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Authors: Cleo Peitsche

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BOOK: Oceans Untamed
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He slammed out of the main back door, his head turning left and right as he swept his gaze rhythmically and methodically over the private beach. She’d been out here, too. There was no doubt about that.

Was she still here? It didn’t seem like it,
but with the wind scattering scents, it was difficult to know for sure. Tracking was so much easier in the water.

He carefully scrutinized the landscape again, but he was alone. Victoria wasn’t the type to hide.
 

His phone buzzed in his pocket, but he ignored it as he surveyed the beach, trying to see it through fresh eyes, trying to imagine what she knew.

She’d certainly noticed the blood
in the pool. There was no doubt about that. He could smell it, which meant she’d smelled it, too, and she would have investigated.

His jaw clenched so tightly that the curses welling in his throat came out in a long growl.
 

Several long strides, and he was standing over the fouled water. Ghostly memories of that night swam through his mind, and he thought of Monroe. As wrong as things had gone,
he’d been lucky.

He unlocked the pool cover and let the motor drag it over the surface. Much better. It wouldn’t fool a shape shifter’s nose, but the men in the truck wouldn’t look at it twice.

His phone buzzed again, and he yanked it out of his pocket. It took an act of will not to crush it in his fist. Two missed calls from Victoria. And a text.

He tapped the icon.
You’ve been a naughty,
naughty boy. We need to talk about what you’ve been hiding behind your house. Today. Or else.

Hiding behind his house? He swung his gaze toward the inlet where Brady had lived for the last six months. Everything went still… It felt like a thick glass dome had slammed over him like he was a mere insect, and the rest of the world was shut outside. Sounds, scents… even the breeze retreated. He blinked
to clear his vision, but it didn’t do a thing for the fuzziness clouding his mind.

The phone slid from his fingers and landed in the sand. He sprinted for the inlet.

She’d been here. Those were her footprints baked into the sand.
 

With a roar, he flung himself into the water, shifting shark, landing with a mighty splash. The remnants of his clothing ripped away as he arced below the surface.

The inlet was cleansed of blood. The ocean had done that. But at the moment, he didn’t care about anything except Brady.

He circled the inlet several times, his tail whipping, his heart pounding. The first pass showed him what his nose already knew. There were no sharks in the inlet. Brady was gone.

Gone.

And Victoria had him.

And just like that, everything Koenraad had tried to protect crumbled
like so much dry sand.

Chapter 3

Monroe set down the paperback she’d bought an hour earlier in the hotel gift shop. The day was turning breezy, and she wanted to get her sweater, but she didn’t feel like moving.

She was sex-sore, satisfied, and feeling lazy.
 

After Koenraad had jumped off the pier, he’d stayed away for twenty minutes. When he returned, he seemed like himself again and even made a joke about
fighting a hermit crab to get her sandals back. Then he dressed—without turning his back to her—and held her close until the sun came up.
 

As they brushed themselves off, he asked if she wanted to know the details of the attack. She shrugged because she didn’t want a repeat of him going cold. She couldn’t tell if he really wanted to tell her or if he felt obligated. Obligation was a relationship
killer.

Then he mentioned that he might have business in New York “after things here quiet down.” She’d been so relieved that she’d prattled on about all the places she could show him, and then they walked back to the hotel and she tried not to be jumpy about Thomas possibly seeing them.
 

Koenraad had told her to order whatever she wanted from room service, and then he went out on the balcony
and started making calls. He was gone before the white-gloved waiter wheeled in a cart with breakfast for two. She had to sit there alone while the waiter squeezed the orange juice into two glasses. She was so embarrassed that rather than meet his gaze and see pity there, she stared at his gloves like an idiot, pretending to be interested in how he managed to keep them clean.

Most of the food
had ended up in the hallway, untouched. She knew she was really too sensitive about being stood up, but it was definitely a recurring theme in her life.

Though Koenraad always made it better, and heaven knew he had a really good reason for being so busy.
 

But… he’d said he’d call in a few hours and that he’d be back for a late lunch. It was almost 1:00 and she hadn’t heard a peep.

