Chapter Forty
KING stood there alone, for some time after Aiden and Morgan left to go down to the beach and ogle the mermaids, and he wondered how long he could keep the construction on the castle going so as to keep Harmony around.
If construction stayed on target, he’d lose her.
If it took too long, he’d lose his buyer.
If he sold the place, he’d break his daughter’s heart.
He closed the window and latched the shutters. If the mermaids were witches, real witches, and if they did get Gussie the hell out, Harmony would have no more reason to stay. Talk about a case of good news/bad news.
Ten minutes later, like perverts fresh out of peep school, King and his friends sat in the sand beside the girls’ lace robes and watched like drooling goobers as the sexpots frolicked in the water.
“They do look like mermaids,” Aiden said.
Morgan laughed. “Aiden, you got a little drool on your shirt.”
“Come on in,” Storm called.
Aiden cupped his hand around his mouth. “What?”
“Join us . . . in the water.”
Aiden shot to his feet.
King threw a handful of sand at his horn-dog ass. “Hey, Rover, try not to sit up and beg.”
Morgan grabbed Aiden’s shirttail. “You’re not gonna let them see how eager you are.”
“The hell I’m not.” Aiden slipped off his shirt, ran and dove in, pants and all.
Storm screamed when he came up beside her and pushed her under; then she shot out of the water and returned the compliment. They swam away from the pack, around an outcropping of rocks to the left, and into a world of their own.
“I always admired Aiden’s up-for-anything-attitude,” King said.
“I admire it so much, I’m going in, too.” Morgan walked into the water, removing his shirt and tossing it toward shore, but it drifted out to sea.
King chuckled.
Morgan gravitated toward Destiny, despite his dumb-as-a-rock fear, and the two of them treaded water as they talked and left Harmony to her own devices.
King felt like a loser until she swam his way. Maybe she’d walk out of the receding sea like a nymph, lure him to the tower, and ravage him. A pretty scary thought when you figure where the toy room and parlor car got them.
Harmony stood in the water, her perfect body glistening from the sea, her sun-kissed hair riding her shoulders and partially covering one breast. One. The other, a testament to perfection, with its wide, dark aureoles, became the focus of his heated attention.
With his blood running south and his heart in his dry mouth, King stood and shed every stitch while she watched. He used his cane to walk into the water, and when he got deep enough to swim, he threw the cane to the sand with a better pitch than Morgan. He wouldn’t need it later. Harmony would help him walk back to the beach.
As he swam toward her, she backed away, leading him like a siren toward the right and away from Destiny and Morgan.
When he got close enough to touch her, his mermaid dove into the water and disappeared.
Like a goddess, she rose to stand beside kissing rock, of all places, waiting for him until she disappeared behind it.
The space between kissing rock and the next outgrowth formed a small entry into an area that had always reminded him of a private lagoon. There he found Harmony floating toward the mouth of the magick water cave—or so he’d dubbed it as a kid—a seductive mermaid awaiting, no, inviting ravishment. Or was she waiting to lure him to some dark, underwater doom?
She tossed back her hair, revealing her glistening breasts, her nipples pebbled with dew and arousal. The salacious sea licked at the triangle of blonde curls between her legs, washing away the sand as if preparing her for his invasion, while she looked as if she felt every pleasurable sea stroke.
Harmony—the goddess of magick who’d invaded his life and invited him with sultry looks to invade her body.
When he reached her, King hovered over her, his legs floating while he held himself over her, skimming her with his body, her hair making slick waves in the wet sand beneath her head. His ready rod probed at her flowering center.
The sun warming his back, his heart beating like a drum, he slipped into her hot, slick core. She arched to pull him deeper, and he buried himself to the hilt.
He stopped to appreciate the amazing experience of her pulsing around him, milking him with her greedy muscles, a feminine magick he’d never experienced or never took the time to notice and savor until Harmony.
Every pulse of her womb shot darts of pleasure to every remote region of his body, even his heart. At the insight, King nearly pulled out, but he couldn’t tear himself away. Couldn’t bear the shock of separation.
Again she arched, their eyes meeting, her look pleading. And after he pulled back, almost, almost all the way, he buried himself again, deep and hard, and she smiled, closed her eyes, and sighed.
He tried to make peace with the degree of heightened sexual energy this woman provoked, his every nerve ending scraped raw, but she wrapped her legs around him and claimed him, and there was no more thinking for him. Then she clawed her fingernails down his back, branding him, enlarging his rod, expanding his capacity for pleasure and his awareness of the woman who inspired it.
Sex for sport no longer seemed enough.
The hellcat drew in her claws and cupped his balls, easy—praise be—but unmerciful in her frenzy to give and receive pleasure. When she stroked him deep at his root, she made him thicker and heavier, but he stubbornly clung to rising pleasure.
She bit his nipple, and he snapped.
Unable to stay the course, he rode her mercilessly, while she wanted harder, deeper, faster. She said she wanted pleasure to lift them from the sea and carry them so close to the sun they’d burn . . . and, by God, it did!
He buried his shout in their kiss and swallowed hers whole.
A series of tiny tremors, small waves of ecstasy, remnants of quiet rapture and unquiet satisfaction, stayed with him as King lay entwined with his mermaid, the water lapping lower along their torsos, causing a pleasant stir against his sensitive nerve endings. He rinsed her mound with seawater, and dusted the sand from his hands before he found her center, stroked her, and raised her up again, and when she took his comatose rod in her hand, and rinsed him of sand as well, he rose like Lazarus from the dead, and they did the dance again.
Nothing slow, just a mind-shattering bliss that came and went as fast as a jet through the sky. A minute later, she fell back to catch her breath. “That was some itch, Paxton, or was it an urge?”
“More than that,” he admitted, against his better judgment.
“Ah, well, good sex then, if a bit sandy now and again.”
“A notch better than sex, I think.”
Harmony raised her head. “Not lust? It couldn’t have been lust. That’s rather intimate. Scary intimate,” she added. “Your words.”
“I might have a problem,” he said.
She rolled to her side to face him and give him her full attention, eyes bright, her head in her hand. “Do tell.”
“I think it might’ve been passion.”
“Whoa. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you feel a partner-focused short-term-commitment type passion . . . for me?”
“Well, I don’t feel it for your sisters, and you are three peas from the same pod—”
“Technically no. We’re not. See the first pod split, and I grew in one half. Then the other half split, but didn’t separate, so Des and Storm grew in the other half.”
That would explain why I’m not attracted to them,” King said. “They are different. Maybe it was just an itch.”
Harmony rose like a furious sea nymph and kicked wet sand in his face! “Thickheaded dumb-ass jerk! Scratch your own itch from now on!”