Falling in Deep Collection Box Set

by Pauline Creeden

  He sure hoped she knew what the hell she was doing. “Please do.”

  She sat on her knees beside him in the sand. “Trust me, okay?”

  Dylan nodded. It wasn’t as if he had much choice. Doing it himself wasn’t an option. He couldn’t bear to even think of trying to jab a pufferfish quill in and out of his leg all while trying to manage the pain. “Okay,” he said. “I will.”

  His eyes met hers and it was if time was frozen. Her eyes were familiar to him, yet exotic. New. He’d never seen eyes so clear. The only word he could think of to describe them was crisp. Like an apple. Sharp and sweet and firm. All at the same time.

  “You need a pillow,” Syreena said. She looked around. “Sand will have to do.”

  She bent at the waist and began scooping sand into a rounded mound. Her breasts were just inches from his nose. Dylan took a deep breath, inhaling her scent. She smelled like salt and sun and woman and it beat any perfume on any shelf anywhere. His body reacted to her and he shifted to the side in an attempt to hide his erection.

  “That should do just fine.” She placed both hands on his shoulders and leaned him back on the makeshift sand pillow. “Try to relax.”

  His eyes hadn’t left her breasts. He wasn’t sure he could make them. “Okay,” he said. His voice a little deeper than usual. “I’ll try.”

  And it was sort of working until she turned the other way and her perfectly shaped ass was now only inches from his face.

  There was no controlling his hard-on after a series of very naughty thoughts ricocheted through his brain.

  For the first time in his life he wondered if part-time mermaids wore panties while they were on terra firma. He tried to concentrate on the shimmery skirt. Tried to close his eyes. Tried not to reach his hand out and squeeze one of her perfect ass cheeks.

  Dylan gritted his teeth together.

  “I haven’t even started yet,” she said. “Please. Relax.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, shaded them with his forearm and concentrated on the pain. Surely pain was the opposite of arousal. He sure as hell hoped so.

  The tourniquet had slowed the blood flow to his leg so the first prick of the quill wasn’t so bad. More like a mosquito bite than a pin-prick. He felt Syreena draw the thread through and tighten the skin. She repeated the motions several more times, each time more carefully than the last. He concentrated on the sound of the ocean and the comforting rhythm of her breath as she sewed.

  “You’re done,” she said. “I didn’t get them too tight. Hopefully they’ll hold.”

  Dylan opened his eyes and stared at her. She was sitting back on her heels and looking at him. “That’s it?”

  “You were scared for nothing, silly.”

  He’d had his share of stitches over the years but they’d never been this painless. “How did you learn to do that?”

  She shrugged. “On the plantation, people got hurt. It was too far to go to the doctor unless it was something we couldn’t handle.”

  “I’m not your first case, then?”

  Her smile was radiant. Her teeth were perfect and white. “Not by a long shot.”

  “Thank you,” Dylan said. “I really appreciate it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shortly after Dylan ate his dinner, a mixture of grilled fish Syreena had caught while swimming, he feel asleep.

  Before he dozed off, she convinced him to move under the shelter of one of the palm trees. While it didn’t look like rain tonight, he’d been in the sun quite a bit today and she didn’t want to add sunburn to his list of ailments if he ended up sleeping late.

  With the day he’d had, he might sleep for a week.

  The move had been painful, his groans excruciating. The soreness would probably be even worse tomorrow.

  Syreena needed a swim and some dinner. The fish she’d cooked over the fire for him had smelled strange. Ever since the spell was cast, she’d eaten only raw fish. Every time she got hungry, The Change began. She wondered if she’d be able to eat regular human food again when the spell was broken.

  Her dreams were filled with the flavors and textures of the food she remembered from Belle Emilie but when she woke, the desire to taste them was nothing more than a memory on her tongue.

  She sat in the shallow water and willed her legs to blur into the muscular lines of a tail. As much as she often hated being a mermaid, there were times, like this one, when the absolute peace of the water was a balm to her soul.

  The water was dark and it she could only see several feet in front of her. She touched the amulet, breathing a sigh of relief when she felt the smooth, worn surface.

  She wasn’t going far. For the first time since The Change, she had another human being to talk to, to touch. And she liked him. Even if he had been stubborn about the stitches.

  Dylan might not know it yet, but he wasn’t getting away.

  Even if he ended up being the most insufferable oaf in the Seven Seas, she would learn to like him.

  He was her ticket back to civilization.

  He just didn’t know it yet.

  *****

  “It was my father’s manservant, Guillaume who Changed me. He and my father thought that by Changing me they could save me.”

  They were eating a breakfast of fish eggs and seaweed for breakfast. Both had risen with the first light, when the sun cast a weak, watery glow onto the water. It was still cool, the heat of the day hours away. A light breeze blew off the water making ruffles in the Caribbean.

  Dylan grimaced when he took a bite. “Save you from what?”

  Not only could he still see her, he listened to her. He was interested in her story. He had to be the one. Had to.

  How long had it been since the day she’d stood in front of her father in the parlor and begged him not to ask Guillaume for help in ensuring her safety? In the beginning, she tried to keep track of the days and months, sure that she would meet her true love and reverse the change but with each month that passed with no sight or sound of humans, she became more and more lax in keeping a calendar.

