Page 1 of Shark’s Edge

Chapter One

Abbi

I was hot.

Sweaty. Aching. Breathless.

Just how a girl should feel after being jolted awake in the middle of a naughty dream.

“Uhhh.” I shut off my phone’s alarm, fell back into my pillow, and glared at the time display through squinting eyelids.

Getting up at four thirty in the morning just wasn’t sane.

Wasn’t. Sane.

My screen flared to life with a text message from a sender whose profile picture was a skull-and-crossbones Chuck Taylor high-top.

Rio.

I couldn’t help but grin. My sister-in-law and right-hand woman loved to message me when she knew I should be getting up. She usually offered some bullshit reason for the predawn communiqué, but I saw right through her game. I had a terrible habit of oversleeping, and everyone in my family knew it.

Did I interrupt a good dream?

I forced my eyes open enough to tap back a reply.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I hit Send, hurled the phone into the covers, and draped the crook of my elbow over my face. “Oh, God.”

The entirety of my dream crashed over me.

It had been another one of those dreams.

A dream in which I really had been hot and gasping, sweaty and stripped . . .

With Sebastian Shark.

Sebastian. Freaking. Shark.

The CEO of my catering company’s biggest account. He who sat in his penthouse high in the Los Angeles skyline, ruling his kingdom with the subtlety of a Mack Truck. He with the body of a modern-day pharaoh—and the allure of one too.

That dark, dangerous allure.

Another moan tore up my throat. Shark. He was the last person on the planet I should’ve been harboring these cravings for, but he was the one my subconscious refused to forget. I couldn’t ignore his hypnotic sensuality, his raw animal attraction.

If only my dream mind would listen to my awake mind.

Sebastian Shark liked the fact that he shared his name with a predator, and he made damn sure the entire world knew it, each and every day. And today would be no different.

“No different,” I repeated to ensure my psyche got the message—and to prepare myself for the ordeal.

And yes, that was the right word. Though I was only going to be delivering lunch to him, the experience was always an ordeal. On good days, he’d give me an obligatory nod from behind his computer monitors. On the rare occasions when he decided I deserved a hello—never an actual smile, though—I relied on the breathe-deeply-and-count-to-ten method to deal with the war in my senses. And yes, that was the right word too. It was a war in there. My raging libido versus my frustrated logic.

Because I knew I wasn’t imagining the way the air thickened between us. An unmistakable call of his body to mine like mating animals in the springtime sun. Invisible strings pulled between us. And from the way he tracked my every movement with fixed attention while I set up his lunch each day, I knew he felt it too.

It was insanity.

“No.” I brought my feet down on the rug next to my bed, but this morning the trendy shag pile was useless. The polished concrete floor of my “Bohemian Charm” condo felt like an ice block. Right now, that was a good thing.