Touching Paradise (11 page)

He pulled her legs down so she was flat on his bed, and he spread her thighs. He tried to be gentle, really he did, but he sensed he was scaring her.

“It’s ok,” he soothed. “I won’t hurt you.” Even if holding back might feel like it was killing him.
 

There was a strange splash in the water, not far away. It reminded him of the weird feeling he’d had right before Monroe had straddled him. The splash didn’t sound quite right. He would investigate later, when this gorgeous woman wasn’t waiting, legs spread, for him to fuck her.

Her buttocks, thighs and pussy glistened. He leaned over her and slowly lowered his straining erection toward her heat. She twitched and hitched her hips up, rolling them slightly as if afraid to vocally express her need for penetration. If he had time, he’d free her from that shyness, too. But he didn’t have that luxury. He had this night.

He didn’t just want to fuck her. He wanted to truly mate with her. Except that wasn’t something a shifter did with someone unless it was meant to be forever. And with a human? That was trouble. And where had this come from, anyway? He’d been with many women over the years, shifter and human alike. Some he’d been intellectually connected to, some he’d had a powerful hormonal attraction to. All of them he’d enjoyed, or he wouldn’t have wasted his time.
 

But nothing had been like this. He didn’t even really know the woman quivering in his bed. But what he did know, he liked very much. And then there was the physical allure that enthralled him.
 

He wanted to mate. Not sex. Mate, as shifters did. He could stop at the last minute, before it was completed. He gritted his teeth. The thought was unspeakably stupid. He knew that. And he could seriously hurt her. Assuming he was able to keep the spurs on his cock retracted, it would bring suffering nonetheless.
 

“Do you wanna turn the light on?” Monroe asked, her voice tentative. She wasn’t innocent, no way, but there was somehow an innocence to her. Of course, she couldn’t truly understand that between the soft lights in the hall and the moonlight coming through the window, he saw every inch of her as clearly as if she were under a spotlight.
 

And she damned sure didn’t suspect that he was trying to stop himself from making a bad decision that would change their lives forever.

She turned to look at him over her shoulder, and he remembered the expression on her face earlier on the beach, when she’d stared him in the eye and told him she wasn’t afraid. He’d almost laughed. Him. An apex predator and inches from his habitat… he could have shifted and dragged her into the water between his jaws. Yet she was unafraid.

And she had been telling the truth.

“Koenraad?” The sound of his name on her lips made his cock twitch. She didn’t pronounce half of the vowels and a third of the consonants, but he loved the sound of it.

“You are too damned sexy,” he said. He traced his hands over her shoulders, tensed from the effort of holding herself twisted around to look at him. If he’d allowed himself to really touch her, he’d lose control. “Hold onto something, baby,” he said softly.

He looked down at the supple, round curves of her gorgeous ass. Even though it almost killed him, he left her arms alone
(don’t pin her down)
and her shoulders (
don’t rake your teeth over her flawless skin)
and that perfect handhold where the flare of her hips tucked into a soft, lovely waist.
 

Instead, he grabbed handfuls of his sheets. She sensed his struggle for control. He could smell her fear, could feel the almost imperceptible change in her body temperature. To mate with her would be committing to her for the rest of their lives. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t subject her to that, and so he drew a line far on the side of safe, and he eased his cock into her slippery, clutching heat.

Oh, she was snug around his girth. And sopping, dripping wet. How was he supposed to control himself? He dug his fingers into the mattress, gathering up the sheets in his fists, and leaned his shoulders back, away from her, forcing himself to stare at the ceiling so he wouldn’t bite that delectable skin where her shoulder and neck joined. Her tight muscles were already clenching around him, squeezing him, sucking on him rhythmically.
 

“God, oh god oh god oh god,” she chanted, sounding out of her mind. Her voice had lowered, gotten breathy. “Koenraad, you feel… it’s like…” She sucked in air—he loved that particular tic of hers—and bit down on the pillow.

Biting. He wanted to bite her. To mar her skin with his lust. Every shark shifter who ever saw her would know that she was mated and claimed.

