Master of the Deep

by Cleo Peitsche

  She hadn’t wanted Brady, and Koenraad strongly suspected she’d encouraged their son to go into the ocean that fateful day, knowing that he might not shift back.

  Then she’d done the grieving mother act, but all she wanted was for Koenraad to impregnate her again. She’d said as much the same week Brady disappeared. The more Koenraad resisted her, the more she came after him. Victoria was beautiful and seductive, and Koenraad would have bet money that he was the only man to ever turn her down.

  And even he wasn’t immune. One moment of weakness was all it had taken. Of course, he’d been drunk on an alcoholic mix that would have put a human in a coma, and she’d been going on and on that summer about how she owed Koenraad everything, how he’d saved her.

  All she wanted, she’d said, was to make it up to him, to give him something in return, and then she’d let it go and they could go back to being friends. All he really remembered of that night was Victoria straddling him, her teeth raking down his neck, her hands like claws digging into him.

  He liked his sex violent, and she’d been happy to oblige. As a shark shifter, she understood it in a way that a human never would.

  In a way that Monroe never would.

  The thought of the sweet, kind woman waiting for him brought his attention back to the present day.

  Victoria inhaled. “You smell like lust, but I can tell that you’re horny. She doesn’t satisfy you, does she?”

  “I was in the middle of something when you called,” he growled. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Victoria plastered a delicate hand to her chest. “Who mentioned anything about little ole me?”

  Her purr got under his skin, made him want to shift shark, to settle this as sharks did, with teeth. Female sharks were often larger and stronger than males, and challenges over territory had nothing to do with male or female, or even size. Physically, Koenraad could dominate most other sharks. He was rarely challenged. Victoria, however, didn’t believe in diplomacy, and her stubborn streak only meant they’d both get torn up before he succeeded in driving her out of his territory. It would have been satisfying nonetheless.

  Unfortunately, Darius wouldn’t be happy if Koenraad ripped off Victoria’s fin. A shifter could regenerate fins, but they took time to grow back. Koenraad might have risked Darius’s wrath, but at the moment every healthy shifter was needed while they dealt with whatever was poisoning the water around Tureygua, Curaçao and Bonaire.

  “Why did you call me?” Koenraad asked. “What’s so damned urgent?”

  Victoria glanced toward the front door. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “No.” In fact, he’d planned to invite her in, to be civil, but at this point if he acted the least bit nice, it would be suspicious. Plus he didn’t want her stench in his house, even if he never used it.

  She pursed her full lips. “It’s about Brady.”

  “We had this conversation yesterday.”

  Her mouth curved into a smile. “We did. And you asked me if I’d scented him. Early this morning, I did catch a trace.”

  Koenraad went stiff before he could catch himself, and Victoria’s eyes gleamed with pleasure.

  She knew he was surprised and upset, but she wouldn’t know the reason. He aimed to keep it that way. He cleared his throat. “I looked for Brady for a year and a half. If he’s anywhere near Tureygua, I would have found him. He’s gone, Victoria.”

  Her smile broadened. “Not here. I picked up his scent on the west side of Bonaire.”

  That brought him up short. She was lying, but why?

  The answer hit him. Because she was Victoria, and she had a one-track mind, and everything was a scheme. She wanted him to come search with her. To get him alone in the ocean and in shark form. It was easier to seduce a shifter in animal form. Every emotion was stronger then, and every urge, too: hunger, thirst… and especially lust.

  “You’re mistaken,” he said.

  “Look at me,” she demanded. She grabbed his arm, and he shook out of her grasp. “You know me, Koenraad. Look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying.”

  He did it only because he knew it would get her off his back—and his lawn—that much sooner. But as he looked into her big, dark eyes, he had the unsettling thought that she was telling the truth.

  But that was impossible. She couldn’t have caught Brady’s scent near Bonaire.

  “Come search with me,” she said. She grabbed his arm again, her fingers digging into his skin, and for once she didn’t seem to be doing it to seduce him. She stared up at him, and for a moment, he saw a glimmer of vulnerability. “Just come search with me,” she said. “If there’s even a chance—”

  Well, shit. What could he say to that? And if he didn’t do it, she’d be suspicious. He was trapped. “Tomorrow,” he said. “But I think you’ve made a mistake.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Once she’d gotten what she wanted—a promise to meet—she’d been easy to get rid of. Still, he went inside the enormous house and stayed there a few minutes, watering his plants and checking on his aquariums and pool. The weekly cleaning service kept everything in good order.

  It wasn’t until he was back home, walking through the long hallways of his ocean-side mansion, that it occurred to him to wonder what the hell Victoria had been doing on the west side of Bonaire in the first place. She was part of the task force searching for Wardell, the shark shifter who’d gone missing in Curaçao. Wardell had patrolled Curaçao, and, to a lesser extent, the east side of Bonaire. Unfortunately, a cowboy boot that had likely belonged to him had been found in the surf not far from where he lived. There had also been a report about a dead shark washed up on the beach, though the night Koenraad had been there, he hadn’t caught any trace of a corpse.

  Victoria shouldn’t have been on Bonaire at all.

