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When I reach for the thick, stiff length of his cock, though, he catches my wrist in his hand and pulls my fingers gently away.

“Little siren,” he rasps, leaning in to lick a drop of water off my collarbone. “All I ask is mercy.”

With that, he drops to his knees, and it only takes a gentle nudge to have me sinking down onto the bench seat. Elias moves immediately into the space between my legs, kissing a trail up one thigh and down the other, then nipping at the inside of a knee before pulling both of them up to rest on his shoulders and leaving me completely exposed to his own mercy.

“Comfortable?” he asks, starting a new, tortuously slow path of kisses down one thigh, inching closer and closer to the place that’s already hot and aching for him.

I arch into him, silently demand he stop teasing me, give me some kind of…

“Nora,” he murmurs into my skin when I don’t respond.

“Yes,” I manage to gasp when one of his hands snakes between my legs, thumb pressing up against my clit. “Are you… are you going to shift?”

“You’re going to come against my mouth first,” he says, lowering his face between my thighs. “And then I’ll give you my tentacles. Maybe. If you behave for me.”

The sound I make is entirely unintelligible as he catches my clit between his lips and sucks, hard. I buck up off the bench seat, but his hands on my legs keep me still as he feasts on me, alternating between long draws against my clit, and slow, languorous strokes of his tongue. He’s teasing me, torturing me, drawing wave after wave of pleasure from me until I’m writhing and mindless, demanding the release he’s holding just out of arm’s reach.

It doesn’t take me long to catch it, not when his damned mouth moves on me more insistently, and two long fingers sink into me. The friction and the fullness have me arching and straining against him, close… so close… until I’m lost completely to a fast, consuming orgasm. My body goes limp on the seat, and my head rolls back. It’s only Elias’s firm grip on me that keeps me from sliding all the way to the floor.

He holds me through every wave of my climax, stroking my legs and my belly, whispering endearments and praise until my head and heart are swimming with warmth.

When I finally peel my eyes open and look down again, though, my breath catches in my throat.

Where Elias was kneeling on the shower floor, his legs have disappeared. In their place, a mass of curling, expanding tentacles in a deep blue-gray.

Twisting in and over and around themselves, there are more than I can count, and as I watch they expand and contract, moving closer, until one brushes against my ankle.

It’s softer and warmer than I thought it would be. Smooth and gentle instead of cool and slimy. I watch, transfixed, as it winds around my leg in a light embrace.

When I meet Elias’s gaze again, he’s watching me, too.

“Is this alright?”

Some of the sexual edge is gone from his voice. In its place, a note of uncertainty, something vulnerable that reaches out and tugs at the center of my chest.

“Yes,” I tell him, leaning forward to drag a hand through his dark hair and bring his handsome, scarred face up to mine. “Yes. You’re beautiful.”

The sound that breaks from his throat is rough and broken, and when he presses his mouth to mine, I want to take all of that doubt away. Parting my lips for him, devouring him with the same hunger he’s always had for me, I put every bit of acceptance I can into that kiss.

Below, there’s another tentacle caressing and teasing its way lightly up my other leg, working in tandem with the first to soothe me and get me accustomed to the feel of him. Despite myself, I feel a rash of goosebumps break out over my skin. Elias’s tentacles must be sensitive enough to feel them too, because he breaks the kiss to check in with me again.

“Still okay?”

I nod, and when one of those reaching limbs skates a little higher up my leg, brushing against the already-sensitive skin of my inner thigh, I instinctively open wider. The pointed, slippery tip passes lightly over my pussy, dipping just inside, and I gasp.

Elias chuckles. “You’re doing so well. My brave little siren.”

“Is this… your full shift?” I ask him, breathless, trying to latch onto the details I learned while reading about shifters over the past couple of weeks, but not entirely capable of making my mind focus on anything other than the hypnotic, beautiful, strange sight of him undulating against my skin.

Elias laughs again. “No. I won’t shift fully while we’re intimate. Even I can understand why having a full sea monster in your bed may not be all that sexy.”

I shiver a little at the idea. A sea monster. A fearsome, ancient creature from the depths stalking the mortal world above.

“I’ll show you sometime, if you’d like to see,” he whispers against my skin, leaning down to brush his mouth over my shoulder before kissing a trail up my neck. “It works best if I’m in the ocean. Maybe I’ll put you in a little rowboat and send you out into the deep. Maybe I’ll be there, waiting in those depths to strike and carry you off to a sea cave where I can ravish you completely.”

Oh, god. The image that puts in my mind shouldn’t be so fucking hot.

Neither should the feel of two of those tentacles moving higher still, winding around my waist, pulling me up off my perch and closer into his body. By all rights, I should want to run screaming from this room, from the monster who’s got me in his grasp, but this is… Elias.