That shut her up.
More of a priority was deciding whether her tail needed sutures. Transformation seemed to have healed much of the hole left by the hook. The bleeding had ceased. He pushed himself off the floor and went to look more closely. Then stopped to check out her teeth, again. Her hands were still zip-tied behind her, but she might be able to arch upward.
More cautiously, he fetched his knife then circled her to come at her tail from the back.
“Stay still.”
She grumbled at him, hissed threats.
While he crouched there, pressing at the wound with his thumb, moving the now shallow laceration, deciding on the severity and what to do – antiseptic should be enough – a thought arrived.
How long? How long could he keep a mermaid? Googling that one was not going to give him an answer.
On the other hand, knowing the internet…
CHAPTER 5
Water spilled from the canvas as it flopped open on the flagstone edge of the pool. Carefully, Wolfgang clipped the wire at the back of her head to remove the improvised wire-and-steel gag, clipped the plastic ties on her wrists, then pushed and rolled her in. A gout of water splashed upward, and in seconds his mermaid was gliding deep then had arrived at the front wall of his pool.
Fast and efficient, swift as a shark.
He’d constructed his pool so it could be a showpiece and so he could house small sharks, if necessary.
The underwater lights decorated the aqua walls and bottom in glowing, undulating scallops of water, and she peered up at him from the bottom.
Startled by the appearance of what seemed likely a predator – and how right that assessment was – the other fish had rocketed to the wall beneath him.
He dabbled his fingertips in the pool. Did she think she could escape him down there?
Still in a squat, he reached backward and found a sun lounge, perched on it to watch her.
Beyond the edge of the pool above her, past the slope of the beach, the sun was rising out to sea, broadcasting a path of glimmers. Small breakers rolled in edged by gold. The thinner sections of wave turned to fine, dark-green glass.
The roof over the pool was fastened to the railing pillars and had been designed burglar-proof due to the isolation of his house. He’d double-checked it for strength. To reach the beach below, she’d have to bite through stainless-steel pillars and railings.
He made a mental note to cover the beach-facing glass, so that tourists and fishermen passing the bay inlet didn’t see his catch swimming about.
Wolfgang scanned the water.
Still there.
Still had a mermaid in his pool.
Magic with benefits. The flick of her tail with the scales dancing in light, her areola stark as coins and reminding him of her taste and the way she bucked against his mouth when she came. Her beauty slew him, relentlessly, and he forgot to breathe.
Animal, monster, human. Her DNA would tell him?
If she were animal, he’d screwed a fish. He snorted at his thought. As if.
A pretty, pretty fish … that made his dick so hard and big when she gave him a blowjob that he’d need new pants and a wheelbarrow for his cock and balls, if his ego had a say.
He had tidied up the room at the research facility, hosed it down, put everything away. The van could go back later, when he would swap it for his SUV, he’d left parked there. Tissue and blood samples waited downstairs, in the fridge in his kitchen. He wasn’t going to leave them at work unless he was there too.
What would those show? What she had told him said she was human, once, but he was no lie detector. She might tell him anything. The honesty of mermaids was not proclaimed in tales, only their shipwrecking and seduction skills.
His house, he remembered, was a mess. Except for where he’d walked her, yesterday. The reason for that smacked home how crazy he was being. To dismiss his vengeance and end up with her in his tank was a rebound of enormous proportions.
When Merrick died, grief had buried him.
Once upon a time, they’d sat here together, drinking wine, laughing, eating pâte, cheese, and antipasto. But Merrick was gone, dead, killed by her or her ilk. And yet that bludgeoning ache of grief had dulled from an obliteration of his very self to this, to acceptance, in one night?
His eyeballs felt raked, desiccated, and very tired. He’d not slept in how long? No idea. Perhaps he’d blown some sort of mental fuse. Denial, anger, grief, acceptance. Were those the stages? Vengeance didn’t get a mention.
Between his legs, he drummed the rim of the sun lounge.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t going to kill her. Wolfgang scrubbed at his chin with his fingers, staring down at her, but this?
“What did you do to me?”
Mermaids and sirens seduced men with song, but he had to admit the rest of her seduced him purely by being in front of him. If she had somehow done that, then she’d encouraged her own violation. Ironic, since he thought he was in command. Unless seduction was automatic and a mechanism she didn’t control?
An interesting way to look at it. Generally speaking, he could resist a woman in a short skirt in a dark alley at night. How a woman dressed would turn him on but not compel him.
But a mermaid had a supernatural essence.
Had she made him do it despite her protestations?
Or was that irrelevant due to his plans to dissect her? His head hurt.
“Your honor, I fucked her
