Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3) Read online

  She huffed again and plucked a round, flat, shiny disk from his plate. “You can fly a spaceship. I’m pretty sure you could figure out the fireplace if you wanted.”

  He picked up another one of the disks like she’d chosen. “I like it better when you show me.” He stuck the disk into his mouth and chewed. “I like this food too.”

  “It’s a cookie—a baked pastry called shortbread. This silvery stuff on top is called frosting.” Though she’d told him she wasn’t hungry, she took a nibble. “Thomas does know what he’s doing in the kitchen.”

  “And you appreciate that about him.” Though he’d been known to tear apart and swallow whole chunks of Cretarni weaponry just to intimidate the enemy, the small sweetened disk stuck in his throat. “Knowing what he is doing in the kitchen is why your mother gave him her name with such a smile?”

  The delicate frosting melted on her tongue. “Well, she hadn’t tried any of his desserts yet, but I think it’s pretty easy to sense Thomas’s kindness.”

  “It smells like sin-mans.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, he seems to take great pride in caring for others.”

  Sting sank to the flat stone before the fire, the food in his lap. “Now that the war is over, I have no purpose.” He glanced up at her sidelong. “And my last mission for my people is a failure since you refuse to be abducted.”

  After a moment, Lana sat beside him, her legs curled to the side. She’d left off her shoes and was wearing only the thick woven covers around her feet which made them almost as large and webbed as his own feet, which he found alluring.

  She took another shortbread. “You definitely need a better hobby.”

  He tilted his head as his universal translator clarified the concept. “I could learn to bake.”

  She blinked. “Um… True, you could do that.”

  Without taking a bite, he put down the cookie in his hand. “You don’t believe me.”

  “No, I…” She shook her head. “Actually, you’re right. The only reason it seems strange is because I am judging you wrongly for being big and lethal and part shark. I’m sorry. I bet Thomas would be thrilled to show you a recipe or two. Before you go back to Tritona with my mother.”

  Very deliberately, he focused on the cookie, chewing more thoughtfully this time so he could be excused for not answering her directly. “This frosted shortbread cookie is flaky, like a pie crust, but sweeter. If it had a dollop of pixberry, the sweetness would be tempered by the tart.” He peeked up at her to see if he’d impressed her with his understanding.

  “A dollop,” she mused. “Of pixberry. Sure, right, that’s what it needs.”

  He scowled. “You doubt me again.”

  She laughed. “No, really. That could be yummy. But I think the recipe you’d want for that is called a thumbprint cookie.”

  “Thumbprint? Can you use it for biometric authentication?”

  She smiled. “Not quite the same kind of thumbprint lock. But if the lock is to a cookie-lover’s heart, then yes.”

  This conversation was starting to become murky to him. He looked back at the cookie. “I think this structure would hold up, at least briefly, to submersion,” he announced. “I will attempt a plankton and krill thumbprint.”

  “I think you could make some Tritonyri very happy with this new hobby,” she said solemnly.

  Pleased at her praise, he worked his way through the rest of the plate, saving the cookies for her.

  She stretched her feet toward the fire. “Is there anything you don’t eat?” There was a hitch in her voice that he couldn’t quite decipher.

  He tilted his head thoughtfully. “Cretarni,” he announced last. “At least not anymore.”

  “Not…anymore?”

  “Once my trainers were confident I could track the taste of our enemies on the waters, they said actual blood was no longer necessary.”

  Lana swallowed, as if she took could taste the blood. “The Tritonesse sure had an awful lot of orders for people who stayed safe in the deeps while others did the fighting.”

  “Awful lot,” he agreed. “But that was our way.”

  “And what is the new way?”

  He licked his fingers and put the plate aside. “I will return to the Diatom tonight and begin duplicating the matrix of the data gel you revived. It shouldn’t take long to repair the systems damaged in the crash.”

