Under the Surface (Song of the Siren Book 1)

by Sonya Blake

  She heaved Sam’s body to shore. He lay motionless and pale, his black hair plastered to his forehead and neck, his beard matted with seawater and bits of shell. She climbed onto his chest and grabbed his face as water sloshed up and over them.

  “Wake up, Sam!” She peeled back his eyelids to reveal sightless eyes. “Wake up.”

  Kaia tried to stand so she could pull him upland and perform CPR, but she couldn’t even bring herself onto her knees. She fell back alongside Sam’s body.

  Fearing the worst, she didn’t want to look down. She was injured, she knew that much. She was probably in shock. Adrenaline must have fueled this feat of strength that would have otherwise been impossible. But then again there was sensation below her waist. Water coursed away from the skin of her hips. Barnacles grated. Encouraged, she gasped for air and forced herself to look down.

  Her legs were gone.

  At her waist, where her shirt stuck to her belly, her skin had become pearlescent and textured with scales. When she placed her fingers—now coated in veiny, diaphanous webbing—on her hips, she found the scales hard as armor and warm to the touch. The buff color gave way to tawny stripes at her thighs, growing darker and reaching a deep fox-red toward the pointed end, where a spiny fin fanned out and moved articulately.

  It’s not real.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed deeply. It couldn’t be real. After a moment, she felt the sensation of water evaporating from her skin. She heard the whisper of the wind singing through the pines. The sound calmed her, reassured her that she belonged to the land.

  Whatever this hallucination of a tail—a mermaid tail for God’s sake—was, it had to have some rational or semi-rational explanation.

  Illusion brought on by stress? Accidental ingestion of psychotropic substance? Manifestation of deific being latent within myself?

  Sam coughed and Kaia turned to shove him onto his side, gripping his shoulders as he vomited seawater, and dinner along with it.

  That’s real enough.

  While Sam retched, life returning in violent heaves and shudders to his body, Kaia dared to look at herself again and saw the monstrous tail still there, but changing. It was terrifying and beautiful even as it reformed into two legs, like a flower closing.

  Human again, she found herself naked from the waist down. Her jeans, her sneakers, even her underwear must have blown off in the transition. She did seem to recall the sense of her expanding body ripping through the clothes, but had that actually been real? Had any of it?

  Kaia wrestled Sam’s soaked flannel off him and wrapped it around her waist as a makeshift kilt. Sam, senseless, shivering and curling into a ball, let out a quiet, animal groan.

  “You’re all right,” she said, as she put her arms around him.

  Sam wasn’t all right; anyone could see that. And she wasn’t all right either. He needed a medical team to help him cope with his hypothermia and she needed a psychiatrist. Blood poured from Sam’s forehead down the side of his face as he gazed helplessly up at her.

  “You just hang tight,” she said. “I’m going to take care of you.”

  Chapter Four

  Sunlight seared through Sam’s eyelids, splattering orange across the darkness. He found himself sore but whole, somewhere familiar-smelling, though it wasn’t home. Someone moved beneath the covers beside him.

  Sam tensed as he felt hot velvet breasts pressed against his back, a soft belly against his bare ass, the slope of thighs behind his, and the dewy starfish of a hand on his hip. She stretched her other hand up, fingers curling into his hair.

  Kaia Foley, he reminded himself, the owner of the house on the Point, the woman with kind eyes and a big smile and a voice that was wild and naked, and maybe divine.

  You would’ve met your end if it hadn’t been for her saving your ass.

  Sam felt her move against him and heard her let out a sleepy moan. He wanted to turn to her and take her in his arms, but a warning went off inside him.

  You and your heart will always belong to the ocean, he had heard the wind say to him on days when he was out alone on his boat, beyond the the sight of land. Always remember you belonged to her first. She is your beginning and your end.

  Sam drew in a breath and forced himself to open his eyes to the cloudy and blustering morning. Judging by the light, it had to be at least eight o’clock. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept past dawn, and he didn’t have a clue what day it was, but that didn’t matter; there was work to be done. There was always work to be done.

