10. Chase
CHAPTER TEN
Chase
The waves were trash.
I stood at the edge of the wet sand with my hands on my hips and a pair of polarized lenses sliding down my nose and watched the Atlantic do absolutely nothing for the third hour in a row.
A break that you wouldn’t paddle out for if you were a tourist, much less if you were an athlete who had a contractual obligation to perform on it in front of live cameras.
Tanner whistled, low and unimpressed.
“Glad I came all the way from Cali for this,” he remarked, flopping back onto the sand.
I couldn’t disagree with him. This was pathetic, and a waste of my fucking time. A sea lion shifter could have told you these waves were terrible, and that was saying something.
Did being a shark shifter give me an unfair advantage in surfing? Debatable. When I was in my human form, my strength came purely from hours at the gym and in the water on a board. Good old-fashioned dedication and more meals of rice and chicken than I wanted to count.
But even fully human, I could still feel the ocean, feel it whisper to me—which I was pretty sure wasn’t what normal humans felt.
Was that an edge? Maybe. But so was a personal trainer, more expensive carbon-fiber surfboards, and personal chefs, which I never saw nepo babies complaining about.
But human or shark, these waves were trash.
“I’m going for a run.” I brushed the sand from my shorts more aggressively than was necessary.
“Going to film some thirst traps, more like,” Tanner muttered from beneath the arm slung over his face.
That wasn’t a bad idea. Better use of my time than sitting around here.
I turned the cap I was wearing around, flipped him off, and headed down the beach at a jog.
It wasn’t long before I came across one of those public workout areas. This one was half-decent, with a set of rings, various bars, and, most importantly, a clean rubberized floor.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, deciding what today’s content was going to be. Maybe one of those half-push-up, half-dance videos to a trending song. That sounded like a lot more brainpower than I was willing to extend right now.
Maybe today was just a hold-a-plank-until-failure-and-moan type of day. Maybe add a few hip pulses if I was feeling it. I always loved the comments the ladies left under those videos. These women were feral, and that was coming from a guy who was literally the apex predator of the ocean.
I was still scrolling for a song when I felt I was being watched.
Not by a person. The beach was mostly empty this far from the main stretch on a Wednesday.
I was being watched by a bird.
A one-eyed seagull, standing approximately four feet away on the rubber matting, regarding me with the focused, judgmental energy of a personal trainer.
A mean one.
I looked at it.
It looked at me.
I went back to scrolling.
It took three steps closer and I looked up again.
“You good?”
It tilted its head.
The single most condescending gesture I had ever received from a living creature, and I’d been in a meeting with RipTide’s legal team last Tuesday.
“Don’t judge me, dude. I have to give the people what they want.”
I propped my phone up against a pillar, angled it, and stepped back to check the frame. Behind me in the shot, I could see the open-air bar and the ocean beyond it, which was exactly the effortless content that kept the followers happy.
I hit record. The seagull walked directly in front of the lens and stopped.
“You’re kidding.” It was not kidding. “Move.”
I waved it off. It didn’t move.
“Shoo. I may not look it, but I will eat you, dude.”
Nothing.
I groaned, hopping up to grab him when I heard a very concerning metallic click.
The seagull had my phone in its beak.
We made eye contact.
It bolted.
I was a professional athlete and a fucking tiger shark shifter, and I had once surfed a forty-foot wave off the coast of Nazaré, and I spent the next four minutes in a full sprint down a public beach unable to catch a fucking seagull.
It flew ahead of me, unhurried, leading me south along the waterline without ever gaining altitude.
It didn’t drop my phone or veer off course. It turned when the beach curved, waited when I stumbled, and eventually banked toward a little beachside shack set back from the sand with a hand-painted sign over the window that said SHARK BITES in sun-bleached letters.
It landed on the counter, set my phone down, and stared at me.
I lunged, but it flapped away easily, settling on the grass roof, completely unbothered. I was contemplating how to climb the side of the building to grab the bastard when I got a better look at the shack.
It was small. The sign needed repainting on one side where the salt air had been at it, but everything else was clean and tended, the menu board written out in careful chalk letters, a hand-drawn sea turtle in the corner wearing tiny sunglasses.
Potted succulents lined the windowsill, and a wind chime made of shells and beach glass hung in the service window, gently dancing in the breeze.
Someone who cared for it deeply had built this place slowly.
I stood there looking at it for longer than made sense.
It sat in my chest, the same feeling as in my dream, of a place that was calm and meant to cradle you.
I traveled for a living. I had stayed in hotels on five continents, and I could not have described a single one of them after checkout. I didn’t build things. I didn’t tend things.
I got on the next flight.
This place felt like a home.
I didn’t know what to do with that thought, so I tucked it away and rolled my shoulders, and by the time I leaned on the counter I was El Tiburón again.
Easy as breathing.
Easier, lately.
“Hey.” I knocked on the wood. “Anybody—”
She popped up from below the counter with a cup of ice in one hand and a dish towel in the other, hair up, shirt tied to show off a narrow waist and wide hips, moving with the ease of someone in her own space.
For one moment her freckled face was neutral.
Selena.
She was even more fucking stunning in the daylight, and my shark brain went straight back to the taste of her in the ocean. I could feel it inside me, fighting to get out harder than it had in months.