  When he saw Monroe waiting by his pool, his anger and frustration melted away. Victoria had ruined part of his morning, and she was going to make a mess of the following day, but one look at Monroe fixed everything.

  “I’m packed and ready to go,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to get off the phone.”

  “We were done anyway. I was talking to Tara. You met her at the hotel when I was at the airport. She’s the one who told you that I’d left.”

  He smiled. He remembered her quite clearly. She was a blonde woman with an infectious smile. She’d taken one look at him and had told him to get his ass to the airport ASAP or he’d regret it forever.

  Not that he’d needed urging. Nothing could have kept him from trying to convince Monroe to stay. When she’d said she needed to go back to New York, he’d given her space, certain that even if she got on that flight, she’d be back in his arms sooner rather than later.

  “Tara wants me to bring you to dinner,” Monroe said. Her tone was casual, but Koenraad could sense her increased heartbeat, could smell that she’d broken into a dewy, feminine sweat. He wanted to lick the drops of perspiration off her neck, then go lower.

  Instead, he said, “I’d love to meet your friends. Probably not tonight, though. We won’t be back in time.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll have to see. But tomorrow or the day after.” He extended a hand and helped Monroe to her feet. She continued to hang onto him while she slid on her sandals. The skin of her palm was so soft, and he immediately thought of her urgent caresses in the bathroom before he’d left.

  “What do water samples and labs have to do with security? I can’t work it out,” Monroe said as they made their way through the mansion to where he’d left the car out front.

  Koenraad thought a moment. The list of things he was keeping from her was getting uncomfortably long. Though he planned to tell her a bit more about shark shifter physiology later, he still hadn’t breathed a word about Brady or Victoria or any of that. And while she hadn’t asked him point blank if he had a kid, he needed to say something soon.

  There simply wasn’t a way to tell her about
Brady, and to have it make sense, without giving her the whole story.

  No, he needed to explain the background first, for context, but filling her in would take time. However, he could partially answer her immediate question.

  “Something in the water is making shifters sick,” he said. “Some kind of toxin. I’m running my own unofficial investigation.” He was fully prepared to answer her followup questions, but she didn’t pose any.

  As they drove to a dock on the other side of the island, he ran through different ways to tell her about shark shifter culture. It wasn’t going to be easy, and he didn’t want to scare her away. In the end, he came up with nothing.

  Rather than park in one of the conveniently located spaces he was entitled to, he paid for access to an enclosed, rundown garage, pulling into a space on the deserted bottom level. The day he didn’t have to sneak around all the time couldn’t come soon enough.

  The yacht he was here for was one he rarely used. It wasn’t his style, and it was on semi-permanent loan to the previous owner, a former classmate who struggled with a gambling problem. No one who saw it would suspect Koenraad was on board.

  He carried the box of water samples aboard and started the engine. “You coming?” he asked as he hopped back onto the dock.

  Monroe’s eyes were wide as she boarded the golden boat, and her head swung back and forth as she took it in. Free Luv was smaller than The Good Life, the yacht Monroe had been on two days earlier. It was also, to an untrained eye, more extravagant. He couldn’t see much from where he squatted to untie the dock lines, but he bet she’d probably noticed the leopard-print cushions and black lamps in the form of posing, nude women.

  Oh, she definitely wasn’t going to be amused when she saw the bed with the custom silk sheets embroidered with “Let’s Fuck!” Maybe he’d keep her away from it… but that would be a crying shame. It was also probably impossible. They could barely keep their hands off each other. Now, with hours of ocean ahead of them and not much likely to pop up as distraction, things were bound to get heated.

  “I bought Free Luv on a whim,” Koenraad admitted as he came to stand beside her.

  It was the wrong thing to say because Monroe tensed.

  “It belonged to a friend who found himself in need of money.”

  Monroe nodded. “You’re very generous,” she said, and some of the tension eased out of her. She followed him to the helm and perched uncomfortably on a zebra-print seat.

  When they were out of the no-wake zone, he set a course for the lab. “There are seats on the aft deck. You can relax in the sun if you’d like,” he said. “Sunburn aside, it’s safe.”

  She shook her head. “I’m happy here.” She looked up at him, her pretty brown eyes the warm color of banded seashells, and she smiled.

  He had a lot of things to tell her, and hours ahead of them. Might as well get to it. “We don’t know each other well.”

  She stiffened, and when she looked at him, he could see she was every bit as terrified as he’d sensed.

  Chapter 5

  Monroe stared at Koenraad. She’d been doing fine until she got on this boat. It was shorter than the other one, though she supposed it was still a yacht. It also only had a single cabin instead of two stacked ones. Were they called cabins? No, cabins were inside. Helms. She’d heard Koenraad say that. One helm instead of two.

  But it looked like something a man would use for entertaining prostitutes. Or murdering them. Now that she thought about it, she was sure she’d seen a very similar boat on a Miami crime television show. As she recalled, that boat had belonged to a pimp.

  The boat didn’t match anything she knew about Koenraad, and learning that he’d bought it off a friend didn’t exactly make her feel better; she could tell a lot about a man by the people he chose to hang out with. Obviously Koenraad was very close to whoever had first owned this floating monument to immaturity.

