch out for another thirty.”
“Find something to do,” Jasper snarled. “Somewhere else.”
Twist made a show of getting up. “Sure I shouldn’t stick around in case you suddenly need an alibi?”
“Don’t need an alibi, because when I kill you, it’ll be justified.”
“You love me. You know it.” He winked at Quinn, and then scuttled back as Jasper took two menacing steps in Twist’s direction. “Calm down, Queen, I’m going. Gotta line up a bridesmaid anyway now the hot bartender is off the market.”
“You should go with him,” Quinn advised after Twist had cleared the doorway, shutting the wooden panels behind him to close them off from the party.
But Jasper had just realized this was the perfect chance for him to find out what the fuck went so wrong in their marriage that she scuttled away like a fugitive without so much as talking to him. Had he pushed too fast for too much? Had he frightened her? Or was it merely that he’d been her next wild ride and she’d never loved him in the first place? It’d torn him up for months, wondering what he had done that was so wrong he chased away the love of his life.
But now she was here. Now, he would know.
He planted his feet again, hands on hips. “Not going anywhere till I get some answers.”
It helped that the rehearsal schedule worked in his favor. The rehearsal guests had finally tucked into their entrees making a break from cocktail orders. The wait staff made similar use of the lull and efficiently prepped tables for the next course in the other room, which meant he and Quinn would be effectively alone in the bar until the dinner ended.
He saw the moment Quinn realized he had her trapped.
She took a step back, grabbed the ledge behind her, and leaned back against her hands. The position thrust her chest forward and lifted the edge of her blouse even further away from her low-slung trousers.
Rock, meet hard place.
Jasper knew she was too pissed at him to be deliberately trying to arouse him, but that didn’t reduce the size of his reaction.
“Oh yeah?” she replied and fuck him, her sneer was such priceless Quinn attitude that, in spite of himself, he had to fight off a grin and get a tighter rein on his hard on. “Like what?”
“Like why you’re using my name again when you told me—through the lawyers, because God forbid you should talk to me—how eager you were to shed every trapping of being married, including my name.”
She shrugged. “I changed my mind.”
That ratcheted up his simmering rage so fast, he almost put his fist into the bar.
His narrowed gaze swept her from top to bottom. Her cheeks were flushed, enough that he could see the heated flesh even in the dim light of the bar. She dodged his eyes too, which was a very un-Quinn thing to do…unless she was trying to hide something from him. “Cut the crap, Quinn. You in trouble?”
His jaw clenched when her face went blank. That quick, she’d shut him out. If not for her body’s reactions—reactions he suspected she had no clue she was giving him—he’d have thought her unmoved by his return. “It’s really none of your business.”
“Bullshit.”
That cracked her mask. Irritated, her shoulders squared off. “Where the hell do you get off?”
“Where do I get off? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, Jasper, I am not fucking kidding you,” she said with an exaggerated patience that ramped him up even more. “We are divorced. Dee-vorced. Who and what I am is no longer your concern.”
That did it. Jasper could practically hear the tether of his control snap as he vaulted over the bar, locked his hands on her hips, and yanked her against him.
Her hands flew up on a gasp, but he was too fast for her to push him away, and they got caught instead against his chest. Jasper took advantage of her open mouth and swooped in.
Her taste was narcotic. His mind fogged over and the burn in his chest exploded as he drank deep. Somewhere along the way that day, she’d indulged in a shot of rum. He licked the spicy flavor from her lips and dived deeper.
Caught by surprise, Quinn had no time to put up her shields, shields she’d held fast even when he’d been deep inside her, so he owned her mouth from the start and rubbed his tongue against hers in a slow rhythm that belied his raging lust. She always wanted to rush to the finish and never more than when they were having sex, laser focused on her orgasm and ready to get on with it. So, he would bridle that instinct and instead prime her with slow teases of what she’d get when he had her naked and spread for him. Blissful torture that only his brutal training to become a SEAL had allowed him to endure, but she’d always, always, made it more than worth it.
This time, slow was going to have to wait for round two.
Or three.
He lifted his mouth to give them half a second to catch a breath, nipping once at her bottom lip because he couldn’t stand to lose her taste even for that long. She exhaled loudly through her nose and then took the offensive, and it was her tongue in his m
outh staking claim and filling Jasper with exultant satisfaction.
