Tiger sharks are not gentle. We are not dolphins. We do not nudge people kindly toward the surface with our adorable bottle noses. We are one thousand pounds of cartilage and muscle and teeth.
I got under her in two seconds. I came up beneath her and pressed the flat top of my head against her stomach—carefully, god, so carefully, more carefully than I had ever done anything in my entire life—and pushed her up. She instinctively grabbed onto my dorsal fin. Her heart hammered in her chest, and I felt her realize, in one terrible instant, what she was holding onto.
But she didn’t let go.
I had to get her to the surface, but I couldn’t just get us caught in the waves again. I angled away from the shore and past the breaks. We broke the surface together, and she gasped, coughing up saltwater. Her hand was still on my fin. I could feel her magic going haywire, sparking against my skin in hot little bursts that would’ve been painful if I’d been human.
I slowly swam her to the shallows, difficult to do while keeping her above water. Every part of my shark brain said to bite her, hold on tight, don’t let her get away again.
I shut that down.
When my belly hit sand, I partially shifted. It was ugly and incomplete because I needed hands, because I needed to hold her, because a shark cannot ask a woman if she’s okay.
I hauled myself up onto the shore beside her, laying down on the wet sand and checking her breathing. It was shallow, but there. My senses honed in on a cut on her shin from the reef, bleeding, but not badly.
“Come on,” I said, willing to beg. “Come on, Selena.”
She was still dazed. Then she rolled onto her side and heaved out seawater.
I slowly rubbed her back. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
We’d come into a small cove, the waves here broken by the outcropping of rock that surrounded it. She was on her hands and knees in the sand, still coughing up water as tiny, gentle waves rolled around her wrists.
“You’re okay.”
She glared at me.
She was furious.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack, swimming at me full speed like that!” she rasped around another cough.
“I’m a shark shifter.”
“I know! But that’s different than seeing a sixteen-foot monster coming straight at you.”
“Sixteen feet?” I tried to keep my face solemn and failed. “Baby, you’ve seen me naked. You know it’s not sixteen feet.”
She stared at me. Then she laughed, half a cough, and shoved my chest with the heel of her hand. I caught her wrist.
“You almost drowned me, and that’s where your head goes?”
“You’re the one who brought numbers into this. I’m just protecting my reputation.”
“Yourreputationis measured in inches, Perez.”
“Now you’re just being cruel to the man who saved your life.”
Her face softened, and I realized I hadn’t ever seen that before. Her wrist was still in my grip, and I felt her pulse hammering, much faster than it had been in the water. I expected her to retort,I was fine. I didn’t need you.But she didn’t. Instead, her eyes traced down my face, then lower.
“You’re half—” she said, her voice barely there.
“Oh, yeah. It can be hard to shift back when I’m?—”
“When you’re what?”
Terrified.
“When you went under, I panicked.”
