wasn’t possible anymore, now that she knew the truth about aliens, mermen, and herself.
Just as she was getting nervous about not having seen Sting for too long—of course he was a shark-man so it wasn’t like he needed to breathe, but still—a spume of white bubbles erupted ahead of her. The froth cut out abruptly as if stopped by an invisible wall. The hull of the Diatom.
Sting broke the surface of the water, the dark water shining on his pale skin. “I’ve opened the hatch,” he called. “Grab my harness and I’ll pull you in.”
Since she’d dived out under her own power, she knew it wasn’t far or long to reach the hatch—within her breath control—but somehow it was different now, being mostly in possession of her senses this time but still not able to see the ship through its mimic disguise.
Treading water, she eyed his broad shoulders. “If you try to abduct me, I’ll zap you,” she blurted.
“I won’t make you zap me. I need the ship in one unzapped piece to get back to Tritona.”
Huffing partly from exasperation, partly from exertion, she paddled closer to him. With almost no distance between them, the strength of the sound waves he emitted was like snuggling right up to the jets of a hot tub. If she angled her nethers just right…
She was going to blame the whole-body flush on the heat of the water.
Warning her hands not to wander, she reached out to grasp the matte black straps of his battle skin.
“Hold tight,” he said, his rough voice sounding almost excited. Then he dove, dragging her with him.
Just as well she’d sucked in an inadvertent breath at the rasp of his skin against her knuckles. He kept saying that his skin was armored, but really the texture was more like a burned-out velvet comforter thrown over that very firm memory foam mattress—an intriguing mix of textured and soft, and her fingertips longed to trace the inconsistency, as if there were an invisible message to be found in the pattern of hard muscle and sculpted hollow under the surface. But before she could worry about running out of air—or running out of self-control—they were rocketing up out of the water into the interior of the Diatom’s half-submerged entryway.
The power of him propelled them all the way out of the water and up onto the dry deck. The emergency lights were low, the pale glow little more than a nightlight. In the ghostly gleam, Sting’s white eyes were even more inhuman, as if she needed the reminder that this was a spaceship, and that she herself pulsed with alien blood that even other aliens considered monstrous.
She wrapped her arms around her chest, her nipples beaded against the flesh of her inner arms. Just the cold, compared to the hot tub water, she told herself. Nothing to do with the giant male watching her silently. How desperately she wanted to ask him what more he knew of fire-witches. How desperately she wanted him…
No, being lonely was no excuse to try to cling to impossibilities; it never had been even though she’d surrounded herself with crystals and psychedelics and intermittent tantric chanting hoping to prove that weirder things could happen than being wanted.
Wanting to believe had taken her all the way to another planet where mermaids were real…
Only to be rejected again.
Yet here she was again, back on this stolen spaceship, even though she’d accidentally done her worst to crash it. But as much as she might be tempted to think this was a second chance—or was it third by now?—to find what she’d been looking for all her life, maybe it was time to just admit that what she wanted didn’t exist.
And even a merman with some sort of x-ray eyes wouldn’t be able to find what she was missing.
Chapter 5
Though the little Earther female showed no signs of fleeing or zapping, Sting found his attention locked on her for a long moment.
As they’d dived to the Diatom, she’d held on tight, just as he warned her, her fingers wrapped around the bindings of his battle skin and her fists pressed into his chest. Though he’d been cross-engineered with armored skin and conditioned to feel nothing, strangely the heat and pressure of her touch lingered in his muscles even after she let go.
Fire-witch. If she could stab and burn through Titanyri flesh, she was even more dangerous than the Tritonesse feared.
The churn of his blood quickened, rising to the threat. But when she