Page 13 of Cruel Tides (Queen of Tridents #2)

13

Claira

I barely had time to appreciate the sparkle of magic-lit barnacles as the surface came into view. Strong arms thrust me forward like an offering, practically throwing me into the side of the fishing boat.

“Go, go, go,” Leander urged, his voice clipped with urgency as he heaved me out of the water.

“It’s fine. The shark already moved on.” I let out a slow breath and decided to take my time finding my grip. As soon as my fingers tightened over the hull, insistent hands were under my tail, shoving me over the threshold.

“Rude!” I snapped, my palms barely saving me from face-planting on the deck. Wiggling my shoulders, I crawled my way across the slick wood so the useless half of my body could slither into the boat behind me. “I can get in on my own, you know!”

I felt Leander’s hands give me one last nudge, and the wide end of my tail flopped over the rail, crashing down on top of me, its weight knocking the residual water out of my lungs. The bottom frills draped over my face like a bridal veil.

Stupid, useless tail!

Throwing it off, I scrambled for a less vulnerable position before dear Leander could flop into the boat and see me looking like a fool. With a little luck, maybe he’d wind up crawling in and looking even more ridiculous than I had. Imitating his stupid, satisfied half-grin, I waited for him to emerge.

Wind beat against the beads of salt water running down my arms, and I was suddenly struck with a sense of apprehension. Without the surrounding rush of water, the night seemed so quiet. Eerily quiet.

“Leander?” I whispered, dragging myself back to the rail. No answer.

I peeked over the edge, and the only thing in the water to greet me was a white pool of fabric.

Leander’s shirt.

My eyes studied the dark water for a glimpse of the rest of him, but any other trace seemed long gone.

Just his shirt? Surely, even if Leander’s sour mood had driven the shark to come back and eat him, it wouldn’t have left his shirt behind.

Was he teasing me? Some sort of signal? Like a white flag letting me know he’d gone out for the trident on his own without telling me? Or maybe he wanted more revenge?

“Leander,” I repeated, my pulse rising as I checked every angle for flashy shimmers of gold. “You think it’s funny leaving me here? Don’t be a jerk!”

The air bubbles in his shirt were working their way out, and the fabric sank just below the surface. “If you think I’m going to save your shirt for you—”

I stopped mid-sentence, all thoughts leaving me as I spotted movement in the middle of the fabric. In the very center, something was shifting around inside it. Tiny jerks here and there, like something was struggling.

“Oh no, Lee!” I gasped as the realization hit. I scrambled for the shirt, stretching down over the side of the boat to fish it out of the water.

Pulling it up as carefully as I could, I prayed I hadn’t lost him to the ocean. I’d never be able to find him again.

Wrinkles pooled around a little mound in the middle of the fabric, and I exhaled a breath of relief. Thank Poseidon, he was still inside. Opening the shirt’s bottom end, I squinted down at the fish laying inside.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Lee,” I mumbled, watching the tiny golden betta fish flop inside the tented shirt. How had this happened?

The curse seemed to be broken earlier, so why was he a fish again?

Cupping a palm, I went to scoop him free from his wet prison, but as soon as my fingers touched the end of a fin, my entire world changed in an instant.

Pop .

The shirt draping over my lap was there one moment and raining down over me the next, its remnants shooting into my gaping mouth as wet chunks slapped against my face. Before I could even choke on the scraps, the explosion blew me straight on my back, and I found the weight of a hefty body suddenly on top of me, knocking both air and cotton fibers out of my throat.

A golden fin thrashed about, striking out at every corner of the boat. Leander’s crazed body twisted on top of me, jerking around like he hadn’t realized he was no longer a helpless betta fish. It wasn’t until his eyes found mine that the rabid beast began to settle. Palms landed on either side of my head, his arms effectively pinning me to the deck. My eyes widened.

Leander had transformed back, only he wasn’t in his human form. He was still a merman. That meant his change had nothing to do with the amount of salt water he had on him. It… it had something to do with me .

Somehow, my touch had brought him back to his true merman self. But how?

A probing query darkened his gaze. He’d realized it, too.

“You.” A mouthful of water sprayed over me with just the one sharp word. My body bristled underneath him, but the burden of his weight had me fixed in place. There was no way I could escape. Leander looked completely feral, every muscle lining his jaw clenched in what looked to be a blend of rage and vexation. Like I was somehow the reason he’d turned back into a fish. Like maybe I had something to do with the ocean’s curse in the first place. I didn’t, though…

Did I?

