Without Porpoise Read online

  Placida Pod 3

  Without Porpoise

  Sean Morita is settling in as Emery Nadel’s mate as the Samhain superpod grows near. They are helping with the preparations, but there’s still a murderous dolphin shifter on the loose, forcing everyone to take precautions. Emery’s dad will appoint him the new pod Alpha during the celebrations…as long as everything goes according to plan.

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Erik’s still scheming to ruin Emery for rejecting him in favor of picking a human as his mate. He throws in his lot with a dangerous Mexican pod intent on taking over the Placida Pod as a way to smuggle drugs into the country.

  Now Sean and Emery are faced with joining forces with their wide network of friends, as well as the dolphins’ natural enemies, to try to rescue their abducted fathers. Will they be able to keep their families and the pod from being cruelly ripped apart, or can they rescue the men before the pod is left Without Porpoise?

  Genre: Alternative (M/M or F/F), Contemporary, Paranormal, Shape-shifter

  Length: 52,286 words

  WITHOUT PORPOISE

  Placida Pod 3

  Tymber Dalton

  EVERLASTING CLASSIC

  MANLOVE

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Everlasting Classic ManLove

  WITHOUT PORPOISE

  Copyright © 2013 by Tymber Dalton

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62740-846-2

  First E-book Publication: October 2013

  Cover design by Les Byerley

  All art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Without Porpoise by Tymber Dalton from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Tymber Dalton’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Dalton’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  To Hubby, for everything he does.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events in this book take place shortly after the events of Porpoisefully Yours (Placida Pod 2).

  The two previous books in the series are Accidentally on Porpoise (Placida Pod 1) and Porpoisefully Yours (Placida Pod 2). Both are available from Siren-BookStrand.

  Lina, Jan, Rick, and Callie can be found in the Triple Trouble series of books, also from Siren-BookStrand.

  And, yes, Wyatt will be getting his own book soon.

  WITHOUT PORPOISE

  Placida Pod 3

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2013

  Chapter One

  Isla Mujeres, a small island in the Caribbean Sea, is located approximately eight miles off the northeast coast of Cancún, Mexico. Due to its close proximity to the southern point of Florida, it’s a popular destination for pleasure sailors.

  Two such pleasure sailors, retirees Jack and Liz Malloy, had set sail from Tampa in their forty-two-foot Island Packet, the Saucy Sizzler. They cruised down the west coast of Florida, spent a leisurely week in Key West, and had anchored the night before in the calm waters just off the coast of Isla Mujeres. This morning, they would proceed into a marina where they’d already made a reservation. It made more sense than trying to motor into an unfamiliar harbor in the dark.

  Two days earlier they had been joined on their passage by a lone dolphin, who seemed content to swim alongside them, sometimes in their wake, but never far from their boat.

  Amused by his antics, they dubbed him Sparky.

  That morning, after eating breakfast, the Malloys were about to pull anchor when they noticed Sparky acting oddly. He jumped out of the water, chattering loudly at them before spinning around and splashing water up into the cockpit.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” Liz asked.

  “I don’t know. Never seen one act like that before.”

  The dolphin grew increasingly more agitated over the next few minutes. Then it disappeared beneath the boat and they heard a loud series of thumps along the hull.

  Jack stared over the edge of the boat, trying to see the dolphin. “What the fuck?”

  Then the dolphin reappeared, floating limp in the water.

  “Oh my god! Jack, do something!”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Go check on him.”

  Not happy about the situation, but knowing his wife wouldn’t let up until either he checked on the animal or she went and did it herself—which would earn him no telling what level of unholy hell from her—he kicked off his shoes, pulled off his hat, shirt, and sunglasses, and vaulted over the starboard safety lines into the crystal blue water.

  He swam over to the still dolphin. “Hey, guy. Hey, buddy. You all right?”

  The dolphin’s eye opened and looked at him. Jack had just enough time to realize there was more than merely an animal’s brain behind that gaze when it turned with lightning speed and struck him with its fluke, stunning him and knocking the wind from him.

  Then it grabbed him by the arm and dragged him below the water.

