Page 10 of Get Kraken

Chase shook his head. “Before this mission? Nope." He left it at that. He was too busy focusing on the monitors in front of him to want to get into any light chitchat.

Not that Carol seemed to notice. The woman sharing space in the van with him seemed to be in a mood to talk. "I've never seen a kraken shifter before. Apparently, she wouldn't shift all the way when doing the pool exercises with the swim team. Do you think that's weird?"

"What? No. Why?"

“I don't know." Despite the discussion, Carol wasn’t taking her eyes off the monitor. Chase couldn't tell if it was because she was just doing her job, or because she was fascinated by seeing a kraken for the first time.

Maybe it was a little bit of both.

"It's just interesting, you know? Like, when I found out you were a half harpy, that blew my mind. I hadn’t met a guy harpy."

That made sense.

Whenever a new shifter entered the scene, especially one that was more on the rare side, people got curious. The first time he found out that Mike was a goblin shark? He’d never even heard of a goblin shark. Learning there was such a thing had piqued his curiosity.

Some shifters were rarer than others, and they were bound to draw the attention of the more common shifters.

As for him? He stared at the monitor, captivated by her. She looked like she was flying through the water, as graceful and gentle as a mythical fairy. She was clearly in her element, a woman of the water.

His surveillance wasn’t picking up any other activity, at least nothing large enough to cause alarm. Olivia and Mike were still the biggest fish in the sea.

She was safe.

Chase exhaled deeply.

That was his woman in the water. His woman who had volunteered to help find a killer.

She was that amazing, and more than ever, Chase wanted to brush his fingers through those strands of red hair, to touch her porcelain skin.

How sensitive would she be to his touch?

The more he thought about it, the more it irked him that he had to share her.

Because as much as she belonged to him, she also belonged to that stupid goblin shark circling in the water below her.

“Hey, new question, kind of perverted,” Carol said. “You think Mike can see her lady bits down there? I mean, are her important parts on the bottom, or like, does a hole open up on her backside?”

He didn't want to hear this. “What the hell, Carol?”

“I just mean, well, you know? When is squid or an octopus grabs pray, they bring it to the center of the tentacles. That's where the mouth is. So does she have two mouths right now, or is that her privates?"

Chase groaned and rubbed his eyes. "This probably isn’t work-appropriate topics of conversation."

“I know! I don't want to think about it either. But I can't get my mind off it. Think I should ask her, you know, like woman to woman? Because the idea of someone going after her and thinking they were going to hit the honey pot, and instead they get a dick full of teeth…” Carol broke off into laughter.

Chase was really starting to get a headache. It annoyed him to think about Mike, in his shark form, swimming down below and constantly looking up Olivia’sskirt.

That lucky bastard.

And Carol was looking at him.

He tried not to growl at her. “What?”

She shrugged, turning back to her monitors. “Nothing, nothing. You just look like you're about to rip the console off the wall.”

He realized his claws were out, so Chase quickly put them away and relaxed his shoulders. “I'm fine. I wasn't going to rip anything off the wall.” Though it did feel as though he came close to doing just that.

She raised a brow at him, that damned little brow ring glinting as she turned away to look at her screens. She reached a hand noisily into her potato chip bag and started crunching down on them.

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