Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,45
There’s no hurry after all.”
She shook her head. “When the council representative comes to Tritona, you need to show a robust plan for sustainable development, and that includes population growth and economic opportunities. You don’t have that much time left.” She curled her knees in toward her chest. “Neither do I. I don’t want my mom to see what happens when my zaps finally get the best of me.”
“But you’re doing better.”
“Only because you’re here.” She snapped a glance at him. “And you’re leaving soon.”
He faced the fire as she did, and somehow he felt like the leap of flames reflected her back at him in a way he couldn’t see even with his predatory senses. “I could stay.”
Though he wasn’t looking at her, he felt her stiffen. “No, Sting, I wouldn’t ask that of you. You don’t belong here any more than I belong on Tritona. You couldn’t be”—she gestured at him—“who you are stuck here on the estate, swimming back and forth to the Atlantyri. Not when you have the wide sea of Tritona as your home.”
“Maybe that’s not what I want anymore.”
“But that’s what you fought for, for so long.”
She wasn’t wrong, and yet… “That’s what they made me to do,” he said. “But maybe that’s not enough.”
She twisted to face him, her scowl intense. “So you’d trade freedom on the planet to sit in the shallows with me, stopping me from zapping myself to death?”
He turned toward her, and the heat of the flames on the side of his face was nothing compared to the desire rising inside him like magma through cold stone. “You could zap me to life.”
The intensity of her electrical aura blinded him to all else. Nothing—not the tiny oceanic lives in the captive tank, not the leap of captured flame in the stone cove, not even the insatiable violence of his own heart—remained in his awareness except the glow of her. All of him that was a killer monster aimed at her with voracious focus, and he plunged inward toward her, his maw agape. For an endless moment, he was in freefall, caught in the pull of his singular hunger.
But a breath away from contact, he stopped himself, though it wrenched every muscle in his body more painfully then being dropped from high-altitude to the punishing waves in the heat of battle.
He gazed into her eyes. This close, with the fire catching in her gaze, her dark irises flickered with restless gold, like diving from a sandy beach into pounding surf where the land and water danced.
Her lashes fluttered as she looked up at him. “You want to kiss me?”
“Yes,” he rasped. He had no more words in any language from the universal translator. He could only touch his tongue to the sweetness lingering on his upper lip and be grateful he’d fed enough for the moment.
Because nothing would stop him from feasting now.
She reached up to place a fingertip under the point of his jaw and exerted enough force to close his mouth partway. She slipped her hand to the base of his skull and down his nape, sending a shudder through him. She tightened her grip. “Then kiss me.”
Like a standing wave suddenly released from tidal forces, he crashed down. But she caught him easily, her hands framed his face, guiding his force as she desired. He followed the course she set eagerly, angling the kiss and the weight of his body against her.
She pressed up into him, her forearms braced on his chest so her sharp elbows poked him. Though he’d faced far deadlier weapons throughout the war, somehow the way she let him hold her up pierced him to the deepest, unguarded heart of him. Though he’d hauled her weight through the waterways beneath Sunset Falls and could have carried her for days and nights more, now just the whispering pressure wave of her breath across his lips wrecked him.
He flared his gills, not caring that the nearness of the flames singed his most delicate flesh, not when it meant he could breathe for them both and let the kiss go on forever and ever. But then her hands dropped from his face to his chest to lower, lower, lower… He gasped so hard, but all the mighty gusts of all the fiercest storms over Tritona’s sea would not be enough to extinguish the flames that erupted in him. That fire seemed to need no oxygen, no other fuel, to rage out of control as her touch