Page 8 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

He could never understand it.

The muffin was excellent. I hope that ruins his day.

Chapter 4

Rafe

The clouds to the southeast have spent the last hour organizing.

That’s the word for it. Not gathering, organizing. An hour ago they were a smudge on the horizon, the kind of thing you’d never notice unless a lobsterman’s knee had put a cold spot between your shoulder blades. Now they’ve got structure, a long slate shelf of it, and the light out here has gone the color of an old nickel. The waves have picked up enough that Carl Sagan is nodding gently against his lashings like he agrees with something.

I don’t love it. I’m not qualified to not love it, my entire meteorological résumé is “checked an app twice,” but I don’t love it.

And I really don’t love what’s happening at the stern.

Nerissa Marsh has been back there since she walked away from me, and for the first hour she did exactly what you’d expect: laptop open, spine straight, radiating do-not-approach in every band of the spectrum. Fine. Message received, twice now. I’ve been up at the rail doing my own version, which is running the keynote in my head and losing my place every time I get to the part where I thank people, because the list of people is ten years long and I keep seeing faces.

But for the last twenty minutes, her laptop’s been closed.

She’s just standing there. Both hands on the stern rail, still as a stanchion, watching the water. Not the horizon, not the clouds. No, the mermaid is watching the water, her beautiful, delicate features closed off. It’s like she’s reading something printed on the waves. And her face, the quarter of it I can see, has a certain lightning-through-a-curtain thing going on, except the curtain’s slipping, and whatever’s behind it isn’t just worry.

It looks like listening. It looks like a person being told something, slowly, in a language she’s not fluent in.

I watch a swell pass under us, and her knuckles go white on the rail, and that decides it. She doesn’t want me to coddle her and make small talk, fine.

I won’t bother her with small talk, but I’m the department Chair and it’s my prerogative to do a wellness check on her. Well, I’m pretty sure HR would disagree, but I’m still going over there.

I fill a cup at the galley sink, climb back up, and walk aft along the rolling deck with my free hand on the rail. I know bringing a mermaid water to drink while on a boat is a silly excuse to check in on her, but I’m not always a clever man.

“Hey. Hydration delivery. It’s ship’s law, I don’t make the rules.”

“I’m fine.” It comes out flat and fast, blade-flat, before I’ve even finished the sentence. She doesn’t turn around. “You can go.”

Okay. Noted, and honestly, after the muffin summit went down in flames, expected. I set the cup in the holder by the cleat anyway, and I’m two steps into a tactical withdrawal when she calls out to me.

“Sorry. That was rude of me and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.”

Her voice is thin and strangely musical, but also sad. Longing. It sends a shiver down my entire body, from the top of my scalp to my heels.

I stop dead in my tracks and turn to her.

She’s turned halfway, one hand still welded to the rail, and up close the curtain isn’t slipping, it’s gone. Her face is doing something I’ve only ever seen on grad students mid-defense when the committee finds the flaw in their dissertation: a person working very hard to keep standing on a thing that is moving underneath them. Her eyes flick to me, bright blue like the ocean on a sunny day, mesmerizing in ways that make my belly churn and my knees feel like I’ve just run a marathon.

Mesmerizing. Yes. That’s the right word for how beautiful Nerissa Marsh is. Her lovely, oval face is framed by that glorious teal hair, falling in graceful waves around a skin that could be made of porcelain. Her mouth, perky and full, is pressed in a thin line, but even then, it has this soft, vulnerable quality that pulls my gaze like a mirage.

I realize way too late I’ve been staring at her lips and I cough, shaking my head like I’m a cat about to throw up a hairball. Very attractive, surely.

And so very inappropriate. I’m her colleague. More than a colleague, I’m her department Chair. There are a number of big no-nos in academia, and a department Chair being attracted to a postdoc in his department is definitely on the list.

Well, she’s technically not my employee. I have nothing to do with the funding for her research or her contract. But it’s still inappropriate.

Then that fascinating gaze goes back to the water. I don’t even know if she noticed how I stared at her mouth like a creep.

“It’s fine,” I say, and keep it easy, and don’t come closer. “Boats make a lot of people nervous. Fun fact, the word ’nausea’ comes from the Greek for ship. Sea-sickness is etymologically the original sickness.”

Nothing. Not even the eye-roll, and she strikes me as someone with a well-developed eye-roll.

“What do you see?” I ask.