“Lee, please,” I pleaded, my voice straining with some emotion I couldn’t quite place. My heart hammered in my chest; I couldn’t stand him looking at me like this, like I’d somehow caused all his suffering. “I really don’t know how…” I grasped for some rationalization to offer him, but I couldn’t find the words. None of this made sense. How could I possibly prove my innocence when I didn’t know why the curse didn’t affect me or how my touch seemed to break it for him?

Even if he wasn’t on top of me, Leander would have me pinned with just the sharpness of his gaze. A talent, it occurred to me, he’d inherited from his father.

Droplets of salt water fell from disheveled strands of his hair, dripping down my face as silence chilled the air between us. His broad chest squeezed me with each breath he heaved in, but I hardly felt it. I hardly felt anything as my mind sought answers it couldn’t possibly find. Then, unexpectedly, his head dropped, and his forehead relaxed against the curve of my shoulder.

“You’re amazing .” I barely heard him utter the words between heavy breaths. Exhaustion draped over his shoulders in an instant, and his whole body seemed to relax on top of me. I was suddenly thankful for the concealment of night. Fire scorched my cheeks, and I was certain my face was red enough to blend right in with my hair.

“I’m not amazing.” I frowned, suddenly feeling ridiculous. Sure, I’d helped one shark, but I didn’t deserve that kind of praise. Not from him. Not from any of the merfolk. “Please don’t say that. I haven’t done anything.”

Wet hair licked at my chin as Leander’s head lifted. “You saved me.”

I blinked up at him in astonishment. Was he seriously not suspicious about the effect I seemed to have on his curse? “Yeah, well, you saved me first. Punched a shark for me, so I guess we’re even.”

“Yeah, I did do that,” he said, and a curl formed at the edge of his lips. I felt my lips curl, too.

I hated to admit it, but my reunion with the ocean hadn’t been as traumatic as I’d imagined. Sure, maybe I thought I was going to get eaten at first, but as far as late-night adventures went, it was actually kind of fun .

My chest constricted, and I felt some foreign emotion tug at my heart. It was like something was unraveling inside of me, invigorating my very soul. Was it because I’d reawakened some of my magic underwater? Whatever it was, I liked it.

“You know you’re not actually supposed to punch them in the nose, right?” I said, shifting an arm free to give Leander a little bop on the tip of his nose. “You’re supposed to go for the eyes.”

“I wasn’t aiming for its nose.” He grinned, his jaws feigning a snap at my finger. “I was aiming for its mouth.”

“ What? That’s even worse! Why would you punch a shark in the mouth?” The image of razor-sharp teeth grating against my scales came to mind, and I shuddered at the thought of how effortlessly they would have shredded Leander’s fist had he not missed.

“Because it bit you.” He gave a little half-hearted shrug. “I wanted to knock its fucking teeth out.”

How could someone be so disarmingly stunning while admitting to something so stupid?

Those smug lips of his tilted, and his blue eyes flashed with the unspoken promise that if he could do it all over, he wouldn’t hesitate to go for the shark’s mouth again. But why would he do that? Because he once thought of us as friends?

The way he was looking at me now, a deep longing burning behind the cool blue of his eyes, was definitely not friendly.

No, we weren’t friends. He was my catch, my captor, my savior… A complete pain in the ass pretty boy prince, and I couldn’t stand looking at his idiotic smirk for one more moment.

Cupping my palm over the hard line of his jaw, I let my fingers glide over the slight dampness of his golden skin. A part of me had always yearned to touch him. To decide for myself if his perfection was real or just an illusion meant to trap a vulnerable mermaid’s heart. That maybe, if I looked hard enough up close, the layers of merman magic would crumble away like a mask and I’d be able to see Leander for who he truly was.

But even up close like this, he was still perfect—an untouchable, gilded prince. Only now—with a dangerous cocktail of magic and adrenaline fueling me—was I brave enough to touch him.

I let my thumb brush against his bottom lip, hoping to follow the bend of that grin of his that always gave me so much grief, but all the humor in his face seemed to melt under my caress.

“Claira,” Leander groaned. The hoarseness of his voice sounded like a warning, but I didn’t care. I raked through his hair, winding the damp strands at the base of his neck around my fingers, and used that handful of hair to draw our lips together.

Leander didn’t seem to know how to react to my little impulse. His body stiffened like a man at war with himself, his hard lips paralyzed underneath mine.

Raw disappointment hit me like a punch to the gut. Clearly, he didn’t want this.

Didn’t want me.

I loosened the fist holding him captive, reluctantly letting his damp hair slip through my fingers.

