Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,18
to keep your stuff in my satchel?” Oh god, had she just said stuff my satchel?
He nodded.
As she accepted the items, still warm from his body, another tingle went through her. Whyyy? These were her clothes, so there was no reason they should feel so intimate after just an hour on his body. But tucking their clothes together in her bag made her face hot. And other parts of her too.
She hung the bag out of sight on a branch and waded back into the water.
Sting watched her. “You swim?”
“Not as well as a native Tritonan, of course, but I’m not half bad.” She sucked in a breath as the water rose up to her knees. “I must not’ve noticed how cold it was last time.”
“Probably because you were escaping a burning spaceship.”
She forced a chuckle, then sucked in another pained breath as the water rose to her crotch and immediately wicked up through her panties, soaking her privates like the least fun frozen margarita mistake ever. She’d left her underwear on since it covered as much as a bikini, but maybe it would’ve been better to just be naked. Sting didn’t seem to mind nudity—or even notice, particularly. He hadn’t so much as flickered a muscle when she took off her clothes.
Not that she was trying to get him to flicker his muscles. Much.
He took a couple of strides past her into deeper water, somehow leaving no ripple around him despite the amount of water he was displacing with those not flickering muscles. He sank down to his neck, his expression never changing despite the chill. When he turned to face her, she gulped in a bracing breath, about to dunk herself—
She let the breath out in a startled gasp when the water around her abruptly bubbled and heated. “What the…?”
“If you don’t go too fast, I can keep the water around you at a temperature you won’t find unpleasant.”
It was like the best hot tubbing ever. “How are you doing that?”
“My sub-acoustics can excite the electrons, heating the water,” he said matter-of-factly, as if anyone could boil water with inaudible humming. “Under battle conditions, I could not waste the energy. But you are small and take up little space.”
She grimaced, but he wasn’t wrong.
As she sank down into the hot effervescence, despite her pique she couldn’t hold back a giggle at the fizz. Maybe being small wasn’t all bad. With the heavy mineral content of the lake plus Sting’s scrubbing bubbles, Sunset Lake had suddenly become an upscale spa, at least her little piece of it.
She waded into the lake and then pushed off into a strong breaststroke. The bubbles gathered on the scallops of the lace trim of her bra, tickling the inner curves of her breasts. Breaststroke indeed…
Sting was nowhere to be seen, but she knew he must be somewhere close under the surface because the enveloping warmth stayed centered around her. Only her fingertips barely brushed the chill if she reached too far ahead of her. She’d never been a professional diver like Ridley or a tabloid-renowned beach body like Marisol, but she’d always made swimming a regular part of her exercise routine, and as she relaxed into the familiar movements, her mind drifted a little too.
No one had ever mistaken her for a fighter and that wasn’t going to change, but just as Tritona’s long war was over, maybe there was some other way for her; she didn’t need to be as fierce as Ridley or as frightening as Marisol.
Right now she was just fizzy.
Maybe she could just kept swimming, dive to the bottom of the lake and find the hidden spring, follow it back through the interconnected aquifers below Sunset Falls, all the way out to the great rivers and lakes and finally the ocean, circling her world endlessly…
Except of course she couldn’t do that, not without Sting’s bubble of protection around her. And she wouldn’t get far anyway, not with the zaps haunting her. She’d run away from Tritona and the Tritonesse judgment when really that was the only place she’d find a cure for her zaps.
Because if she was being honest with herself—just for a minute, out here in the middle of a lonely lake—the zaps were the only thing she had to call her own.
Oof, too much honesty. If this were the parks & rec swimming pool, she would be doing an awkward flip turn right about now and skedaddling back the way she’d come into blissful self-inflicted delusion.