Derek nearly spat his drink out.
“Virgins?”
“Bien sûr. Those who come here wish to see something truly unusual, something magical or mythical. Beautiful women, naked, exquisite and all virginal.”
“Even Xenia?” Derek asked.
“Even she.”
“But she must be in her twenties, right?”
“She is. She started here at age eighteen and has been a mermaid three years now. I saw in the paper a little article about a girl who’d broken a record for holding her breath underwater. I met her the next week, and she’s been here ever since.”
“But that’s crazy,” Derek protested. “Why would women this gorgeous choose—”
“If I offered you an extraordinary sum of money to go a year without sex, would you do it?”
Derek stared at Kingsley and burst into laughter.
“So it’s the opposite of prostitution here?”
“I pay them to not have sex. As long as they stay intact, they can work very few hours, meet the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, and leave whenever they wish. Most depart after a year or two with a rich boyfriend, a very large bank account or both. Many, like Xenia, stay longer.”
Just then a redheaded mermaid slid off her rock and divded back into the water.
“Come back, Alanna,” the man at the table called after her. “Please?”
“No, go away,” the girl, Alanna, said when she surfaced. “I don’t like your tie. It’s ugly.”
Kingsley chuckled softly at the scene.
“Mermaids,” he said to Derek, “have cold hearts. To win the heart of one takes much perseverance.”
Shaking his head, Derek could only gaze around him in awe. He understood it all now. Beautiful virginal women who were trained to be unimpressed by the wealth and power that surrounded them…no wonder this club attracted such a high-caliber clientele. Seducing a stripper was child’s play. But netting a virginal mermaid? Now, that was a feat.
“But how do you know they’re virgins?” Derek asked. “Can’t they sneak out and do whatever they want?”
“We have ways of knowing.” Kingsley took another sip of his drink.
“What ways?” Derek studied him out of the corner of his eye.
Kingsley merely swirled the ice in his cocktail.
“Land is grand, Mr. Prince, but wetter is better. Some days, it is good to be the King.”
At that, Kingsley strode off and sat next to someone Derek recognized as the top prosecutor in the state of New York. Glancing up, he saw Xenia swimming to the top of the column of water. Derek headed up the stairs again and found her just as she pulled herself from the water.
“You stayed,” she said, smiling as she stood naked and dripping in front of him. She didn’t reach for one of the dozens of towels stacked nearby. Nothing in her posture or manner seemed remotely seductive. Although everything in him longed to lick the water off her extraordinary curves, she appeared almost unaware of her naked body and the effect it had on him.
“I did stay. But I have to go now. Can I see you again?”
“If you come back you can see me again. If you don’t come back you can’t.”
“Then I’ll come back. I’ll definitely come back.”
“But go away now,” she said as she started to walk off. “I like your face enough I want to know how it feels to miss it.”
Grinning ear to ear, Derek nodded. He never knew getting dismissed could feel so good.
He returned to Cirque du Nuit and found Ireland long gone. But he had told her he’d see her at her place and even if she couldn’t keep a promise, he could.
He reached Ireland’s apartment by eleven o’clock. Knocking on the door, he half hoped she wouldn’t answer. For a month now he’d been putting off the big “this isn’t working” talk. They weren’t exclusive. Whenever he started to consider it, she’d shift into bitch overdrive and all thoughts of happily ever after would go screaming out the window.
Ireland answered the door wearing only a white shirt—one of his—and wet hair. She always took a long hot shower when angry. Not a good sign.
“Can’t believe you showed up.” She stepped back to let him in.
“Told you I would. I’m even early.”
Derek entered and sat on her couch. He hated how attractive she looked with her hair down and wet. Apparently he’d acquired a wet-hair fetish in only one evening.
Ireland exhaled heavily as she came to stand in front of him.
“Derek, I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to be so late and not call. Forgive me?”
Derek shook his head and groaned. He hated these conversations.
