Barefoot Bay: Wild on the Rocks (Kindle Worlds) Read online

  “Techno wonder boy couldn’t find her?”

  “He found her,” Jasper admitted. “At a motel in San Diego.”

  “You left her there,” Twist said after a moment.

  “I left her there,” Jasper confirmed. “It’d been three days. She was unharmed, and it was clear she’d left of her own volition. And I—” He stopped walking. “I wasn’t going to force the woman to stay where she didn’t want to be. I wasn’t going to force her to stay with me. She didn’t want me, so I let her go.”

  Hands on his hips, he stared at his feet, but all he saw was Quinn in San Diego. He’d run surveillance on her for hours, watched her do errands, and realized she was prepping for a trip, preparing to leave him behind for good.

  Yeah, he’d left her there.

  “A year,” he mused. One hand clutched the back of his neck squeezing hard in an effort to keep hold of the fear he’d lived with all year. “A year not knowing where she was, if she was safe, what she was doing. Not a word from her, not even a fucking text, until the divorce papers were delivered to the base. Even then, the lawyers told me she didn’t want any direct communication. She wrecked me, man. We were together for six months, divorced for a year, and now, suddenly, after all that, she’s here?” Stricken by the memory, he looked up at his best friend. “What the fuck, Twist?”

  “It sucks, Jasper,” Twist quietly replied. “I’m so sorry, man.”

  “I need answers. She has to give me answers! She needs to tell me why!”

  “I geddit. But Roy, been shrinking people’s heads for years and the one thing I’ve learned is that everyone has their own reasons for their personal crazy. Only guarantee is those reasons will not make sense to anyone else, but to them, they’re gospel.”

  Twist probably thought Jasper crazy for marrying Quinn after knowing her only two days. But there’d been no stopping him, even if someone had been there to try. To this day, despite the many combat scenarios his team had been in that got a bit…creative, marrying Quinn was still the wildest thing he’d ever done.

  “I know one thing for sure though,” Twist added. “You really are crazy if you think that woman doesn’t want you.”

  Jasper’s head jerked. He met Twist’s eyes. His friend’s expression was set, but full of understanding. “You gotta take a breath, brother, and dig deep if you’re going figure this out. Also, it’d be good if we don’t wind up in the middle of the ocean while you do.”

  Jasper glanced around and realized he’d led them out of the resort, through the parking lot, and down the beach without being the wiser.

  “Think we missed a turn back there.”

  “Christ, I’m a mess,” Jasper muttered.

  “Well, you’re sure as shit in one. Not like it’s your first time.” Twist tilted his head, listening, and Jasper keyed back in to the directions McBain was issuing over the coms. “I’ll take the patio with Rocco. Queen’s good to relieve Ryan. Hell, we’re already at the edge of the resort’s property line.”

  “I can man the bar,” Jasper objected. Damned if Quinn’s drama was going to screw with his ability to do the job.

  “Make the switch,” McBain confirmed. Jasper scowled at Twist, but didn’t argue further.

  “Take a break,” Twist advised. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “It’s not a break. The perimeter is the first line of defense.”

  “Casa Blanca ain’t the Green Zone, pal.” Twist studied him for a second. “Look, walk it off and sort out your head. She’s here. She’s locked into this wedding and not goin’ anywhere for the next few days. You’ve got time to figure out what to do next.” He grinned. “Besides your wife.”

  “That is not going to happen,” Jasper vowed.

  Then he thought of Quinn in that tight tuxedo top. Then he pictured the opened buttons on her top. Then he remembered the heat of her skin between the top and her hipster trousers.

  That was probably not going to happen.

  “Sure it isn’t.” Twist’s eyes widened comically as jogged backwards toward the resort. “Holy shit, I nearly hit on your wife!”

  Yeah, and they’d be talking about that later. “For the last time, she’s my ex-wife,” Jasper called after him.

  “She’s as much your ex-wife as I am!” Twist shouted back.

  “Oh, if only.”

