Page 54 of Boomer (SEAL Team Tier 1, #7)

She stilled and her eyes popped open. Suddenly, her eyes filled, and she surged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. Pressed her flushed cheek to his throat and that skin-to-skin contact undid him more than any wound ever had. He anchored her, his throat working.

“I’m sorry. I just hate this. I don’t want to be a burden. This is all my responsibility.” She took a choking breath.

“No, it’s not. We’re here to carry out your orders. Do it from TOC. Please, Taylor, for my peace of mind, so I can maintain my focus. I can’t effectively do my job if I know you’re out there and not one hundred percent.”

Her eyes searched his and what she saw there made her breath soft. “For you, Carter, meine Liebe." I’ll stay here, but please don’t ask me to stay out of this fight. It’s personal…Emil…he died because of this filth. I want it eradicated.”

He nodded. “Okay, I can live with that, but if you get fatigued, promise me you’ll rest.”

“I promise.” Her eyes went even softer, then warmer. “We’re soaked to the skin. Let’s get out of these wet clothes,” she whispered. She unbuttoned and unsnapped him, stripping him down to his soul. Her hands lingered on his skin. “Boomer,” she whispered as he pulled off her clothes.

She pressed herself against him, pushing him back, and he tried to fight it. She took his mouth, the kiss working him over, more naked than his body, and he returned it helplessly. Before he could draw another breath, her hand closed around him, firm, sure. She owned him, and she knew it.

His hips surged forward before he could stop them, an involuntary thrust of hunger and shock that made her inhale sharply, like his need had touched something deep inside her.

“I love how you move beneath my hands, fill my body, use your mouth on me, all this beautiful power, banked for me. Only me,” she murmured.

“My breacher…dangerous, so dangerous and so unaware how beautiful you are.”

His entire body shuddered, and he almost came, hard and deep, muscles locking as he braced against the sheets, realizing in that moment just how much Taylor did own him.

Not because she had him in her hand, though, God, that alone was enough to level him, but because she saw him.

She chose to touch him like this, with deliberate, sensual passion…

with her love twining through every word, caress, and move she made.

Adrenaline whispered through him, leftover charge from the mission still burning under his skin, turning every nerve into a live wire.

It made him more aware, more keyed into every stroke of her palm, every glide of her thumb.

It jacked him up past control, past patience, made the restraint he’d always counted on feel razor-thin, barely holding.

He couldn’t look away. She knelt between his thighs, moonlight catching the glint in her eyes, that sly, beautiful hunger written in every line of her mouth.

Her fingers moved with maddening precision, stroking him slowly and deep, cupping his aching sack with her other hand, rolling him in her palm with a touch that was both gentle and merciless.

His head dropped back with a groan, breath breaking on a curse as her thumb circled the sensitive tip, slick and throbbing, every nerve ending tuned to her.

“Taylor,” he gasped, voice cracked and thick with need. “Sugar, you’re concussed. I can wait.”

“I can’t,” she whispered fiercely.

His hips jerked with the words, the sound of her voice, what she was doing to him, how she touched him like she knew exactly what lived beneath his skin. Like she was coaxing him open from the outside in, until all that was left was the man she had claimed with her hands, her body, her soul.

The man who was so in love with her, he didn’t know how to process it or handle her when she was like this.

She straddled him, her face contorting in pleasure as her lips parted and she moaned, her hands sliding up her ribcage to her breasts, fondling them.

She rode him gently, quietly commanding, and when her body slowed, her eyes fluttered, he shifted them both to their sides.

Pausing, hunger and ecstasy swamping her, she clutched at him, her nails digging into his biceps when he sucked on her nipples, then moved the rest of the way, sinking deeply into her as she lifted up and wrapped her legs around his hips.

He held her gaze, in between long, slow kisses, his hand cupping her soft mound, thrusting inside of her, feeling her match his steady rhythm as easily as if they’d done this for centuries.

He finally slid his arm beneath her, tilted her hips up that extra bit, so he could sink a tiny bit deeper, reach that spot he already knew was there, the one that made her gasp and tighten around him almost convulsively.

The one he knew would take them both over the edge.

But he held her there, for that one moment out of time, and looked into her eyes. “Taylor….”

