beach below, she’d have to bite through stainless-steel pillars and railings.
He made a mental note to cover the beach-facing glass, so that tourists and fishermen passing the bay inlet didn’t see his catch swimming about.
Wolfgang scanned the water.
Still there.
Still had a mermaid in his pool.
Magic with benefits. The flick of her tail with the scales dancing in light, her areola stark as coins and reminding him of her taste and the way she bucked against his mouth when she came. Her beauty slew him, relentlessly, and he forgot to breathe.
Animal, monster, human. Her DNA would tell him?
If she were animal, he’d screwed a fish. He snorted at his thought. As if.
A pretty, pretty fish … that made his dick so hard and big when she gave him a blowjob that he’d need new pants and a wheelbarrow for his cock and balls, if his ego had a say.
He had tidied up the room at the research facility, hosed it down, put everything away. The van could go back later, when he would swap it for his SUV, he’d left parked there. Tissue and blood samples waited downstairs, in the fridge in his kitchen. He wasn’t going to leave them at work unless he was there too.
What would those show? What she had told him said she was human, once, but he was no lie detector. She might tell him anything. The honesty of mermaids was not proclaimed in tales, only their shipwrecking and seduction skills.
His house, he remembered, was a mess. Except for where he’d walked her, yesterday. The reason for that smacked home how crazy he was being. To dismiss his vengeance and end up with her in his tank was a rebound of enormous proportions.
When Merrick died, grief had buried him.
Once upon a time, they’d sat here together, drinking wine, laughing, eating pâte, cheese, and antipasto. But Merrick was gone, dead, killed by her or her ilk. And yet that bludgeoning ache of grief had dulled from an obliteration of his very self to this, to acceptance, in one night?
His eyeballs felt raked, desiccated, and very tired. He’d not slept in how long? No idea. Perhaps he’d blown some sort of mental fuse. Denial, anger, grief, acceptance. Were those the stages? Vengeance didn’t get a mention.
Between his legs, he drummed the rim of the sun lounge.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t going to kill her. Wolfgang scrubbed at his chin with his fingers, staring down at her, but this?
“What did you do to me?”
Mermaids and sirens seduced men with song, but he had to admit the rest of her seduced him purely by being in front of him. If she had somehow done that, then she’d encouraged her own violation. Ironic, since he thought he was in command. Unless seduction was automatic and a mechanism she didn’t control?
An interesting way to look at it. Generally speaking, he could resist a woman in a short skirt in a dark alley at night. How a woman dressed would turn him on but not compel him.
But a mermaid had a supernatural essence.
Had she made him do it despite her protestations?
Or was that irrelevant due to his plans to dissect her? His head hurt.
“Your honor, I fucked her because her siren beauty made me do it.” He tsked. Not sure that would work in court. A pity. Fatigue crept in and thumped him again, weighing down his body and making scratchy eyeballs even scratchier.
“Ohhh god.” Groaning at the headache prying him apart, he rose to his feet. He would clean up his house and think on this. Crash into bed. Pray she didn’t get out and come and drown him, somehow, in his bed. Maybe by sitting on his face.
Chuckling at his vile humor, he staggered toward the stairs that led down to the door, which then led past his main lounge room.
Wait. What was he going to feed her?
She must eat something more than people? A splash made him halt, and he turned. Raffaela had surfaced.
“What do you eat?” Then he saw the wriggling fish in her hands, the chunk missing from its middle, and the blood staining the water. “Okay. Right. Now I know. Hungry, were you?”
Narrow-eyed, she nodded then bit off more fish, chewed.
His pool filters could handle the blood and debris.
Blood smeared her lips.
Something induced him to return to the pool. Easier to talk with less distance. If she lunged from the other side he had, ohhh, about three seconds to get away? Wolfgang took one step back. Make