8. Chapter 8 #3
To my left, Stacey is stretched out on one of the loungers the villa staff dragged down earlier, with one ankle crossed over the other. She’s been talking for the last ten minutes, and I’ve retained maybe three words of it.
Unfortunately, all three were Mercer.
“I’m telling you,” she says, tilting her face toward the sun, “I packed the right bikini for a reason.”
I smooth damp sand off one of the kids’ shoulders and pretend not to hear her.
“A man like that does not show up to a beach camp to spend the whole weekend behaving.”
I don’t answer. If I do, I’ll probably say something rude. And I have absolutely no right to. Stacey can flirt with whoever she wants. She can wear whatever she wants. She can talk about him however she wants. None of that has anything to do with me.
Still, something ugly twists low in me every time she says his name like she’s already half picturing how she’d get him flat on his back.
She props herself up on one elbow and lowers her sunglasses enough to look at me. “You’re really not interested?”
“In what?”
“The six-foot-seven tattooed behemoth currently standing on that patio.”
Against my will, my eyes flick up toward the villa.
He’s there, where he’s been all day whenever there are too many kids around me. Orbiting the invisible line he seemingly refuses to cross. Even from here, he looks separate from the scene.
“God, just imagine what he’s packing down there.” She groans, dropping back down.
I shake the imagery out before my mind can conjure it.
“You do realize there are children here.” I glance at her.
“Yes,” she says. “And they’re all busy digging a hole to Australia.”
I look at the group of kids fully committed to some massive excavation project.
She stretches lazily and says, “I’m making progress with him.”
Something in me wants to tell her to shut up. Which is insane. And unfair. And absolutely not something I’m entitled to feel.
“Men like that only need one good reason.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want one.” I scrape sand off my knees and look down at my half-buried feet.
She lets out a soft, wicked little laugh. “Oh, Lilly. They always want one.”
Before I can answer, a chair scrapes violently above us.
The sound is so abrupt, so wrong against the loose rhythm of the afternoon, that my body snaps toward it.
I whip around just in time to see Zed lunge. He launched up from his chair so fast it kicked back hard against the patio stone with a violent crash.
The table jerks with the force of it. Dom barely has time to shift before Zed is already around the corner of the table. He doesn’t go around the others. He goes through them.
Jace gets knocked sideways at the shoulder, Tanner stumbles back into one of the loungers, and another player catches himself against the railing with a shouted, “Mercer, what the hell?”
Soon everyone’s shouting.
“What the hell—”
“Zed!”
“Mercer!”
Nobody understands what’s happening, including me. Zed does. That’s obvious from the way he runs. He’s already sprinting down the steps and across the sand before anyone else has even finished turning their heads.
Every stride eats ground, kicking up sand in violent sprays, arms pumping hard enough that the tattoos on them blur into one dark motion.
The whole beach is following him with their eyes now. Dom is halfway down the stairs with Jace following. The kids go still, their little heads following Zed across the beach.
He hits the shoreline and keeps going straight into the water, fully clothed, no break in pace, no thought given to anything except whatever he’s after.
The first wave smashes against his thick thighs. Then his hips. Then he’s driving through it harder, rough water kicking up around him, shirt soaked to black against his body in seconds.
“What the hell is he doing?” Stacey takes her sunglasses off to squint at the water.
Then somebody farther down the beach yells, “Oh, shit!”
And I finally see what Zed saw.
Too far out, there’s a little body in the water. It’s one of the boys. He goes under just long enough to make the entire world inside me seize.
Oh God, he’s drowning!
Everything on the beach changes into real panic. Counselors are running for the waterline, kids are being called back. Dom is already moving with the rest of the team and my father. People are dropping towels and drinks and everything else that mattered five seconds ago because now none of it does.
But Zed is already farther out than anyone else, cutting through the water with brutal certainty, all power and zero waste. He dives once through a swell and comes up closer, then surges forward again.
I’m not even sure I’m blinking.
All I can see is him driving into the water as though no part of him ever considered a version of this where he doesn’t make it to that child in time.
He reaches the boy just as another wave tries to swallow the kid under again.
Zed catches him. One thick arm wraps around the boy, the other cutting through the water hard enough to turn them both back toward shore.
Around me, people are still yelling, but the note in it changes.
By the time I start moving, half the beach is already in motion. I run toward the waterline. The wet sand grabs at my feet as I get closer, and all I can see is the dark shape of Zed in the water and the small body in his arm.
Then he hits the shore.
He drags the boy in with one arm hooked hard around his chest, the kid coughing and crying now, weak but conscious, and the sound of that cry makes my chest loosen enough to drag air in again.
He’s alive.
Oh, thank God.
The second Zed’s close enough, the others rush in. Two counselors wade out to help.
I reach the edge of the crowd just as they get the boy onto the sand, and I finally recognize him. It’s Sam, one of our younger ones.
People crowd around him. My father, Dom, and the medic on site.
Voices overlap everywhere.
“Give him space.”
“Easy, easy, buddy.”
“He’s breathing.”
“Get me a towel.”
“Move back, move back.”
He’s crying properly now, coughing seawater, terrified but very much ok, and the whole group around him collapses inward with desperate relief.
A few feet away, Zed stands in the surf, soaked through.
His black shirt is plastered to every brutal line of him, every tattooed inch of his arms and throat. Water streams down from his hair, off his jaw, over the hard shape of his chest, dripping from his fingertips into the sand.
He looks furious... and terrified. His chest is rising hard, his whole body still keyed for impact, and his eyes are locked on the cluster around the boy like if anyone in it makes the wrong move, he might actually tear them apart.
I have never seen that much emotion on his face.
“He’s okay,” the medic finally says. “There’s no water in his lungs. He’s okay.”
Zed looks at the nearest counselors with an expression filled with so much fury it nearly makes me flinch.
“How the fuck,” he barks out, “did he get that far out without one of you noticing?”
No one answers right away. A counselor opens his mouth, then shuts it again.
Another one stammers, “He was just with the group and then—”
Zed’s hands flex at his sides, veins standing out under wet skin. He looks a second away from letting the rage fully off the leash in front of everyone.
Instead, he curses under his breath, then looks back toward the group around Sam.
“He’s okay?”
It comes out harsh, but I hear the thing under it now. Fear.
The medic nods quickly. “Yeah. He’s okay. Shaken up, but okay.”