  On board the Saucy Sizzler, Liz screamed her husband’s name. She kicked off her shoes and grabbed a rescue ring before jumping overboard and swimming toward where she’d seen the dolphin drag her husband under.

  After searching for several minutes and yelling his name, she saw him pop to the surface close to the sailboat, near the bow. She struggled not to panic as she swam toward him. Facedown, he wasn’t breathing. She flipped him over and her training from thirty-seven years as an ER nurs
e kicked in. She gave him two rescue breaths while dragging him back toward the swim platform.

  By now the dolphin was the farthest thing from her mind. She got Jack to the small swim platform on the stern of the Saucy Sizzler and started to haul his limp body onto it when she heard someone behind her load a round into the chamber of the 9mm her husband had assured her they needed to have on board for protection.

  Before she could turn, the person stuck the end of the muzzle against the back of her head.

  “Leave him,” a man said.

  Panic set in. When she started to turn, a blinding pain encompassed her world before everything went black.

  * * * *

  When Liz came to in the cockpit, a bearded man stood there, wearing a pair of Jack’s shorts. She knew they were Jack’s, because they were the cutoff denim jeans with the splatters of blue bottom paint on them.

  She started to get up to go find Jack, but the man raised the gun and pointed it at her.

  “Pin numbers.”

  “What?”

  With movement faster than she could follow, he backhanded her. “I said give me your fucking pin numbers.”

  He’d grabbed the scratchpad and pencil from the holder just inside the hatch.

  Struggling to think, she rattled off whatever she could.

  He studied the list. “Anything else?”

  “What?”

  He smiled. “Go after your husband. He’s about thirty yards that way.” He pointed.

  She looked. There he lay, floating facedown.

  After letting out a scream, she jumped overboard again. She barely registered the splash she heard a moment later as she stroked toward Jack.

  When she reached him, she did her best not to start crying, but she knew it’d been too long.

  It didn’t stop her from rolling him over and trying to give him rescue breaths.

  That’s when the dolphin popped up on the other side of her husband. She’d swear the damn thing grinned at her before it dove below the surface, grabbed one of her ankles in its beak, and dragged her under.

  * * * *

  Erik Chait—who thought Sparky was a fucking dorky name for a dolphin anyway—returned to the Saucy Sizzler’s swim platform. He took a quick look to make sure there was no one around who had witnessed any of the events. There wasn’t, either on the shore a few hundred yards away, or any boats anywhere close to them. He shifted back to human form and pulled himself out of the water before turning to watch as the current carried the two bodies away from land.

  With a smile, he climbed aboard and went below to find himself a towel and, hopefully, a cold beer.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  Chapter Two

  Sean Morita throttled back the Yamaha outboard engine and shifted it into neutral as he scanned the surface of the water through his polarized sunglasses. He couldn’t have asked for a better Tuesday morning to play hooky from work. Just three weeks before Halloween—or Samhain, as Emery and his pod of fellow dolphin shifters called it—and the weather was perfect. Sunny, warm, but not too hot, and with just enough of a breeze to keep the temps comfortable without raising a chop on the still-warm Gulf’s gently rolling surface.

  It was the perfect kind of day to get out on the water and get naked and nasty with Emery. Unfortunately, they weren’t alone today, and nasty nakey time wasn’t on the itinerary.

  Twenty yards off his starboard bow, two dolphins broke the surface and began chattering at each other. Sean crossed his arms and waited.

  There weren’t that many boats around today. The few people out were either fishing the shallows inshore, or up on plane and heading west toward deeper water. He was a couple miles offshore, just off Cayo Costa and Gasparilla islands. So no one was close enough to witness it when one of the dolphins suddenly shifted into an older man.

  “Emery, enough. I told you, we don’t need to have armed lookouts on the boats.” Joseph Nadel, the current Alpha of the Placida Pod, turned and began swimming with strong strokes toward Sean’s boat.

  The other dolphin shifted into Emery Nadel, Sean’s mate. “Dad, we’re going to have a lot of kids here. Plus non-shifting and human mates.”