  She gazed past him to the flames, tapping her toes together in counterpoint to the restless energy he sensed still sparking her. “So maybe tomorrow, or the next day. But my mom still needs to review all the disclaimers we borrowed from the Intergalactic Dating Agency handbook as well as the planetary immigration agreement, plus the testing for Tritonan genetics.”

  “Perhaps she would rather stay here, to become reacquainted with you after all this time. There’s no hurry after all.”

  She shook her head. “When the council representative comes to Tritona, you need to show a robust plan for sustainable development, and that includes population growth and economic opportunities. You don’t have that much time left.” She curled her knees in toward her chest. “Neither do I. I don’t want my mom to see what happens when my zaps finally get the best of me.”

  “But you’re doing better.”

  “Only because you’re here.” She snapped a glance at him. “And you’re leaving soon.”

  He faced the fire as she did, and somehow he felt like the leap of flames reflected her back at him in a way he couldn’t see even with his predatory senses. “I could stay.”

  Though he wasn’t looking at her, he felt her stiffen. “No, Sting, I wouldn’t ask that of you. You don’t belong here any more than I belong on Tritona. You couldn’t be”—she gestured at him—“who you are stuck here on the estate, swimming back and forth to the Atlantyri. Not when you have the wide sea of Tritona as your home.”

  “Maybe that’s not what I want anymore.”

  “But that’s what you fought for, for so long.”

  She wasn’t wrong, and yet… “That’s what they made me to do,” he said. “But maybe that’s not enough.”

  She twisted to face him, her scowl intense. “So you’d trade freedom on the planet to sit in the shallows with me, stopping me from zapping myself to death?”

  He turned toward her, and the heat of the flames on the side of his face was nothing compared to the desire rising inside him like magma through cold stone. “You could zap me to life.”

  The intensity of her electrical aura blinded him to all else. Nothing—not the tiny oceanic lives in the captive tank, not the leap of captured flame in the stone cove, not even the insatiable violence of his own heart—remained in his awareness except the glow of her. All of him that was a killer monster aimed at her with voracious focus, and he plunged inward toward her, his maw agape. For an endless moment, he was in freefall, caught in the pull of his singular hunger.

  But a breath away from contact, he stopped himself, though it wrenched every muscle in his body more painfully then being dropped from high-altitude to the punishing waves in the heat of battle.

  He gazed into her eyes. This close, with the fire catching in her gaze, her dark irises flickered with restless gold, like diving from a sandy beach into pounding surf where the land and water danced.

  Her lashes fluttered as she looked up at him. “You want to kiss me?”

  “Yes,” he rasped. He had no more words in any language from the universal translator. He could only touch his tongue to the sweetness lingering on his upper lip and be grateful he’d fed enough for the moment.

  Because nothing would stop him from feasting now.

  She reached up to place a fingertip under the point of his jaw and exerted enough force to close his mouth partway. She slipped her hand to the base of his skull and down his nape, sending a shudder through him. She tightened her grip. “Then kiss me.”

  Like a standing wave suddenly released from tidal forces, he crashed down. But she caught him easily, her hands framed his face, g
uiding his force as she desired. He followed the course she set eagerly, angling the kiss and the weight of his body against her.

  She pressed up into him, her forearms braced on his chest so her sharp elbows poked him. Though he’d faced far deadlier weapons throughout the war, somehow the way she let him hold her up pierced him to the deepest, unguarded heart of him. Though he’d hauled her weight through the waterways beneath Sunset Falls and could have carried her for days and nights more, now just the whispering pressure wave of her breath across his lips wrecked him.

  He flared his gills, not caring that the nearness of the flames singed his most delicate flesh, not when it meant he could breathe for them both and let the kiss go on forever and ever. But then her hands dropped from his face to his chest to lower, lower, lower… He gasped so hard, but all the mighty gusts of all the fiercest storms over Tritona’s sea would not be enough to extinguish the flames that erupted in him. That fire seemed to need no oxygen, no other fuel, to rage out of control as her touch blew open pathways through his nerve endings he hadn’t known existed.

  The noise he made reverberated so deep in his chest that the fire flickered.

