Riptide (Renegades 6)

“I said I needed to get back to the hotel, and he asked who was waiting for me. I didn’t go into details. Dammit, he even asked to see a picture of her and said she was cute.”

Tessa put a fist to the pain in her stomach. She was shaky and sweating and terrified.

“Does purple go with red?” Sophia’s voice made Tessa jump and turn.

She held up a sundress that was more orange than red and bright purple leggings. “I want to wear these.”

A laugh bubbled out of Tessa’s throat. “I think you might be a little hot if you wear both.”

Sophia’s brow furrowed in concentration as she looked down at the clothes. She gave a dramatic sigh, shrugged, and said, “Back to the drawing board,” before she turned back into the bedroom.

Tessa started laughing, but the sharp pain of fear cut it off. “I can’t lose her, Abby.” Just saying the words brought tears to her eyes. “I really can’t lose her.”

Abby met Tessa at the railing with a reassuring hand on her back. “Okay, let’s put this in perspective. He wanted to get you into bed, so, sure, he was a nice guy. But don’t forget, this is also the guy who paid Corinne twenty-five grand to go away when he found out about Sophia.”

True. But the fear continued eating away at her. “That was four years ago. He’s probably matured. Maybe he regrets doing that.”

“Then why didn’t he ever search for her? He’s had four years to find Corinne and meet Sophia.”

That slowed the spin of Tessa’s mind. She took a deep slow breath. “Right.” She nodded, reassuring herself. “That’s true.”

“And even if he is a nice guy now,” Abby said, “that doesn’t mean he can raise a little girl. A little girl he doesn’t even know.”

“Right, right.” Okay, this was helping. She needed to pull on her rational side. “And what court would give a little girl to a man who paid the mother off to get rid of them both?”

Even as Tessa weighed the ding to Zach’s case, she knew in the back of her mind that it wouldn’t outweigh his biological right to Sophia. The jitter kicked up in Tessa’s stomach again. “Oh God…”

Abby took Tessa by the arms and pulled her around to face her, her gaze glinting with determination. “Nothing has changed. You still have legal guardianship of Sophia. She still considers you her mother. You have both a heart-wrenching letter and video from Corinne stating that very fact to the courts in the event this ever happened. You have me to testify on your behalf. And you need to remember that the reality is, Zach travels all over the world. He doesn’t have the capacity to raise any child, let alone the one he sold off.”

Tessa nodded, clinging to all facts she had to hold on to when she faced him again.

The thought pounded a spike of dread into her gut. But she swallowed and shored herself up. “Yeah, okay.” She pulled in a breath, then let it out slowly. “Okay. I should get dressed and go back over there before he leaves for the—”

“No, you need time to get this right in your head,” Abby said. “You need to spend the day with Sophia at the Discovery Museum so you have some distance and perspective when you approach him again.”

She frowned at Abby. God, had she been reduced to seeking advice from a twenty-one-year-old with little to no life experience? Then Tessa realized it was exactly what she would have told someone else to do. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay. I’ll get dressed for the museum.”

But in the bathroom, her fear took over. Tessa locked the door and ran the water in the sink, then crumbled under the wave of terror over the thought of losing Sophia. She slid to the floor, wrapped her arms around her legs, and pressed her face between her knees to muffle her sobs.

7

The Sea-Doo towed Zach beyond the point break, and adrenaline surged through his body.

“Godspeed,” Joe, the driver, called just before Zach released the ski rope.

A moment later, Keith yelled, “Action,” through a bullhorn from the deck of a powerboat trolling just outside the surf’s breaking zone.

The waves were monstrous, which would have been a blast if Zach could actually surf them. But today wasn’t about surfing. Today was about getting thrashed.

He slid into the rhythm of the wave and the way its force swelled beneath him. Zach had been surfing since he was five, had ridden a million waves, but he was still humbled every time he fused with this force of Mother Nature.

The crest grew and expanded and threatened until a massive wall of water towered twenty feet above Zach’s head. A soothing silence—the calm before the storm—settled around him, the only sounds a splatter here, a kerplunk there and the slice of his board across the water. Zach fell into the Zen of it. That powerful sensation of being one with the sea. Of being embraced by the colossal power of Mother Nature. There was nothing like it.

He heard the rustle of the first curl as the energy of the wave ebbed and the wall of water curved at the very top, pulling the rest of the wave that direction. In seconds, Zach was cocooned in a tube of pristine, electric turquoise, and the crash of the wave filled his head until he could hear nothing else.

Crouching to keep his body from interfering with the wave, he gripped the side of his board with one hand to keep it under his feet and lifted his other arm to skim the wave’s wall for balance. To Zach, it felt like an affectionate caress. A way for him to express his love, his passion, his reverence—something no one but an avid surfer would understand.

The euphoria of the ride spilled through him, the equivalent of ten times the runner’s high. This was the very best sensation on the planet, and one that tugged him back to the ocean like a perpetual rip current, day after day after day.