What the heck was wrong with me? A pinch of adrenaline, and suddenly I was some sort of lust-filled deviant, too caught up in a merman’s spell to use even a fraction of my brain. I’d always known being ridiculously alluring was just a part of Leander’s nature. All mermen were divinely orchestrated to rouse emotions no human male ever could. How had I let myself forget?

Nice, Claira. Very smooth.

In a pitiful attempt to hide the hurt, I dropped my lashes so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I went to pull away, but a broad hand caught me on the way back.

Leander’s palm molded to the curve of my neck, and my flesh prickled at the touch. Stupid , I hissed at myself. He doesn’t want you.

“I’m sorry—” I began, but my apology was cut short, smothered away by a hard crash of lips as Leander’s mouth reclaimed mine.

A little gasp worked its way up my throat, and he devoured that too, suddenly too greedy to let even a puff of air come between us.

He kissed me like it was a command, this intense authority that stole the breath right from my lungs. And oh, how easily I gave in to his control. Leander was nothing like I’d imagined—though, admittedly, I’d had little time to dream up how a kiss with him might be.

Sure, his tilted grin had never failed to strike a certain chord in me. And yes, it intrigued me how he wore that maddening grin of his around so carelessly, looking perpetually on the brink of laughter whenever I was near. But only occasionally had I imagined how those same lips would feel curled against mine. How the low hum of his irritating chuckle would feel with his mouth pressed over my throat.

But this—this was nothing like the playful Leander I thought I knew. The mask he wore seemed to dissolve with each authoritative slide of his tongue. Each touch was laced with urgency, like he feared that if he took his time with me, I might just turn to sea-foam in his embrace.

Whatever drove him not to push me away, I was thankful for it. The touch of his skin against mine was such a delicious, otherworldly sensation. I never wanted him to let go.

His tongue teased at mine, twisting and coaxing my mouth open wider for him, intoxicating me more than any reawakened magic ever could, and it was everything I didn’t even know I needed.

Suddenly emboldened, I let my hands roam him freely, tracing along the perfect lines of his chest. Remnants of his shirt fell off his shoulders as I worked my way over him, exploring the stretch of each hard muscle under my fingertips.

Even with my eyes pressed shut, everything seemed to reel around us—the boat, the water, the looming presence of his arms as they possessively closed in around me. Leander’s grip left my neck, and his other hand soon followed, sliding down the curve of my back, the swell of my waist, the scales covering my hips.

Then I felt the edge of his tail nudge under mine, curling around that worthless hunk of flesh, and our fins twined together. For one fleeting moment, I let myself feel grateful for my tail. I wanted—no, needed —to touch all of him, and craved his touch in return, however I could get it.

The vague sense that I was missing some important detail pricked at me through the haze, stalling my mind for a moment. There was something… something crucial I was forgetting. But what was it?

Leander’s firm hands shifted, and nothing else mattered. He’d found the little points poking through my soaked shirt, and any lingering thoughts left me as I felt them harden under the insistent pressure of his thumbs.

I failed to suppress a groan, and suddenly, Leander broke the seal of our lips.

My eyes fluttered open as he eased back, and the golden flecks in his gaze greeted me, smoldering around his irises like hot metal. The impish tilt of his lips told me he was satisfied with the little reaction he’d caused.

A rising warmth flushed my face, and when he started teasing slow circles around those tight pebbles, our gazes still locked, my groan rose into a full-on moan.

Heat flared through me with each drawn-out stroke, sending my spine bending into an involuntary arch and—

Pop.

My tail suddenly—

Pop.

Both of our tails burst apart at the seams, and the vicious sound of scales grating and flesh splitting flooded my ears.

Instead of dispersing as it should, magic swelled around us, building into a cyclone so intense the universe seemed to bend around it. The power released from our combined transformations fought, the forces tugging and pulling like two opposing whirlwinds at war before backfiring over us in a marvelous explosion of magic.

Strong arms locked around me, securing me in a tight embrace, and our bodies lurched across the deck, slamming into the side of the fishing boat as the magic crash-landed on top of us.

The boat creaked, bopping madly over the water’s surface while the whirlwind dispersed, its power quickly draining from the air, and suddenly, we were nothing more than a tangled heap of human limbs sprawled across the deck.

“Oof,” I groaned, fighting to free a section of hair pinned under Leander’s shoulder. “What in Poseidon’s Deep was that about?”

A low sound built in Leander’s throat as he flung one of my boots aside, rubbing at the crown of his head where it looked to have struck him. Pain strained his features, and my heart sank as some hard projection prodded at me from the space between us. He’d used his body as a shield for me. Had he broken something during the chaos?

