A rupture where everything twisted.
She had a tail again, but he was snoring. Smiling, she left him alone, waiting until her skin began to dry out before she nudged him awake with kisses on his nose and a slap of her tail on his feet.
“Oh.” Bleary of eye, he sat up on his elbow then levered himself off the sofa.
Without doing much more, apart from wandering to another room and saying he had to get something from the ‘fridge’, he staggered up the stairs with her in his arms and took her to the pool.
She rolled then dived in, slipping through the water, her skin prickling with the coolness and breathing a sigh of its own as the liquid soothed it. A mermaid was meant for the sea.
Wolfgang kneeled and let the second fish plop from the bag into the pool. “You have completely screwed me.” His slight smile said he didn’t hold a grudge. “I’ll make a date with you for tomorrow.”
Standing slowly, stretching joints, he eyed her as she swallowed the very dead fish. It was cold, and she decided he must have kept it cool somehow. Another miracle of these times.
“I’ll bring you some more tomorrow. Fresher.” His head inclined. “Next time we do a cheese platter, antipasto, some wine. I’ll make us a small banquet. I need to feed you. And to think I nearly shot you that day at the beach.” He shook his head, scrubbed his hands through his dark, unruly hair.
Raffaela stared, and not only because of the ripple of muscles over his chest and stomach as he stretched, or the V lines of his belly ridges leading downward. No, not just those pretty parts of him. Idly, she flicked her tail to stay balanced.
On the beach, she’d never seen a weapon.
His words reminded her of how he had been. How brutal he had been. Had tiredness made him unguarded and let slip a fact he never meant to say?
When he headed for the stairs, his gait lurched a few times, and she remembered the shadows around his eyes.
Tomorrow, he would feed her more. This was good. She sank to the bottom, water gurgling about her ears, thinking. Perhaps she should urge him to go slower?
Had the experiment been all that he intended?
She had certainly learned something.
For once he neglected to turn out the lights inside the house and she watched him collapse on the sofa again, legs and arms sprawled out, and fall into another long, heavy slumber. Hours. The TV remained on. The night passed to midnight from the look of the moon and stars, and still he stayed there.
He had not eaten. Or drunk. Not since they had fucked.
Curious.
CHAPTER 9
“You didn’t bite me,” were the first words he said to her on that tomorrow. It was mid-afternoon. “You could’ve have ripped out my carotid with those.” He waved toward her, meaning her teeth, she presumed. “While I was asleep.”
“True.” Raffaela shrugged, knowing the movement would draw his eyes to her breasts as they rose and fell, seen then not-seen as water covered them.
There was a thrill to this. Pursuer and victim, but who was which? It was a game she had played for longer than he had lived. Never on land. That was new for her.
Who would come out on top?
Upon hearing the door open, then his steps, she’d swum to the shallower part of the pool, lying with her tail stretched behind her, the water sloshing from her swift passage. Her palms were flattened on the underwater ramp and her nipples played peekaboo.
His pants already showed signs of being tented by an erection. She smirked until he lifted his eyes.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was…” With her finger she drew circles in the surface of the water, spawning ripples. Her back felt the nudge of her hair where it drifted. “… as tired as you were, and you would not have been so careless as to leave your doors for me to open.”
“Huh. Smarter than I thought. Yeah, the windows are locked down and the door locks are passworded.” When she cocked her head, he read it correctly as puzzled and added, “Means you need the right combo of words tapped on a keyboard – written down – before it will unlock.”
That seemed crazy. “Why? How?”
“I have things I want kept secret from people and things I don’t want stolen.” He’d turned to rummage in his brown bag. “As for how – it’s complicated.”
If he wanted to tie her up again, would she let him?
It seemed so unnecessary, considering.
“I could have killed you then broken out through a window,” she mused.
His hand emerged holding a chain and a black dog collar.
“Nope. The glass is toughened.”
And what was toughened glass? She could guess. There were so many new things, new words. Walking among humans once yearly had only let her see the surface of what mankind had invented and how people had changed.
He raised the tinkling chain, with his feet set apart and him watching her, as if he wished to see her response.
She was close enough to register the hazel-brown color of his eyes, the wrinkling around them, and a tiny scar on his forehead. Again, he wore a soft shirt that fit him perfectly. When he moved, she could see the heavy curves and ridges on his chest and stomach. At the end of his ill-shaped dove-gray pants his bare feet showed. They looked large when she thought of her own toes.
Men, she decided, had nice feet.
“Think of this as a compliment.”
She looked up, pretending she had not been admiring his toes.
“No gag, No rope. Just this on your neck and the chain.”
Oh. That was for her not a pet? Raffaela blew bubbles, letting her