  But Kaia coiled her arm around his body and nuzzled her cool nose against his back. There was a vacant swath in Sam’s memory between the instant he’d fallen out of the rowboat and the present moment.

  As he moved, pushing one arm beneath the pillow to support his head, he felt a bruise-like ache deep in his chest. His head felt as though it was filled with gunpowder about to be lit. He’d almost drowned—in fact he was pretty sure he had drowned—and Kaia had saved his life. The blur of events was becoming clearer the longer he was awake. After she’d hauled him back to land, he’d been helpless as an infant, and Kaia had tended to him without thought for herself.

  Sam decided to risk turning onto his back to get a look at her, half expecting to see something that was more than just human, something he had dreamed up in his fitful, hypothermic sleep: a woman with the body of some kind of big fish, something too real to be out of a storybook. Yet Kaia was as he remembered her from the Hook and Anchor—not much larger than a child, with the soft topography of the blanket hinting at full, womanly curves.

  A pile of fiery red curls hid her face. Sam pulled on one and watched it spring back. The colors in her hair were mesmerizing: cadmium red and carmine, golden ochre, mahogany. He stuck a finger in through the mop and lifted it away from her eyes. Sunlight made her eyelids incandescent as orchid petals. She squeezed them tight and Sam dropped the lock of hair and ran the backs of his fingers over her cheek where freckles graced her fair, round face. Her full lips blossomed a pretty raspberry color—a little chapped, but beautiful.

  This was a face he could spend hours looking at, figuring out if some deeper mystery hid beneath her skin. He could paint her, he thought, if he ever painted people.

  Kaia stirred and grumbled something about coffee and Sam reached to touch her mouth, but stopped himself. She might not want that. She might not want him. Sure, she was naked, and when he’d woken just now she had been holding him like a lover. But they were naked simply because neither of them had had dry clothing to wear to bed, and he’d been so cold he’d frankly needed the skin-to-skin body heat to regain equilibrium. She’d risked her life for his, yes, but they hadn’t touched each other in any way that was anything other than innocent or necessary. Whatever they shared—traumatic, maybe sacred—he didn’t want to complicate it.

  Despite a growing need to piss, he settled into the bed to watch her sleep a little longer. Almost as soon as he moved, though, her fingers sought him and she hugged him close, throwing one leg over his. Sam let himself burrow his nose into her curls. Then he felt the heat between her thighs pressed against him. His body responded.

  Fuck.

  This was very bad and very stupid. He could not get involved with Kaia Foley. She was just another tourist, for all intents and purposes. He’d sworn he was done with summer girls, those vacationers who were inevitably more trouble than they were worth. Kaia might’ve been born in Quolobit Harbor, but the way she’d talked about it the night before, she was set on selling the old house on Foley’s Point, and even though she’d said she was untethered, he expected she was no different than anyone else—a slave to the status quo, or too ambivalent about life to do more than wallow in mediocrity. He was no different, he had to admit to himself, with no small degree of shame. As he saw it, she would return to her life in Tennessee as soon as possible, and he’d never see her again.

  Besides, there was Violet.

  Kaia wrapped her leg tighter around Sam�
��s. His fingers itched with the urge to grab her thigh and squeeze hard. But he remained motionless and tried to breathe deeply, willing his throbbing cock to chill the fuck out before Kaia moved her knee and discovered it for herself.

  He forced himself to think of Violet instead of Kaia’s heat like a ripe peach smashed on his hip, her grippy little hand now lodged in his armpit.

  Violet. Violet. Violet.

  This thing with Violet had never been serious, but maybe it ought to be. She was a local. If he screwed it up, he’d have to deal with the fallout maybe for the rest of his life.

  He should take Violet out to dinner some time. Or better yet—breakfast. Maybe that would make the difference to her. Maybe then she’d see him as more than a blue-collar lobsterman with pipe-dreams of being a painter. Maybe, but probably not.

  As Sam lay there, miserably pondering just how deep that relationship could ever get and trying to ignore the sensation of Kaia against his bare skin, it occurred to him that today was Friday and there was something important he had to do.