“Ireland, you’re smart and beautiful and—” He discovered he’d already run out of compliments. “That’s fantastic. But all you and I ever do is fuck or fight. If we’re not doing one, we’re doing the other.”
“So?”
“So that’s hardly a relationship. Look—” he began and she stopped him with a finger over his lips.
“So…” she said as she sat on his lap, a knee on either side of his thighs, “I’m done fighting.”
“Ireland, not tonight. We have to talk—”
“No, we don’t.”
Ireland raised her hand and unbuttoned the top button of her shirt.
“Don’t, Ireland.”
“Why?” She unbuttoned her shirt all the way to the bottom and let it slide off her arms and slip to the floor. She dipped her head and kissed his neck, his earlobe.
Against his will, Derek’s body began to respond to her expert touch. She brought her breasts to his face and Derek suckled lightly on her nipples as she reached down and freed him from his pants. As he kissed her breasts hungrily, she rose up and pushed him inside her.
“Ireland, stop,” he said as he tore his mouth from her body.
“Stop what? Stop this?” She moved her hips forward, taking him even deeper into her. Rocking against him, Ireland unbuttoned his vest and shirt and pushed them back. Running her hands down his strong chest, she pressed her hands into the hard flat plane of his stomach. Derek took a deep breath and hated himself for letting her have such power over him. Ireland used sex as a weapon. She wielded it like a trained assassin.
Leaning in close, Ireland let her hair tickle his bare shoulders.
The touch of her wet hair on his skin proved too much for him. He ordered her up and bent her over the back of the couch. Gripping her shoulders, he brutally drove into her. Her hips bucked frantically against his. She loved it rough, but tonight his force was for his benefit, not hers. With bitter, angry thrusts he slammed into her as she panted his name. He pushed into her so deep she flinched. All the water in the ocean couldn’t put out the fire in his blood tonight.
Under him Ireland groaned and gasped. Derek suspected half of Ireland’s vocal pleasure constituted mere theatrics designed to keep him ensnared to her. Her orgasm seemed louder than usual and out of spite, Derek came silently and pulled out of her as soon as he’d finished.
“See?” Ireland grabbed her shirt off the floor. “We’re good together.”
Angry with himself for letting her win again, Derek shoved his shirt back into his pants.
“We’re only good together when we’re in bed.”
“That was the couch,” she said with an arrogant toss of her hair.
“And it wasn’t good. It might have felt good, but it wasn’t good.”
“Derek, what’s your problem? You’re hot and rich. So am I. You said yourself you weren’t planning on ever getting married again. God knows I don’t want a husband and a bunch of screaming brats around puking on my carpet and throwing cereal in my Porsche. We’re right for each other. We make sense.”
“We make nothing.” Derek hastily buttoned his vest. He hated who he turned into around Ireland. “We don’t even make love. I feel nothing with you. Tonight this girl kissed me on the cheek, and I felt more from that than I did five minutes ago when I was rammed up in you.�
��
“What are you saying?” For a moment Ireland seemed almost human.
What was he saying? In those few brief moments with Xenia, he’d laughed, mostly at himself. He’d felt like an idiot, like a teenager, like a man on a mission—things he never felt with Ireland, things he never even felt with his ex-wife. “I’m sorry, Ireland. I want more.”
The tiny moment of humanity had been an act. All the way to the door Ireland pelted him with insults and profanities. Derek didn’t respond. He merely walked out, found his car and headed to his own apartment. On his way there he tried to think of Ireland, but his mind went back to Xenia. Derek Prince—son of the deputy mayor of New York, partner in his own law firm by age thirty, and now he couldn’t stop grinning at the thought of seeing a twenty-one-year-old virgin who worked as a mermaid in a nightclub. Mark and Christian would die laughing if he told them. Then and there he decided he would keep it to himself.
“Asshole,” Mark interjected. “You could have told us.”
“Seriously,” Derek said, “I shouldn’t even be telling you this much. Nobody wants to get on Kingsley Edge’s shit list.”
