Chapter 18
Light and heat roused him.
Again.
Wincing at the brightness glittering against his eyelids, grimacing at a jab of numbed nerves in his right arm, and despite the taste of his own morning breath, Wes woke up grinning.
Light: a summer sun was piercing Monterey’s fog, so it must be close to eight o’clock.
Not that he could check his watch and the alarm he’d forgotten to set.
Because, heat: Isabel, sprawled across his squashed arm and his watch-wearing wrist. Her body was limp and heavy, one hand curled in the lone pillow they hadn’t knocked off the bed last night.
Her other fingers were splayed over the reef knot inked on his chest. Sunlight whispered along her naked shoulders, a glow nestling at the base of her spine.
Tantalizing contours morphed over her skin with every slow breath.
An aurora of snarled hair fanned across her face, strands fluttering between her parted lips, teasing her nose.
She was snoring; laughter lodged under his ribs as he watched her inhale.
So beautiful.
He inched upright on his unencumbered elbow and reached out to smooth back her hair. Just so she wouldn’t choke, no ulterior motive. . . but it was a stupid idea. He lost his balance and toppled over with a muffled, “Jesus in a jumpsuit!”
Isabel’s eyes snapped open.
One eyebrow twitched.
Honestly, was there any other way to answer that sarcastic lilt than to roll them off his traitorous arm, to kiss her deep into the mattress, daring her to laugh at him—while hoping she would?
Her smile tasted of sunshine.
And her skin?
Her skin tasted of musky sleep and sweet salt when his lips skimmed her jaw, sucking with delicate pressure down her throat, nibbling across her breasts, her squirming stomach—“Wes, what are you. . . a-ah!”—and to her thighs.
He exhaled against the pale curls between them, breathing in her shiver, stroking his thumb over her wetness gathering for him, fluttering his eyelashes.
“W-Wes—” Her fingers scrabbled through his hair, fastening on his ears.
He flicked his eyelashes a second time.
Her ticklish, moaning laughter rippled through the bedroom. “But I h-haven’t showered yet.”
“Mmm?” He raised his head an inch. He captured her dark, open-mouthed gaze, caught her smile that trembled with eager anticipation despite her protest. Without breaking contact, he reached for her left ankle, tempting her leg over his shoulder, opening her to his tongue. “No. We will, though. After. Good?”
Her inhale stuttered. But then she nodded, her head falling back into the light. “Yes. G-good.”
Her gasp of pleasure as he circled over her, dipping two fingers inside her core to massage a little patch of roughness that made her hips buck against his diligent mouth and her breath break on his name, was better than good.
So much better.
“. . . you know,” he panted against her throat thirty minutes later, the fading edges of a release still juddering through his hips, groaning while he propped himself up on his elbows to bring them nose-to-nose, dropping another kiss on her mouth, “I could get used to waking up like this. Even aside from taxes and a payment on my hypothetical Nauti Lass, there are some significant benefits to marrying you, Buttercup.”
“But we’d be late to MORI every day.” A smile persisting, Isabel wiggled under him to squint at his watch. “Definitely today.”
“Worth it.”
“Yes.” Her heel flexed against his thigh. She returned his kiss quickly. Then she hitched her hips free before he could detain her with the beginnings of a delicious and naughty morning habit. “We need to shower now. It’s nearly nine. You promised—”
“I did.”
He kept his promises. Defying the bed’s gravity and Isabel’s own enticing warmth, he grabbed a fistful of their upholstered headboard and pushed upright.
He carried her laughing to the bathroom and into a spray of hot water.
Steam enveloped them, beading on their skin, slicking the tiles underfoot while they reached for shampoos and soaps.
Who could blame him for the palm he braced over her stomach while he smoothed a frothy loofah across her forearms and ribs, gentle between her thighs?
Who could fault him if he kissed her again as her fingers scrunched suds through his hair, his mouth moving with the droplets raining down her face, nibbling at her ear. . .
“I’ve decided what to do at the institute today,” she said into his shoulder. She wiped bubbles from her lips.
“Hmm?”
“Brianne plans to extract a juvenile two-spot octopus from Dr. Solomon’s tank. I’ll surprise her when she tries. I’ll confront her. And,” she continued before he could speak through the shampoo froth dribbling into his mouth, “I’ll get hard proof.”
