Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3)

by Elsa Jade

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know…”

  “Call,” he urged.

  Though his hand was on her backside, not above her heart, he felt the tension of her muscles. But he didn’t feel the sub-acoustics.

  “It’s not working,” she said, disappointment making her tone waver.

  “Here. Let me show you.” With a hand on her hip, he turned her toward him.

  Since she was up on the step, her position put them closer to eye to eye. He took her hand, still wet, and flattened her fingers across his chest, before angling them both toward the cistern.

  “They are tiny, delicate,” he murmured. “So the call must be tiny, delicate.” He pushed the wavelength through his chest, not so different from a sound in the air.

  Her eyes—the same dark brown as the edible thing he’d licked out of the domed container—widened. “I felt that!”

  “Look.”

  She seemed to have some trouble dragging her gaze off of him to the cistern, but then she let out a delighted laugh. “They’re dancing.”

  The little distant cousins—seahorses, she’d called them—rose up from their protective weeds in a helix, releasing a whorl of bubbles from the fronds.

  “I don’t know dancing.” He sent them another ping, pointing them toward the food, then guided her down from the step.

  Evading his touch, she warned, “Stay away. I don’t want to accidentally zap you.”

  “You let me close just a moment ago.”

  She grimaced. “Maybe because I wanted to purposely zap you.”

  That made sense to him. “If you mastered your power, you could zap me on command.”

  “Honestly, that’s the best news I’ve heard in a while.” But her scowl smoothed. Instead, she sighed. “Why are you still here, Sting? I told you I’m not going back to Tritona.”

  “But I need to go back. Which means I need the ship you crashed.” He glanced over his shoulder a moment before the Earther male glided through the doorway.

  “Breakfast is served,” he intoned. “I set the nook, if you’d like to follow me.”

  Since the male was wafting interesting smells, Sting fell willingly into step behind him. After one disgruntled huff, the soft clunk of Lana’s heavy footwear echoed behind him.

  “Do you have more of the dirt-colored substance that was in the container I returned to you?” Sting asked as they made their way to the inner room that he’d ransacked last night.

  “Chocolate cake is usually considered a dessert, sir,” the Earther informed him. “For breakfast we have these.” He lifted the lid off another container to reveal a much lighter-hued concoction. A scent reminiscent of the little female beside him rolled toward Sting—something that seemed to sink spicy teeth into his olfactory system and heated his blood inside. “Cinnamon rolls.”

  Sting peered down at them. The golden hue was just a little lighter than Lana’s skin, the inner swirl the same color and pattern as her hair. The silky, white drizzle across the top… He plugged his finger into the middle of the swirl, then stuck his finger in his mouth.

  He grunted. “I like this.”

  With a smile, the guardsman put the—what had he called it?—sin-man onto a small, transparent platter along with a second and handed it to Sting. “Please, do sit down, and I will assemble a plate for you.”

  Sting slanted a glance at Lana who was already helping herself to a selection from various other containers. Suddenly reluctant to display his ignorance, he nodded once at the other male and stood awkwardly clutching his sin-mans on their tiny platter. When Lana moved to a seat at the counter, he took the one next to her.

  The Earther male placed a much larger platter in front of Sting with another smile. “This should be enough to get you started. And here’s a cup of coffee, plus cream and sugar, if you’d like.”

  Sting looked at him. “Thank you,” he said very deliberately. The Tritonesse from the weapons conclave might have considered him little more than an animal, but animals appreciated tasty food too.

  “Aren’t you having breakfast with us, Thomas?” Lana clutched her eating implements as if they were small weapons.

  The guardsman shook his head. “I have a call with two governors about the foundation contributing to a river restoration. But I will check in on you shortly.” His gaze drifted to Sting. “Just press the intercom if you need anything.”

  From the way his gaze flicked again back to Lana, Sting wondered which of them the guardsman considered more likely to require his assistance.

  Or which of them was more the threat.

