5. Chase
CHAPTER FIVE
Chase
The Atlantic at night was a different universe.
I’d been swimming for six hours because six hours of open ocean was the only thing that made the noise stop.
Social media obligations and branding slides and old debts had swirled in my head until I couldn’t take it anymore, so I’d gone down to the beach and shifted for the first time in months.
RipTide would have paid for first class. Champagne, one of those little eye masks that made you look like an asshole but feel like a king. I’d told Derek—my agent—I needed the travel time, and he hadn’t asked questions.
I needed the water more than I needed the sleep.
My family called it following the old paths.
The migration routes we had traced for generations before humans invented jet skis and cruise ships.
My muscles moved in the rhythm encoded in my DNA, powerful tail strokes that could cover fifty miles without strain, and for six hours there was nothing but the current and the dark and not having to be the person everyone wanted me to be.
The water told me stories as I swam. Here, a pod of dolphins gossiping. There, the echo of a shipping lane I knew to avoid. The temperature dropped and rose in pockets that meant different currents, different worlds. But they passed over me like…well, water.
I’d been seventeen the last time I’d swum this far north, when I’d still shifted regularly and hadn’t traded that in for surfboards and trophies.
I’d still been young enough that the transformation felt like a gift instead of a complication.
That trip, I’d been traveling to the family gathering in Nova Scotia that I’d never attended again.
But I remembered this exact spot, where the continental shelf started its curve, where the water was charged—an energy I’d felt nowhere else.
Now, at twenty-five, I found that feeling again. Like I was being wrapped in a golden light, a soft power as ancient as the deep but warmer—welcoming.
And mixed with that was the one thing I couldn’t resist. One drop of blood, dissolved in the current and moving south with the tide.
It tasted like that same electricity, like a power that was sleeping in the deep, waiting to be awakened. My body made a unilateral decision before my brain had any say in the matter.
I angled toward shore.
My tiger shark instincts cataloged everything automatically.
Water temperature: a perfect sixty-eight degrees.
Current: mild southern pull. Prey fish: abundant and ridiculously easy to catch, though I wasn’t hungry.
And underneath it all, a new sensation that made my electromagnetic sensors light up—magic, actual magic, woven into the water.
Crescent Cove.
The name surfaced in my human consciousness, along with the competition details I’d been trying not to think about. Three days of performing for cameras and winning another trophy that would end up in storage because I’d run out of shelf space years ago.
But first, I needed legs. And pants. And probably a shower.
I let my instincts guide me to a stretch of beach away from the main town.
The waves carried me into the shallows, and I felt the familiar discomfort as my body recognized it was time to change.
The shift was never painful—my father had been very clear that if it hurt, you were fighting it—but it was deeply unsettling.
Like turning yourself inside out, except the inside was human, and the outside was apex predator.
I dragged myself onto the sand, my body reforming in segments.
Tail splitting into legs. Rough skin smoothing into something that could pass for human if you didn’t look too closely.
Teeth retracting from rows to a single set that could barely handle corn on the cob, let alone seal blubber.
My stripes faded everywhere except my ribs, where I could pass them off as tattoos.
My senses dulled instantly—the electromagnetic awareness vanishing, the ability to smell blood reduced—but not entirely gone.
“Fuck,” I gasped once my vocal cords reformed. The word came out rough, like I’d been gargling saltwater. Which, technically, I had been.
I spat out the corner of my board shorts I’d had hooked on my teeth the whole swim here. It was late, but the last thing I needed was a public indecency charge.
I pulled them on, still dripping, and tried to remember how to human.
Walk upright.
Check into your motel under the fake name you’d given for a little privacy before this whole circus began.
Bite nothing—unless it’s too pretty to resist.
I struggled up the beach, very ready to sleep for twelve hours, then figure out how to survive another competition without drowning my agent in the motel pool.
I made it exactly fifteen feet before I tripped and fell over something soft and definitely human.
“What the fuck—”
“OW, Jesus Christo—”
We both scrambled backward in the sand, my shark brain jumping into action—female, five-foot-eight, not a threat, smells like coconut and electricity and, beneath that…iron. Just a trace. Enough.
My eyes found the source before I could stop them—a thin cut on her palm, already clotting. The blood that had pulled me off a straight line and reeled me in like a fucking tuna. A human wouldn’t have noticed it.
The shark noticed it but didn’t lunge. It went still instead, settled like it had been flipped onto its back. That was new, and I didn’t have time to wonder about it, because then I noticed the rest of her.
Trouble.
Even by one flickering candle, that much was obvious.
She was sitting in a circle of shells with hair that had been styled by the wind, and eyes that caught the light gold-brown—and the shark in me, the part that should have been reading her as prey or threat, just fixed on her, like it had found the thing it swam up the coast for.
And immediately I imagined biting into the soft skin of her neck as I—
Wow.
That was not a normal human thought.
I briefly considered adjusting my stance, letting the moonlight hit my abs just right, to highlight my tattoos. Three sponsorship deals and a lot of terrible decisions in beach bars had established a reliable playbook for moments like this.
I didn’t.
I didn’t want to, which was also new. Maybe my shift back to human was taking longer than I thought.
“Did you just come out of the ocean?” Her voice was incredulous. “What the hell? It’s like one in the morning. On my beach.”
Her beach.
Interesting.
All right, I wasn’t sure if I was more human or more shark right now, but either way, I was very sure I was male with a gorgeous woman yelling at me—one of my favorite things.
