Chapter 13 #2
“Ask me what you actually want to ask.” He shifts on the board, easy and balanced, like the water belongs to him. “You’ve been collecting questions about me since yesterday.”
I lean back on my hands. “Okay,” I say. “Who are you really, Ace? Not the surfer, not the luau guy. You.”
He goes quiet, and for a second, I think he’s going to dodge it the way I did. “I grew up doing work for people who never explained the full shape of it. By the time I understood what kind of men they were, I was already useful to them.”
I stop moving entirely. “Useful how?” I ask.
“Running packages. Moving cash. Dropping off things I knew better than to ask about.” His mouth hardens. “Started when I was fourteen. Paid well enough to make it easy to ignore what kind of men I was making money for.”
My chest tightens. I can see it too clearly, a younger version of him getting pulled into that life because it paid and because someone taught him to call it useful.
I shake my head. “That’s not a childhood. That’s exploitation.”
He shrugs and nods at the same time. “North and Luca were the first people in my life who didn’t want anything from me. Didn’t judge when I drew them into situations where we traded our morals for money for a bit to build a new, better life for us. All that changes a man.”
My chest hurts. “I would’ve never guessed,” I say quietly.
“Good.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “Then I’ve changed enough to be a different person.”
“I’m guessing you’re not going to expand the whole traded our morals part if I ask?” I grin his way.
That gets me a real smile that curls upward slowly, dangerously, giving me the answer I expected. He points at me. “Your turn. Real Adelaide.”
I drag my fingers through the wax on my board, buying myself a second.
“I grew up in Whispering Grove and spent most of my teenage years trying not to suffocate there. I left the first second I could and told myself I’d never miss it.
” I glance up at him. “My brother still lives there. His pack, his Omega. I think they’re probably going to have a baby soon. ”
His whole face softens. “You want to be there.”
“So badly it’s embarrassing.” I smile despite myself. “I want to be the aunt who teaches the child terrible songs and buys them loud toys and then gives them back the second they start crying.”
Ace laughs. “I can see that perfectly.”
“Thank you. I plan to be a menace.”
“I don’t doubt it.” The teasing eases out of his face. “You’d be good at it.”
That means more than I want it to, because I’m pretty sure he isn’t referring to the toys or the noise, but the loving part and the showing-up part.
I try to cover how much that affects me with a smile.
“You say alarmingly sweet things for a man who spent half of yesterday making me nervous on purpose.”
His mouth curves. “You were?”
“Please. You know I was.”
“I was enjoying how hard you were trying not to let it show.”
I point at him. “That is deeply unfair.”
“It was very entertaining.” He shifts a little closer on the board, water rocking us gently between sentences. “And for the record, you weren’t exactly unaffected either.”
“You’re very confident.”
“I don’t need confidence.” His voice drops just enough to make my stomach tighten. “I remember exactly how you sounded every time I got too close on the plane.”
Heat rushes through me so fast it feels vicious. I shift on my board, suddenly very aware of the sun on my skin, the water between us, the fact that he’s sitting there saying things like that with a completely straight face. That is an infuriatingly difficult thing to argue with.
Then he says, quieter, “You should probably be careful.”
“With what?”
His voice drops a little. “I’m already trying very hard not to come over there.”
My whole body reacts to that. A pulse deep in my gut, my fingers tightening on the edge of the board. I should say something clever. “What would happen if you did?” Okay, that was terrible.
His gaze holds mine. Steady. Heated. And there’s no amusement on his face now. “I’d kiss you,” he says. “And I don’t think I’d stop at one.”
My breath catches so hard it hurts. The wave rocking us is small, barely anything, but it feels like the whole ocean tilted.
“This is exactly why I left while you were asleep.”
He smiles, and there’s no humor in it this time. Just heat. “Yeah. I figured.”
We float for a while. The sun is properly up now, the water sparkling, a pelican doing a low pass overhead. I breathe in the salt and the warmth.
“I fell for you on the plane,” Ace says quietly. He isn’t even trying to dress it up. He’s sitting there on his board with the sun on his shoulders, telling the truth, and that somehow makes it worse. Better. Worse for me.
