Page 14 of Shark’s Edge

My lungs screamed and my thighs burned, but I pushed myself to finish strong on the final leg of my sunset jogging loop along Venice Beach.

Though I usually avoided the shorefront trail at this time of summer—when runners and cyclists were joined by tourists, street performers, and the owner of every sculpted body in Southern California—the chaos was a welcome distraction for my mind right now.

Ever since the bizarre turn of events on Monday, I’d refused to return to the Shark Enterprises building.

Clarification. I’d pulled myself out of the picture, not Abstract Catering. I was shaken, not stupid. Rio, like the superstar she was, had jumped in on covering the downtown route after I’d sneaked in a sentence about the media mob freaking me out—not completely the truth, though not a lie—but now it was Thursday, and the reporters were tiring of Shark’s information blackout regarding what had happened to Tawny Mansfield.

Not that he gave a crap that they all needed to make a living too—or that some people in this city might care about what had driven a woman to take her own life. A woman he didn’t even remember, if I was correctly interpreting the snippets I’d heard during his chat with Grant Twombley on Monday.

Yeah. A freaking chat. As if they were shooting the breeze about the Dodgers’ winning streak or a fluctuation in the stock market, not a woman who’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours.

I forced my eyes open, grimacing into the wind as I paced in a circle, hoping to walk off a cramp. The pain didn’t dissipate. Neither did my memories of those unbearable, unnerving, utterly arousing moments.

“No.”

I plopped onto a bench and dropped my head onto my crossed arms.

I couldn’t take it back. I’d finally admitted the truth. I’d been standing in Sebastian Shark’s office, aroused as hell and trembling like Red Riding Hood in the middle of a wolf pack.

All while being assessed by the pack’s alpha himself.

At least he’d come all the way out from the computer monitor man cave. For the first time, I’d discovered Sebastian Shark actually had legs—and they were glorious. And of course, they were topped by an ass that belonged on some graceful angel, not a devil with ice-blue eyes and a steel-angled jawline.

By the time I realized we weren’t alone in the room, his right-hand man had witnessed our mutual gawk fest. Not that it bothered Shark—in the least. After all, what was another lascivious leer of another pair of breasts and thighs to the man? Hell, they probably had a good laugh at my expense after I tripped out the door in frustration. Just thinking about it now made me wince with residual mortification.

The alarm from my calendar app cut through the playlist still filling my ears. I needed to get across town for a hair appointment I’d scheduled weeks ago after Rio encouraged me to try something new for summer.

Who was I kidding?

“Something new” could be as simple as a two-inch trim instead of the half inch I normally went with. Rio teased me mercilessly that I acted more like a steadfast sixty-two-year-old woman instead of the twenty-two-year-old I actually was. Rio thought I should be footloose and fancy-free—her words, not mine—and I couldn’t even come up with a valid excuse not to be. Because she wasn’t wrong.

When I got to my truck in the public lot, I whipped my sweaty T-shirt over my head and grabbed a fresh one out of the bag on the passenger seat. Just as I was plugging my phone into the charger, I received a text.

Hello Abbigail. It’s Viktor Blake. Pardon the note on your personal device, but your sister-in-law was just here delivering lunch and said it would be fine to contact you. Hope you are feeling better and will soon be back to brightening our days.

I sighed, watching the dots bounce from his end as if he had more to say, but after I started the engine and my phone connected to the truck’s Bluetooth, they were gone.

Thank God.

I didn’t want to wake my cell back up from sleep mode, for fear of what the screen would bring from my “friend,” so I put the truck in drive and headed toward my hairdresser.

No matter what Rio was attempting to spin, the man wasn’t my friend. Honestly, I wondered how many friends Viktor Blake actually had. There was something off about the way he handled himself, always ready to greet me like some housewife from a forgotten era.

It was creepy.

Which made his text really creepy.

Amber, my hair girl, had a shop located about half the distance between the beach and my condo in Torrance, and the late-afternoon traffic gods smiled down on me. I made the journey in about forty-five minutes, which also gave me enough time to check in with Rio while I drove to my appointment.

“Greetings, savior of my sanity,” I said into the open cab of my truck when the phone call connected. It wasn’t the first time, especially in the last few days, that I’d given Rio an honorific greeting of one type or another. I owed her—big-time—for taking the heat around Shark’s offices, but she was so much better at handling stressful situations than I was. Plus, there was the whole obsessed with the man and the way he looks at me situation that I was secretly dealing with and had no intention of sharing with Rio.

“Mmm, I don’t know, Abs. You might want to go light on the savior awards today.” She cleared her throat nervously.

“Why? What happened?” I forced myself to sound easy. Didn’t think I was fooling her, though.

“I just want you to understand that I didn’t start it, Abbigail.” Rio sounded like a schoolgirl hurrying in from recess to tattle on a classmate.

“Shit.” Did we lose the contract at Shark Enterprises?