“Bad list to be on, I hear,” Christian agreed.
“Look—do you want to hear the story or not?” Derek demanded.
“Does it get better? The only sex in it so far was with Ireland and even then you left the good parts out.”
“There were no good parts with Ireland. But yes, it gets better. And weirder. And yeah, there’s definitely more sex.”
Derek remembered the next day after meeting Xenia and the impossibility of concentrating on work. The hours crawled by and it seemed to take ten years to get to night again. He showered, changed into black slacks and a black button-down. At eleven o’clock he returned to Cirque du Nuit and took the stairwell down to Fathoms.
Finding a seat at the lavish bar, Derek ordered a drink and toyed with it as he watched for Xenia. Finally he saw her slip out of one of the smaller pools and position herself on a rock next to a table. He could only stare at her glistening body as she tucked her silvery feet to the side and chatted with one of Fathoms’s many preposterously wealthy patrons.
He tried to catch her eye but had no luck. Almost despairing of his inability to talk to her, Derek debated whether he should leave or stay.
“Welcome back, Monsieur Prince.”
Derek turned around and saw Kingsley standing behind him. Tonight he wore a slightly more modern suit—black Armani—and his hair down instead of back in last night’s ponytail. A well-named man, he looked both aristocratic and undeniably edgy.
“Mr. Edge, Xenia asked me to come back. That’s allowed, isn’t it? I just want to talk to her.”
“Of course. My mermaids are employees here, not prisoners. They see whomever they desire. Xenia asked me to give you this note.” Kingsley handed him a piece of sea-blue paper covered in water splotches.
“A note?”
“You should feel quite flattered. I do not deign to play messenger often. Lucky for you, I’m in a very good mood.”
“Do I want to know why?” Derek asked as he carefully unfolded the waterlogged piece of blue stationery Kingsley had given him.
“See her?” Kingsley pointed at a beautiful mermaid with long black hair, voluptuous breasts and a wide bright smile. “My Emelia…this is her last night. Joining the Peace Corps or some other such nonsense.” He said “nonsense” but Derek heard pride in his voice.
“And that puts you in a good mood?”
“Let’s just say at her request she will be getting quite a special send-off.”
Derek could only imagine what he meant by that. He tilted Xenia’s note into the light and read what he could of the wet words.
Hello, my handsome Derek Prince—If you stay until midnight I might turn into a pumpkin again. Wait, that’s the wrong story, isn’t it? I like how tall you are and that you smile when you look at me even when you think I can’t see you.
“She likes you,” Kingsley said.
“I like her. But we haven’t gotten to talk much.”
“She’s a delight. Intelligent, unusual and, of course, quite beautiful. I worry about her though.”
“Why? She’s amazing.”
“She’s been here so long, I fear she may have forgotten what the sun looks like. Perhaps you could remind her.”
“I can do that. Happily. Pumpkin at midnight?”
“When she’s finished for the night. There’s a lounge upstairs and to the left. You may wait there if you promise that what you see tonight, you will not share with others. I’m very protective of my mermaids.”
Derek pledged his silence and headed up the stairs Kingsley had indicated. Taking a hard left down a tiled corridor, Derek found the softly lit and luxurious lounge empty of men or mermaids. Impatient for midnight and his chance to talk to Xenia again, Derek wandered around the lounge and out into the hallway. Across from the longue, Derek found another room, this one appointed like a tasteful massage studio complete with padded table and bottles of exotic oils. Alanna, the redheaded mermaid from last night, stepped past him wearing only a towel. Without even waiting for him to look away, she dropped her towel and lay prone on the table. An attractive young man of about twenty-seven or-eight followed her into the room and washed his hands. He poured clear thick oil into his hands and ran it through the mermaid’s lustrous long hair. Then he doused the naked girl in a thick layer of golden oil and began to massage it into her skin.