“Are you okay?” I said, quickly shifting my weight to help relieve the pressure, but his legs were still hooked around mine, and I didn’t get far.

“Please. Just… stop moving,” Leander rasped, and I froze on top of him.

“But you’re hurt,” I countered. His head rocked back and forth over the deck, his eyes pinched shut. “So, you’re not hurt?”

Unconvinced, I endeavored to check for myself, quickly finding the part of his leg poking against my stomach. My fingers wrapped around it gingerly, sliding down with a featherlight stroke to find the source of the break without causing more pain, and—

Every stomach muscle underneath me tensed up in unison.

“ Fuck , okay then,” he grunted, and a glassy haze seemed to cloud over his eyes. He let out a hiss as my fingertips landed on the place where his protrusion connected, and his whole demeanor seemed to shift in an instant. His voice turned into a command, the deep timber straining in a way I didn’t recognize. “Keep going.”

It took me about five seconds too long to realize what I was doing. A noise, something between a whimper and a plea, squeaked out of my throat as I went to jerk my hand away, but Leander caught me by the elbow, drawing me back in again.

Hazy eyes watched me with such intensity, waiting to see what I would do next, and I felt the swell I held pulse against my palm. I was certain he was about to bring me in for another kiss when—

“ Fuck ,” Leander groaned, and this time, it wasn’t because of anything I’d done.

My stomach dipped when I recognized the sound of metal grating on metal in the distance. The warehouse doors were rolling up.

But it was still nighttime, as far as I could tell. How early did they start their day?

“Do you think someone noticed I escaped?” I whispered, fighting the urge to gnaw on my lip. If they found us here together, would Leander get into trouble? It was obvious I’d escaped without his help. Perhaps he could say he’d found me on his own and—

“Hurry and get dressed. I think we’d better see what’s going on,” he said like I wasn’t currently palming his sea cucumber, and suddenly, there was a boot in my face.

Ugh.

“Fine, fine.” I could hardly hold back my irritation. Sure, I might have been half-soaked and freezing now that I was in my human form, but Leander had stoked a certain fire, and I expected him to extinguish it! Stupid freaking warehouse full of merfolk . I snatched the boot from his hand and rolled off him.

Feeling around for my clothes, I let the icy breeze cool me down. I found everything easily enough, though it was a wonder something hadn’t blown overboard with the weird magic explosion. As I started wiggling my pants back on, Leander caught my eye.

He was just standing there, his chin cast down, sullenly looking at his half-erection like some sort of dejected flounder.

Completely naked.

“Oh my goodness, Lee, your clothes,” I gasped, slipping on a boot.

“Yeah,” he said, his broad shoulders giving me a little shrug. I froze—Leander should have had a flirty joke at the ready. Had the kiss already changed the dynamic between us? I felt my lips sink into a frown as I laced up my boots.

“So, what are we gonna—Oh, have you seen my knife?” I kicked around the dark corners of the boat, but I couldn’t locate the blade anywhere. Had it fallen overboard? I let out a long sigh. Good thing I’d stashed away half a dozen other knives I’d found sitting around the warehouse. Too bad for the next unfortunate soul to venture into the storehouse for a sandwich, though. They were going to be pretty upset when they realized they had no way to spread their nut cream.

Flipping open one of the boat’s built-in storage compartments, Leander rummaged around inside before pulling out a wad of netting.

“You’re joking,” I said, stifling a laugh as I watched him fight to untangle the mass. The threads looked stiff with dry rot, but it would do for some sort of makeshift cover-up. That is, if Leander wasn’t a prince. Would his pride really let him drape something so ridiculous around his hips? He’d be better off walking back completely nude. Looking at him, there certainly wasn’t any part of him to be ashamed of. He glimmered like a freaking statue carved by Poseidon’s own hands.

“Let’s go see what’s going on,” he grumbled, collecting the netting around his waist. My jaw snapped shut. Okay, something had definitely changed with him.

Stepping to the edge of the boat, Leander reached up for a slimy wooden plank and catapulted himself up onto the pier. My heart skipped when his hand didn’t immediately reach back down for mine, but before I could stretch up to grab onto the pier for myself, powerful arms came for me.

“Come on,” he called down, but his voice didn’t ring as pleasantly in my ears as it should have. He sounded deadened. Somehow cold. I reluctantly took his hands, and when his strength drew me up, his arms wound around me like he was refusing to let me go again.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered in a voice so pained and gravelly that it sent shivers through me. “No matter what happens, I won’t let him hurt you.”