  “The slaves,” she said. “They revolted and took over almost all the plantations on the island. The whole island was on fire,” she paused, remembering the overwhelming smells of burning sugar cane and coffee. She shuddered. “Papa knew it was only a matter of time until they came to our place. He was trying to save my life by hiding me in plain sight.”

  “Wait,” Dylan said, shaking his head as if her words made no sense. “What island?”

  “Saint-Domingue,” she answered.

  “What war?”

  “The war.”

  “What year did your father change you?”

  “1791,” she replied.

  *****

  If his head weren’t hurting so badly, maybe he could remember some of what he’d learned in history class. The only thing close to that date was the French Revolution. But France didn’t have coffee and sugar cane. French colonies. Caribbean. He combed his brain. Voodoo.

  Less than twenty four hours after falling into the drink and he was already missing Google and Wikipedia.

  “Haiti,” he said triumphantly. “Your island is now called Haiti.”

  “Haiti,” she repeated, the word sounding deliciously French on her lips. “The slaves won then?”

  “Yes, they did. The island became independent of France in the early 1800s.”

  Her eyes widened. “They are no longer French?”

  He shook his head. “No, they’re on their own. They still speak French, though. I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It has been so long since I’ve talked to another human being. Since The Change, I seem to be invisible to everyone. You’re the first person who’s been able to see me. While I am sad to hear Saint-Domingue isn’t a colony, at least I know my island is not as it was when I left it. It was a frightening place then.”

  “It’s not exactly an island paradise, now.” Dylan said. There was rarely any good news ou
t of Haiti.

  “What do you mean? Saint-Domingue is the most beautiful place on earth.”

  “There was a huge earthquake a few years ago. It destroyed many of the buildings and lots of people died.”

  “That explains the rumble I felt. I was swimming and I’d never seen the fish so agitated and skittish. I thought bad weather was coming. All of the sudden, the whole world shook. Like a dog shaking water from his coat.” She trailed a finger in the sand. “Was the whole island destroyed?”

  Dylan nodded. “A lot of homes and buildings were destroyed. Thousands of lives lost. On top of all the destruction, Haiti has been plagued by political corruption for ages.”

  “Haiti,” she whispered. “Haiti,” she repeated, a little louder this time. “I don’t know if I could ever get used to calling it that.”

  “Old habits are hard to break,” Dylan smiled at her and something strange happened to his heart. It fluttered, tumbled. Buzzed. “How did you remember how to speak?”

  “I practice. I sit on the beach and carry on conversations with myself, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. I talk to myself in my head while I swim. I wanted to be prepared.” Her words were very deliberate. “I don’t want to forget what it means to be a woman.”

  “Do you know what year it is now?”

  Syreena shook her head. “I tried to count but I when I realized it might be decades before The Change was reversed, I lost hope.”

  “It’s 2015.”

  Her pouty lips formed a perfect, sensual “O”. He watched her mentally calculating the passage of time. “I’ve been a mermaid for two hundred and twenty four years? How is that possible?”

  If he’d met her anywhere else, he’d have guessed her age to be close to his. A little younger. Maybe twenty or twenty-five. “How old were you when it happened?”

  “Two and twenty.”

  The accented English made her even sexier. Not only was she the mermaid of his teenage fantasies, she was a French mermaid. Yowza.

  Dylan grinned. “Syreena, I’m still trying to believe that I’m sitting on an island somewhere in the Caribbean with a mermaid who saved my life from sharks. I can’t even begin to comprehend the science of mermaid aging but you don’t look like you’ve aged at all, especially when you consider the sun, the salt.” He shook his head. This couldn’t be real.

  “I still look the same as I did the day of The Change,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  She grinned. “Let me get my box. It’s under that tree,” she said and pointed to a palm several feet down the shore. She rose and retrieved it.

  A mermaid with a box of treasures. Sure. It happened all the time. In the movies.

  Dylan shook his head, willing himself to wake up. All this had to be a dream, a really convincing dream. When he opened and closed his eyes several times and the scenery didn’t change. If he was stuck in this dream, he might as well see everything there was to see while he was here.

  The box was weathered and old. About the size of shoe box, it looked like a tea chest. It was bowed out on the bottom, making the wraparound brass closure impossible to latch.

  She reached out her hand, showing it to him. “I keep my most important things in it.”

  When his fingers brushed against hers, a curious fizz of electricity crackled up his arm. “Will you show me what’s in it?”

  Syreena sat next to him on the sand, her leg brushing against his. More electric sparks.

  She looked shy. She lowered her eyes to the sand, her long dark lashes like perfect fans. “I will show you some things.” She opened it slightly and stuck her fingers inside. After some scraping and shuffling, she took out a tiny sliver of a mirror. “I can see myself,” she said.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “On the beach. It washed up after a storm.” She tilted the silver sliver from side to side casting sunlight in weird directions. “How far are we from my island? How far is it to Saint-Domingue?”

  He bit his lower lip. “Depending on how far we swam from where I was tossed off the ship, I’d say less than a hundred miles.”

