Or maybe it was,Don’t be a dumbass.
I was still learning seagullian.
“I’ll still eat you,” my stranger warned the bird, which I ignored as I gathered my courage.
I could do this.
For the beach, the town, and the turtles.
Definitely only for those things.
“I’m going to take a break in ten if you want?—”
He already had that smirk plastered on.
“This time, I won’t go easy on you, baby.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chase
Longest ten minutesof 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 overmy 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.
