She helped him out of his pants while he tugged off his shirt. No underwear on her merman, Minali thought admiringly as she surveyed his naked glory. Every hard inch of him.
"Stars, Sven," she said again, hooking one leg around his hips so she could rub against him. "Are you always this nervous around women?"
He grinned, sliding his hands under her butt and lifting her so that when she next rubbed against him, it hit all the right spots. Minali couldn't help letting out a moan of pleasure. Stars, the man wasn't even inside her yet and he was going to make her come again.
"Only the ones I love," he whispered. With one smooth stroke, he entered her.
Minali wrapped both legs around him now, pushing him in deeper. Now it was Sven's turn to moan. He turned and pushed her up against the wall, pinning her in place as he thrust slowly into her again. Hard and slow and deep, like he wanted to do this forever. His green eyes drank in her face, her body and every moan of pleasure that left her lips as her climax built. She clenched down on him as she came, shouting his name, and her own cries had barely died away before he gasped out her name with the awe of a man experiencing his first orgasm.
"So you like doing it up against the wall?" she teased him.
"Stars, yes," he gasped, still breathless.
"Wait until you've tried a bed, and in the shower," Minali continued.
"Your bed?" he ventured, looking hopeful.
Minali unhooked her legs from around his hips and slid down to the floor. Beds weren't as hard as walls. "If you're half as good in bed as you are everywhere else, I might have to break out the handcuffs," she said. "Because once I have you in my bed, I don't think I'll want you to leave."
He grinned. "Sounds great to me."
She eyed his perfectly shaped butt as he padded over to the wash basin to clean himself up. "Get some clothes on, and I can have us at my place in ten minutes. My flyer's outside."
In record time, she mounted the flyer and felt Sven's hard body settle in behind her. He wrapped his arms around her torso and leaned forward. "I never want to let you go." There was such yearning in his tone it made Minali's heart ache.
She relaxed in his embrace. Most men were bastards, but she'd stumbled across a good one. A Meta and a merman, too, but most of all, a good man.
"You won't have to," she promised. "You're the only man in the galaxy I'll ever want, Fishtail."
Thirty
In the heart of the water cascading into a fish tank, the spark of a naiad spirit beamed. Sven deserved some happiness, after being lonely for so long. She was delighted that she'd been instrumental in bringing it about, even if she'd had to die to do it.
But naiads couldn't truly die, even if their temporary corporeal forms did. Bolina drank the thin trickle of energy from the water swirling in the tank. Her recovery would be slow, but she would soon be back to her full power.
Next time, when she took corporeal form, she would do it properly. And when she next saw him, she wanted more than a kiss.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my novella from The Complex!
All reviews are appreciated.
If you would like to read more from The Complex series, please click on the link below:
The Complex Website
(http://www.thecomplex.info/)
Or…if you'd like a sneak peek from Allie and Galen's story, Halcyon, which you can get HERE, read on…
On a planet far from home, a solitary siren sped through the wine-dark sea toward her quarry, swifter and more deadly than a long-extinct shark. Her target, a Human ship, lay becalmed in the waves. Almost as if it expected and awaited its fate.
Halcyon the siren paid no thought to the ship's passengers or crew as she hauled herself up the Poseidon's anchor chain to the deck. She listened for one voice and one voice alone – a prisoner the Humans had taken. A civilian they had no right to take.
As she stalked the deck, she lifted her voice in song. Humans heard and fell into slumber. Those who already slept sank deeper still. Deadly music echoed along the passages as she passed, until she heard a pained gasp, followed by, "Halcyon, dearest, you should not be here!"
Halcyon wrenched open the hatch that was all that lay between her and her husband. Except that the man she beheld no longer looked like her husband, for all that he spoke with Ceyx' voice. The bloodied piece of meat strapped to a table before her didn't look like a man at all, let alone a living one.
"What have they done to you?" she whispered, reaching out to touch the man she loved.
