His shoulders fell in a long sigh. He got up, reaching for his clothes. “I do not know.”
She bit her lip, watching him dress. Even now, with her heart made of lead, the sight of his muscled body made heat surge through her veins.
“Could we…figure it out later?” she asked, tentatively. “No matter what happens, we have the rest of this week. Can we take a vacation from our real lives, just for a little while?”
He went still, his back to her. “Yes. We could do that.”
She slipped out of bed herself, padding over to him. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned her forehead against the hollow of his spine, breathing in his salt-sea scent.
Four days.
Four days before reality caught up with them. Four days to find a way that they could be together.
Otherwise four days would be all they had.
Chapter 12
She was not going to come with him.
His hopes had ebbed away like the tide as she’d chattered to her family, leaving his heart bleak and bare. Her dark eyes had been alight, emotions darting across her expressive face as brightly as shoals of tropical fish.
His kind were solitary by nature. Sharks might come together for a purpose—to feed, to mate, to defend territory—but it was usually a brief-lived alliance. In his arrogance, he ha
d assumed that a pack was no more than an unusually persistent hunting group.
Now, having heard her talk to hers, he knew just how badly he’d been wrong. It was clear that a pack was more like a coral reef—a symbiotic relationship, lives so completely intertwined that they were like a single, unified being.
And he had asked her to leave that behind. Trade her busy, sun-lit, joyous existence for the dark silence of the deep.
She was not going to come with him.
And she had not wanted her pack to know that he even existed.
Martha glanced over her shoulder at him, her brow furrowed, and he made himself push his despair down into the abyss of his soul. He had promised her four days. A vacation from their real lives, she’d called it.
If these four days were all that they could ever have, he would not spoil them with his insatiable hunger for more.
“You all right?” she asked him. “Feet okay?”
“I am fine.” In truth, his feet were aching abominably. But the pain was a welcome distraction from the deeper pain in his heart.
Martha turned, putting her hands on her hips and glaring up at him. “No heroics, Finn. You can’t possibly be used to hiking.”
“I spend a great deal of time in human form.” He lengthened his stride to catch up with her, forcing himself not to limp. “I must, in order to be the Voice of the Empress. Different types of sea shifters cannot talk with each other in our native forms, so we gather in Atlantis in order to speak with human voices. I am accustomed to walking.”
Unfortunately, this stony dirt trail was a far cry from the smooth, coral-paved streets of Atlantis. The resort guidebook had described this as a ‘short, easy hike.’ If that was true, then he dreaded to think what a dry-lander might consider a difficult trek.
Martha poked him in the center of his chest with one finger, still looking unconvinced. “Well, you just say if you want to take a break, okay? No shame in admitting you need a rest.”
She trotted ahead again, her sneaker-clad feet flashing easily across the uneven terrain. She looked as fresh as she had two hours ago, when they’d first started off. Watching the glide of the muscles in her strong brown legs, he was strongly tempted to suggest they did indeed take a break…though not to rest.
She cast him another glance over her shoulder, but this time her eyes were mischievous rather than concerned. “I’m beginning to think you’re lagging behind deliberately, you know.”
“I am admiring the view.” He let his gaze drift over her curves, enticingly displayed in cut-off shorts and a filmy top. “You said that was the purpose of a hike.”
“Oh, you.” Nonetheless, there was an extra sway to her hips as she turned away. “Come on, keep up. We must be nearly there.”
He could hear the familiar murmur of the sea now, under the foreign trills and squawks of dry-land birds and insects. The scent of moisture in the air grew stronger as they followed the trail up the last few switchbacks.