Page 44 of Take Me Back
“Do notshhhme right now! I will not beshhh’d. There’s a motherfucking shark out there. What about the others? Oh my God.”
My husband, who apparently doesn’t fear sharks or bogeymen or those little geckos that sneak up on you in the showers in the tropics, just wraps his arms around me again. “They’ll be fine.”
My attention cuts to the water, where I’m anticipating a giant cloud of blood to form any moment when the shark tears them into tiny shreds like inJaws.
Captain Tisdale finally cuts in. “Fedor is trained. He will not panic. And Mr. Cross is correct—they are not usually aggressive. Usually we only see nurse sharks, and very rarely anything else.”
“I saw the blacktip, so I figured it was a good time to move out.”
Tisdale’s eyes narrow on Dane. “I’m surprised you were able to identify it so easily. You must have spent a lot of time in the ocean in order to do so.”
Chapter 19
Dane
Tisdale is looking at me a little more intently than I’d like, but I’m not about to give him the rundown of the two times I’ve tangled with sharks that were more curious. Once was a hammerhead off the coast of Nicaragua, and the other was a blacktip another time in Belize that decided it was pissed off at the world.
We all watch the fin as it moves away from the catamaran and Fedor and Vander.
“What’s going on?” Anya carefully walks down the side of the deck, returning from the bow where she’s been sunbathing. She holds a hand over her mouth to cover a yawn.
“Oh, nothing,” Kat says. “Just Dane spotting sharks in the water and not mentioning it to me while I swim to safety.” She glares at me. “I don’t know whether to thank you or strangle you.”
“A sh ... shark?” Anya stutters, and her voice breaks. “Are you fucking serious?” She scans the water, looking for Vander, I assume. “And you just left them behind?”
Captain Tisdale, probably sensing the fit she’s about to throw, places a hand on Anya’s shoulder. “It is unlikely the shark will come any closer. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is panic. They sense fear.”
Fedor and Vander turn toward the catamaran and make their way back at a leisurely pace.
Captain Tisdale steps back, and Anya screams. The pitch is so high, my eardrums protest. It takes a moment before I realize she is screaming a name. Strangely, it doesn’t sound like Vander.
His head pops up from the water and turns toward us. Anya starts waving her arms and pointing in the direction where we last saw the fin.
“Shark!”
Fedor lifts his head and looks around, searching the surface, before he goes under to no doubt try to see it from beneath. Vander surprisingly doesn’t panic like his girlfriend. Instead, he follows Fedor’s lead and does a scan before increasing the pace of his strokes on his return to the boat.
“Please, ma’am. Just stay calm. I’m sure it will be fine, and you’ll all be able to laugh at this memory in the very near future.”
But the cloud of fear surrounding Anya is palpable. There will be no laughing at this in the near future for her or for Kat, I have a feeling. She’s still shaking, wrapped in a towel in my arms.
Anya turns to me. “How could you possibly leave them there? What is wrong with you?”
I give her a hard look for daring to question my actions. “My priority—first, last, and always—is keeping my wife safe. They’re men. They can handle themselves.”
“That’d be sweet if I wasn’t worried about Vander being torn to shreds and eaten,” Anya snaps.
The men are within a dozen yards of the ladder, and there’s no fin in sight. We all breathe easier when they climb on board.
Vander shakes the water out of his blond hair. “That sure got the blood pumping, didn’t it?”
Anya wraps her arms around herself, her boobs in jeopardy of popping out of her top. “Oh, thank God.”
Fedor laughs. “I only saw it for a moment. Looked like a blacktip.” He looks to me. “You get a better look?”
“Blacktip, for sure. Sorry for leaving you hanging with no warning.”
I didn’t need to explain to him why I did it. It’s clear when he looks at Kat and nods. “Not a problem, sir. It is our duty to make sure you both get home safely.”
