The day of the plane crash started out completely ordinary.
Sunlight kissed the palm trees outside Dannika’s guest cottage, the owner’s peacocks began squawking for their breakfast in the back garden, and four nude warriors broke down Dannika’s bedroom door.
Dannika jolted up in bed and flung off her lavender-scented sleep mask. “Wha—? Is it?”
The warriors raced around her suite, peeking in the bathroom, closet, and the attached kitchen. Intricate, iridescent tattoos covered their bulging muscles, and their hands patted their bare biceps for missing daggers and tridents.
One warrior with bright orange tattoos swirling across his lightly bluish-tinted skin—his name was Gailen—leaned out her open kitchen window. “There! She cries for help in the grass!”
The warriors raced out the way they had come. Dannika’s front door hung open, swinging on its hinges.
The peacocks squawked louder with surprise. Heeeemeee. Heeemeee.
Gailen called, “Where are you? We hear your cry for help. We are coming!”
Heeeemeee. Heeemeee.
Oh, goodness.
They’d misheard the peacocks.
“Again?” Dannika collapsed, noodle-spined, against the carved hardwood, and yawned. If she closed her eyes or squinted… No, she’d never mistake the call of a peacock for a human. They sounded like birds with a throaty squeal.
She yawned, then pushed the sheets off her long satin nightgown, tugged on a fluffy bathrobe, and belted it as she wandered to the front door. “Gentlemen? You can relax. It’s just the peacocks. Again.”
The morning sunlight warmed her front step. A pleasant breeze carried in the scent of ocean salt, sweet grasses, and fresh banana bread made with some of the ripe dwarf Cavendish bananas hanging in the garden.
Gailen strode around the side of her white cottage. An all-seafood diet with plenty of exercise grew the marine warriors into big, hard, gorgeous males intent on claiming and fiercely protecting their soul mates. And performing the occasional peacock rescue, fully nude.
Dannika forced her gaze on his muscular pectorals and face. Above the waist. Definitely above the waist to ignore the bounty that nature had endowed. “Please call the other warriors to come out of my back garden.”
Worry wrinkled Gailen’s brow. “Someone cries for help. A woman, or a child.”
“And I applaud your responsiveness.” She rested a comforting hand on his beefy shoulder. “You must have run all the way from the beach. But it’s a bird, I promise you.”
He peered around the far side of the waist-high hibiscus hedge. “Are you sure?”
“I grew up with peacocks. And they made the same sound yesterday morning when Tial broke into my cottage, and the day before, when Zoan did.”
The other warriors rejoined them, and Dannika greeted them individually, focusing on their serious, tattooed faces and not on their hard, toned, endowed lower bodies.
Gailen’s frown deepened. “Land creatures are so strange. Do you not think so? Why would a bird make such a cry or carry such a tail? It is too strange.”
“The world is a strange place.” She patted his bulging bicep. “Just think of how shocked we humans were when mermen appeared on our shores.”
On the land, they looked like any other muscular, warlike, nude tribe. But under the water, gills sprouted in their lower backs and their toes elongated into fins. Dannika had seen it a few times. It was fascinating to watch.
And five years ago, it had been unthinkable. Mermen were the stuff of legends.
Who would have believed they were living beneath the ocean all along?
For centuries, the warriors had arisen only to unite with brides on isolated, sacred islands. Modernization had emptied those islands and caused a population crash. Five years ago, one warrior had defied his rulers and sought his bride on the mainland. His quest had revealed the mer to the shocked modern world—and launched Dannika’s mission.
That first modern bride had envisioned a dating site for warriors to find their soul mates. With the help of good friends, she’d made her vision a reality, and for the past year, Dannika had been running it.
The mer were still a critically endangered species. Dannika’s work had never been so necessary, and she awoke every day excited to do it.
She just usually awoke a little later and better rested.
“Why don’t you return to the beach?” Dannika suppressed a yawn. “I’ll join you as soon as I’ve dressed.”
“We disturbed you. I apologize.”
“Oh, no. I wanted to get up early today.” She guided him to the white stone path and released him next to the still-open front door. “As always, I’m honored that the warriors of Atlantis care so much about my well-being that you feel the need to break down