12. Chase
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chase
Longest ten minutes of my life.
I’d taken my smoothie out to one of the picnic tables behind the shack—delicious, by the way—to give her some space.
But it had been agony. I’d wanted to climb right over her neat counter and taste her right there, my shark brain doing its damnedest to make me.
But what clung to me of my humanity knew that she needed to come to me.
She was stubborn but flighty, and as much as I wanted to chase her, I needed to get at least a little bite first.
As I tried to get my very hard cock under control, I heard the side door of the shack slam open.
For a moment, we just stared at each other, and I watched her pulse flying beneath the skin of her throat. Then she crossed the space in three long strides, grabbed my face, and slammed her lips onto mine.
She kissed as aggressively as she’d challenged me to that pull-up contest. This woman did not like to lose.
Her hands gripped my jaw and threaded into my hair, and mine went to her waist as the world narrowed to the press of her mouth and the sweet smell of her skin and the small involuntary sound she made when I walked her back against the wall.
Her thigh gave perfectly under my fingers as I hooked it over my hip, and the small sound she made got bigger as my cock twitched against her through very thin board shorts.
“Do you have somewhere…” she half asked against my mouth.
I had a van in the beach parking lot. Tanner had the keys, and Tanner had never locked anything in his life.
I found her hand, and she followed without asking where, which said something about one of us.
As we approached the windowless, beat-up monstrosity, she stopped.
“That’s yours?”
“Technically Tanner’s.”
She looked at the sun-faded paint, a sticker stuck to the bumper that Diego had put there as a joke in Malibu eighteen months ago and none of us had gotten around to removing.
“Hmm,” she said, biting her lip, before pulling the back doors open.
Inside, it smelled like surf wax and a men’s locker room, surfboards piled on one wall, gear bags everywhere else, a half-empty bottle of sunscreen rolling loose on the floor.
Romantic.
She looked at it for exactly one second.
Then her hands were back in my hair and her mouth was at my jaw, and her teeth caught my earlobe so my vision briefly went white, and the inside of a beat-up van in a public parking lot stopped mattering at all.
I shut the door behind us—barely—before she was on top of me, and something uncomfortably hard wedged against my back. I scrambled to dislodge the tub of board wax as her weight came down on top of me.
She didn’t apologize for her weight.
I respected that.
Her knees bracketed my ribs and her mouth came back down on mine, and I got my hands under her shirt and felt her shiver—not from cold; the van was a greenhouse—and somewhere in my hindbrain the shark surfaced, slow, interested, tasting the water.
Tasting her.
Elevated pulse, and coconut and salt and heat.
I told it to wait.
It didn’t usually wait once things got this far, but for her it waited. I’d be thinking about that later.
I had things to do now.
“This comes off.” She yanked my shirt up.
“Buy me dinner first.”
“Smoothies count as dinner.”
I made to protest, but then her nails dragged down my chest and the sentence died of natural causes.
I threaded my fingers through her hair, tugging her closer to me, those perfect tits right in my face.
I nipped one through her white tee, and she made a small sound of encouragement, so I caught her nipple in my teeth before sucking harder, letting both the rough fabric and my tongue drag across the hard bud.
Oh, she really liked that, and so did the shark. She started grinding against me through my very thin board shorts and her bikini bottoms, and every single part of my brain—shark and man—said the same thing.
Taste her.
My other hand wrapped around the soft skin of her ass, yanking down her elastic bottoms to find the wet heat of her pussy, already waiting for me.
“Fuck, baby, you’re soaked.” I released her nipple, enjoying the dark, translucent mark on her shirt that gave me an amazing view of the mauve skin beneath.
I sank two fingers into her until she moaned, taking a little too much pleasure in the whimper she released when I immediately pulled them out and brought them to my lips.
Her pupils blew wide as I licked her arousal from them, making sure my tongue went between.
“This is better than anything on the menu, for sure.”
In the dim light of the van, she looked down at me like I was a solution.
To what problem, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t really care.
I’d been on magazine covers, I’d had crowds chant my name, and not one second of any of it had ever lit me up like that look.