  When he stepped out, Lana focused on her food. Since he was hungry, Sting did the same. When he’d cleared the platter, he picked up the cup of coffee. The liquid was even darker than Lana’s eyes and smelled almost as good. He took a mouthful—

  And spat it back. “Kak.”

  Lana let out a choked sound—probably sympathy, since she had a cup of nasty beverage too—and pulled his cup toward her. “It’s black coffee, not fish poop. Here. Try it this way.”

  He watched distrustfully as she dumped a pale liquid and even whiter granules into the blackness. “Is that more poison?”

  “You’re tough enough.”

  Since that was true, he sipped at the cup she gave back to him. “More white granules,” he decided.

  She added another spoonful. “No more. Too much will make you jittery. But who would’ve guessed you’d have a sweet tooth.”

  “I have many teeth, from the gene mods that made me Titanyri.”

  “Ah… Well, that explains some things.”

  He went back to the container of sin-mans, since he suspected the sweetness of the rolls would offset the lingering bitterness of the coffee, and though he was a clandestine visitor to this planet, he felt an obligation to explore—

  “Sting.”

  He froze with his hand over the rolls. “No more?”

  She frowned at him. “What? No. I mean yes. Have another. It’s fine.” When he still hesitated, she let out a snort. “Oh, just bring one for me too.”

  He brought the whole container back with him. Using the flat-bladed utensil as he’d seen Thomas do, he carefully served them each two more sin-mans.

  Lana gazed down at the platter he put in front of her. “I can’t…” She let out a breath. “Never mind. Back to the real problem.”

  Sting eyed the container. “That we’re already running out of sin-mans?”

  “Noooo. That you’re still here.”

  “Need a spaceship,” he mumbled around a mouthful of spicy sweetness washed down with more coffee, which tasted surprisingly good with Lana’s flourishes. Like pixberry pie, sin-mans were not suitable for submersion, so he would need to eat them all now before he returned to the water.

  “Well, I’m fresh out of spaceships, just like we’re about to be out of cinnamon rolls.”

  He stiffened. If she tried to take his, he could probably take her down before she electrocuted him, but he didn’t want to fight over breakfast. “I will fix the ship you broke.”

  Her eyebrows flew up as if the planet’s gravity had failed. “You’ll fix it? But you’re…”

  He waited. “What?”

  “I mean, I didn’t know you were an electrician or an engineer or a pilot or whatever.”

  He ate another half-arc of the sin-man while he contemplated how much she might know of war. “There were never enough of us in the fight. So we all learned to do more than we were meant to be.”

  Her eyebrows crashed down again, puckering. “Tritona’s war was so hard for all of you, wasn’t it?”

  Giving himself time to answer, he took another bite, although the rolls were starting to weigh heavy in his gut. Which didn’t make sense, because he could eat much more than this so-called breakfast. “After so long, war was all we’d known,” he said at last. “And it was why I was made at all.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt you.”

  He looked down at her. Although they
were both sitting, she was just so much smaller than he was. “As you said before, my skin is armored, my eyes always shielded.”

  She drew another breath but then let it out slowly. “I don’t know, Sting. I think I screwed up that ship pretty bad. When I was crashing…” She shuddered. “There were a few too-long minutes where it looked like the end.”

  The memory of flames seemed to dance in her sin-brown eyes, shadowed with the glimpse of death. He’d seen that darkness far too often himself. For himself, the cold, bitter black felt like home, but for her, he wished he could lighten and sweeten it—bright as the drizzle across the top of the sin-mans. “I think you are tougher than you know.”

  “But not armored.”

  She wrapped her soft hands around her own cup. “So if I tell you where the ship crashed, maybe you can fix it and then fly away?”

  “You must take me there, yes.”

  She frowned at him. “Can’t you just swim there? I know all the waterways around here are supposed to be connected.”