  Renew the boat registration? No. Someone’s birthday? Not that, either.

  It had to do with Violet, he remembered that much. And paintings. Yes, that was it. Friday at noon, he had an appointment to meet Violet’s sister Emory at the gallery to show her his paintings. Recalling the dread and anxiety he’d been carrying around in relation to this meeting and coming out of the closet as a painter, Sam found himself settled enough to move.

  Getting up, he went to the bathroom in the hall instead of the one attached to the master bedroom, hoping he could shower and get off Foley’s Point before anyone—especially Violet—noticed the Angeline had been moored there overnight.

  Chapter Five

  Kaia blinked and it hurt. Sam was gone. The bed linens lay rumpled in his place, the quilt and blanket thrown to the middle of the bed. She let her head fall back onto the pillow and shut her eyes to the headache pounding in her skull. Reverberations of the surge of energy that had ripped through her body and enabled her to save the fisherman’s life still pulsed through her now, aching in her back, tingling in her feet. The body remembered what the mind would not—like that finned tail where her legs should have been.

  Kaia opened her eyes again, just a millimeter. The room was empty save for a battered Shaker-style dresser and the maple four-poster bed. It didn’t feel empty, though. Outside the sky yawned, and white-feathered flashes flew back and forth in the stormy gray sky.

  She lifted the covers and found herself to be fully human, and without a stitch of clothing. Even though her body radiated a deep heat, an inner blossoming like she’d just had three good orgasms in a row, she’d spent half the night keeping that man alive. No orgasms for her—though she reckoned Sam Lowell would make one heck of a lover. And it had been that particular notion that had led her to such peril…

  Kaia sat up and pushed her curls away from her face as a swell of nausea overtook her. “Oh, sweet Lord,” she moaned as a flash of hot and cold passed over her skin. She ran her hands down her thighs, just to remind herself they were there, to survey the damage. Her knees and the heels of her hands were scraped to ground meat from barnacles, but other than a bruise on her bottom and general aching and queasiness, she felt physically whole.

  Mentally whole: not so sure.

  Someone began to hum a tuneless and meandering melody just on the other side of the wall behind the bed. The faucet squealed. Water pattered into the tub. Wrapping herself in a soft cotton throw blanket, Kaia made her way downstairs.

  She peered into the dryer in the kitchen. Pulling out her shirt, she recalled dismally that the rest of her clothes were long gone, lost during her metamorphosis—or whatever the hell had happened out there. Out of options for bottom-coverage, she put on Sam’s boxer shorts and rolled them up at her hips.

  The faucet squeaked again from upstairs and the house made a clanking, lurching sound as the flow of water stopped. Sam would be out in a matter of moments dressed in nothing but a towel, and they’d have to exchange an awfully strange good-morning. She quickly gathered up his jeans and threw them at the bathroom door upstairs before retreating back down.

  Hearing floorboards protest as Sam moved around upstairs, Kaia pulled on her coat. It was still somewhat warm from the dryer, but her phone, which even now was still zipped into the pocket, was well and truly dead. Leaving the kitchen, she stepped into a pair of galoshes by the door as she snuck out onto the porch. Beyond the snow-blown grass and the shivering thorny briars that buffered the land from the rocks, the ocean glowed. It was now calm as a stone, marbled with reflections of the morning sky.

  Sam’s boat, the Angeline, moored off the southern side of the Point, looked spitefully fresh and cheery. Kaia stepped out into biting wind to look at the exterior of the house. Grayed cedar shake siding in various stages of weathering covered a no-fuss frame built to withstand any blow; window boxes where she recalled her mom planting petunias; a laundry line out back where her grandmother used to hang sheets that had been in use since Kaia’s dad had been a boy. She felt a rush of longing to remain at the house on Foley’s Point but instantly quashed it, reminding herself that she was here to sell the place, plain and simple.

  As Kaia turned to go in, a breeze shot up from the water and goosed her, as if the ocean demanded her attention. Her nose caught its delicious and disturbing tang in the air and her mouth watered in response.

