Page 62 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Awe only highlighted her beauty.

I gently pulled on her wrists so she could hear me. “Wiggle your toes in the sand.”

Warily, she stuck her bare foot into the sand and giggled. “It’s soft!” She slapped a hand over her mouth and that frown poppedback up. Gradually, it dissolved as the foaming waves lured her mouth to lift into a subtle, unintended smile. “We’ve been this close to the ocean all this time?”

“The sea. We are about a three-hour drive from our compound. The ocean is about a thousand miles that way.” I gestured along the shoreline to where sand fused with the sky.

“Why?” she asked, watching Zion leap up and jog to the sea. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Drink.” I offered her the water bottle she had aimed at me.

“Why would I? You won’t answer my questions either way.” She huffed, concentrating on dipping her toes in the sand, the grains sifting between the gaps, and tilting her head aside at the crashing waves on the shore, the ground darkening in areas the sea had claimed for its territory.

“A deal, then. Drink the water, and I will give you the answers you seek.” It had worked the previous time. She agreed to anything for a price, and the predictability made me consider the possibilities of what she must have gone through to develop a need to search for hidden meanings. Mistrust had implanted its roots deep within her.

She drained the water, grimacing each time I raised my eyebrows at her for taking a break between the gulps.

“Explain. Now,” she demanded.

“I thought you would like it.”

“That’s not an explanation.”

“It is.”

“Not if I have a say in it.”

“You do not.”

“You have no hold over what I have and don’t.”

“And yet that is all you are going to get.”

Growling from frustration, she zeroed in on Zion coming back. His abdomen muscles tensed as he stretched his arms above his head. “Come swim with me.”

She put the empty bottle on the beach blanket and buried her feet back in the sand. “I don’t know how. They don’t teach us that in the city.”

“I will teach you.” I reached for Jayla’s backpack in the heap of others at the edge of the blanket.

“You will not,” she spat out with a lovely bit of indignation. “I won’t let you so much as touch me.”

“You already did,” I said, rummaging in the mottled brown leather bag.

She stammered for a retort, but came up short.

Chuckling, I handed her a few clothing items Jayla had packed. “Here, you can go change behind the cliff there.” I motioned toward a narrow path leading out of the bay.

Suspicion was evident in how fast she snatched the clothes from me. Like a child about to be cheated out of a lollipop.

She stepped out of the shade on the sun-heated sand and yelped, “It burns!”

“I can carry you,” Zion offered up.

She jabbed a finger at him. “Not a chance.”

Once she marched off, the rush of the sea called to me, and I followed its trail starting at his neck, the glittering droplets of seawater trickling into the hollow of his throat and down his muscled torso. Multiple scars marred his front, from his chest to his green shorts glued to his hips, accentuating every curve of his body.

My tongue dried out.