Like she’d told him, this was her job. This was what she’d trained for. Supposedly. After she had to drop out of college and Lance MacInnis took pity on the weird girl with the creepy face. She was meant to work in the office, not in the field, but… here she was.
“As soon as the storm clears, we can see about heading back to the mainland and—and getting in contact with my team. And your family; I’m sure they’re worried about you.”
The slightest tension went through Moss’s arm—not a comforting squeeze like before, but as though he was bracing himself. “Yes. I’m sure they are.”
“We can shift if we have to, too. Between us we’ll be able to rig up something to keep the eggs safe and stop Maggie from trying to swim away.”
“…Right.” Moss relaxed. “We’ll figure it out in the morning.” He moved slightly, and she found herself leaning further into him, her head pillowed on his shoulder. “Until then, I think Maggie’s got the right idea of it. You should get some rest.”
She wanted to protest, but he was right. The metal shifters might have lost track of Maggie for now, but that didn’t mean they’d given them the slip for good. If they returned, she needed to be ready, and that meant being as well-rested as it was possible to get while stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere.
With her mate beside her.
“Everything all right?” Moss asked, his voice intimately close.
They were pressed against one another, side to side, both soaked through. Her wet clothes made the heat of his body more noticeable: the strength in his arm around her, the exhilarating comfort of his closeness.
If they’d met in any other circumstances, she wouldn’t be worried about not resting well because of the uncomfortable surroundings. They’d be doing what all shifters did after they met their mates. For hours on end, to hear her brothers brag about it.
She bit back a sigh. If they’d met in any other situation, he would have known that she wasn’t caught in her shift. That what he saw when he looked at her was all there was to her.
They wouldn’t have spent the night fucking like bunnies either way.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just cold.”
“I can help with that.”
Before she could respond, he pulled her into his lap. Maggie squeaked sleepily, but she barely heard it over the pounding of blood in her ears.
“Better?” he murmured, his cheek pressing against the top of her head.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
He’d lifted her like it was nothing. Which shouldn’t have been surprising. Shifters were strong; everyone knew that. And she’d already seen—felt—how muscular he was, underneath his sodden clothes.
If she were any other person—
But she wasn’t. It was pointless to imagine otherwise. And no matter how guilty she felt over hiding the truth about herself…
It wasn’t like she was the only one hiding something, here.
“I thought I saw something else out there,” she blurted out. Fuck. She reallyshouldn’thave trusted herself to speak. Super-secret spy field agent, she was not.
But there was no mistaking Moss’s reaction this time. His whole body tensed, as though ready to fight.
Or flee.
“What do you think you saw?” he asked, his voice so carefully neutral she could practically feel him fighting to keep his breathing even, his tone flat.
Her skin prickled. “I don’t know. It was when I was falling. It was like—like the storm itself reached out and caught me.” She laughed weakly, wondering if it sounded as fake to Moss’s ears as his careful non-reaction had sounded to her. “Maybe my shark sensed your octopus below us, and the shock made me blow it all out of proportion.”
Never mind that he’d never shifted into octopus form. But some people could sense shifters’ inner animal type without seeing them shift. It wasn’t that unbelievable.
Not as unbelievable as seeing a dragon, and being more shocked by it biting him on the chin than the fact that dragons existed at all.
Not as unbelievable as what she’d really seen, as she fell through the storm.
Moss’s voice rumbled through her. “My octopus? Could have been. Or the waves. Storms like that do strange things to your senses.”
