Coriolis: Intergalactic Dating Agency: Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides (Mermaids of Montana Book 2)

by Elsa Jade

  “I wasn’t thinking. You probably need this more than I do, being a merman.”

  The splashing of her rising was like half shattered crystal, half a river of pixberry wine across his nerves, and the energized swirl of steam over his sensitized skin brought out a flush of longing.

  Longing for the water, not for…anything else.

  “Your turn.” There was a tone to her voice, not shy this time, but silky, dark, and edged, like an obsidian blade.

  A warning flared to life in him, along with his echolocation. Even with his eyes closed, her image appeared in his mind, an aura of her shape and energy.

  She hadn’t gotten out of the tub. She’d just moved to one side.

  The warning inside him was like all the Bathyal’s intruder, collision, and structural integrity alarms blaring at one. But really, she only took up a small arc of the pool, leaving plenty of room for him.

  Warily, he looked up to meet her gaze. Those eyes were darker than obsidian, opaque. It was easy to forget she was mostly Earther when he stared into those cryptic depths.

  “I can come back later,” he said.

  When she shook her head, the pale hair piled high threatened to tumble free. A few strands had already defied the tousled knot and lay along her forehead and the long column of her neck in icy curls against her darker skin. Droplets clung to the strands, and his tongue felt too thick and dry, wanting to lap up those drops.

  “I think we need to clear the air now,” she demurred.

  He squinted through the whorls of steam. “If I open the door, the fog will scatter instantly.”

  She laughed softly. “Too late. And I know the translator is getting this right.” Her smile faded. “I heard what Maelstrom said about your…mating. There is no IDA contract between us, Commander, but we need to be clear what we are telling that commission rep to protect your world. And now me, because obviously”—she swirled her fingers through the pool and then lifted her fist, letting the water stream out as if to show off her pretty little hand—“I’m not going anywhere else.”

  Not going anywhere because she needed water to survive. He understood she meant nothing more than that, and yet some nameless force, faint but inexorable like gravity, pulled him toward the pool. The recessed lighting under the water lit her from below although the churning of the water, powered by bubbles, partly hid her body. He took another breath, his gills flaring.

  She’d been staring him down, but now her gaze drifted lower to his neck.

  He followed the shift of her attention. “Does it bother you?”

  She didn’t pretend to not understand. “It’s…a reminder of what you are.”

  “Fair enough.” He leaned down to touch the restless surface of the water. “So you like it hot?”

  “What?” Her gaze, the darkness deeper because of the underlighting, shot back to his eyes.

  “The water. You’ve set it to hot and bubbling.”

  “Oh. Yes. I guess I was inspired by the soup.”

  He chuckled, his muscles loosening as if the warm water was already engulfing him. Even half desiccated, he could’ve resisted the urge to slide in across from her if she’d kept up with that shy tone or even the sharper one. But her smile…that hooked him.

  “Wavercrest porridge?” he mused as he stepped into the pool.

  “Just add salt.” When she sat a little straighter as his bulk displaced the water, the upper curves of her breasts surfaced like… Not like anything he’d ever seen.

  Tritonesse were rare and isolated in the deepest trenches, so his time with them had been limited and their interactions restricted. And their cloistered citadel was subjected to extremes of heat and cold that required they don more protective layers. Plus, he’d always suspected a bit of pride made them ornament themselves as well as they could in their reduced circumstances.

  So the number of female breasts he’d seen could be counted on one hand. A hand that would properly cover Marisol’s sweetly sized breast…

  Though he would not yet officially say he’d seen hers since he kept his gaze on her face. Only his echolocation provided an image.

  As the hot churn immersed him, his palms tingled with bubbles and yearning. He forced himself to sink toward the bottom until the roiling meniscus tickled his jaw. He flattened his hands on the hard plasteel basin. He’d hold onto that, and it would have to be enough.

  “Here’s the thing, Commander—”

  “Coriolis,” he reminded her. Little flecks of water popped from the bubbles onto his lips. He tasted her again… “The war was supposed to be over.”