Her eyes grew glassy then, at that one hoarsely uttered whisper.

It didn’t scare him so much as cut him. She was his, dammit, and he’d never do anything to hurt her, and the look in her eyes spoke of much the same, even as they both knew the reality of what they were doing to each other.

Where it would leave them. “With me,” he said, pushing the rest of the way in.

“Always,” she whispered, voice barely audible, but strong enough to destroy him.

They bagged Duarte Alv?o Ribeiro, the goddamn minister of shipping, like it was nothing.

Boomer had caught a glimpse of the man as he was marched off the Gaspard , wrists cuffed, mouth tight, wife sobbing, daughter shaking in the arms of a plainclothes Portuguese agent.

No shouting. No begging. Just the crumbling of a dynasty under the weight of its own corruption. One piece of rot ripped out clean.

It was a good takedown. A clean takedown.

But it was just the start.

As they continued into day three, the fatigue was bone-deep, sleep-starved, nerves frayed, muscles aching with a kind of weariness that settled into the joints and stayed there.

No one said it out loud. But every man felt it.

They were running on instinct, muscle memory, and the kind of brotherhood that didn’t need words.

In the fourth and final phase, from 0300 to 0800, the tempo went surgical.

Their first target, Marseille Dawn , a rusted cargo freighter flying under a falsified Cypriot flag.

Engine room lab, poorly vented, half the crew already sick from exposure.

They breached low, masks on, chemical levels spiking before Kodiak even hit the second deck.

Taylor coordinated the op from TOC, voice calm in Boomer’s ear, clocking their movement, rerouting traffic around the naval zone like she was born to it.

Next came Anastazija , a money-laundering trawler turned ghost. It took hours to find. AIS spoofed six ways to Sunday, false echo trails pinging her off Cyprus, then again off Almería. Boomer had started to think the thing didn’t exist. Just another breadcrumb from a cartel already burned.

But Taylor didn’t blink.

She stayed on it. Stayed focused. Refused to accept the silence as fact. Refused to let the scent of it go.

They caught her near Rabat, moored like a ship too tired to pretend anymore. A coffin floating in the fog. The boarding team found falsified manifests, encrypted drives, three disconnected SAT rigs, and a safe full of bills in six currencies, all waterlogged and bound in plastic.

By then, Boomer should’ve felt like they’d hit the capstone.

Then word came that the Rovika had docked in the Balkans. The same ship he and Taylor had tagged in the harbor with an RFID tracker had finally returned to home base.

Taylor froze mid-brief. Just for a breath. But Boomer saw it. Felt the shift in her like static in his blood.

The CIA was already on the ground, circling it like wolves. They were feeding intel live to MAOC, and with every update, the net pulled tighter.

The name that rose from the wreckage?

Arkan Holdings. This time it wasn’t a whisper. It was a full-blown shout.

Boomer’s jaw clenched the second it was mentioned…

again. They had been chasing that corporate ghost since this op began.

The answer to who was running this outfit.

Old-world, blood-fed, Balkan warlord wealth, scrubbed through shell corps and diplomatic immunity.

Taylor didn’t say anything for a long minute.

Just stared at the screen, her lips parted, eyes unreadable.

She didn’t need to say a damn thing. He knew what it meant to her.

Then came Málaga’s Reach .

The flagship.

The linchpin.

She wasn’t listed on any registry. No AIS. No current manifest. No open port log. But she existed. Big, fast, and dangerous. Like the Gaspard , she tried to run, making for Moroccan waters.

But the American Navy didn’t play games. The USS Falchion fired a missile across her bow. Boom. That was it.

No shots fired after. No standoff. Just complete surrender under the black sky.

They stormed the ship at sunrise. Inside Málaga’s Reach was everything.

Vaulted files, burner drives, full manifests from six other ghost ships, live ships, still in rotation.

GPS logs. Offshore accounts. Photos. Names.

Payoffs. Blood money and supply chain intel that could rewrite the entire fentanyl war across two continents.

Tucked in the nav panel’s side chamber? A hardwired server drive. Encrypted. Untraceable. Until now.

The CIA was already diving into it. MAOC, Taylor’s MAOC, would be the face of the takedown.