a sleek leather tote bag in the other. With her stylish clothes and arresting good looks, she was a world apart from the granola girls he usually gravitated toward.
One glimpse of her, and his heart had stalled in his chest.
He was a post-grad student, teaching his first class, and if he hadn’t already been late he’d have followed her. As it was, he’d turned to watch her go, ogling her in a way that was gauche and obvious and embarrassingly impolite.
Maybe it was fate, because she showed up in his classroom a few minutes later. Apparently, she’d forgotten the syllabus and had gone back to her car to retrieve it.
He was sure he’d babbled nonsense for most of the hour, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. In fact, she’d approached him after, claiming to have enjoyed his lecture. Every time the class met after that, she sat closer to the front of the room.
During the final exam she’d been in the first row, wearing a low-cut top so distracting he’d stuttered whenever his eyes tripped over her.
That was ten years ago.
He didn’t know how they’d arrived at this painful juncture, and it hurt too much to retrace the steps. Trying to live without her the past year had been agony for him, but it hadn’t been as bad as living with her, watching her slip away.
Was she truly on the mend?
He hadn’t lied when he’d told her she looked good. She was lovelier than ever, to be honest. The new hairstyle worked for her, framing her heart-shaped face and feathering out against her cheeks, drawing his attention to her mouth.
He wished he didn’t remember all the things she’d done to him with it.
Pulling his gaze away from her, he searched the horizon, looking for a seal carcass or a boil on the surface of the water. The tearing motion great whites used while feeding, tails whipping back and forth, created a unique disturbance.
Skull Rock, the islands’ most striking natural feature, loomed in the near distance. While most of the rock formations were jagged, jutting toward the sky like a row of wicked teeth, the Skull had a rounded shape and two distinctive, cavernous indentations. One went all the way through to the other side, giving the impression of a gaping eye socket.
It was a fitting place for a kill.
Jason saw the body before he did. “Starboard side, twenty meters,” he said, cutting the boat’s speed to a crawl.
Daniela turned her head, doing a visual sweep of the area.
Sean placed his hand on her shoulder. “There,” he said, pointing her in the right direction. She was trembling, and that would affect the video, but it hardly mattered. He’d taken some shaky footage himself.
A certain amount of fear was normal. Hell, if you weren’t scared of a lightning-quick predator with razor-sharp teeth and the striking power of a Mack truck, something was fundamentally wrong with you.
Of course, the shark was nowhere to be seen at the moment. Only the headless body of a California sea lion was visible, floating in a slick red bath. The water wouldn’t keep the color long, for the Pacific Ocean was a vast expanse, but while the animal bled out it was surrounded by a shock of crimson, pure and dark and undiluted.
“Wh-where is it?” Daniela whispered, camera focused on the corpse.
“Close by,” he said, dropping his hand from her shoulder. He wanted to keep touching her, to make sure she stayed put. Which was foolish, as no one in their right mind would leap from a boat in this situation. “Zoom in.”
She fumbled with the camera for a moment, familiarizing herself with the controls before she resumed filming. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes stark.
Brent attached his underwater camera to a pole with a crooked arm and lowered it into the water. He didn’t talk much while he was filming, claiming that the man behind the lens shouldn’t be seen or heard.
Next to him, Jason Ruiz was silent at the helm. Although he was more loquacious than Brent, he knew shark behavior as well as Sean, and kept his comments to a minimum while they were out here. He was a good scientist, if a little overeager, and they got on well.
When Jason glanced up at Sean now, his eyes narrowed for a split second before he looked away.
The younger man’s disapproval wasn’t obvious, and Sean was almost convinced he’d imagined it. Over the past few days, Jason had treated him with deference and respect and damned near adoration. It was kind of annoying, actually.
Less than an hour with Daniela, and he’d switched sides.
Jason hadn’t known about their marriage, but perhaps he’d heard a few random details about the divorce. They’d separated after she almost died in a car accident, which didn’t cast Sean in a very positive light. His ex-wife also had a singular effect on people, especially men, and Jason had a weakness for the ladies.
He’d never met a beautiful woman he didn’t want to sleep with.
Sean could practically hear him thinking, “You dumped her? Are you insane? She’s hot.”
She’d dumped him, not the other way around, but almost everyone assumed the failed relationship was his fault. They were right, in a way. He’d been unable to protect her, incapable of comforting her and at an utter loss for the right words to say to her.
“Why isn’t it…eating?” she whispered, her voice wavering.
“A pause between the first strike and a feeding isn’t unusual. We think they’re making sure the prey is in no condition to fight back.”
This sea lion wouldn’t put up a fuss—not without a head. White sharks often attacked by ambush, rocketing toward the target from underneath and incapacitating it in one fatal blow. The current victim had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, swimming too far from the shallows and too close to the surface.
Although blood no longer gushed from the wound, the animal’s exposed vertebra was a grisly sight, and the air was thick with the smell of death. Seabirds waited on nearby perches, feathers fluttering, ready to snap up a meaty scrap.
Sean watched Daniela’s throat work as she swallowed back her nausea. She was holding up well, considering. As a marine biologist, she’d interacted with dangerous animals before. They’d worked in the field together on a regular basis, so he knew her level of expertise.
He’d seen her reach out to stroke the slippery back of a stingray, grin with delight when visited by a school of blue sharks, stand up to a braying Northern seal and get bitten on her pretty little backside as she beat a hasty retreat.
Daniela had a way with animals, a confidence gained from experience and a natural ease that couldn’t be taught. She wasn’t a shark expert, however, and the great whites at the Farallones were like no other predator on earth.
With her unsteady nerves and devastating personal history, she wasn’t the best candidate for this kind of research.
The sight of a white shark breaching, or propelling its massive body above the surface of the water during the initial attack was heart-stopping. There was also no way to predict this occurrence, so footage of it was rare. Unlike in
