Meg scooped up some of the icy water and bathed the aching flesh between her thighs. She plowed through the lacy surf where the lovers had performed—to the very spot where the mysterious selkie leader had spent his seed—and tried to order the mixed emotions riddling her. Absorbed in thought, she failed to feel the vibration beneath her feet until the horse was nearly upon her. It reared back on its hind legs, forefeet pawing the air, its long tail sweeping the sand. A real horse this time, no illusion. Meg cried out as recognition struck. There was a rider on its back. He was naked and aroused. It was him, with neither bridle nor reins to control the beast, and nothing but a silvery sealskin underneath him.
He seemed quite comfortable in the altogether, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to sit a horse bareback, naked in the moonlight. She gasped. The horse had become quite docile, attempting to nuzzle her with its sleek white nose as it pranced to a standstill. She didn’t want to look at the man on its back, but she couldn’t help herself. He was a beguiling presence. As mesmerizing as he was from a distance, he was a hundred times more so at close range. Now she could see what the shadows had denied her earlier. His eyes, the color of mercury, were dark and penetrating, and slightly slanted. Somehow, she knew they would be. And his hair, while waving at a length to tease his shoulders in front, was longer in back and worn in a queue, tied with what appeared to be a piece of beach grass. How had she not noticed that before? But how could she have when he’d made such a display of himself face forward? Besides, her focus was hardly upon his hair.
Her attention shifted to the horse. At first she’d thought its mane and tail were black, but upon close inspection, she saw that they were white as snow, so tangled with seaweed they appeared black at first glance. But wait…What had she heard about white horses whose mane and tail collected seaweed? A waterhorse! The phantom creature of legend that seduced its victims to mount and be carried off to drown in the sea…But that was preposterous. Nevertheless, when its master reached out his hand toward her, she spun on her heels and raced back toward the cottage.
His laughter followed her, throaty and deep. Like an echo from the depths of the sea itself, it crashed over her just as the waves crashed over the shore. The sound pierced through her like a lightning bolt. The prancing waterhorse beneath him whinnied and clamped ferocious-looking teeth into the hem of her night shift, giving a tug that brought her to ground. She landed hard on her bottom, and the selkie laughed again as she cried out. Plucking her up as easily as if she were a broom straw, he settled her in front of him astride.
“You cannot escape me, Megaleen,” he crooned in her ear. “You have summoned me, and I have come. You have no idea what it is that you have conjured—what delicious agonies you have unleashed by invoking me.” His breath was moist and warm; it smelled of salt and the mysteries of the Otherworldly sea that had spawned him. “Hold on!” he charged, turning the horse toward the strand.
“Hold on to what?” Meg shrilled. “He has no bridle—no reins!”
Again his sultry voice resonating in her ear sent shivers of pleasure thrumming through her body. “Take hold of his mane,” he whispered.
His voice alone was a seduction. He was holding her about the middle. Her shift had been hiked up around her waist when he settled her astride, and she could feel the thick bulk of his shaft throbbing against her buttocks, riding up and down along the cleft between the cheeks of her ass. The damp sealskin that stretched over the animal’s back like a saddle blanket underneath her felt cool against Meg’s naked thighs, but it could not quench the fever in her skin or douse the flames gnawing at the very core of her sex. The friction the waterhorse’s motion created forced the wet sealskin fur deeper into her fissure, triggering another orgasm. Her breath caught as it riddled her body with waves of achy heat. She rubbed against the seal pelt, undulating to the rhythm of the horse’s gait until every last wave had ebbed away, like ripples in a stream when a pebble breaks the water’s surface.
In one motion, the selkie raised the night shift over her head and tossed it into the water. Reaching for it as he tore it away, Meg lost her balance. His strong hands spanning her waist prevented her from falling. Their touch seared her like firebrands, raising the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. The horse had plunged into the surf. It was heading toward the open sea, parting the unreal phantom horses galloping toward shore.
Salt spray pelted her skin, hardening her nipples. Spindrift dressed her hair with tiny spangles. The horse had plunged in past the breakers to the withers. Terrified, Meg screamed as the animal broke through the waves and sank to its muscular neck.
“Hold on!” he commanded.
“I cannot,” Meg cried. “His mane…It is slippery with seaweed.”
All at once, he lifted her into the air and set her down facing him, gathering her against his hard, muscular body, his engorged sex heaving against her belly. How strong he was! “Then hold on to me,” he said.
“W-who are you?” Meg murmured.
“I am called Simeon…amongst other things,” he replied. “But that hardly signifies….” Heat crackled in his voice. Something pinged in her sex at the sound of it.
He swooped down, looming over her. For a split second, she thought he was going to kiss her. She could almost taste the salt on his lips, in his mouth, on the tongue she glimpsed parting his teeth…But no. Fisting his hand in the back of her waist-length sun-painted hair, he blew his steamy breath into her nostrils as the horse’s head disappeared beneath the surface of the sea.
Meg’s last conscious thought before sinking beneath the waves in the selkie’s arms was that she was being seduced to her death; another orgasm testified to that. Weren’t you supposed to come before you die? Wasn’t it supposed to be an orgasm like no other, like the orgasm riddling her now?
The scent that ghosted through her nostrils as she drew her last breath of air was his scent, salty, laced with the mysteries of the deep, threaded through with the sweet musky aroma of ambergris.
2
M eg groaned awake and opened her eyes to eerie green darkness. The sound of rushing water echoed nearby. She tried to raise herself, but her limbs felt weightless, as if she were floating. But she wasn’t floating. Something was holding her down. She waved her arms about in the water…water! She was immersed in water. But it couldn’t be. How was she breathing?