He coughed out suds, skidded on wet tile when he reached to steady himself against a slippery, water-beaded wall. “No. . . wait, Isabel—”
“I’ll set my phone to record audio.” Her nails scraping lightly over his scalp turned him to her, demanding his focus on her words instead of on the sharp pinch of anxiety in his gut. “But I’ll need you to capture visuals of everything that happens, from down on the beach.”
“Outside?” The steam coiling around them was abruptly too hot, too intense. “If I’m on the beach, I won’t be in the lab. With the octopuses. With you. What if something goes wrong? What if—”
The shower head shut off with a shudder and a cold drizzle.
“I know,” she said into the quiet. She reached for their towels. “But, Wes, I’m going to do this myself.”
Under the firmness of her gaze and the softness of her mouth, the pressure of her hand leading him from the tub, handing over first his toothpaste by the sink, then his photography gear in the living room, before retrieving their discarded clothes and tempting Thalassa with shrimp.
. . how could he protest? How could Wes argue against her plan, when their two-spot had come unmoored from her coral sometime during the night?
When her suckers were limp, drifting aimlessly in the tank?
When she was unresponsive to the crustacean and even to Isabel’s electrifying touch?
Isabel wanted—needed—him to accept her decision, though his stomach iced and his face burned at the thought of her deliberately putting herself in harm’s way, alone. Doing so when he could stop her, protect her.
But he also understood: while she might actually want him now, she needed this.
He’d never make her choose.
He trusted her.
So he swiped through the Monaghan chatter filling his phone and interrupted Erin’s final Florida travel preparations with a call for assistance in reattaching Baby’s wires, then got his engine roaring again.
Beneath David Attenborough’s narration about wildlife migration patterns, an expectant silence quivered over the dashboard as they curved north through pine-edged inland fields, across the Old Salinas River, and pulled into MORI’s parking lot.
He cut the ignition.
Still quiet.
Isabel unbuckled her seat belt and stepped down onto the pavement.
“I. . .” He couldn’t stop himself. The jangle of keys in his fist was too loud. He swallowed and said, “I won’t tell you to be careful.”
“Thank you,” she nodded. Then she was gone, her baseball cap and her beat-up boots and her reckless, gorgeous courage vanishing into the ocean institute.
Fuck.
She was counting on him to do his part, however.
He grabbed his duffel and hauled his gear across the parking lot, down through the grasses and mussels to a stretch of beach with visibility into MORI’s rear windows.
These panels overlooked the bay; tidal plants craving sunlight flourished in shallow tanks by the glass.
But that same clear view from his vantage point meant that he was equally visible to anyone inside the institute who might be watching the beach.
So he rigged a tripod facing the surf as a decoy and took his time snapping a few establishing shots with a teleconverter.
Normal, casual, not even a little suspicious.
Gauging angles and glare off the kelp and the tide, he gradually moved his focus away from the water, inch by inch up the sand, and to MORI.
Yes: there were the marine plants by the windows. Behind them, human figures in waterproof boots studied data tablets, lugged buckets past recessed pools edged with Caution tape, fin-tagged incoming specimens, and monitored the salinity in a maze of seawater supply pipes.
The illumination in his shots was poor. The ambient light outside was much brighter than the institute’s interior.
But these utilitarian images weren’t meant to win him any prizes.
He scanned his viewfinder sideways, ignoring the splash zone that was an otter pup’s swimming lesson with a wader-clad scientist. . . searching. . . and—
There she is.
Rolling on her sanitary protective gloves, Isabel dumped a mass of mackerel from an industrial refrigerator onto a worktable.
With a snap of elastic over her elbows, she nodded at an IT tech exiting the computer lab, then greeted Jiang (who was busy rolling up the day’s ration of squid burritos on the same bench), and began to cut apart her fish.
Wes wasn’t the only one watching her. At her hatching station nearby, Dr. Solomon ignored a tentacle twitching toward her braid through her tank’s bubble curtain while she observed Isabel haul buckets of feed to the leopard shark enclosure.
Even at a thousand-yard distance, the scientist’s frown was unmistakable.
Brianne’s entrance was, too.
Smiling, waving a hand and her Stanley cup at the lab’s Friday staff, she circulated around the facility with a tablet and stylus, evaluating sockets and drains as she ran a routine maintenance inspection.
That, or a check on who was at the institute today and wasn’t so myopic about their research that they might notice when she stole an octopus later. She had the nerve to greet Isabel.
Maybe Isabel answered her.