  Oh no, please, not again.

  Fearing she would have another hallucination—or worse, an actual metamorphosis—Kaia hurried inside and shut the door behind her, leaning against it with her eyes closed, letting the quiet strength of the house hold her safe.

  It felt so real, that tail. I can still feel it now.

  Kaia was thinking of phantom limb syndrome and gripping the chilled skin of her thighs when the steps creaked. She opened her eyes to see a barefoot man in nothing but jeans coming down the stairs. Woad-blue animals intertwined in a Nordic design up his right arm and sprawled over his shoulder and the top of his pectoral muscle. His damp black hair was brushed clean away from his finely-formed face. The man was at least six-foot-three and had to weigh nearly two hundred pounds.

  How? How could I have saved him?

  “Do I still have a shirt?” he asked, lifting his brows as their eyes met, both silently acknowledging what serious trouble they had miraculously scraped their way out of, and the foolish attraction that had led them to it.

  Kaia felt heat rise to her cheeks. “Oh, um, yeah,” she stammered. “It’s still in the dryer.”

  She followed him into the kitchen, where he pulled on his T-shirt and the flannel over that, then draped his coat over the back of a chair.

  “Coffee?” he asked, running a hand over his damp, dark hair. The man was even more good-looking than she remembered.

  “I don’t know if I’m there yet,” she confessed, rubbing her head, pained at the very sight of him. Or of anything, for that matter. “You got any aspirin?”

  Sam snorted a laugh as he dug a bottle out of the cabinet. “Might be expired,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Hand it over.”

  After taking three tablets and a guzzle of water out of the tap, Kaia sat down at the table while Sam began to make coffee. He had the economy of motion of a man accustomed to working in small, cluttered spaces, and seemed to know where everything was, from the coffee can to the teaspoon. To her relief, there seemed to be no need for small talk or awkward embarrassment with Sam. He didn’t smile or frown, but maintained the stoical expression that she figured to be his default.

  “You seem like you’re feeling okay.” Meanwhile, she not only felt maybe about to die of nausea or spontaneous cranial explosion, but also embarrassment for how flirtatious she had been last night. She palpated her temples and listed sideways onto her uninjured left butt-cheek.

  Sam stooped to pull a dishrag out of the third drawer beside the sink and turned to look straight at her. “Why do you need to
sell this place?”

  Taken aback at his stark question, she drew in a deep breath. “I… want to go back to college,” she answered hesitantly. “Maybe become a school teacher.” It wasn’t at all what she had pictured for herself in the past, but it would be a solid, responsible way of living. “Did you go to college?” she asked.

  And instantly regretted it. He was a fisherman, and that was really all that mattered. Plenty of blue-collar workers would take offense to that kind of question, her father among them.

  “I went to art school in New York,” Sam told her. “Studied painting.”

  “Damn,” she said.

  He stood straighter and returned Kaia’s gaze. He was so tall. Massive, really. But not so bulky that he couldn’t move around gracefully. He was built like a man who could’ve been a football player but who’d chosen ballet instead. Regardless, there was no way she could’ve pulled that man to shore in the weak, trembling form she currently inhabited. Sam continued looking directly at Kaia for longer than was comfortable. She fidgeted.

  Did he see? Does he know?

  “So you really are a painter,” she said at last.

  Sam snorted and dried his hands, then went about the business of pouring coffee beans into a hand-crank grinder.

  “You sure you’re set on selling?” he asked, returning to the subject Kaia would rather avoid. Clearly he didn’t want to talk of his creative pursuits. She’d have to respect that, for now.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You’re sure,” he repeated with a hint of sarcasm, like he didn’t believe her. “How long’s it been since you’ve been back?”

  “I was five when we moved,” she said, swallowing hard. Her dad had decided he needed to get away—away from the ocean, away from the memories of her mother. “We came back only once, for my grandmother’s funeral. That was ten years ago. My father could barely stand to be here a minute longer than necessary.”

  “That’s why you left Maine?”