My wild lady.
One of her hands slid under his pit to grab his lat while the other plunged up into his hair to hold him to her. The movement put them chest to chest and Jasper groaned as the hard points of her nipples poked him through their shirts. She lifted her lips, tilted her head, and kissed him again, the new angle deeper and astoundingly more intimate.
Crushed between them, her necklace rattled against his chest until it gave up the battle and split apart, crashing pearls to the ground like scattered hail. He felt her back-of-the-throat whimper in his dick and squeezed the bounty of her hips. She followed his silent direction by boosting her ass up onto the ledge so he could bump her knees wide and finally, finally, shove his hard cock into the cradle of her covered pussy after being denied it for twelve…fucking…months.
His arms crisscrossed the small of her back, brushing the edge of those low-slung pants so that his thumbs skirted the top of her ass. He held her tight enough to make breathing a chore, and he didn’t care, he didn’t care one damn bit, they could suffocate from kissing and that’d be fine by him, because he knew the second he set her free, she’d be gone.
And he would not lose her again.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the kiss was over. They stood there, clutching each other, mouths as close as possible without connecting, breathing heavily in shared astonishment, each unwilling to be the first to shatter the moment and bring hard reality back to crash around them.
I missed you. The words ripped through Jasper’s soul. He’d missed her mouth, her tits, her pussy, her deep brown eyes, the scar on her chin, her sharp tongue, and her ridiculous sense of humor. He missed how she held him and how she took him and how she got him better than anyone, even Twist. He’d hear a pun and think to text it to her knowing she’d never met one she didn’t like, only to painfully remember he’d blocked her number. He’d go to a bar and expect to see Quinn behind it, so he stopped going out except when called to untangled a teammate, and that immediately put Maverick back in his mind, and fucking hell, he did not need that right now.
She’d turned his world effervescent so that it fizzed with joy and laughter, like one of her drinks, showered him with wild beauty and then wrenched it all away to leave him feeling utterly abandoned, something he hadn’t experienced since his adoptive parents returned him to foster care only to keep his two younger brothers as their own.
I missed you.
But Jasper knew better than to say that to Quinn. And that hole she’d left behind that had ached in his chest for twelve long months rang hollow with renewed loss.
“You still kiss like a wet dream,” he muttered instead.
It was a mistake. Quinn immediately went stiff with insult and tried to yank free of him, but she’d never been a match for his strength—though always more than a match with her tongue—and he braced to get the edge of it and not in the way he wanted.
Instead, when his arms locked her in place, a deeply wounded look seeped into her dark brown eyes, eyes that yet shimmered from their kiss. It pierced past betrayal and abandonment to stab Jasper right in his aching heart. “You’re a son of a bitch, you know,” she whispered.
That was truer than she could realize. His hands cupped her jaw. I missed you. “What trouble are you in, Quinn?” he asked again. His thumbs brushed her racing pulse, coaxing her to capitulation.
Not that it made a dent in his determined wife. She blinked, erasing any hint of that rare vulnerability, and said, “Honestly, it’s none of your business,” and Jasper was done.
Enough fucking around. His fingers dug a bit deeper into her skin, enough that her mouth popped open with an invitation he’d bet she didn’t realize was on offer. “Everything about you is my business, and you’re gonna stay my business until one of us stops breathing no matter what goddamn name you’re wearing when we do.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Always do sober what you said you would do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
—Ernest Hemingway
“Jasper, you gotta let her go, brother.”
He released Quinn and had her tucked behind the not inconsiderable shield of his body before Twist had finished the sentence. She clung to the shirt at his waist to keep her feet and huffed out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
Trapped. But with Jasper, she never minded it so much. With Jasper, a sense of safety and protection warred with that hated feeling of being trapped.
It’d been a long time since anyone had tried to protect her.
Like, about a year.
You’re gonna stay my business until one of us stops breathing, no matter what goddamn name you’re wearing when we do.
And Quinn knew with crushing certainty that if she hadn’t left him back then, Jasper would’ve been with her in Atlantic City. She felt that in her bones and knew too that, had he been there, she never would’ve gone down that hallway and never would’ve seen that murder because Jasper never would’ve let her put herself at such risk. She wouldn’t have even taken that job, would instead still be working in that martini bar in San Diego waiting for Jasper to come home from defending the free world and slowly losing her mind at the sheer monotony she’d agreed to live with in order to stay by his side.
