Page 51 of Shark’s Edge

Unbelievably, her stare got bigger. “And the Trojans came marching in,” she exclaimed. “At last. Yes! You cashed in your V card?”

“Oh no, sweetie. No Trojans marching—though they might have stormed the barricades. Maybe a little.”

Rio’s first response was a litany of F-bombs and something about a sawed-off cactus stump that I couldn’t quite make out because I was laughing so hard. As she walked the pots of noodles over to the strainer in the sink, she finally said, “All right, NDA or not, you’re going to spill everything. I’ve got freaking whiplash. Which Shark are we dealing with here? The Jaws who rocked your world or the guy from here”—she jabbed a thumb toward her T-shirt—“who wanted to just be friends?”

I dug my teeth into my bottom lip. “Oh, I don’t think he wants to be friends.”

Rio studied me like I was a Jenga tower and her next move had the potential to topple the entire stack. And I loved my sister-in-law a little more for her cautious treatment of the subject. “But he never moved things into the other category?”

“It was . . . amazing,” I finally whispered. “Oh damn, Rio, he was amazing. We were on his patio, and the wind was blowing in from the canyon . . . ”

“And he brought out a throne and then slid your feet into a pair of glass slippers?”

Her undercurrents were sarcastic, but her tone was all dreamy fantasy. And this was still Rio I was dealing with. I could work with that. “Better than that,” I sighed out. “So much better. All the right words. All the right ways to touch me . . . ”

“But . . . ” She pitched it up into a question at the end. The rest was up to me, but I didn’t want it to be. Why couldn’t I live in the fantasy forever?

“But my phone rang.”

“Okaaay.” Rio narrowed her eyes while drawing out her bafflement. “I don’t get— Oh shit.” But then obviously, she did get it. “Your phone rang . . . right when you were getting to the good stuff?”

Feeble nod. “Exactly.”

“And you answered it? Oh, God. Don’t tell me. No; you have to tell me.”

“It was the forwarding ring from the business line.”

“And you’ve got this modern gizmo called voicemail,” she said. “It’s the coolest thing. Just go with me here. If somebody calls you and it’s after hours, you can let the phone ring a few times. And then—here’s the really magical part—”

I stopped her by raising a hand, extending one select finger. As Rio leaned over as if to bite off the digit, I tapped its tip to her forehead. “If I’d left it for voice mail, we wouldn’t be flush by thousands more of Viktor Blake’s dollars.”

“Whoa.” She reared back and slammed her hands on the rims of the noodle pots. “The call was from him? Hottie Russki Viktor?”

“I believe I just said that?”

“But needed to about five minutes ago,” she snapped.

“Huh?” I didn’t hide my genuine confusion.

She explained while walking the pots into the cooler. “You know they’re notorious rivals, yes?”

“Professionally. Which stands to make sense because they’re in the same business. But we’re in an ambitious field too. If we got pissy every time some healthy competition came along and—”

Her high chirp of a laugh cut me short. “Dearest, there’s nothing healthy about the way those two go after each other. If Shark and Blake could actually make ‘cutthroat’ a thing, you’d see blade sharpeners next to their desks. Probably the huge stone ones, like from the Middle Ages.”

I shook my head and groaned. “Can we talk about things that don’t involve them wanting to behead each other?”

“Won’t eliminate the fact that they do.”

“But why?” I held up a hand, conciliatory despite the big yellow oven mitt I’d just donned. “Go with me here, okay? From where I’m standing, Viktor and Sebastian have achieved damn near the same level of corporate god status. True, Shark Enterprises has more employees here in LA, but that’s because Blake split his HQ teams between here, Singapore, and St. Petersburg. While Sebastian is commended for keeping the majority of his core workforce in America, Viktor has been praised for strengthening foreign relations through commerce. They both feature fine art and high-end brands in their offices. They both wear bespoke suits—”

“Someone’s been doing her homework,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And you could be rattling down this list for the next hour. Point made, girl. The crowd gets it.”

“No.” I launched into an adamant head shake. “I don’t think we do get it.” I turned and pulled the finished avocadoes out of the oven. “What’s really going on between those two?”

“It’s a mystery to most of us, Abs.” Rio returned to shucking her stack of carrots. “But it’s real, as you saw with your own eyes—and paid for with a crying clit—last night.”

I’d picked the wrong moment to slug down some water. After choking on the stuff for the better part of a minute, I finally croaked, “Want to warn a sister before doing that again?”