  Sean turned the key to shut off the engine as Joseph, technically his father-in-law, reached the swim platform at the back of his boat. Emery finally started swimming toward the boat.

  Joseph pulled himself out of the water and took the towel Sean offered him. “Son,” he said to Emery, who’d reached the swim platform, “that is exactly why I don’t want a bunch of armed people in boats. For starters, there’s too great a risk of someone accidentally getting shot. Secondly, if we happen to draw the attention of Fish and Wildlife and they send a boat out to investigate, I don’t want people getting arrested for having weapons should they get stopped and boarded. If several people get arrested, the press will make it look like people were out there to hunt dolphins. That is attention we absolutely cannot afford.”

  Emery climbed into the boat and also took a towel from Sean. “Thanks, babe. But, Dad, we have no idea if Erik is still in the area, or if he’s going to try something.”

  The older man turned on him. “Exactly. And we’ve already got volunteers from six other pods not involved in the superpod coming to provide perimeter security. All participants have already been notified about what’s happened and the potential risks. Believe me, this is most likely the one event we don’t have to worry about Erik Chait attempting to harm someone. He’ll be outnumbered over a hundred to one, or more.”

  Emery looked like he wanted to argue with his father some more, but the elder Nadel put an end to it. “We’ve seen no sign of Erik in weeks. No reports. We had tight security at the last full-moon swim. Sean’s dad has coordinated with the shifters who will be manning boats around the outskirts of the superpod, as well as the ones in the water. At the slightest hint of trouble, the entire world will converge on Erik Chait, or on anyone else who thinks they can mess with us. So stop it. Now.”

  Emery frowned. It was all Sean could do not to laugh at his mate’s predicament. Then the sobering thought of the crimes Erik had already committed came to mind, the way Erik had sabotaged his truck and tried to kill him in an accident, as well as the memory of retrieving the bodies of the two dolphin shifters Erik had murdered.

  “Em,” Sean said, “your dad’s right. If you let the thoughts of what Erik might do rule your life and the pod’s activities, then the fucker’s won regardless of if he’s in the area or not.”

  Emery looked from Sean to his dad and back. He heavily sat on the bench seat behind the console of Sean’s Boston Whaler. “You’re right,” he said resignedly. “I know it in my head, but my heart’s terrified. I just want to protect the pod.”

  Joseph smiled. “And that, my son, is why you are going to make an excellent pod Alpha. Because you do care, and you do want to put the pod’s welfare first. You just have to learn to temper those feelings with common sense. There will always be some element of risk, even in our human lives. I could be in an accident on the way home. I ha
ve no control over that. Look at what happened with that bull shark at the hunt. Had that boy been out alone with his parents and not with the pod, he might have been seriously injured or even killed. That has nothing to do with Erik. You cannot protect everyone against every possible threat.”

  Emery stared at his feet. Sean slipped an arm around his mate’s shoulders. “Dude,” he quietly said, “your dad’s right.” He gently shook him. “And hey, considering the rocky start we had, take the fact that I agree wholeheartedly with your dad as a win.”

  That finally earned him a smile from Emery. “True.”

  * * * *

  After the two shifters got dressed, Sean dug into the cooler and handed out sandwiches and bottles of water.

  Emery still looked contemplative. “I still cannot believe Erik just disappeared without a trace. He went through all that bullshit to try to get to Sean, and then to try to get to me.”

  “He probably realizes he has a death sentence on his head,” Joseph said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he headed south to one of the islands. Maybe even to South America. We don’t have a lot of contact with some of the pods down there. As a dolphin, it’d be ridiculously easy for him to disappear and never be found. If he makes it to some small coastal fishing village somewhere, he could easily mix with the local population and form a new identity.”

  “But you did put the word out about him?” Emery asked.

  “Yes, of course I did.” Joseph took a bite and chewed carefully as he thought for a moment. “But there are plenty of pods over on the west coast of Mexico, and Central and South America, where I don’t have contacts. And down the eastern coast of South America. One of my friends in Texas was talking to pods along the eastern coast of Mexico for me, but he said communication is sometimes spotty with them. Not to mention they really don’t give a damn what we do here in the States.”