“I could ask you the same thing.” Cocky was still the easiest mask to slip on, even without the posturing. “Who sits on a beach in the dark? That’s how you get murdered. Or stepped on.”
“This is Crescent Cove,” she replied, like that explained everything. “Nobody gets murdered here. We’re too boring for that.”
“Boring.”
I tested the word, oddly offended on behalf of a town I’d never actually visited. Also, there was nothing boring about a woman—especially one who looked like her—sitting in candlelight doing what was clearly some kind of ritual.
“You’re sitting in a circle of shells at one a.m. That’s not exactly standard boring behavior. Should I be worried you’re about to sacrifice me?”
The corner of her mouth moved and she killed it.
“Why’s a tourist swimming at night in June? It’s shark season.”
“Is it?” I asked innocently.
“Tiger sharks, mostly. They run the warm current up from Florida this time of year.” She tilted her head, studying me, like she couldn’t quite figure me out. “Nobody with sense swims at night in June.”
“Maybe I don’t have sense.”
“That’s obvious.” Her eyes flashed, amused. “Or maybe you wanted something only the ocean could give you.”
Maybe she had figured me out. The honest answer came up before I could intercept it.
“It’s quiet out there,” I said.
She absorbed that, and then a small nod. Was that agreement—or maybe even understanding? Then she let it go.
“Sharks don’t scare you?” she asked.
“They’ve got a bad reputation. I think they’re misunderstood.”
“Spoken like someone who’s never met one.”
If only you knew, beautiful.
“I don’t know, I think they’re kind of majestic. Apex predators, perfect evolution, masters of their environment, all of that.”
The corners of her eyes crinkled, like she was still resisting a smile.
“You a fan or a marine biologist?”
“Just a guy who appreciates physical prowess. I’m basically half-shark myself.”
“That would explain the ego,” she muttered, but that smile was starting to sneak through.
“And the teeth.” I flashed her my best grin. “Want a closer look?”
“I want to know why you actually have a death wish, but you keep dodging.”
“Maybe I was hoping to run into a beautiful woman doing mysterious beach rituals.” I glanced at her hand. The cut had almost stopped bleeding. The shark in me was disappointed, and I looked back at her face deliberately. “Mission accomplished.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there before.
“Does that line usually work for you?”
“I don’t know, is it working now?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You sure? Because you’re blushing.”
“There’s no way you could see that.”
She stood, brushing sand off her legs, and I tried to be subtle about watching.
Failed completely.
She noticed, too, because now she was the one smirking.
“Besides, I don’t flirt with tourists who are probably here for that stupid surf competition.”
“What if I’m not here for the competition?” Technically true. The competition was here for me. “What if I’m just a guy who likes midnight swims and tripping over beautiful women?”
“Then you’re still a tourist with a death wish and terrible pickup lines.”
“You haven’t heard my good ones yet.”
“Thank god for small miracles.”
But she was definitely smiling now, even as she started gathering her shells.
“You should really be more careful. The sharks around here, they’re different during migration, bolder—hungrier.”
Oh, you’re very right about that.
“I’ll take my chances.”
I watched her blow out the candle with a quick puff that made her lips purse in a way that was absolutely going to haunt me later.
“What’s your name?”
She looked at me for a long moment, deciding whether to answer.
“Selena…Torres. Like the moon goddess, but also like the singer.”
“Selena.” I tested the name, liked how it felt in my mouth, liked how it made me think of moonlight on dark water.
“Beautiful name for a beautiful woman doing mysterious midnight things.”
“And you’re back to the terrible lines.”
“Would you prefer I stick with the shark facts? Because I have a lot of those. Like, did you know tiger sharks have incredible night vision? Best in their family, actually. They can see everything in the dark.”
She paused, her bag halfway over her shoulder.
“Really?”
“Yeah, so if I was a shark, I would have been able to see how many times you’ve looked at my abs during this conversation.”
She pursed her lips.
“That’s very specific knowledge about tiger sharks.”
“I’m a very specific kind of guy.”
“The annoying kind?”
“The persistent kind.”
I stood and stepped closer to her, close enough that I could smell the coconut oil on her skin, the sea salt in her hair.
“The kind who’s going to be thinking about you for the rest of the night. The kind who’s hoping you’ll be thinking about me and back here tomorrow, same time, same place, so I can trip over you again.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“The thinking about me or the coming back?”
She shouldered her bag, but I caught how she bit her lip to fight another smile.
“Both. Neither. Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you want to eat me.”
“Maybe I do.”
I wasn’t even trying to be smooth anymore. It was just the truth. I reached out and took her hand, and a spark passed between us, electric and golden. It reminded me of the taste of the ocean here.
“Goodbye, stranger,” she said, but hesitated before pulling her hand away and walking up the beach. “Try not to get eaten by sharks. It would be embarrassing to die from your own overconfidence.”
“Would you miss me?”
“I’d feel bad for the shark. You’d probably give it indigestion.”
I laughed. Couldn’t help it.
“Selena?”
She paused but didn’t turn.
“What?”
“Same time tomorrow?”
“I won’t be here.”
“I will.”
She didn’t look back, but I felt it. A small surge of that warm electric current, and I stood there like an idiot, watching until she disappeared into the darkness.
I waited another full minute before diving back into the ocean, needing the cold water to clear my head. I swam in human form, just in case any other locals were lingering late at night.
I was so completely, utterly fucked.
Long legs and perfect lips were a distraction; I had waves to learn and sponsors to please.
Even if this distraction felt electric, made me want more like nothing had in years.