  If she wasn’t with him when he repaired the Diatom, he would not be able to launch without her. “I can go by myself,” he agreed. “If I am seen by closed-worlders, Tritona will be sanctioned and the innocent Earthers will have their minds wiped. But if you don’t want to go—”

  “Okay, okay. As if I wasn’t feeling guilty enough.”

  Frowning back at her, he said, “There is no guilt. Just truth and necessity.”

  She snorted. “You sound like my tarot cards.”

  He perked up. “Are those as tasty as sin-mans?”

  She shook her head. “Too often, they tell me what I don’t want to hear.”

  “Then don’t listen.” He pushed to his feet. Now that Lana had agreed to accompany him to the Diatom, the leaden feeling in his belly was gone, making room for more rolls. He stuffed his down and eyed hers. “Why haven’t you finished?” He couldn’t warn her that she might never have them again, not without revealing his scheme to take her away.

  She pushed the plate toward him. “I’ve had enough. If I have to take you to the ship, let me get changed. I’ll meet you in the library.”

  Grabbing the platter, he followed along behind her until she turned towards the stairs.

  She stopped and jabbed one finger toward the big room with the glass cistern of fish. “There. You wait there. You aren’t coming to my bedroom.”

  He stood obediently in the doorway and watched her head up the stairs.

  Halfway to the landing, she stopped to peer back at him. “Do not follow me,” she warned.

  When he didn’t answer, she huffed and flounced the rest of the way out of view.

  Would she try to run away? Not that it mattered.

  If she ran from him, he would find her again.

  Chapter 4

  Should she run?

  If she did, she had no doubt he would find her again.

  Lana paced two steps forward and back behind her closed door. As if that would keep him out.

  Why had Marisol and Ridley sent Sting after her when they knew their new lives would be better without her? The Tritonesse had made very clear that she was some sort of eldritch horror, as if that hadn’t already become clear to her as her zaps got stronger. Ridley’s pathological fear of deep water had only threatened her sense of self. And even Marisol’s allergy to water had threatened her own life but no one else’s. The zaps were getting strong enough to kill others. And whatever the Tritonesse thought she was—nul’ah-wys—seemed even worse than death.

  She would just have to take Sting to the crashed spaceship and convince him that it was better to leave her behind. No doubt he believed he could trick her or force her into going with him. But she wasn’t going to ruin anyone else’s life. If she had to stay here, locked up on the remote estate and become the new Wavercrest recluse, that would be best for everyone.

  Now she just had to trick Sting. Or force him…

  A little shiver went down her spine as she stripped out of her pajamas. After a moment’s hesitation, she chose her best pair of matching panties and bra; really, they were too silky and pearly white for tromping around the wilds of Montana, but the support was top notch, and just in case she was abducted by a certain alien…

  Not that she would just let him, of course. Over her undies, she pulled on a flowing caftan. The slide of the glossy fabric on her skin gave her another shiver, so she added fleece-lined leggings for more coverage. Since she was going to be tromping—and maybe forcing a predatory merman to do anything—she should probably wear the closest thing she had to pants. She only had the rubber clogs for shoes, but she added her heaviest ragg wool socks.

  This look was even more eclectic than her usual hippie fashion statement. Just as well Sting was an alien with no sense of style and barely any clothes. Speaking of which…

  She grabbed a few more things along with her messenger bag and went back downstairs. Before heading to the library, she sidetracked to the office where Thomas spent most of his business hours when he wasn’t taking care of her or the estate.

  She peeked in to make sure he wasn’t still on his call, but he was working at the desk and glanced up at her with his usual open smile. “Come in, Miss Lana.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t. You don’t want me to zap your computer.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, now that we know the reason our signal was so poor was because of the Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost in Sunset Falls, I’ve become quite enamored with high-speed internet enhanced with alien technology. Wouldn’t want to lose it now.”

  She smiled back at him. At least Maelstrom breaking closed-world protocols had a sort of silver lining. And of course Marisol and Ridley had gotten their lives back. Her smile slipped.