Frantically, she groped her body. She was naked. Where had her night smock gone? Oh yes, the selkie lord had flung it into the sea. But he couldn’t have. That was just a dream…Wasn’t it?
Something snaked its way between her legs, and she cried out. How strange her voice sounded under water. Why didn’t she choke on it when it rushed into her mouth? Why hadn’t she drowned?
She swatted at whatever was groping her thighs and cried out again when it probed the V of golden hair curling between, parting her nether lips. This was no eel…no creature of the deep, and sea vegetation did not move with the deftness of fingers. She shot her hand out and gripped a wrist…a man’s wrist…his wrist!
His warm mouth covered her scream.
In spite of herself, Meg groaned as his pointed tongue plunged in and out of her mouth, filling her the way his penis had filled the woman on the beach. It felt like hot silk, moving with the same ebb and flow of the sea. She was dead; she had to be. She had drowned and this was the entrance to the Netherworld the elders spoke of, the purification by water the dead must endure that the shamans held in such high regard. But if that were so, why had he entered it with her, this enigmatic lord of the selkies?
Reason returning, she fought the human tether he had become. “Let me go!” she cried, slapping at his arms and kicking her feet. “Take me back. I will be missed. There will be reprisals. My aunt Adelia and my uncle Olwyn are shamans. They are mentoring me in the Witching Way. I am to become a priestess of the Isle of Mists! Take me back, I say, and no harm will befall you!” Why was the water so murky? Why couldn’t she see?
He slipped one a
rm around her waist, threaded the other between her legs, and stroked her buttocks. “Every man, woman, and child on the Isle of Mists practices shamanism,” he said. “They are nothing to me. You are in my world now, Megaleen, and here I am Simeon, Lord of the Deep. You summoned me, remember?”
“When did I do that?” Meg snapped at him. “How? I never summoned you. This is some wicked nightmare—some vicious trick of my subconscious mind. I will awake in my loft, in my bed of feather quilts, and you will be what you really are…a wet dream; a figment of my imagination…”
A deep gravely laugh lived in Simeon’s throat. It resonated through Meg’s body, sending little tingling shockwaves along her spine. She stiffened in his arms as his deft fingers traced the cleft between her buttocks. Her quick intake of breath rang in her ears as the finger slid lower, ever so lightly flitting over the taut pucker of her anus, then moved on to explore her virgin skin. The finger traveled higher, reaching for the tiny bud at the top of her vulva. Rolling it between his fingers, he pressed down upon her nether lips until he had exposed the hardened erection to his tongue, and he laved it until she cried out in excruciating ecstasy.
Meg gripped his shoulders. She should struggle—push him away. She could not. Instead, she threaded her fingers through his long wavy hair. Carried on the underwater current, it flowed about him like strands of silk. It was beyond bearing. Never had she dreamed such ecstasy existed. As if they had a will of their own, her hands fisted in that cool dark silk and held his head against the tender spot he nipped and laved and sucked until her body shuddered to a riveting climax.
The moan that left her throat echoed through the underwater labyrinth, through her body—through her very soul.
“This is only the beginning,” Simeon murmured in her ear.
Taken with a sudden wave of remorse, Meg stiffened in the arms that pulled her closer. “I did not summon you!” she got out. Her voice was no more than a hoarse whisper. “Take me back! I beg you…Take me back to the Isle….”
His deep throaty laugh shot her through with gooseflesh. She had heard tales of the selkies’ hypnotic power over women, of their prowess in the art of seduction. What else had she heard about them? Why couldn’t she remember? Why couldn’t she think? There was more to the legend, so much more…But his hands were exploring her body again, playing with her nipples, just as he had played with the nipples of the woman on the strand—rolling them between his thumbs and forefingers, making them hard and tall for his lips to suck on, first one and then the other.
“Did you not come to the strand…and watch the seals sunning themselves on the rocks?” he said between tugs upon her aching buds, meanwhile laving the pebbled areolas mercilessly. He was going to drive her mad. Please the Powers, let this be a dream! she prayed.
“The seals, yes,” she said. “Many times, but I don’t see how—”
“Did you not lament your lot, little fledgling witch? Did you not wish the kind of love your situation denies you, for you know no priestess of the Isle can marry, Megaleen?”
“I-in my secret heart, perhaps, but that does not mean—”
“Did your condemnation as a witch not make an end to your betrothal on the mainland?” Simeon interrupted. “You are not simpleminded. You know a witch of the Isle’s mystery—her very power—lies in her maidenhead, in the taking of it by the shaman high priest in her right of initiation….”
Meg had all but forgotten about that, and cold chills riddled her as she remembered what fate she’d resigned herself to when she escaped to the Isle of Mists. These traditions were eons old, rooted in the mists of time that gave birth to the Isle and created the mystical priestesses who ruled it.
Simeon’s sultry voice cut into her thoughts. “Was that not the reason you were whisked away from your marriage bed before the conjugal quilts were laid out upon it?”
Meg gasped. “How could you know that?” she cried.
“We selkies are perceptive entities,” he responded. His hands were everywhere, flitting over her skin, exploring every orifice, every crevice and fissure. It was as if he was memorizing every contour of her body with hands that knew just how to touch, to arouse, to tantalize in ways not even she had fantasized in her wildest dreams, waking or sleeping.
Whatever sea plant she was lying upon was as soft as satin, caressing her in places he could not reach since his hands were occupied elsewhere seeking out her pleasure zones. The broad, flat ribbonlike growth swaying in the water seemed an extension of him, as alive as he was and of like mind with his advances. How far did control of his water world extend, this Lord of the Deep?
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