  Jasper set off in the opposite direction and relieved Ryan from his position on the north edge of the resort’s property line. He checked in on coms with the other men at the rotation points, guys he’d briefly met that morning who’d now probably heard more intimate details about his personal life than he’d prefer to dwell on thanks to Twist.

  Jasper settled into place and began his surveillance. From here, he could see most of the resort’s island and practically all the way down to the water, not a far distance as he’d just learned in his mindless rush from the bar. Lush with palms and flowers native to the region, the grounds around Casa Blanca teemed with easy breezes and burgeoning foliage, even if he couldn’t see it all without night-vision goggles. But Jasper had spent his professional life looking for threats in some of the most beautiful and, admittedly, some of the ugliest places of the world. The most colorful hibiscus could hide a tango. The laziest of palm trees an ambitious sniper. The smoothest sand an IED.

  As one of Florida’s barrier islands, Mimosa Key was a tropical paradise smack in the middle of—well—paradise. For a man who made his living on, over, and often under the water, it wasn’t the first piece of paradise Jasper had guarded. But it’d been a long time since he’d walked a perimeter. He’d forgotten how much it allowed him to focus. Others might find it monotonous, but Jasper discovered early on that the stagnation of the duty eerily heightened not only his external awareness, but an internal one too. Without weakening his alert ready factor, his mind used the duty to sift through the events of the last hour even as he clocked every ripple of movement that happened in his quarter.

  Relax, man. He could practically hear Twist’s admonishment and even checked his ear piece to make sure his friend wasn’t whispering to him over coms.

  Relax, right. That’s why they were there. To relax away the stress of their enforced leave and the questionable state of his ongoing career, and empty his mind of the image of Maverick killing that biker and offing himself. Except that never left Jasper. It stayed hovering on the edge of his subconscious to slam him when he least expected it, like during his reunion with Quinn.

  Heh. Some reunion.

  The alarm on Jasper’s watch pinged moments before Bob, one of the guards on the beat with Jasper, sounded his intent to do a walk through his quarter. Jasper widened his surveillance to include the eastern quarter as Bob started his round. He’d keep this overview until Bob returned and swapped with Jasper, so he could do his own walkthrough while Bob kept similar watch over his section.

  McBain left nothing to chance, a philosophy Jasper admired and shared. The overlapping coverage made it so there was never a moment where the overall was sacrificed for the specific, no chance for someone to slip in when one of them was off doing a walk through. Never a moment when Casa Blanca and all her people were left unprotected.

  Including Quinn.

  Jasper took a deep breath and narrowed in on his assigned area. With dinner now over and everyone hours into their drinking, this was the point of the festivities when people got stupid. Which meant Quinn would be in the middle of it all. He checked the impulse to return to the bar, knowing she’d be lubing up guests and pulling in tips with that wide smile you had to look closely to see didn’t often reach her eyes. When she worked, she was always the good time girl, happy to keep the laughs rolling so long as the orders kept coming. But he’d learned that was simply another mask she wore, another persona she used to keep people at bay, even the ones she slept with.

  Even the one she married.

  An amorous couple stumbled off the patio and into the parking lot and made their way to a dark corner where a low-slung Ferrari was parked.
Jasper watched them make out from the corner of his eye. The man pushed the woman onto the expensive hood and half mounted her. Jasper looked away when his groin tightened. Helluva a way to treat such a fine machine, but his job wasn’t to police morality nor was he about get turned on by a clandestine grope. Not when his greatest temptation was all too close for good sense to prevail over seriously unwise urges.

  And Quinn always spurred the dirtiest urges in him.

  A guard from Thornquist’s personal security hustled an ambitious paparazzo away from the resort. Jasper was relieved when he made enough noise of it to spook the couple into returning to the party, the woman shimmying her dress back up her chest along the way.