I watched her face change to surprise, then rearrange into something more like recognition, and she set the cup of ice down on the counter.
“How can I help you?”
“Your bird stole my phone.”
For a beat, she said nothing.
“What?”
I picked it up off the counter. “Luckily, I got it back.”
“He’s not my bird, and he stole your phone…out of your pocket?”
Now it was my turn to pause.
“Not exactly. I had it propped up.”
Her expression shifted again, just like on the beach last night—the corner of her mouth fighting the smile.
“You were filming yourself?”
“I’m a content creator,” I said defensively.
“Is that what they’re calling it?”
Her smile snuck out.
I grinned back. I couldn’t help it.
“What, like you don’t recognize me?”
“Should I?” She picked up the dish towel again. “You want something? We’re known for our smoothies.”
I looked her up and down again, making sure she saw. I leaned on the counter, taking my time about it—admiring long legs leading up to an ass that just wouldn’t quit, defined calves and shoulders you couldn’t get from diet alone.
She moved like an athlete; I could see it in how her feet were planted, like she was ready to move.
“What if what I want isn’t on the menu?”
Oh, she couldn’t hide her smile now.
“I’d say your lines haven’t gotten better from last night.”
“Oh, so you do remember me?”
She was about to retort when—
“TIBBY!”
I closed my eyes briefly, my breath coming out in an audible sigh from the back of my throat.
Wingmanned by a bird just to be cock-blocked by a dolphin.
Typical.
Tanner came jogging up the sand behind me, shirtless—of course—and not even slightly out of breath despite the fact that he’d clearly just sprinted a quarter mile. He clapped me on the back hard enough to move me forward an inch and beamed at Selena.
He looked her up and down just as shamelessly as I had, but when he did it, it was gross and misogynistic.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
“Friend of yours?” she asked me, glancing between us with the calm, assessing expression of someone used to working with rowdy customers.
Then, only looking at me, “Is that your name? Tibby?”
Tanner opened his mouth.
“Sure,” I said.
She didn’t know who I was, and that was something I didn’t experience often, especially in beach towns. I wanted to cling to it just a bit longer. Maybe I didn’t have to be El Tiburón for her—not yet, at least.
A knot in my chest relaxed at that.
Tanner closed his mouth. Looked at me. Looked at her.
Had the self-preservation instinct—for once in his life—to say nothing.
“Huh.” She decided it wasn’t worth it, then looked back at Tanner. “I’m Selena.”
“Tanner,” he replied, already leaning on the counter with a smile I recognized as his going-to-try-something smile, which pissed me off way more than it normally would.
I flashed my teeth at him, but he was too distracted to notice.
“This your place? It’s great. Really great. You make those acaí bowls? Because I would come back every single day for a good acaí bowl, and I mean that as both a compliment and a genuine inquiry—”
“I make them,” Selena cut in, suppressing a laugh.
“Amazing. You’re amazing. Tibby, she’s amazing.”
He was bouncing on his toes, all the energy he couldn’t spend on the waves having nowhere to go. I understood that feeling, but I knew Tanner always felt it ten times more.
He spotted a pull-up bar mounted to the outside of the shack, between one wall and what looked like an old watchtower post. Part of me wondered if it had been installed to keep the shack from tipping over.
His face lit up.
“Oh, rad. Hey, what’s your count? Because I’ve been doing these ring pull-ups lately, and I feel like I could go all day. I really think I could just—”
“Tanner,” I interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Shut the fuck up, please.”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
His face fell, and I might have felt bad about if he hadn’t woken me up at the ass crack of dawn this morning just to watch some useless waves.
He helped himself to a pen from the counter and spun it between his fingers, which was just what Tanner did when he was being forcibly prevented from talking.
I turned back to Selena, who had watched this entire exchange with the expression of someone being mildly entertained at no cost to herself.
“So, how many?” I nodded at the bar.
She glanced up at it, then back at me, her eyes lingering.
“More than you.”
Damn, this girl knew the way straight to my heart.
“That’s a bold claim.”
She turned away, ostensibly to set down her dish rag, but I saw the color on her cheeks before she could hide it.
“It’s a factual one.” She faced me again. “Why? You want to find out?”
I stretched—I mean, I flexed and made it look kind of like stretching.
“I don’t know. What do I get out of it?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and, yeah, her tits looked great too, just the shadow of her nipples visible through her white shirt.
“How about a bet, then? If I win, I get those big muscles to help fix the AC unit on the back of the shack.”
“I’ll do you one better. How about you can use me however you want until the end of your shift today?”
As I said it, her eyes darkened, and her tongue flicked out beneath those plump lips.
Oh, so she isn’t just flirting.
Good.
I had no intention of letting her get away again.
The part of me I’d been suppressing, the one that changed into a fourteen-foot-long apex predator, had been circling her since last night, dying to get a bite.
And with her arms crossed, hip jutted out, and a challenge on her lips, she had no idea of the danger she was in.
“And if you win?” she asked.
I smiled. The smile that was all over my Instagram. El Tiburón’s smile.
“I’ll think of something.”
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t object. Instead, she stepped out of the small side door of the shack.
“Fine,” she agreed, lining up beneath the bar. “Ladies first.”