  Thomas strode from the big desk and came around swiftly to her side. “Miss Lana?”

  She reversed by a few careful steps, not wanting to hurt him. She was the last person who should have this sort of power. “Sorry. I was drifting again.” If the zaps got worse in her brain, she feared it would mean a stroke from which she might never recover. Or maybe that was the best-case scenario. “I need to borrow the car,” she told him. “I’m going to take Sting to the Diatom. He thinks he can repair it and get home.”

  Thomas gazed at her. “Are you thinking of going with him?”

  She shook her head, hair flying every which way with her vehemence. “As I already reminded him, they don’t want me back.”

  He pursed his lips but didn’t comment. “I shall accompany you to the lake.”

  “No, this is going to be the worst road trip ever, but there’s nothing you can do about it. As much as I hope Marisol and Ridley can save Tritona, Earth matters too, and your work here is important. You keep doing that, and I’ll get Sting out of here.”

  He nodded, though his expression was dubious. Whether he doubted she could get rid of Sting or if she should get rid of the Tritonan male, she wasn’t quite sure. But Thomas rose with another smile. “I’ll at least pack you a snack.”

  “We just had a huge breakfast,” she protested. “We won’t be gone long. At least I won’t.”

  His lips twitched. “I think it might be worth having something to bribe Mr. Sting.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What, you think I can teach him to jump through hoops like a trained poodle?”

  “More like a luring a shark. But you might need it.”

  After a moment she nodded. She returned to the library where Sting stood in front of the aquarium with that unnatural stillness that made the little hairs on the back of her neck quiver. It was the stillness that hid unknown depths, and the part of her that was still a creeping Earther mammal was wary of a fall.

  Only his white-shielded gaze shifted toward her. “We go,” he rumbled in that rough voice.

  “Just one thing,” she said. “You can’t wander around Earth looking like…that.” She waved one hand vaguely up and down.

  He turned to face her full on, and she had to glance away. To
o bad there was no way to deflect the heat rising in her cheeks.

  He ran his hands down the straps of his battle skin. “What is wrong with me?”

  There was an edge to his voice she hadn’t heard before—and his usual voice was plenty edgy. Had she accidentally touched a sore spot despite the thick muscles and heavy flesh?

  He was much larger than the other Tritonyri, who were already very big, and she had a sense from some comments that the way he’d been bred or engineered was almost as perverse to his fellow Tritonans as her own status as a fire-witch. She certainly hadn’t meant to hurt him.

  Feeling her way carefully she said, “It’s not you, but your clothes. Or lack thereof. I know Tritonans leave more of their bodies exposed so that you can feel through your extra senses, but here on Earth we cover up more. Especially when it’s cold.”

  The tense set of his shoulders eased. “I only have my battle skin. Since it is self-cleaning and self-repairing, I don’t need anything else.”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, you need something.”

  He tilted his head. “Isn’t it enough that I’m armored?”

  “No,” she said curtly. He might be huge, thick-skinned, and steel-eyed, but for all the strangeness, he was still built more or less like a man. When she’d read the handbooks from the defunct local Intergalactic Dating Agency, she learned how the general humanoid shape was fairly common in the galaxy, and the IDA made a point to match compatible shapes among their interested clientele. Any oblivious Earther who saw Sting might think he was just doing some elaborate cosplay of an obscure anime character, but they’d still find it inappropriate for the streets of Montana.

  Also, she couldn’t be in a small car with him with all his muscles just…bulging and whatnot. Maybe his body was resistant to electricity, but the heat he gave off seemed to amplify the energy that powered her zaps. And that wasn’t good for either of them.

  Also also, ever since a particularly ferocious zap had melted her vibrator in the midst of a happy ending, she’d been afraid to pleasure herself, even with her own hands. Sting might not be a man, but his battle skin barely contained the blatant bulk of a very sturdy sex organ, and knowing it was armored too and maybe less vulnerable to her zaps had definitely featured in her dreams last night…