  But the damage had been done and Jasper’s concentration effectively splintered. Now, as he surveyed the grounds and marked people coming and going, the back of his mind was working its way down Quinn’s shirt, unbuttoning the remaining buttons on that tight blouse until her breasts sprang free. He felt the heat of her skin under his flexing fingers, how that band she’d left bare between shirt and trousers had grown damp with sweat under his demanding grip, and he knew the flesh between her thighs would be hotter and wetter than he could imagine and just waiting for him to get his mouth on her and burn them both up in that fire.

  And he hated it, but he couldn’t help but wonder what other man had tasted her heat in the year since she’d left him.

  The very thought of another man touching her—or another man fucking his wife—shot Jasper into a fugue of possessive rage. Quinn was his.

  His jaw clench with resolution. Yeah, they weren’t married anymore, but she’d taken back his name and with it his claim. Let her call him a sexist bastard, he knew she’d felt the same possessive need for him from the very beginning. She’d fail to convince him otherwise if she tried, and he’d ruthlessly use that failure to stamp himself on all of her so the next time she left him, she’d do it knowing she lived her life without the only man who could truly fulfill her.

  She wanted to drop back into his orbit with no warning and refuse to give him any explanations? He’d take that wild ride with her again. Only this time, he’d be the one doing the leaving, and only when he was done with her. Only when there wasn’t a single sensation left that he could wring from her.

  When there was nothing left in him to feel for her.

  She could keep her secrets and cling to her trouble. That was fine with him. He’d fuck her blind every chance he got and leave her to live life without him the way she clearly wanted. Twist was right; she wasn’t going anywhere for at least the next three days, and Jasper sure as shit had nothin’ left to hold him back. No teammate to pull out of the crapper. No mission to execute. No sense of self-preservation.

  Suddenly, he realized that, for the first time in his life, he had not a single responsibility beyond this short-term security job and reminding his ex-wife exactly what she’d left behind. For once, he was going to be as totally and unrepentantly irresponsible as he wanted.

  Starting tonight.

  CHAPTER NINE

  They speak of my drinking, but never of my thirst.

  —Scottish Proverb

  New York City that same night

  In Gregg’s experience, nothing good came from a middle-of-the-night callout.

  Back when he was a member of the Russian intelligence network—a spy, to be gauche about it—any such summons could end in spilled blood, possibly even Gregg’s depending on the night’s events. Now that he was a respected international businessman, such calls were usually less blood and more money related.

  He felt no shame in admitting he preferred the financial dilemmas over the life and death ones.

  Though this night, the life and death question was not his to prevaricate.

  His town car came to a stop on the lower east side of Manhattan. “You sure you want to get dropped here?” his driver, Thomas, double checked. He peered through his windshield at the row of poorly lit storage units that butted up against the river and was where Gregg had ordered to be dropped off. “This looks like a bad idea, sir.”

  Gregg checked the area. It looked like what it was: a dump site. “You needn’t worry, Thomas. I’ve men waiting for me.” He shifted out, opening his black umbrella against the cold spring rain. “Park under that street light and keep the doors locked and the engine running. I’ll call when I’m ready to go. Shouldn’t be long.” As soon as he cleared the curb and shut the door, Thomas sped the town car down the block as directed, inadvertently spraying Gregg with road wash.

  Gregg sighed and shook the mud from his Burberry coat before heading down the long stretch of storage units toward the far-off glow of search lights. He’d lost the taste for this kind of cloak and dagger bullshit and would’ve preferred to be home in bed, wrapped around his darling wife who’d only that night returned home from her latest assignment. They’d been apart for a week and Gregg was pissed to get called away from her on her first night back.

  They hadn’t even had the chance to indulge his favorite Russian drinking game.

  “Grigori Nyekovic?”

  “Da,” Gregg responded and shook the hand of the man in the suit who’d called his name.

  “Agent Dougherty. Thanks for coming out so late.” Unlike Gregg, Agent Dougherty had foregone an umbrella. His belted trench coat was turned up at the collar and rain pattered off the brim of his FBI labelled cap.

  Gregg nodded. “I am at the FBI’s service.”

  “We appreciate it. Wish the task wasn’t so gruesome.”