She stood,
stretched the kinks out of her back—she really had to stop having sex on hard surfaces—and went inside to call herself on the hotel room’s phone.

It came through just fine.
 

Frowning, she chewed on the edge of her lip. If he was going to be much longer, she needed to know. She was hungry, and there wasn’t much on the room service menu that appealed to her. Or, rather, nothing that looked so
delicious that she wouldn’t mind sitting in a hotel room and eating it on her own.

She tapped out a message to Koenraad, then dug her sweater out of her bag. The weather on Tureygua was changeable to say the least. The nights were chilly, the days either blistering hot or chilly, depending on the hour. Her original trip was supposed to be two nights, and while she’d overpacked, she didn’t have
a week’s worth of clothing for all the wild temperature swings. Koenraad kept buying her stuff, but she needed more.

When he got back, she’d have to find out where the locals shopped. The boutiques near the resorts were expensive as hell, and for the most part, not her style. She didn’t need summer beach dresses. She lived in New York; the closest she ever got to a regular beach outing were rooftop
pools. In the future, even those would be limited; Thomas was the one who had membership to the best one.
 

Nope, she wouldn’t be going back there.

Her phone buzzed with a response from Koenraad.
I’m so sorry. Something has come up and I’ll be a couple more hours. If you can’t wait, order whatever you want (food or otherwise) and charge it to the room.

“That’s just lovely,” she said, then caught
herself. Koenraad was
nothing
like Thomas. He wouldn’t prioritize his job unless it was dire, so his forgetting to let her know that he’d be late was uncharacteristic. He was never callous or thoughtless. He wouldn’t cancel on her unless it was serious.

None of that changed the fact that she was on her own. Her friends, who were staying in a more moderately priced resort across the street, were
out on an all-day exploration of the island’s wildlife preserve. Monroe had mixed up the dates and had thought her friends’ vacation was done, otherwise she probably would have tagged along.

It was easy to lose track of time on Tureygua. She only had a few more days left, but it felt like she’d just gotten there. It also felt like she’d been there forever.

There was nothing to do but read—might
as well do it on the beach, so she ran herself a hot bath and dug her razor out of her bag.

As nice as the hotel was, it had nothing on Koenraad’s mansion. When they’d checked in the night before, she’d been confused. He’d taken a room for the rest of her stay. “For your safety,” he’d said.

That hadn’t quite made sense. Yes, she’d been attacked by a shark, but that wasn’t a good reason to abandon
the mansion. She didn’t remember anything leading up to the attack, and she most definitely had no recollection of Koenraad giving her the transfusion. But just seeing the freshly healed skin was enough to keep her out of the water.
 

It wasn’t like sharks could walk out of the ocean and grab her. She appreciated that he cared, but his reaction was overprotective. If it had been her house, she
would have insisted on staying. But it wasn’t, and giving him a hard time seemed rude.

She lathered up the thick guava body wash, spread it over her legs, and slowly scraped the razor up her calf.
 

There wasn’t much to remove, but she finished shaving anyway, rinsed her legs, then inspected her knees and found she’d missed a spot. Looked like she’d missed it a few shaves in a row. Ten years
she’d been shaving and she still couldn’t get it right.

Koenraad had surely noticed.

Irritated, she wet the razor and swiped it across her skin, nicking herself in the process.
 

She reached for a washcloth and wiped the blood away. To her surprise, the wound had already stopped bleeding.

Bending her knee, she brought it close to her face, but she couldn’t see any evidence of the cut.

Her
stomach growled, and she winced as she pulled herself to standing and reached for a fluffy towel that smelled of lilacs.

Rather than dress for the beach—because she’d never be able to eat her fill while sitting in a revealing bikini—she chose a tank top and shorts.
 

She was walking across the lobby when cool fingers wrapped around her arm. She immediately knew it wasn’t Koenraad, but she hoped…

Thomas stood there wearing jeans and a
Tureygua
is
Paradise
T-shirt that was so new she could still see symmetrical lines from when it had sat folded on a shelf. There was a smudge on his glasses, and his hair was mostly obscured by a Harvard baseball cap.
 