  “No, we don’t know each other well,” she said. “But that’s what this week is about, I guess.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m very wealthy.” He shook his head. “Obscenely wealthy is perhaps more accurate.”

  “Koenraad—”

  He held up a hand to interrupt her. “It means I can be free with my money. I bought this to help my friend, but I rarely use it.”

  She felt her face heating. Had her disapproval been so transparent? “You don’t have to explain anything to me. Really.”

  “But you’re uncomfortable, and I’m starting to think it’s not just because you’re wondering what grown man would own something like this boat. So why? What’s really bothering you?” He turned toward her, his eyes piercing her, penetrating her soul.

  Even though it was quite warm, she wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s just weird. I feel like I know you, which is dumb, and then when I realize that I really don’t, it kinda throws me off.” She looked up at him. “Does that make any sense?”

  He nodded. “So that’s why you were upset this morning. All this must be overwhelming to say the least. Who I am, what I am, my lifestyle… any one of these could be a challenge. Add it all together, and… I understand.”

  “Why do you keep pushing me away when I try to go down on you?”

  He blinked, clearly not expecting the change of direction. “Um. That’s….” He cleared his throat. “Ok.” He patted the cheetah-patterned seat next to him. “Please sit.”

  She moved, and the moment she was beside him, goosebumps rose all over her skin. She wanted to turn her face into his chest and rub her cheeks on him. A little moan threatened to escape from her throat.

  She kept it at bay.

  “I’m going to tell you everything about shifters.” He frowned. “Shark shifters. Because all shifters aren’t the same.”

  He adjusted some knobs on the boat’s instrument panel, then took her hand. The touch of his skin thrilled her, and she curled her fingers around his.

  “Shifters are born this way.” He paused for a long time, and Monroe frowned. If he was already over-thinking this much so early into the explanation, it wasn’t likely to be a very long or complete one.

  “You’re not obligated to tell me,” she murmured.

  “You’re here at my request. I think you deserve to know.”

  She couldn’t hold his gaze at that, and she stared out at the endless ocean rushing by. They were far enough out that all solid land had disappeared from view. Four other vessels shared the ocean with them, and all were a distance away.

  Koenraad squeezed her hand. “I like you, Monroe. No, we don’t know each other, but I want us to.”

  “I’d like that, too,” she murmured. God, she sounded pathetic. Even though she’d been kind of a doormat with Thomas, that wasn’t how she was. With Thomas, she’d been trying to be considerate, to give him space to pursue his career. When he’d crossed the line, she’d dumped him.

  Sure, she would have considered getting back together if he’d showed signs of changing, but she wouldn’t have put up with his taking her for granted forever.

  With Koenraad, though, she was so far out of her element that it unnerved her. He treated her well, but what he was made her feel powerless. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

  “Monroe.”

  She looked up into his handsome face and saw concern written there.

  “Am I freaking you out? Is this too fast?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s not too fast, but it feels almost too easy. It’s just… I’ve never had a… well, a relationship… that didn’t feel like…” She frowned. “Like work.”

  “Even at the beginning?”

  She nodded and shrugged at the same time, and Koenraad squeezed her hand again.

  “You’re only here a week, and I want to take advantage of this time. That’s why I’m telling you these things. Everything is tied up together. I’m rich because I’m a shifter. So long as humans prize gold, any shifter who can dive will be rich. There’s plenty of gold in the oceans if you kno
w where to look, and that’s not including sunken ships, though most of those have been looted by now. Money breeds money. Most marine shifters are quite wealthy. It also breeds power.”

  “So a lot of you are politicians?”

  “No.” He released her hand and slid his arm over her shoulders and pulled her to him. Heaven help her, he smelled so good. Each breath brought the scent of him deeper into her lungs.

  “We’re born this way.” He paused again, but only for a moment. “Many shifters have a preferred form. Some prefer to stay human, others prefer animals. My parents, for example, love to migrate the world as sharks.” He glanced at her. “If you need me to stop, if this gets overwhelming, just say the word.”

  Overwhelming? If that was the criteria, she should have stopped him two days ago. She licked her lips. “Please continue.”

  “My parents. You might assume, based on what I just said, that they’re uncultured, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you met them, you’d probably find them charming. Educated and intelligent. Sophisticated.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” she said.

  The compliment had been intended to make him smile, and it did.

  “And I’m guessing your mother is beautiful and always says the right thing.” He leaned forward and turned a knob. “My parents have the shark side, and they love to hunt together, to prowl the oceans. It makes them happy.”

  She was afraid to ask the next question, but she had to know. “Which do you prefer?”

  “I’m somewhere in the middle. I love the water in any form. I can enjoy it more deeply as a shark. But I also love civilization. It’s mostly a personal preference, not genetic predisposition.”

  Mostly. She wondered what that meant.

  “There are five kinds of marine shifters. Dolphins, porpoises, orcas, manatees, and, of course, sharks. Those groups are further subdivided. For sharks, there are bull sharks, tiger sharks, et cetera.”

  “What kind are you?”

  “White.”

  “As in great white? As in Jaws?”