He could restrain himself. He could lightly drag his teeth over her body. Harmless. Innocent.

He came down over her and opened his mouth wide, pressed his teeth onto her shoulder. His cock swelled, and her sweet, sweet pussy squeezed him. She was so wet. So receptive.
 

She whimpered, nearly sending him into a frenzy, but some deep reserve of prudence made him rock back before his jaws could clamp.
 

His erection, though, plowed deeper into her velvet heat. He could feel every muscle in her body, and he adjusted his rhythm so that each thrust stroked the most sensitive spots of her pussy, and every inch of his length rubbed the skin closest to her clit.

She unleashed a torrent of desperate pleading. He slid a finger into his mouth and then bent his hand under her damp hip. The sheets underneath them were soaked, and he knew that even after he changed them, he would be able to detect her scent for months to come. Once he had his finger on her clit, he pressed in deep and pounded into her, hard and fast and relentless, his sweat-damp hips slapping against her soft thighs.

Feeling her orgasming around his cock and hearing her excited, unintelligible pleading made him see stars. Heaven knew he wasn’t a screamer, but that night he did, an animal grunt tearing from deep within as his balls tightened and sent uncountable spurts into Monroe’s perfect, gorgeous body.

 
His pulse finally slowed. He took a deep breath and shook his head. Now that the flood of hormones was clearing, he was grateful that he’d managed to hold back. Monroe deserved better than to be pulled even deeper into his world. She had her own life to lead, and it was unfair of him to take that away.

He should have regretted revealing what he had, which was far, far too much. But he didn’t.

He kissed the damp, curled hairs on the back of her neck, enjoying how clean and healthy she smelled. He shuddered as he reluctantly pulled from her pussy’s grip, then fell onto his back next to her.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” he said with a yawn.

She laughed. “You’re sending mixed messages here, ‘cause you sound like you need a nap.”

“Ok, I’m tired, too,” he said as his stomach growled, and they both laughed. He sensed that she’d curled her hands into fists and was drawing her arms in, and he realized that she was getting cold, so he pulled her back into his chest and draped his arms over her.
 

“You’re so warm,” she murmured.
 

There was a reason for that, but he wouldn’t explain it to her. He felt her breathing grow slower, then even, and he felt the moment when she passed from dozing into true sleep.

He wanted nothing more than to stay curled up with her, but those strange noises he’d ignored earlier were now again nagging at him, and there was something else, a strange sensation that worked on his nerves. Maybe it was technically his day off, but there weren’t any other sharks patrolling his waters. That splash had been weird… needed looking into.

Reluctantly, he eased his lover out of his arms and went into the hallway on feet as silent as death. Concentration made his senses hyper acute. No strange noises, but an unidentifiable sensation made his teeth itch.
 

He passed onto the deck, sniffing, then dove into the ocean, shifting automatically when the water touched his skin. Immediately, he felt like something had slammed into him from all directions at once. He forced himself to come back to the task at hand, and he swam fast, tasting the water, smelling, sensing, trying to tease out the identity of that unnameable sensation.

Sick.

No theory as to its provenance, if it was a smell or a taste or a goddamn electromagnetic disturbance. His brain was simply overwhelmed. Every cell in his body told him to get out of the water and do it now.
 

If he were any other shark shifter, he would have circled back to the boat, climbed back aboard and gone somewhere else for a few days, hoping that whatever was wrong would blow over. But this was his territory, the ocean filled with his charges, the beaches full of people who, while they didn’t realize it, depended on him for safety. Protecting Tureygua was his job, but it was also his calling. And so he forced himself to head toward the
sick.
 

As he swam, he tried to break the sensation into components. It was mostly a smell, and not a remotely familiar one, yet his brain assigned it a word.
Sick. Very sick.
It was jumbling his senses, making touch and smell and feel and vibration… all of it was confused. He remembered, suddenly, the dolphin he’d been following when he’d gone to investigate the stalled
Dragon
.
 

