Good thing, Taz made up for his lack of romantic gift-giving skills with other talents that involved full-body massage and orgasms—lots of mind-melting, knee-buckling, toe-curling orgasms.
She glanced up at the door to the oversized bathroom as the sound of the shower running continued. It was the only room in the loft with walls, otherwise it was just exposed brick, ceiling-to-floor windows and a private elevator that led down to the expansive garage for the Devil’s Dip Gym. She didn’t have to close her eyes to imagine how good Taz would look right now with water streaming over the hard planes and defined muscles of his body. Without even trying, she could smell the sandalwood of the soap he used on his tawny brown skin. She bit down on her bottom lip, trying to distract herself from the naked man she’d fallen for so hard and fast that she was surprised she didn’t have a love concussion.
The shower turned off.
Temptation tugged at her. She checked the time on her phone.
They weren’t needed for the briefing for another thirty minutes and Taz hadn’t even begun to pack for the mission to rescue Gidget. Their equipment, guns and ammo were already stowed on the private jet that would leave in a few hours to take them to the Indulgence Resort. But unless he got packing, Taz would be buck naked while they were posing as the fabulously rich and newly married Trey and Bethany Alderson. While she loved having him like that, this was the last lead they had as to Gidget’s location and nothing could take priority over finding her.
Bianca wouldn’t fail her friend again.
Taz strolled out of the bathroom in a haze of steam. A white towel sat low on his hips and the wet ebony waves of his hair made his mossy-green eyes stand out even more than usual against his brown skin. The air of barely constrained danger and never-questioned dominance as natural to him as his confident strut when he crossed the open space toward her. She caught a glimpse of his full lips curled into a sexy smirk moments before he walked behind her as if he wasn’t thinking the exact same lusty thoughts that she was.
He could have her anyway he wanted and the cocky bastard knew it—but then again, the reverse was just as true.
They may not have shared their darkest secrets with each other, but all of those skeletons were in the past and they were about the future. Taz. Her. The B-Squad. She formed a fist around the good-luck brass balls. They’d find Gidget, destroy the drug kingpin and the world would be theirs. There was nothing standing in their way.
Taz wrapped a sinewy forearm around her waist, yanking her backwards against his hard chest. “It’s not polite to play with your balls so much.”
Desire licked her skin, making her feel as naked as he was. Water droplets from his chest dampened the back of her black tank top. Her mouth went dry. Her panties went wet. And her heart went into overdrive.
“Like you know anything about being polite,” she said, her voice breathy and low.
His fingers dropped to the button of her jeans. “I’d rather stick with what I’m good at.”
She looked down at her phone lying next to the suitcase. Fuck—and not in the good way. “We have to leave in less than half an hour and you haven’t even started packing.”
“I’m a dude.” Taz kissed and nibbled along the exposed column of her throat, sending delicious shivers of want through her. “It takes me five minutes to scoop things out of one drawer and put them into a suitcase.” He suddenly dropped his seductive hold and moved to stand next to her, his attention focused on the matching set of luggage spread out over their king-sized bed. “Oh God, tell me we aren’t using these obnoxious things.”
She glanced down at the six-piece set of limited edition Louis Vuitton suitcases she’d borrowed from one of her Sutherland cousins. They were expensive, ostentatious and beyond over the top, which was exactly what made them the perfect accessory for going undercover at any exclusive resort to find Gidget and take down the mystery asshole who’d kidnapped her.
Taz reached into a half-filled suitcase and pulled out a bright green scrap of material. The swimsuit was on the high end of the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-polka-dot-bikini scale. It lo
oked even more ridiculously tiny when being held in Taz’s strong boxer’s hands that could do—and had done—serious damage. The contrast between the delicate, ultra-feminine string bikini and the strong, very male hands holding it was enough to make her giggle.
He pivoted, giving her an eye full of his eight-pack abs and the precarious hold the white towel had on his lean hips, and held out the bikini like it was nuclear waste. “You can’t wear this.”
Annoyance snapped her spine straight at his high-handed declaration. “Why not?”
He glared at her, not even bothering to hide his bossy alpha-hole tendencies. “You do realize this mission is work?”
She huffed out a sigh and rolled her eyes. Men. “What, you want to work this undercover gig as newly married Mrs. Alderson in your old gold boxing robe with Taz ‘Tasmanian Devil’ Hazard embroidered on it?”
The sexy idiot grinned at her as if she’d just uttered the most brilliant thing ever. “That’s one way to make sure no one gets the wrong idea.”
She hip-checked him. Hard.
He smiled down at her as though she was just the cutest thing ever and dropped a possessive hand to her waist, pulling her against his brick wall of a body.
Bianca glared up at him even as her nipples puckered and warm desire made her lungs tight. “Shove the caveman back in the closet. If Mrs. Alderson needs to do a little skin flashing or flirting with the resort guests or staff to get the intel we need to find Gidget, then you’re just going to have to suck it up.”
The twenty-minute warning went off on her cell phone. The high-pitched beeping bounced off the loft’s high ceilings and ricocheted back down, a shrill reminder of what was at stake on this trip. She wiggled out of Taz’s grip, giving herself some breathing room. The tip leading them to the Indulgence Resort was their last lead. The scrap of paper with a partial reservation number was all they had after the trail had gone ice cold in Phoenix.
The drug kingpin who’d taken Gidget six months ago had been hoping to snag Bianca instead—why, she had no idea. No matter how much digging she and the B-Squad team had done, they hadn’t been able to figure out who was behind Genie’s Wish or why he was targeting Bianca and her friends from the now-defunct St. Bernadette’s Academy for Young Ladies, AKA St. B’s Reform School for Rich Bitches, where the moneyed sent their very bad daughters.
She’d thought the nightmare that had been St. B’s ended after three girls killed themselves and the authorities raided the school before shutting it down and arresting most of the administrators, many of whom were still in jail. Now, more than a decade later, St. B’s specter was back and pointing them toward paradise in the Pacific Ocean.
The Indulgence Resort was a string of five small private islands in the Pacific, a few hundred miles from Hawaii. Instead of hotel rooms, guests stayed in individual luxury bungalows. It was exclusive, expensive and exhaustively hard to get into. It was a miracle Elisa had managed to pull off a last-minute reservation, but the woman had connections that spanned both sides of the legal line and she’d used every one to make it happen.