  Lana reared back, straddling his thighs and breathing hard. “Oh god, did I zap you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” He stared down his body. “I’m tingling all over, from my lips to…there.”

  The leggings she’d given him to cover himself had been strained as soon as he put them on. Now, the fabric between his legs was bursting upward as if he’d captured one tentacle from a boundary beast in his borrowed pants and it had decided to set itself free.

  A soft, wild smile curved her lips. “Oh, I did that to you, did I?”

  “Or perhaps an allergic swelling in response to the cookies?” He wriggled his hips. “It’s never happened before.”

  “Never happened…” Her smile faded. “Sting, you’ve never had an erection?”

  “Erected what? Ships? I was never part of any shipyard construction crew. I was only ever intended for destruction.”

  “No, I mean, erected…yourself.” She gestured at the burgeoning part of his body. “I just assumed a…a certain physiological compatibility.” She frowned. “Marisol and Ridley certainly made you Tritonyri seem compatible.”

  “I am Titanyri,” he reminded her. “Made, not born. Marked for killing, not life.”

  As she lifted her turbulent, fire-touched gaze to his, her frown turned infinitely sad. “Sting, the Tritonesse don’t control you anymore.”

  “They never controlled you. But still you left.”

  Her stroking hands, which had stoked such a blaze in him, tightened around his flanks, as if she were holding him in place even though he’d never been one to leave, no matter the risk or price or aftermath. “Maybe…maybe for right now, none of that should get in our way.” She gazed down at him. “Maybe our past left us fucked up, but we might—”

  “Fuck each other?”

  Her lips quirked to one side. “I’d use a different word there, but…yeah, that.”

  “Would the word matter?”

  The flames flared in her eyes again. “The only word that matters between us right now is yes.” She brought her hands up to his chest again, resting lightly. “Or no, if it doesn’t feel good. Or say wait, if you’re not quite sure.” She spread her fingers wide over his pecs. “You can also say faster or slower, harder or softer, up or down or all around, depending on what you feel.”

  He bit his lip. Where the sweetness still lingered, not the cookie anymore—her. “They told me I couldn’t feel.

  “Those tingles? Do you like them?” She lifted her hands just a bit, not abandoning him just letting her fingertips glide over his armored skin. “Do you feel that? Like that?”

  Afraid of what urgent sounds, indecipherable by any technology, might burst from him at her touch, he bit down harder on his lip as he nodded. “I feel that. I like that.”

  Her lashes dropped halfway over her eyes, shadowing them from reflections of the flame, which somehow only fanned the fire within him. “Tell me more or less. Tell me duration, pressure, velocity, trajectory, intensity. Tell me what you like, what you want, what you’ve dreamed of. Tell me now.”

  With each mesmerizing cadence, her hands circled, as if his little nul’ah-wys was conjuring fire out of his skin and bones. Creature of the darkest depths he might be, but he would burn for her. “Now,” he rasped. “I tell you now.”

  When she crashed down upon him, he realized she’d been holding back. Though there was no electrical charge in her touch besides the power between the two of them, rousing every nerve behind the thickness of his skin and sending his pulse into overdrive centered around the ever-thicker jutting from his loins as she stripped him bare, which he liked. The tingles weren’t her devastating zaps, but somehow left him even more vulnerable than being blown over a ledge or out a window.

  And he liked that too, he liked it very much. Her mouth slanted hard across his, and though she had yet to manifest any Tritonan gills, somehow the ways she breathed—in circles, in aroused gasps that both fed him and fed from him. It seemed only fair to make her naked too, to expose her skin, to feel what he was feeling.

  This power rising between them was wilder than any ocean and fiercer than any flame. It swirled more tempestuously than any tornado and rocked him deeper than the ancient stones at the core of any world in the universe. This was an elemental power that wove them together that could not be engineered or forced or bought for any amount of galactic credits. Her clever fingers found places on his body he hadn’t bothered to acknowledge. The kind of magic she conjured buffeted him in vast waves of sensation that eclipsed every star he’d ever seen.