The homunculus coughed, bringing up more blood, which he spat on the floor. "Tortured me for information, dearest. They think me one of them, and a traitor. My research – " He coughed again, more thickly this time. "My research is what they wanted. Human and Meta genetics. They are the same. The same, dearest. We can breed with them and they with us. Worse, if they work out how to bestow Meta powers on their own, they will annihilate us. That is why they tortured me. I refused to experiment on them. To work for them. I will not be a part of – " A deep, hacking cough seized him, leaving him gasping for breath that he was unable to draw from the air.
An eternity passed in a moment, as Halcyon was forced to watch her husband suffocate to death, like a fish out of water.
Her blood boiled within her veins. Metas were violent, yes, but none would dare harm one of the Mer, let alone attempt to torture one. Not like this. Not knowing what one siren could do to thousands of them.
Halcyon scanned the room, her fingers itching to show them what she thought of such despicable tactics. Her gaze lighted on a slumbering Human, almost hidden under a bench. Sleep was a luxury he would never know again.
"Wake," she commanded him, first in her language, then his own when she got no response. The ignorant Human didn't speak Mer, so she would speak in English, and in pain. Both languages he would understand before he died.
The man blinked, patting down his lab coat that looked so much like the one Ceyx once wore to work. No more.
Halcyon ripped the plastic name tag from the man's chest. "Get up, Doctor Claudius Tasker. Did you do this?" She pointed at Ceyx' corpse.
"The traitor wouldn't talk," Tasker grumbled.
"So you tortured him?" Halcyon demanded. "A doctor. A healer. You caused harm that killed him?"
"I had to. The traitor wouldn't cooperate," Tasker said.
His last words. Halcyon screamed, a wordless sound that didn't need words.
Tasker clapped his hands over his ears, but it was already too late. Blood streamed from his eyes and nose as Halcyon hit the precise frequency that made every blood vessel in his head burst. The man dropped to the floor, as dead as Ceyx.
But one life was not enough. Ceyx would not want his research to become widely known, especially among Humans. That meant destroying all knowledge of it on this ship. In data banks. On paper. And inside Human heads.
A bereaved siren's grief knows no bounds, and a siren seeking vengeance for murder would make her fury known. She was the storm no Human could escape.
Halcyon raised her voice again, louder than before, as she marched with gruesome purpose to the bridge. There, she found Humans sprawled all over the floor and the consoles, but she didn't need to wake them to find what she wanted. She had spent six years studying Human technology, as her husband sequenced their genetic code.
She turned on all the pumps, flooding the ballast tanks with seawater until it sloshed into the cargo hold and overflowed into the lower decks, too. She would send Ceyx to a fitting grave in the ocean depths, and all aboard the Poseidon would rest with him.
When she dived from the deck into the waves, the ship sat so low in the water she could reach over the gunwale with her hand. Not for long. The Poseidon sank beneath the surface, leaving only a single floating lifeboat to mark its existence. A lifeboat, where there was nothing but death.
And Halcyon, who would exact a siren's vengeance from all the Humans who had summoned the storm by daring to steal her husband
from her, even as she cried an ocean of tears for his loss.
Neutrality was a luxury for other sirens who had not lost a lover to the barbarous aliens. Now, for the first time in living memory, a siren went to war.
Ten years. Ten long, hard years, he'd worked and waited for this. Ten years since the night the Poseidon sank, drowning all the family a teenage apprentice engineer had left. At the time, he'd thought the three weeks he'd floated in a lifeboat at sea were forever, vowing vengeance on the copper-coloured fish tail he'd glimpsed in the dark, swimming away from the sinking ship. Galen grinned at his own naiveté. War had wised him up quickly to the world he lived in, or the Seldova system, anyway, as he stood on Lorn today for the first time, staring up at the silvery dome of his Complex home like all the other new colonists, Human and Meta alike.