  “That’s not so far,” she said. Her eyes widened.

  “Not unless you count the sharks.”

  “They don’t scare me,” she said, wrapping her fingers around the amulet that hung around her neck. “This keeps me safe. You’re the proof.”

  Dylan leaned closer. She did nothing to move away.

  He itched to take the amulet between his thumb and index finger, but the power of it scared him. “This is a voodoo charm.” Even though he didn’t want to touch it, he couldn’t help himself. His curiosity got the better of him. It felt warm, old. Powerful. A shiver ran from the tip of his finger all the way up his arm.

  A circle, about two inches in diameter, it hung from a simple leather strap. Painted onto face of the amulet was the image of a mermaid but totally unlike the images he’d seen over the years. It was primitive, like something he’d expect to see painted on the wall of a cave. The mermaid had the features of an African woman, black curly hair, skin the color of coffee. Her breasts were large and painted in an exaggerated style. Curving around her scaled tail, was a large snake that wound its way up the side of her body, around her neck, and rested its head squarely between her breasts.

  Behind the charm, attached to the same leather strap, was a small leather bag, no bigger than a walnut. It was drawn closed and tied very tightly at the top.

  “I’ve never seen a mermaid like her before,” he said, moving the charm so that it caught the light. “What’s in the bag?”

  Syreena’s face flushed. “Gris gris for protection.”

  “Who is the lady?” he asked.

  “Mami Wata,” she answered. “Sometimes she’s a mermaid, sometimes she appears to be human, but that’s just a trick. She’s never really human. She loves baubles: jewels and mirrors and necklaces. Mami Wata likes to kidnap handsome men and take them under the ocean with her and then she makes a deal with him: if he promises to remain faithful to her, she grants him riches and good health. The slaves venerate her because she represents material wealth and beauty.”

  He squinted and looked back and forth between the amulet and Syreena.

  Dylan had never been a stellar student but even he saw the parallels. This whole vision, the beach, the mermaid, the voodoo story, had to be the result of head trauma. Or too much whiskey. But it seemed so real.

  He took a deep breath and the clean air of the sea filled his lungs. The sounds of the small, shallow waves lapping on the beach. His finger brushed Syreena’s breast bone. Her skin felt real. The pulse point in her neck looked real.

  “You’ve never opened the gris gris bag?” He found it hard to believe that she’d never peeked. After all, she’d had plenty of time. “Not even once?”

  She shook her head. “Never.” Her eyes were so earnest he believed her. “I wanted to.” She glanced up at him through her long eyelashes. Her eyes were the color of an aquamarine, but softer. The impish expression on her face made her even more attractive. “But I was afraid that if I did, it would go against the voodoo—”

  He raised one eyebrow. “You believe in it?”

  Syreena nodded. “You should, too. It saved your life.”

  He looked into her eyes. “You saved me. Not this,” he said, dropping the charm so that it landed flat on her breast bone. “Thank you. I’m indebted to you and I always pay my debts.”

  *****

  His eyes were as dark as a truffle, a rich, warm brown so deep she just wanted to dive into them and never surface. In a world where nearly everything was a shade of blue or gray, the color reminded her of her old life.

  Syreena held his eyes with hers. The moment was frozen, as if in ice. Then he lowered his eyes and let them roam over her body. Her skin shivered where his eyes roamed over it.

  She lowered her eyes and looked up at Dylan through her eyelashes. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said. Her voice came out in a w
hisper.

  “Without you I would be shark bait.” He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “It reminds me of a line from a kids’ movie called Finding Nemo. There aren’t any mermaids in it but plenty of fish. My daughter has watched it at least a million times.”

  “A movie?”

  “It’s a moving picture with words and music.”

  Syreena couldn’t imagine it. “I don’t understand.”

  “When we get off this island, I’ll take you to see one. My treat.” He turned to face her. “I forgot you weren’t from the same place, I mean time, as me.”

  “Tell me about your daughter,” she said. She’d been so busy trying to picture what a movie might be like she’d almost missed the daughter part.

  Daughter meant wife. Syreena’s heart sank. The one man who could see her, touch her, in over two hundred years, and he already had a wife.

  Dylan smiled. “Her name is Mariana. She’s beautiful. Looks a lot like her mother.”

  And Madame Gray was beautiful. Syreena’s luck couldn’t get much worse.

  “She’s lived with her mom since our divorce and since I’m usually at sea, I don’t get to see her as much as I’d like.”

  “Divorce?” The word felt strange on her tongue. “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’re no longer married.”

  “Like an annulment?”

  He nodded. “Sort of, except this is from the government, not the church. She’s already remarried to another man.”

  Syreena breathed a sigh of relief. “This is a good thing?”

  “A very good thing.”

  He had that right.

  A few hours later, a storm began to blow off the water. Clouds, the color of a deep purple bruise, were building quickly and the wind was blowing them toward the cay. The storm was still at sea but it was heading their way.

  Lightning shot through the sky, illuminating the water and the beach in a weird white-purple light. Thunder followed almost immediately. Syreena shivered. She hated storms even though she’d made her way through hundreds of them, if not thousands, but they still scared her as much as the first time.