Page 25 of Currents of Desire

I take him all at once. The stretch is immense, a fullness that borders on pain but bleeds immediately into exquisite, blinding pleasure. My anatomy, designed for the crushing depths of the ocean floor, shifts to accommodate him.

My internal muscles, stronger and more dexterous than any human woman’s, ripple and clench. They are designed to hold fast against the current, and now they hold him. I grip him with a possessive strength that makes his eyes roll back in his head.

“God,” he chokes out, his head falling back against the tiled wall, his neck arched. “Nerida…”

I begin to move. It isn’t the rhythmic, gentle motion of human lovers in a soft bed but the thrashing of the surf. It is primal, wet, and desperate. I ride him with the ferocity of the storm that brought me here, my hands bracing against his chest, my nails digging in, leaving crescent moon marks on his skin.

The water churns around us, splashing over the sides, flooding the floor in rhythmic waves. The scent of the deep salt is overpowering, filling the small room, mixing with the musk of our bodies and the metallic tang of the storm.

Beneath me, his control fractures. The careful logic drains from his eyes, leaving only the dark, frantic stare of an animal.

“Look at me,” I command. My voice drops into the siren register, a dual-tone vibration that bypasses the ears and goes straight to the brainstem. It drips with compulsion.

He forces his eyes open. They are dark, and filled with a raw worship that feeds the monster inside me. He looks at me not with fear, but with a reverence that borders on madness.

“I see you,” he rasps, his hands gripping my hips, his body bucking up to meet my thrusts. “I see you.”

My lips pull back. I can’t help it. The pleasure is too intense, and it strips away the human mask I wear for him. My teeth descend, needle-sharp, translucent rows of serrated ivory designed to tear flesh from bone.

I lean down, the predator surfacing completely, and bury my face in the crook of his neck. I hear the blood rushing through his carotid artery, a thundering drumbeat calling to me. I don’t break the skin, not deeply, but I graze him. I scrape my teeth against the sensitive cord of muscle there, a warning, a promise, a brand.

He shudders, a full-body convulsion. His grip on my hips tightens until his fingers dig into my flesh, anchoring me to him.

“Mine,” I growl against his throat, the vibration of the word humming through his skin, resonating in his bones. “You are mine, Jack Ford. You belong to the deep now.”

He arches into me, driving deeper, touching a place inside me that no current has ever reached.

“I am yours,” he confesses, the words tearing from him on a ragged exhale, a surrender. “I’m yours.”

The surrender in his voice breaks me.

I bear down on him, forcing him over the edge. His whole body locks up beneath me, and that sudden tension completely shatters my own control.

Pleasure crashes through me. My bioluminescence flares blindingly bright with a brilliant, white-hot violet that illuminates the heat radiating from our bodies. I throw my head back with a sharp cry, casting jagged, monstrous shadows against the walls as the storm rages outside.

Jack follows me a second later, shouting my name, his body convulsing as he pours himself into me.

We stay like that for a long time, tangled in the aftermath.

The water in the tub is cooling, turning tepid, the glowing indigo fading to a dull blue, but neither of us move. I’m slumped forward against his chest, my face buried in the ruin of his shirt, listening to the slowing rhythm of his heart. His arms are wrapped around me, holding me fast, as if he expects the tide to try to drag me away if he lets go.

Outside, the back half of the cyclone hammers the house. The walls shake. The rain lashes the windows like gravel, seeking entry. But in the small, flooded bathroom, with the scent of deep ocean salt heavy in the air, there is only the sound of our breathing, syncing slowly in the dark.

We are an island.

We are the eye of the storm.

And we are alive.

CHAPTER 10

Nerida

The storm outside has not abated, but inside the bedroom, the air is heavy with a different kind of pressure.

We have moved from the flooded ruin of the bathroom to the bed, a raft of dry linen in a house that feels increasingly like a ship taking on water. Jack is asleep. He lies on his stomach, one arm thrown carelessly over the side of the mattress, his face turned toward me. In the dim light filtering through the rain-lashed window, he looks impossibly fragile. His skin is soft, unarmored, lacking the protective scales or the dense muscle fibers that knit my body together. He’s warm, radiating a heat that I can taste on my tongue, a furnace of mammalian life that fascinates and terrifies me.

Humans sleep; my kind merely drifts. We power down part of our consciousness to let the tide take over, leaving the rest anchored in the dark, always watching for the shadow of a shark or the sudden flicker of a squid.