Since the war ended, he'd gradually learned to see Metas as more than just the enemy. Four years ago, he'd have itched for a weapon at the sight of the family in front of him – shifters of some sort, he figured, given the fur some of the children sported, which couldn't be comfortable in this baking heat – but now he just felt a sort of aching envy. Not for the parents, but for the kids. He'd had a family once, and he would have liked to show his father how he'd turned his passion for tinkering with things into a career that put him in charge of managing the environmental controls of this incredible facility. His dad had never understood how Galen didn't want to be a doctor like him.
His mother…she would have admired the dome, for she'd had a technical bent that she'd passed on to Galen, but she would have been more impressed at the possibility of peace between Metas and Humans, cooped up in the Complex. If his mother stood by his side now, Galen might have been tempted to believe it, too, but peace was a pipe dream. As long as one Meta lived who kept on killing, there would never be peace between their peoples.
Halcyon. One Mer was to blame for so many deaths, including those of his parents, Claudius and Panacea Tasker. He'd been chasing the bitch for a decade, always too late to see any more than the carnage she left in her wake, but now he'd finally struck it lucky. To a terrorist like her, the Complex would be the ultimate prize, because destroying it would mean an end to peace. Through his contacts, he'd discovered that she was believed to be among the colonists, which meant if he signed up, he'd have two years to search for her. Two years where she couldn't get away. After that time, when she was as dead as his parents, maybe he'd be able to look at Mer without hating them. Maybe.
Staring around at the mostly Humanoid crowd sweltering in the sun, he wondered how the Mer would enter the Complex. Would someone wheel a huge water tank out of one of the jetters, and drag it into the Complex to the Aquatic Dome? He hoped to be inside by the time that happened. He'd only ever seen one Mer in his life and it had been her. If he saw the copper-coloured tail that had haunted his nightmares for a decade, he'd dive into that tank and try to kill her with his bare hands. Hardly a good start to what was supposed to be an experiment in peaceful, mixed-species living.
Mixed species...he'd heard rumours of a bonus the AS government would give to any couple who produced a mixed-species child. As if such a thing was even possible. Even if they were able to breed (which he strongly doubted – wasn't that what made a species a species? They could only breed with their own kind?), just the thought of wrestling a slimy, fishy-smelling Mer into his bed…and where did you put it? Did she have some sort of trapdoor in her tail, or did she spawn like fish, so all a guy had to do was squirt into a bathtub where she'd laid her eggs and…ugh. It was enough to turn Galen off sex for life. Sex with fish was bestiality, tits or no tits. Period.
He shivered, trying to forget her and just focus on the moment. He stood in a queue that stretched so far from the Complex entrance he couldn't even see it yet, but he knew it was there. They all did. Somewhere at the end of the line was a door that led to the hope of a better life. Hope hung in the air like humidity – a hot and cloying security blanket you believed with all your might would keep the monsters at bay.
Galen wanted to believe it. If his hunt for Halcyon meant that no other child would wake up orphaned by a war he didn't want and would never understand, then it was worth it. He'd do anything it took to catch her, because the end justified the means. Any means. As long as it resulted in her end.
You can read the rest ofAllie and Galen's story, Halcyon, HERE
Author's Note
Halcyon and Fishtail aren't my only books about sirens or mermaids – far from it. If you'd like to get a bundle of books for free, including three free mermaid books, go to: http://subscribe.demelzacarlton.com/Halcyon
Or you could click on the picture below.
Demelza Carlton has always loved the ocean, but on her first snorkelling trip she found she was afraid of fish.
She has since swum with sea lions, sharks and sea cucumbers and stood on spray drenched cliffs over a seething sea as a seven-metre cyclonic swell surged in, shattering a shipwreck below.
Demelza now lives in Perth, Western Australia, the shark attack capital of the world.
The Ocean's Gift series was her first foray into fiction, followed her suspense thriller Nightmares trilogy. She swears the Mel Goes to Hell series ambushed her on a crowded train and wouldn't leave her alone.
Want to know more? You can follow Demelza on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or her website, Demelza Carlton’s Place at:
www.demelzacarlton.com
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Fishtail (The Complex Book 0) Page 8