Because I knew she was seeing me, and not El Tiburón.
“You want more?” she asked as she wove her fingers through my hair, tugging just enough to make my cock twitch, hard.
“Fuck yes, I do.”
She shifted up my body, her knees walking forward over my chest, and the scent of her hit my predator brain like chum in the water. The shark was not going to wait anymore.
“You know what I want?” she murmured.
Oh, I absolutely did.
I got my hands under her thighs anyway and purred, “Tell me,” because some things you make your competition say aloud.
“You talk a big game. Let’s see if your mouth backs it up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I pulled her down onto my face.
She tasted like salt and coconut, and the shark in me went still and very focused. I learned her in about ninety seconds. It was just like learning a break, but with even better results. Where did the energy gather? What made her stutter? Which rhythm did she chase with her hips?
It got easier when she stopped holding back and started using my face for exactly what she’d commandeered it for. Her hands found the wall of the van, then my chest, then back into my hair as she started rolling her hips, my tongue and nose hers to use.
“There,” she breathed. “There—don’t you dare get creative—”
I hummed something agreeable against her, and her whole body jolted as I sucked her clit into my mouth, keeping the same rhythm, just tighter. Static built where her skin met mine. Little bright pinpricks at every point of contact, like the air before a summer storm.
She was getting close. I could tell by how she was shaking. Wait, no, the whole van was shaking.
I opened my eyes, and just seeing the line of her stomach as she stretched over me, pinching her nipple through her white tee and biting her lip, had my cock throbbing so hard I thought I might have creamed my pants.
But beyond her, a tub of surfboard wax was floating in the air…and glowing. It twirled in the air so I saw the label: Sex Wax.
A few empty RipTide bottles floated by, but her eyes were closed as she ground against my face again and again, that static charge lighting up my whole body until my toes curled and I dug my fingers into her thighs as the current shot straight to the base of my spine and up the length of my cock.
Her legs clamped around my head and the van bucked on its shocks, the windows rattling, and she came with the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard—and the charge that had been crawling over my skin all this time snapped, every nerve I had firing at once.
I came like a teenager at a school dance who’d never touched a girl before, right into my sponsored board shorts, groaning into her as I lapped up everything she gave me.
Dignified? No.
Did I care, with her still trembling against my mouth and various objects orbiting the dome light?
No.
She peered at the tub of wax, lifting her hand, and it zoomed right to her. She seemed surprised, like she hadn’t expected that to work. She levitated it over her hand, then unscrewed the lid without touching it.
Then, like she remembered I was there, the tub fell to the van floor with a soft thud.
“Guess this town is full of surprises.”
She didn’t respond. Instead, she glanced down at me with a look I wasn’t too pleased about, considering how I’d just had her coming all over my face. She shifted back until she was perched on my chest and ran her fingers over my jaw.
Her touch was like lightning, like a thousand tiny electric shocks, and for a shark, that was fucking hot. My board shorts proved it.
The hum moved from my face through my whole body, like she was trying to probe beneath my skin, see what I really was.
“Should I be worried about something?”
“You’re a shark shifter,” she said, no hesitation.
“And you’re a witch,” I retorted, my thumbs slowly tracing circles on her thighs.
She raised an eyebrow. “That a problem?”
I thought about what Tanner had said.
A magical battery. Was she using me to power up?
Fine by me. Maybe I could even use it to my advantage.
A pretty local who didn’t want anything from me but orgasms and voltage was the least complicated thing I’d touched in a while. No expectations, no debt to settle, no one keeping score.
Well, unless it was foreplay.
“Not a problem, baby.” I tightened my grip on her thighs, already thinking about flipping her under me. “But I’m thinking round two. I’ve barely gotten started—”
I shifted my hips to make my case, and that’s when I felt it. The decidedly not-dry situation inside my board shorts.
I stopped.
She felt me stop. Her eyes tracked down my body, then back up to my face, and I watched the slow, delighted comprehension spread across her features.