The dolphin had emitted the faintest of traces of this
sick
. It hadn’t registered, then, this new smell; it had been barely detectable, and he’d lacked a framework for it. Now it hammered at him, seemed to have gotten deep inside and lodged there. He knew that even when he shifted back to human, when he closed his eyes to sleep, it would return and plague him until he discovered what it was and then fixed it.
 

It wasn’t the right time to investigate this. Not with an innocent woman sleeping on his boat. She could wake up at any moment, and if she found him gone, with nothing but dark seas around…

Reluctantly, he turned and headed back. He didn’t need to consult Darius, but contacting one of the sharks who patrolled a nearby island felt like a good idea. The last thing he needed was to go headfirst into some new toxic sludge. Though this didn’t feel like chemical runoff from an unmonitored factory.
 

He hoped there was an easy explanation, but his instincts said otherwise.

Chapter 11

Monroe pulled the sheet around her shoulders and stepped into the hallway. Koenraad must have stopped his boat far from the inhabited islands because she didn’t see even a sparkle of manmade light, no matter which direction she looked.
 

“I’m out here.”
 

Even those three words set her to tingling again. Koenraad had been the most amazing, mind-blowing, incredible… every superlative she could muster up, it applied to what the man had done to her body.

She carefully walked out to the boat’s deck where Koenraad sat, naked in the moonlight, elbows on his knees and staring intently at nothing she could see. He looked up at her and seemed almost surprised. She wanted to tease him a little, but the slightly worried, concentrated look on his face made her think better of it.

“Hi,” she said shyly.

He seemed to snap out of it, or mostly. “You make that sheet look good.”

Charmer.
She touched him, feeling self-conscious, like she had no right to be so familiar with him. But wasn’t that how it always was with someone new? Except it was an order of magnitude greater with Koenraad. Despite his perfect manners and attentive consideration, there was still something wild and uncontrollable lurking under the surface.

She couldn’t keep Thomas interested. There was no chance in hell that someone like Koenraad would consider her as anything more than a fling.

Not that it mattered. Her life was in New York, and Koenraad’s was here. And then there was that other thing… which, after her nap, felt even more like a really bizarre dream, or perhaps the result of undiagnosed heat stroke or something. But at the same time, she accepted it. He was… a shark. That’s what he’d called himself. When she got home, she was going to be researching the hell out of it.
 

“Your hair is wet,” she said.

“I went for a quick swim.”
 

“Before we got distracted earlier, I asked about dinner…”

He stood easily, gracefully. “I would love to take you to dinner, but I’ve got something to deal with.” He frowned. “Forgive me. I would love to. Yes.”

“Ok,” she said, surprised. “I’d like to treat you, to thank you for ferrying me around—”
 

“Not gonna happen, but if you insist, we can flip a coin for the privilege. So you know, I always win.” He cocked an eyebrow. Despite his flirting, he seemed a bit tense.
 

She put on her bikini, which had dried and was now cool, then slipped on the coverup dress and the sandals.
 

“Which hotel is yours?”
 

She dug the room key out of her beach bag and was relieved to find the name printed on the side. She held it up for Koenraad to see, and he nodded. “Are you cold?”

“Just a little,” she said as she followed him inside the lower cabin. She stared at the steering wheel. “What would happen if I went up and turned the other steering wheel while you were down here?”

He shot her an amused look. “I have no idea. Maybe we can try it tomorrow. What time is your flight?”

Try it tomorrow.
She liked the sound of that. “Two-thirty.”

“You have plans in the morning?”

She shook her head although she didn’t know if it was true or not. She’d make time for him. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten her friends, but first, she saw them often in New York—even Linda, who had moved to Chicago when she got engaged, still returned several times a year for big company meetings. Plus her friends all had someone to keep entertained. She was the only one who’d come alone.

To her surprise, Koenraad took his boat right up to the beach near her hotel. Well, not
right
up to the beach. She didn’t ask how he intended to get her onto dry land, but she had a pretty good idea what he had in mind.