  “It is not my first time. You found a body, yes?”

  The agent nodded. “Single shot to the head. Execution style killing.”

  “Ah. Sticking to the classics.” He gestured ahead with his umbrella. “Shall we get on with it, Agent Dougherty? I’d like to return to my wife before sunrise.”

  Agent Dougherty led the way down to the waterfront. Gregg stepped over a sewer grate and heard the rattle of a subway train far below. Air blew through the tunnels in its wake, wafting up through the grate so the reek of wet garbage assaulted his senses.

  Ah, New York.

  Gregg had known taking down Dmitri Vlitnik was only the first victory in the continuing fight to eliminate the Bratva crime presence in Brighton Beach and the greater New York area. Like the cockroaches they were, more Russian crime lords scurried to infest the gap left by Vlitnik’s dethronement. Brighton Beach, that great bastion of Russian immigrants, was constantly under the threat of another Vlitnik, and there was only so much that could be done from the outside. That’s why Gregg offered to assist the FBI in the first place. Though many might call him a traitor for once being a double agent during his tenure with Russia intelligence, Gregg knew himself to be a patriot who’d made the difficult if ultimately right decision to inform on the Motherland in order to save the Motherland.

  After the communists were ousted, the Bratva took over and quickly expanded to prey on those who had come to the United States to escape Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the rest, only to have their families persecuted by the ones who should be protecting them.

  Which was how Gregg found himself walking with Agent Dougherty to view the latest victim in this seemingly endless war.

  They walked the short distance to where a group of techs were gathered at the edge of the river. Gregg braced himself for the reveal and felt more than a pang of regret when he recognized the man lying sightlessly on his back in the rain. There was indeed a single hole in the center of his head, a precise shot made not by an amateur, but by someone who knew what he was doing. Or what she was doing. Gregg tried not differentiate between the abilities of the sexes, especially not when his own wife was so accomplished at what many would consider to be masculine skills.

  “You realize there are more than twenty-five Russians in all of New York, and we do not all know each other and have slumber parties, yes?”

  “There’s my international policy professor debunked. You do, however, consult for the organized crime divi
sion of the FBI’s New York field office on matters concerning the Russian mob.” Agent Dougherty motioned for the evidence techs to give them some room. Gregg crouched down next to the body and pulled aside the dead man’s shirt to show a Russian star tattooed on his shoulder. “I have a feeling this falls under your purview.”

  “Well, your feeling would be correct. This is Dima Petrovich. He is—or was—an enforcer in Dimitri Vlitnik’s organization.”

  “No, he was an undercover agent for the FBI.”

  Gregg wasn’t fast enough to mask his shock.

  “Thought that might be a surprise,” Agent Dougherty noted, missing nothing. “Dima Petrovich is actually Agent Paul Goyut. He was originally embedded in Vlitnik’s organization. Once Vlitnik went down, Goyut here got himself taken in by Nikolai Sokolov.”

  “I am aware of Nikolai Sokolov.”

  Agent Dougherty grunted. “Well, the wound in Goyut matches position and bullet caliber as in the Vasily Romanov murder from last week.”

  “Romanov is dead?” This was not a surprise. Gregg was connected from Brighton Beach to the Bowery. He knew about the death of the Bratva commander for Lower Manhattan almost at the same time the FBI did.

  Sooner, probably.

  But Agent Dougherty didn’t need to know that.

  “His body washed up in that cesspit known as Camden, New Jersey. It took a few days for the ID to make its way across the bridge to us.”

  “Sokolov is consolidating the Bratva presence in New York City,” Gregg concluded.

  “And he’s not shy about dropping bodies to do it. Goyut hadn’t checked in for more than a week so all we officially have is the last report he filed. Which gets us in the door for an interview, but not much else. And we’ve got dick on evidence to connect Sokolov to Romanov.”

  “I doubt there is much more that I can offer,” Gregg demurred. “But I have heard that Sokolov has hired a freelancer named Palach.”