  She inclined her head, another strand of pale hair uncoiling to brush the water above the breast he couldn’t quite see. “Coriolis.”

  The roll of his name on her tongue was like a wave tumbling him. That hadn’t happened since he was a spawnling; he was too strong now for all but the lethal surge of the mating season storms.

  It took him a moment to empty the roaring from his ears to concentrate on the rest of her words.

  “The truth is, I’m using you.”

  He considered. “To survive. I understand.”

  She nodded, and he wished the spindrift knot would just come undone already. “It seems I’ll be able to live with Tritonan water, although I don’t know what other symptoms might arise from the syndrome.”

  “It’s not a disease,” he interrupted. “It’s your blood.”

  “That was killing me until not too long ago. If not for that, I would never…” She took a deep breath that made her breasts bob higher, distracting him again. “Even before…this, I planned to never marry. Like my grandmother, like her mother.”

  That made him focus. “All females?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Women,” she corrected. “But yes. I mean, I assume there were men involved in there somewhere.” She grimaced. “As little as possible, from what my grandmother implied. My mother was married to a man, but when she had me, my grandmother said something…changed. Looking back now, I wonder if it was the Wavercrest syndrome”—when he made a noise of protest, she amended—“our Tritonan blood that affected her. She went out sailing one night and never came back. Her boat was never recovered. Authorities said it was an accident, but…” She lifted her hand from the water and tipped her knuckles toward him to display her ring. “She left the Wavercrest sigil ring on the dock. Like she knew she wasn’t coming back.”

  Reaching slowly through the bubbles—he lifted his gaze to hers for permission first and waited for her nod—he took her hand to study the ring. “A sea-tear. Those are rare. It’s beautiful.”

  “A sea-tear… My grandmother’s appraiser thought it was some sort of mutant pearl, too hard to be natural, so he said it had no value, especially with the crude W carved into it.”

  “That’s a Tritonesse symbol.” He tilted her hand to let a water droplet slide through the carved channel. “It represents the resonant frequency of the First Waters.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Really?”

  He leaned forward and blew across her knuckles. She gasped as the carving flared with light.

  Tugging her hand out of his grasp, she stared at him for a long moment before curling her fingers against her throat. The pulse of blood under her skin made him sink back to his side of the pool.

  “I’m sorry there was no one to help your mother,” he said softly. “She would’ve been welcomed on Tritona.”

  Marisol bit her lip then gave him a sad smile. “After she left, my grandmother built the estate outside Sunset Falls. I think she wanted a landlocked place I could go if…” She made a vague gesture that he thought was supposed to indicate her submerged body.

  “I know there was a time when the ratio of male to female Tritonans”—when she made a similar noise to his, he smiled—“women to men was more equal, but the Tritonesse were particularly vulnerable to the polluted runoff from the Cretarni. They sickened, and their fertility rates declined. Even when they retreated to the purest depths, they were hurt
. Going to war was the only way to save ourselves. When the Tritonesse long ago sent the Atlantyri away to save what they could, I have no doubt they adjusted for female offspring, knowing we needed you most.”

  She grimaced. “Finding out my many-times-great-grandmother was exiled so that someday she might come home as a breeder? Not really winning me over here.”

  “No, they were losing,” he reminded her. “They were desperate and dying. Do you think they wanted to send their daughters and granddaughters out into the void, not knowing what would become of them? With only a few frozen specimens of the world they’d known? Only to be lost and forgotten, to forget themselves over the centuries alone.” The bubbling water through his gills made his voice catch. It made him sound… Weak, like he was drowning in this pleasure pool, vulnerable in the way no Tritonyri commander should ever admit.

  But to his surprise, Marisol’s enigmatic dark eyes softened, the jet black shining with tears. She edged around a quarter way of the circular pool until she was just within reach of his outspread arm. With him still submerged up to his chin, she gazed down at him, and the bubbling froth of the water might as well have been ice compared to the lava suddenly seething in his veins.