“Before we even got off the ground,” he goes on. “And when I woke up and you were gone…” He exhales through his nose, once. “I was a mess for a while.”
My throat goes tight so fast it hurts.
“I’m not saying that to corner you,” he says. “But I wanted more too, and then you disappeared, and I think you deserve to know I would’ve wanted it just as badly.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
He fixes me with those hypnotic eyes in the morning light, green and gold and devastatingly steady. “I think I still would,” he says.
The water rocks us gently. My hands are flat on the board, but my pulse thrums in my palms anyway.
“I have so much going on,” I say, and I hate how small my voice sounds. “Too much. More than you know.”
“I know enough.”
“And the second my van is sorted, I need to…”
“Go where?”
I look away first. “I’ll figure it out.”
“You’ll keep running.”
“I’ll keep being strategic about my location choices.”
His mouth twitches. “You’re going to run out of road.”
“Better that than dragging this to someone else’s door.”
His answer is immediate. “You’d be letting someone stand beside you.”
I have to blink against the glare of the water. “You don’t know what this is,” I say.
“No.” He shifts closer on the board, not enough to touch me, just enough that I notice. “But I know what I am. And I know what we are when the three of us are together.” His gaze holds mine, unwavering. “Nothing is getting to you while you’re with us. Do you understand me?”
It’s the way he says it that nearly breaks me—as if protection is a fact, not a promise. My heart is pounding so hard I can barely think over it. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to believe you.”
He licks his lips, and I’m staring too intensely. “Then start there.”
That is… not a fair thing to say to me while I’m sitting in the ocean in a bikini, trying very hard not to ruin my own life.
A clean set starts building behind him, the swell lifting the water between us.
Ace glances over his shoulder, then back at me. “Come on. Turtle’s probably doing another pass, and he might scare you.” He chuckles.
“I will absolutely let the turtle have you,” I say, already swinging my board around because if I stay facing him much longer, I’m going to do something reckless.
I paddle hard for the wave, shoulders burning, and I almost make it cleanly into the set before I hear him splashing behind me, much closer than I expected.
“If you let me in,” he says, his voice low enough to slip under my skin, “I’ll take such good care of you.”
The wave lifts me. I catch it and ride it in without turning around because I can’t right now. My whole body is flushed, stomach tight. There’s heat low between my thighs. By the time I hit the shallows and step off, the water feels too warm against my ankles.
Ace glides in beside me twenty seconds later, board under his arm, and doesn’t say another word. I’m grateful for that. Barely.
We stroll up the beach together, side by side, wet sand giving way to dry, and I keep my eyes ahead because every time I glance at him, I remember that tone and feel my body buzz all over again. Everything is burning up, which shouldn’t be happening this intensely, this fast.
I need normal. Immediately.
“So,” I say, clearing my throat. “Tournament training. Distract me.”
His mouth curves. He knows exactly what I’m doing. “Need more practice,” he says anyway. “All of us. The North Shore breaks faster than this. Meaner too, so less room for mistakes.”
I nod, grateful for the subject change even while I’m still burning. “You all compete together?”
“Most of the time.”
I chance a look over at him. Mistake. Sun’s on his chest, hair damp, board tucked against his hip, so many muscles, and still too sexy.
“You should come watch the tournament,” he says.
“I’d like that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I mean it.
His expression changes a little at that, warmer, more satisfied, and I have to look forward again before I do something stupid like tell him he could ask me for almost anything right now and I’d probably say yes.
Past the fence line, I prop my board against the metal railing, and he does the same beside it. The morning is full and golden, and I’m aware of being in a red bikini with about six inches of space between us.
His arm comes around my waist instantly and draws me against him. Not fast, not surprising, just inevitable, like the tide. Like something that was always going to happen and had simply been waiting for the right moment to stop.
“It feels right,” he says, low, near my ear. “Having you here. Like I’ve been walking around with a gap in me and now I’m not.”
I tip my face up before I can stop myself.
His mouth finds mine, and for one suspended second, everything else falls away. The beach house. The morning. The fact that this is dangerous in at least six different ways. None of it matters once he kisses me.