“Were you looking for me?” he asked.

She went stiff in shock. “Thomas…” was all she could manage. Surely there was something neutral she
could say? Then she noted the full duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
 

He followed her train of thought and patted the bag. “I’m heading back to the airport,” he said with a little shrug, though his eyes never left hers. “I thought it was the romantic thing, coming down here to change your mind. You don’t know how disappointed I was… Anyway, I’m so glad you came by, even if it was at the last
minute.”

Her stomach twisted as she stared up into his eyes. It had been one thing to despise him from afar. She’d been so furious about how he’d left her a dateless bridesmaid, and about the horrible things they’d said to each other the night before the wedding, that she’d forgotten there were things she liked about him.

Like the way he looked at her as if she were the only woman in the world.
He was doing it right now, and it never failed to make her heart beat a little faster.
 

He adjusted the duffel’s strap over his shoulder, and that reminded her of how great his massages were. He had strong hands, and he knew just when to dig into a knot and when to reduce his touch to a soft caress.

“I didn’t…” she began, but it felt cruel to tell him the truth, that not only hadn’t she decided
to find him, she was staying in the same hotel with her new boyfriend. “I didn’t want this to be a big deal.”

He frowned, no doubt suspecting she was hiding something. “But you’re here now, and I’ve got about forty minutes before I have to leave for the airport. Let’s see how much groveling I can do.” He smiled, but Monroe felt tense.

“I am seeing someone else. That wasn’t something I invented
to get back at you.”

“Look, I understand why you’re pissed at me. If it helps, I’m pissed at me, too. We’re on the same side here.”

“Then you understand why we’re not good for each other.”

“We’re going to have to agree to disagree about that, but I need help understanding. Who is this guy you met?” His voice turned harder, and hurt flashed in his eyes.

“Look, Thomas, it wasn’t planned. I met
him and we hit it off.”

“You met him here?” He adjusted the strap again. “This bag is heavy. Why don’t we go into the restaurant, order a coffee. I won’t try to change your mind, but I think we can’t end things the way we did. There needs to be some kind of resolution.”

Monroe had gotten her resolution right about the time Koenraad was showing her how to use a snorkel, but she felt her resolve
weakening. It was partially Tara’s fault, for giving her a mini guilt trip about avoiding Thomas.
 

“That’s fine,” she said.
 

As they walked into the restaurant, Monroe wondered what he was thinking. Surely nothing good. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her if she’d slept with Koenraad.
 

She really hoped Koenraad wouldn’t come back early.

They chose a seat at the window with a view overlooking the
tropical garden, complete with bright orange and red flowers and verdant foliage. There was a narrow walkway winding through it, and just beyond, a stretch of sand, flashes of the Caribbean Sea.
 

A toned woman in a white bikini passed just outside the window, but Thomas didn’t seem to notice her. “Were you happy?” he asked.

Monroe hadn’t expected him to start with that. “I… I don’t know,” she
said.

The waiter came and Monroe ordered a sandwich. She was relieved that she wasn’t asked her room number. She didn’t want Thomas to know she was staying in this hotel; her daily quota of awkward had already maxed out.

“Monroe.” Thomas looked at her hands twisting the cloth napkin. He didn’t move to touch her, though. “I want you to know how deeply sorry I am about everything that happened
between us. It was a real wake-up call for me.”

“You don’t have to—”

“If I could go back in time, I’d have been at that wedding with you. I want you to know that.”

“Ok.” This was getting even more awkward than she’d feared. She wanted to run back upstairs, but she was frozen in her chair.
 

The waiter brought two cups of coffee. Thomas stirred cream into his and took a sip. Silence stretched
out tensely. It practically begged to be filled, but Monroe couldn’t think of anything to say, so she didn’t. She found herself staring at the Harvard baseball hat, and she wondered if he’d bought it a separate seat on the plane or if it had been forced to travel on his head like a common hat.

BOOK: Oceans Untamed
5.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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