  And he wanted more.

  He, who’d eaten his body weight in pies, who could swim while sleeping, who’d ripped apart enemy battalions with his hands, was matched kiss for kiss, stroke for stroke, gasp for breath by this little fire-witch. She urged him to speak but he was too far gone to say more than “yes…lower…yes…harder…yes…” And her voice was near as low and guttural as his when she commanded “higher…more tongue…another finger…now…”

  She was so small and yet her presence surrounded him. He was drowning in her, and going down happily, willingly. And when she took him inside her, she took him all in a relentless consumption that only spiked his own hunger higher. She rode him up as if he was a wave taking her to some distant shore, her hot, slick inner muscles caressing his swollen flesh with its own liquid fury. Her electrical field was rising, spiking around her and sending warning signals through his senses. Perhaps he was courting death, but it would be a glorious demise.

  He gritted his teeth as her knees clamped around his flanks, as tight as her inner muscles rippled and strained, and he filled his hands with the strong muscles of her backside, flexing to hold her partly aloft, as if she were flying, connected to this planetary surface only by his thick, plunging shaft. When she straightened to stare down at him, grinding her pelvis into his, he switched one hand to splay across her sternum, the width of his fingers cradling the overflowing bounty of her breasts while the delicate skin of the web between his fingers vibrated with her pounding heartbeat.

  Her eyes flared wide and golden with the flames and the raging gust of her exhalation was sweetened with frosting and the perfume of her arousal. With each flick of his fingers across her engorged nipples, her radiant aura spiked in a starburst pattern across his senses, an entire galaxy of desire. “Sting,” she groaned. “You’re going…”

  “I am right here,” he assured her.

  “You’re going to push me over the edge.”

  “Seems only fair since you did that to me twice,” he reminded her. “I want it.” Letting her settle hard and flush against his groin, he repositioned his free hand to hover his thumb over the tiny heartbeating shell he’d found at the entrance to her hidden harbor.

  Her eyes widened even more, the black pupils an abyssal midnight into which he could plu
nge, ecstatically and eternally. “I’ve dreamed of this…”

  With the delicate precision he’d used to call the tiny seahorses, he extended his claws to pierce her with the most exquisite sting of Titanyri power.

  She arched in ecstasy, her head thrown back. With her hair a frothing waterfall of curls and her eyes closed in abandonment, she was like a tidal wave lit by fire, caught in an impossibly suspended moment of time. As he gazed at her, his chest squeezed tight, not from her knees but from the inside, with a yearning like an unfathomable hunger. As if he might dive into her and be lost forever. Or maybe find what he’d never believed could be his…

  She inhaled the deepest breath as if swallowing everything he could give her. And he held tight as she convulsed and her aura went supernova.

  The scintillating starburst of her release exploded across his senses like the backwash of a thousand spaceships landing on his head. He held tight and rocked with the waves of her pleasure—an endless fall and breathlessly satisfying crash.

  No, he would not leave her behind on this or any other world. After the directionless drift at the end of the war, he’d needed a new direction. And now, she was his course.

  Chapter 10

  Almost afraid to open her eyes, Lana shuddered in the aftermath of her orgasm. If she peeked, would she see Sting’s body, his heart blown out. Or maybe just a drifting cloud of ash, that was likely all that remained of a shark-man, her self-control, common sense, and her old beliefs and the limitations of just how good an orgasm could be.

  As her senses came back online, she decided that at least she hadn’t incinerated her lover because she wasn’t huddled on the marble hearth alone. Although he wasn’t much softer than rock, Sting had at least a little give in his massive muscles. Tentatively, she cracked one eye and angled her face upward.

  He gazed back at her. So, alive still. That was good, or maybe something more… The fire in the hearth had gone out, leaving only the tiny pilot light—had that been her fault?—and the only other illumination in the library was the luminous glow of the aquarium illumination. In that shimmering light, the opalescent gleam of his eyes told her that the protective shield had rolled back. Her heart seized at this evidence of his vulnerability.