The girl and her masseur chatted softly during her massage. At one point she flipped over to allow him access to the front of her body. She didn’t seem the least fazed when he oiled her breasts and thighs. Daily hot-oil massages as a perk of the job…no wonder Xenia didn’t want to leave this place. Derek decided that massages might be something he’d have to implement at his law office. Maybe Christian and Mark would pull their weight a little more with that incentive.
“Dude, the commentary is not appreciated,” Christian interrupted.
“But yes, massages at work,” Mark agreed. “Now continue.”
At first Derek thought it was an ordinary massage. With all the time the women spent in the water, Derek imagined they’d require an intensive skin-care regimen. But soon the rather perfunctory massage turned intimate as the masseur pushed apart Alanna’s legs and rubbed high on her inner thighs. Sighing blissfully, she opened her legs even wider. The young man reached between her thighs and spread apart the folds of her vagina.
“You’re shitting us,” Mark breathed, his eyes going wide enough Derek had to laugh. “Hymen check?”
“Exactly,” Derek said, flushing a little at the intensity of the memory. “But not just that.”
The man moved his fingers higher and began tracing tight circles around the mermaid’s clitoris. She closed her eyes, raised her hips slightly and after a few minutes of the masseur’s ministrations, she came with a flinch and a gasp. At no point during the procedure had he penetrated her in any way. Yet the look on her face indicated a very happy mermaid who’d just had a spectacularly strong orgasm.
“We can include that in our office massages.” Mark took a fresh drink from their scantily clad waitress. Derek knew Mark and Christian must be engrossed in his story as neither of them even bothered to flirt with her. “That won’t be an HR nightmare at all.”
“Screw our law firm.” Christian collapsed back into his seat as if spent. “I’m going to find that guy and take his job. Massages with happy endings. Awesome.”
Alanna rolled off the table, picked up her towel and strolled out of the studio. On her way out, she patted Derek on the cheek and kept walking. Just another day at the office.
“I guess swimming naked around the upper echelons of New York high society makes for some seriously immodest virgins,” Christian surmised.
Derek shook his head, still unable to believe that he’d seen what he’d seen last year at Fathoms.
“You haven’t heard anything yet,” Derek said and took a de
ep breath before diving back into his story.
Intending to head back to the lounge, or maybe the men’s room first and then the lounge, Derek turned around and came face-to-face with the striking blonde bartender from last night.
“Enjoy the show?” She arched her eyebrow at him.
Blushing guiltily, Derek knew he had no excuse for watching other than no one told him he couldn’t.
“I’m sorry. Urs, right? That’s your name?” The girl didn’t bat an eyelash. “I was waiting on Xenia. Kingsley told me I could come up here.”
The girl’s anger flickered only slightly at the mention of Kingsley’s name.
“Xenia’s happy here. This is her home. This place may seem like a freak show to you, but it’s heaven here. Kingsley takes amazing care of his employees. The mermaids make incredible money, live in gorgeous free apartments, and as you saw, we get great benefits.”
“Kingsley said Xenia’s been here for three years. Don’t you think she might want to have a relationship with someone eventually?”
“With someone who will see her as some kind of prize, use her and then drop her when the shine wears off? When he realizes she’s just a tattooed girl who had a very cool job once upon a time but now is as human as he is? That kind of relationship?”
“No. A real relationship. Marriage maybe or kids. Or if not that then at least a healthy sexual relationship with someone she’s in love with. Is she going to be doing this when she’s sixty?”
“You’ll still want her when she’s sixty?”
“I just want to get to know her. She’s weird and beautiful, and I can’t stop thinking about her. And no, I wasn’t just thinking about having sex with her. Believe it or not, I’d really like to take her to lunch and talk. Is that so horrible?”
“It’s not horrible, no,” she said, the venom gone from her tone and profound regret in its place. “But this is better. Trust me.”
Derek didn’t know what to say. He glanced down at the floor and saw a flash of a silver tattoo on Urs’s ankle, but no mermaid pendant graced her neck.
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