  “I’m going to Tritona hoping your matriarchs have information on my syndrome, and to see what I can do to convince the commission representative that your world deserves another chance. But I never intended to be anyone’s mail order bride.” She lifted her chin. “I read about the problems with the IDA outpost near Sunset Falls. It seems apparent to me that even before their name was hijacked by your Cretarni to trick us, the Intergalactic Dating Agency targeted desperate, lonely women willing to throw away everything they know for a date.” Derision dripped from the word like the stingers of a hectopi.

  He studied her from his lower position. “So,” he drawled, “really not so different from you.” When she recoiled, her nose wrinkling, he continued inexorably, “And not just for a date.” He echoed her scorn. “For a mate. A bond sweeter than pixberry and deeper than oceans. A lifetime of joy and passion, growing richer with every season of storm and seed and spawn and silence, celebrating the First Waters and the Last Tide together, not just while passions run high but through all the waves of our lives.”

  She stared at him in silence, as if mesmerized, the jet of her eyes shining with some strange new light. “Your skin,” she whispered.

  He’d risen partly out of the water with the intensity of his words,, and now the water wasn’t just bubbling with the fun of a vacation rental party pool but with the subacoustics of his aroused Tritonyri blood.

  He sank deeper into the water again. “It’s nothing,” he muttered.

  “Is that your skinshine?” she whispered. “It’s beautiful. Like a butterfly’s wing.”

  She let go of the edge of the pool to edge closer to him. Not that the middle of the basin was much deeper, somehow it felt like a vast fall away beneath him as the pressure wave of her body coming toward him through the water caressed his skin, and the faint bioelectrical impulse of her presence tingled in his nerves. Unable to stop himself, he rose up out of the water until he was equal with her. Other parts of him were rising too, but that he tried to ignore. She lifted her hand, water streaming from her elbow, and her fingertips hovered near the edge of his cheek. This close, the reflection of his skinshine in her eyes was like miniature galaxies spinning. Abruptly her gaze focused on his. “May I?”

  She’d just told him she would be no one’s bride, that she was using him because to do otherwise was to die. The transaction with the Intergalactic Dating Agency was supposed to have negated all this negotiating after the fact. Everyone was supposed to know exactly what they were getting. The IDA transaction was supposed to have simplified all this, eliminating this awkward dance of despair and desire. Instead, the Cretarni had stolen their profile payment along with any illusion that they’d finally found peace. Now there was only this moment.

  If this touch was to be all he had, it would be immeasurably more than he’d ever dreamed.

  “If you please,” he whispered.

  The brush of her fingertips was lighter than the wind-driven spendthrift that fled before the storms. His fists clenched on the bottom of the basin, but there was nothing to hold onto there, just the bubbling water that squeezed between his fingers and was gone.

  Her touch skimmed lower, gliding over his lower lip. “You’re growling.”

  “I don’t mean to,” he murmured. “It’s the Tritonyri call to the Tritonesse across the deeps. It’s been too long since I soaked, and your eyes are so…black.”

  Her lips curved in a wicked smile. “So black? That’s what you like?”

  “It is,” he confessed. “The black of the deeps is an embrace that never ends, the peace and silence that nothing can break. It’s where life begins and ends.”

  As he spoke, her smile faded, her lips parting on some more intense emotion. “For the last year, I’ve been afraid to touch,” she whispered. “The spit in a kiss, even the sheen of sweat would make me break out in hives. I’ve been alone…”

  “That’s why you want this,” he murmured.

  With a final nod, the haphazard twist of her pale hair finally came undone, cascading down around her bare shoulders.

  In a slow surge, he closed the last bit of distance between them, the water fleeing his advance. But she held her ground, such as it was.

  He stopped with just a few bubbles left between their bodies. “If you still want to use me, the last step is yours.”