“Did you—” She bit her lip, failing completely to hold it in. “Big scary shark shifter with all those teeth. Did you come in your shorts? I didn’t even touch you.”
“In my defense, you definitely touched me with your magic. A lesser man wouldn’t have survived at all.”
“A lesser man…pinche sirena.”
She was openly laughing now, perched on my chest like she’d won, which—fine—she had, this round. But then the heat returned to her eyes.
“Best two out of three, Tibby?” Her legs pulsed just a tiny bit as she said it.
“As long as you don’t call me that.”
She smirked, crawling backward. She licked her lips, and my cock twitched again despite the mess inside my shorts as she slid her hand over the laces.
Her grip was sure and slightly mean, which—I was learning things about myself in this van. Her thumb dragged over the head of my cock, and the entire length of me jumped in her palm. She smiled, a real smile, and it was entirely at my expense.
Worth it.
But before she could go any further, the back doors of the van flew open, and she screamed.
“CHASE! Derek is looking—oh, damn!”
Tanner’s eyes immediately locked on Selena, who was desperately trying to cover her naked bottom half with what looked like a gym bag.
“My bad, dude! I forgot the first rule. When the van’s a-rocking—”
“Tanner, if you don’t get the fuck out of here in the next two seconds—”
He sheepishly closed the van doors, mumbling, “Derek is looking for you.”
The van doors clicked shut, and I glanced back over at Selena, who was beet red. But her eyes were darting around the van, maybe really taking it in for the first time.
“Sorry about that, baby. I swear these guys have no concept of privacy…”
But she wasn’t listening. Her eyes locked onto one of the half-drunk bottles of RipTide before sliding over all our boards and landing back on me.
“He called you Chase.”
Shit. I guess the jig was up.
“Well, that’s my name. Kinda hurt you didn’t ask before we—”
She scrambled back over to me, grabbing my face like she was seeing me for the first time.
“Chase…Are you fucking Chase Perez?”
“Actually, I think you were about to be fucking Chase Perez…”
She pulled away from me, and I thought I heard her mutter, “Of course he fucking is.”
That…wasn’t what I expected.
Normally, one of two things happened. Either people were all over me, fawning, or they were telling me what a piece of shit I was for what I’d done to surfing’s reputation. She was trying to run away. The shark in me latched onto that immediately, no longer sated.
I watched her tug on her swimsuit bottoms, disappointed as my new favorite place in the whole world disappeared.
“You know, normally it’s the ‘shark shifter’ part of the ‘pro surfer shark shifter’ that freaks people out.”
“This is Crescent Cove. I’ve known shifters my whole life.”
“So it’s the surfing that freaks you out?”
“It’s not the surfing.” She dragged her hands down her face. “You’re here with RipTide. You’re on my beach when—” She cut herself off. “It doesn’t matter. This was fun.”
She reached for the door handle.
She thought she was done with me. I’d had her coming on my tongue so hard she’d practically levitated the whole van, and she thought she was done with me.
I almost laughed.
No one ran from me.
I might look human, but what she didn’t realize was that prey that tried to run was always the sweetest catch.
“Waiiit a minute.” I grabbed her around the waist and tugged her back into my lap, nuzzling her neck, feeling the pulse of her blood beneath my tongue, and that sharp electric hum sparking against my skin. “That’s it? Not even a goodbye kiss? What are you, an ice witch?”
“Ice witch,” she repeated. “That’s original.”
“I have more.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
She stayed in my lap, which was a win.
“You’re here for two weeks.”
“Give or take.”
“And your people are taking over the beach.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
I realized something.
“Did you think this was more than—”
“No,” she said immediately, turning in my arms. “You want a goodbye kiss?”
“I want a lot more than that.”
The corner of her lips twitched. “I’m sure you do.”
She grabbed my jaw and kissed me like she was the one devouring me now. But I could tell it was an ending, not a beginning. I gave her ass a tight parting squeeze anyway.
Consolation prize.
She climbed off me, fixed her swimsuit, and got the door open in one clean motion. The afternoon light spilled brightly around her, lighting up her curls like a halo.
“See you around, Chase Perez.”