Page 47 of Sucker For You

Here he was, a grown man who called his JeepBaby.

“R-right.” He cleared a hot, rough itch from his throat. Swallowing did nothing for the flush burning up through the jellyfish blisters on his neck. He wasn’t embarrassed, though. Definitely wasn’t thinking about how that water droplet had clung to Isabel’s lips. “But—if you had to guess why?”

“It could be play. Irritation. Hunger. Or fear. Also,” despite the blush lingering in her ears, her scientific parsing of the octopus’s behavior was precise, “possibly jealousy. I can’t say for certain. As you noted, she’s clearly familiar with being handled. Dr. Jennifer Mather has documented intelligent play behaviors between individuals in many cephalopod species. Betweenoctopuses and humans, too. Some of these behaviors indicate what we’d consider a sense of humor.”

He snorted a third time. As if in answer, the octopus blew a bubble ring. “She’s definitely a prankster. Soaking us was funny to her, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

“Was it funny to you?”

“Game recognizes game,” he said lightly. Or tried to. He rubbed a hand over his too-warm nape. “I’ve seen common octopuses punch parrotfish in reefs off the Maldives. So she could’ve gotten us worse. . . Why, though? Was this funny toyou?”

Less lightly, he couldn’t help wondering: what would happen if he touched a finger beneath Isabel’s chin? If he raised her rosy face again? If he narrowed their distance as he’d done just a few minutes earlier, when her focus had slipped to his mouth and her breath had caught between parted lips?

Fine, so he was thinking about the damn water drop.

But she took his question seriously.

“No.” Isabel’s flush faded. Her gaze lifted from the tank, but it was direct, no trembling eyelashes or hazy gray rain clouding her attention. “No, nothing here is funny. Something’s very wrong with this octopus. I suspected as much in the bay. But now?”

Shit.

There went the mood.

He tried to apologize.

Isabel ignored him. She extended her hand deeper into the tank, attaching another set of suckers to herself before elevating the two-spot’s ductile arms a few inches above the surface. “Have you noticed the texture of her skin where she’s regrown her third, fourth, and fifth arms?”

On an ordinary wild octopus, identifying deviations from the normal in base skin texture would have been impossible.But relaxed in Isabel’s palm, with the horned protrusions of her papillae smoothed flat, this creature still wasn’t camouflaging. The scars where she’d lost her arms were visible in high contrast—and they were surgically perfect. No chomping moray or fishing-line tourniquet could have produced such precise aberrations. Needle punctures were visible at the base of each tentacle.

“These scars, and her lack of both camouflage skill and situational awareness in the open water? An octopus hatched in a research facility wouldn’t have had an environment where she could hide. She would’ve been raised in a barrel or a tub or a sump, with nothing to mimic. Camouflaging is a learned behavior. It’s not instinctive. Which. . .” Isabel paused. “Which means that she can’t be a wild octopus. She came from a lab.”

Fuck.

“You mean they experimented on her.”

“Yes.” Her caress over the two-spot’s mantle stilled. “And she escaped.”

10

She escaped.

“You think this octopus came from the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute,” Wes confirmed.

Just that.

No questions, no prevarications. Not even a suggestion that she might be misinterpreting the sensory data before her, that maybe her Ceretobicin was causing mental fog—admittedly, a documented side effect for some users in Phase Two of the clinical trials.

Isabel nodded; she was grateful.

And scared.

Her logic was too sound for doubt.

The octopus in their reef tank must have escaped from the institute, since MORI was the only experimental marine lab in the area. The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station also opened onto the bay, but the uncamouflaged two-spot would never have survived her passage along twenty miles of sea currents to Moss Landing from either the aquarium in central Monterey or Hopkins in Pacific Grove.

So: she’d escaped from the institute.

“What did they do to you?” she asked the cephalopod suctioned to her thumb. “And. . . why?”