  Chapter 6

  He was teasing her, but Marisol wasn’t sure if it was coy or cruel. She’d just wanted to be honest about their situation, as she’d been about the size of the ship, so he knew where they stood.

  Or floated, really.

  Every part of her seemed suspended, not just her body or her breath but even her future. The threat of death had loomed too close for too long and to suddenly feel it lifted, literally floated away on water that didn’t burn her, was too much.

  She’d only meant to relax in the “space hot tub” as Ridley snickeringly called it when she gave them the tour, a little personal celebration for one that water was no longer trying to kill her.

  And then he marched in, wearing nothing more than a skimpy, half-shredded wetsuit type thing and that shine upon his sleek muscles. He’d looked so panicked when he barged in and saw her that she’d felt safe in comparison. And when he explained how distant the women were on his world… Well, maybe he was lonely too.

  He was so close now. If she took a deep breath, she’d be pressed right up against him. It would be easy to pretend it was just an inadvertent touch, the girls bobbing boobily out of bounds. But she wasn’t into pretending.

  Slowly, she reached out to wrap her fingers around those gleaming biceps, almost the same as he’d done when he caught her out by the mermaid fountain a few million lightyears ago. Her pulse was racing, her head spinning with something like vertigo, and he was her anchor, right here.

  She stroked her hands higher, following the swell of heavy flesh over hard muscle to his broad shoulders. The crossed bandolier of his alien wetsuit emphasized the width of his pectorals, and her palms tingled like the lava-leaf spice had burned her tongue. Of course he had a swimmer’s body…

  Under the water, the hot tub had several layers as seats at different heights, and she had been lounging at an angle, but Coriolis was holding himself suspended in the deeper middle, neither sinking nor looming, and he made no attempt to thrust closer.

  Even though she might find herself soon longing for that thrust.

  The dark, feathery structures of his gills made her hesitate, and the urgent beat of her heart faltered.

  She was alien too.

  Wrapping her fingers around the straps of his wetsuit, she leaned forward across the last little space between them. It had been so long, with her focus on dying, not living… This felt like a cosmic distance on par with her first spaceflight, not just the br
eathless anticipation of a first kiss.

  As she’d done when the Bathyal launched, she closed her eyes and gave herself to the moment.

  His lips were firm, almost strict, just as she’d known they’d be, but there was a silkiness to them that delighted her, and when she parted her lips on a pleased inhalation, he followed her lead. She’d forgotten to ask if Tritonyri kissed…

  Late one night at the estate, she’d heard Ridley and Lana giggling in that way of schoolgirls and naughty magazines, but she felt too ill—and too much the outsider—to join them. She would’ve known more now, been more confident, if she’d joined them that night. She hadn’t even finished her immersion lessons…

  Coriolis reached up to wrap his long fingers at her nape, tilting her head just so to deepen the kiss, and all thoughts of gossip and studying washed away as he exhaled into her breath.

  The breath of rising desire… Maelstrom had mentioned it when he explained how Ridley had overcome her fear of dark water. This is what they’d meant.

  More nuanced than the spice Coriolis had added to her food, but with the same spreading heat that made all her nerve endings come alive. But instead of fading, leaving her satiated, this heat kept rising until every fiber of her being was tingling on the edge of some sensory overload. Struggling to contain the rush was like trying to hold back the tide with her bare, trembling hands. She let out a sound, a moan of yearning and need.

  Before the sound had faded from her lips, he gentled his grip, his fingers combing up gently into her loosened hair and drawing the strands forward to float on the narrow channel of water still between them. But as her breaths calmed, he began to wind one long strand around his fingers, slowly reeling her in.

  As if she was a fish! Which… She partly was, apparently…

  Because she loved it. The perfect mastery of his touch with only two fingers in her hair and his lips on hers.

  She wanted to press closer, lay herself flush on the shining muscles and the slick black straps of his strange wetsuit. But his endless kiss left her as light and uncontrolled as bubbles, and his grasp on her hair held her in place.