Yeah, she’d left him.
But if he’d bothered to come after her, for Jasper, she would’ve learned to love monotony.
You gotta let her go, brother.
She released his shirt and took the half step that backed her out from the buffer of his body, dodging when he reached for her and doing her damnedest not to think about how soul-shattering it had been to kiss him again. She could not fall back under his thrall. She could handle this alone. She was better on her own.
Twist had his back to the bar, a show of privacy that was more than a little too late, not that Quinn cared. She’d blown all claim of professionalism when she allowed Jasper to stick his tongue down her throat while she was working. She didn’t care how private they were at the time, anyone could’ve stumbled in on them, and the she’d be out of a job and on the road again with nearly no money.
But Jasper always did blow her self-preservation to shit.
“Dinner’s wrapping up, Queen.” Without looking, Twist handed something over his shoulder. Jasper plucked it from his fingers and shoved it in his ear before turning around to corner Quinn.
“We’re not done here,” his promised. He didn’t touch her, but he was close enough for her to feel his breath on her lips. It was the fierce look in his eyes that sent the shiver down her spine.
She knew that look, the one that said he wouldn’t give up until he held all her secrets. Until he knew his next course of action, whether she asked for his help or not. She had to figure out a way to deflect him, keep him off target long enough for her to finish the wedding, get paid, and take off again.
Her gaze slid to the side. “Yippee.”
He gripped the sides of her neck, thumbs tilting her chin up so she could look nowhere but at him. “You took my name back. That says something to a man like me. And you know exactly the kind of man I am. You always have.”
Yeah, she knew the man he was, the kind who stubbornly stuck to his responsibilities no matter how destructive they might be to his well-being. There was no off switch with Jasper, no too much, no line that could be crossed to justify his letting go, no matter what it cost him.
And Quinn knew there was no one with more ability to destroy all that Jasper valued most than her.
“Semantics,” she scoffed. “Figured since I’d never see you again, you’d never know the difference. Kinda counted on it.”
“Here I am anyway. Sorry to disappoint.” His smile was tight but knowing. She didn’t count that in her favor. “But I’d bet, somehow you were hoping I would be.”
Yeah, but he hadn’t been with her in Atlantic City and there was no changing that, not now, not ever. She wouldn’t taint hi
m with this shit now, not Mister Responsibility. He’d feel obligated to sort out her mess when there was no sorting out this bad a mess. Once he figured that out, no way he’d abandon the life and career that defined him to go on the run with her with no end in sight. And she couldn’t go back to being under the protection of Jasper McQueen—even when the thought of being under him made her heat up in all the right places—staying leashed in one place while he jetted around the world saving humanity.
That didn’t work. They didn’t work. She couldn’t lose herself in him like that again. Not for any reason. Not even to save her life.
No matter how much she might want to.
“It’s too late, Jasp. You’re too late.”
His thumb ghosted over her bottom lip. “No such thing, babe.”
He tilted her head back and kiss her hard, without tongue, a reiteration of his claim, and then rounded the bar and didn’t look back as he and Twist exited the restaurant. The message was clear: he was going, but he wouldn’t stay gone.
She watched him leave; she hated herself for it, but she kept her eyes locked on him until he was out of sight, her chest aching under the weight of all she’d lost when she left him.
And all she might risk to get it back.
* * *
“You okay?” Twist asked, voice low.
Jasper strode blindly out of the restaurant, his mind full of his infuriating ex-wife. “That woman drives me crazy.”
“I get that.”
“I come back from deployment, and she’s gone. No note, no message. Gone.”
“Had to be tough.”
“Scared the fucking shit outta me. You know, I even filed a missing person report? Cops had to point out she’d taken all her shit with her, and that it was unlikely she’d been abducted and allowed to pack first.” He snorted with self-derision. “Bet they had a good laugh over that.”
“Doubt that, Queen,” Twist consoled in a gentle voice.
“I looked for her. Spent days looking for her. With the kind of crazies out there—and we are uniquely positioned to know the kind of crazies out there—had to be sure she was okay.” He shot Twist a look. “Even got Badger to search her social and track her phone’s GPS.”
Barefoot Bay: Wild on the Rocks (Kindle Worlds) Page 7
