Page 30 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

“I can walk.” But her words are slurred.

I shift her higher against my chest.

"I want to carry you. Let me."

Something in her expression softens. She puts her arm around my neck.

I carry her across the meadow, through the door, past the cold hearth, and lay her in the nest of wool on the iron bed.

The light through the deep-set window is thick and gold as syrup. Her hair is drying in spirals in every direction.

I pull the blankets to her chin and allow myself one kiss on her forehead.

I'm straightening up when her hand comes out of the wool and catches my sleeve.

"Hey."

Her eyes are closed shut but her grip is strong. She tugs my sleeve once, toward the bed.

"There's room for two."

She fits herself back against my chest, cold feet claiming my shins without apology, my arm gathered up in both her hands and tucked tight against her sternum.

Between one breath and the next she's gone, all the way under, in the syrup light.

I won't sleep for a while.

I don't mind.

Outside, the tide is coming back in. In a few hours we'll wake up hungry on a rock nobody's searching, with one net to mend and a hundred problems, and I'll care about every one of them then.

Right now she's warm and heavy against me and breathing slow.

Chapter 13

Neri

I wake up in a bed the size of a generous bathtub, wearing a large warm astronomer instead of a blanket, and for once my brain doesn’t start the morning meeting.

No agenda. No slides. Just the syrup-thick light through the deep window, the weight of his arm over my ribs, and his breath slow against the back of my neck. His stubble grazes my shoulder when he stirs. The tide is going somewhere below the meadow, unhurried. Everything smells like woodsmoke and salt. And him.

He surfaces slowly, and his arm tightens around my body.

“You’re here. Good.” His voice arrives against my ear, sanded soft with sleep. “I was scared the whole thing was an extremely detailed dream.”

“The dream would have a bigger bed.”

“The dream,” he says, his lips brushing the back of my shoulder before finding the seam of my gills, “would not improve on one single thing in this one.”

His mouth closes gently over the seam beneath my ear.

My breath catches.

The reaction is immediate, the same helpless bolt of pleasure I experienced on the beach. It’s like my entire body wakes up beneath a single one of his touches.

“Rafe.”

“Mm.”