For example, the tourists and what they’d think if the sharks turned on, say, the eels at exactly the wrong moment. Like the guy she could see through the window. He’d probably freak out at a feeding frenzy. Or maybe he’d get off on it; you never could tell. A bigger problem was that the guy was here wicked late—the place had closed a couple hours ago. Did they even have security guards in this place anymore?
And what was he doing? Leaning on one of the fifty-two windows and staring at her. Like there weren’t 650 other fish in the tank to glare at. No, he had to gawk at her. When were the tourists going back to wherever the hell they spawned? Wasn’t it autumn already?
Well? Wasn’t it?
She irritably tossed another smelt and glowered at the dark-haired gawker, then realized with something like relief that it wasn’t a tourist, it was Thomas Pearson. Hmm, another geek with no life; he’d fit right in at NEA. Why else would he come back to the aquarium in the wee hours of a Friday night?
And he was looking right at her. Guess he was giving the toxins a rest. Was that flattering or annoying?
You have a tail right now.
She had a tail right now. She’d been so distracted from Artur’s top tank pawing that she’d completely—
Their eyes met across a crowded tank of fish. Thomas’s face was actually squashed up against the glass, “the better to see you with, my dear.” His hands were plastered flat. His breath fogged the pane.
Then he vanished.
She dropped the smelt, put her arms over her head, and with a powerful flick of her tail shot to the top of the tank. She thought, Right this minute he’s sprinting up the stairs. That’s three flights he’s got to go up. I can—
What? Haul her big white butt out of the tank, dry off, get into her clothes, and pretend it was some other green-haired mermaid in the NEA tank?
She grabbed the edge of the tank and flicked her tail, just as Thomas galloped into the observation room. He was breathing hard and his dark hair had tumbled into his eyes. He jerked his bangs back and clutched his collar, actually yanked at it until the top button flew off and exposed his throat. He gulped air and she thought, Good thing he wasn’t wearing a tie or he might have been strangled.
He pointed at her, his big dark eyes practically bulging from his head. “I knew it!” he practically screamed. “I knew you weren’t like all the others!”
“Dr. Pearson,” she began, but trailed off in mystification as he ran to her, lost his balance, actually slid on his knees until he was leaning against the top of the tank, and then he leaned over and kissed her spang on the mouth.
Okay. I guess it’s just going to be that kind of a day. The kind where men I’ve just met have this odd illness where they can’t keep their hands off me.
“Dr. Pearson,” she tried again, but “ffgggrrrll” is what came out, since he was still kissing her. And she was kissing him back, holding onto his shirt so she wouldn’t drop the rest of the way back into the tank. His lips were warm, almost hot, they were burning her, he was scorching her with his kisses, and she wasn’t minding. No, she wasn’t minding at all.
His hands on her shoulders were equally hot, making her think about rolling around under the sheets with him on a cold winter day, when the only way to stay warm was to snuggle with the guy in the bed with—
Weirdly, he was gone. Like he had teleported. Or been grabbed from behind and hauled away from her. But Pearson was a big guy. Who’d be strong enough to—
“Artur, don’t!”
She almost covered her eyes; it was going to be too awful. Pearson, looking astonished. Artur, red eyes slits of rage. Pearson, looking not exactly happy himself. She opened her mouth to yell—what? She had no idea.
Then Thomas whipped an elbow back, catching Artur in the throat. This loosened the giant redhead’s grip long enough for Fred to realize that Pearson was going to—yep, she knew that move from watching Jonas’s self-defense tournaments. Thomas grabbed Artur’s left arm and threw the guy over his shoulder, right into Main One.
Artur hit with a spectacular splash, wriggled around beneath the surface for a moment, and then popped up beside Fred, his shorts whirling toward the bottom of the tank, momentarily covering a sea turtle. Artur’s tail was easily seen in the water—more easily, in fact, than Fred’s had been.
Thomas gaped down at them. They stared up.
“Okay,” Thomas said after a long moment. “I’m gonna need a minute, here.” And he sat down on the deck, propped his exhausted chin in his hands, and just gawked at them both.
Chapter Sixteen
“Until you came along, nobody but Jonas knew my secret,” Fred bitched.
“Do not keep your rightful self hidden.”
“Who’s to say legs aren’t my rightful self? I’m just as much a human as I am a mermaid.”
“Undersea Folk.”
“Don’t correct me! If I want to call myself a Havmand there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”
“Havmand?”
“Scandinavian mermaid,” Thomas called, still staring at them like a kid getting his Saturday morning cartoon fix.
“Right. Or a—wait.” She focused on Thomas who, she was relieved to see, no longer looked like he was going to stroke out. “Oh, don’t tell me.”
He shrugged. “I’m afraid so.”
“What?” Artur asked sharply.
“Mermaid geek,” Fred sighed. There were, she had noticed as a grad student, three types who went for the doctorate in marine biology: women who lurrrved dolphins as little girls (see: Madison, the annoying), men and women who wanted to come up with the newest bioactive drug and make big bucks working at a pharmaceutical company (see: the greedy), and men who fantasized about mermaids. Thomas, it appeared, had no interest in pharmacology or dolphins.
“I am not surprised at all,” Thomas was saying. “That’s what’s so surprising.”
“Sure. You staggered around looking like an M.I. about to happen because you were unsurprised.”
“M.I.?” Artur asked.
“Heart attack.”
“Okay, I was taken off guard for a few moments. But I’ve since recovered,” he insisted, still pale. “Because I’ve had this theory since I was eight—”
“Yeah. Well. Theory realized.”
He crept closer. “So, obviously you’re more the Daryl Hannah-type mermaid than the Hans Christian Andersen-type—”
“That’s enough of that,” she said, nicely enough.
“Is this the biped you wished me to meet?”
“Huh? Oh. Prince Artur, this is Dr. Thomas Pearson. Thomas, this is Artur, High Prince of the Black Sea.”
Thomas had scooted all the way up to the edge of the tank as she talked, and now stuck his arm out. Artur leaned up, balancing on his tail like a dolphin, and they shook hands. Thomas nearly fell in while trying not to make it obvious he was still staring at them. “Nice to meet you. Sorry about kicking your ass right into the tank like that. You sort of surprised me.”
“Indeed,” Artur said dryly. “I, also, was surprised to see your mouth on one of my subjects.”
. “I’m not one of your subjects. I mean it, Artur, cut that shit out right now. I was born in Quincy, for God’s sake. I have American citizenship, okay?”
“Dual citizenship, it looks to me,” Thomas said, ogling her tail.
“You are not helping.”
“You may not put your mouth on her without my—ow.”
“I’m trying not to stare but you guys keep giving me new things to look at. That punch, for example. Didn’t it hurt like hell?”
“It did,” Artur said, gingerly pressing the flesh below his eye.
“We have enough shit to worry about without this weird possessive streak of yours. If I want all twelve Boston Celtics to put their mouths on me, that’s my business and not yours.”
“Yeah,” Thomas added.
“And you.”
He leaned away from the tank. “If my theories on differences
in strength evolution between bipeds and mermaids are true, I really don’t want you to slug me.”
“You’re not helping, either. Both of you, quit with the groping and the kissing.” She had never, in her life, had to say such a thing. And she never, in her life, could have imagined the circumstances in which she was saying it.
“Then there is little for me to do,” Artur teased.
“No, there’s a lot. Artur noticed your little toxin problem,” she said to Thomas. “I thought you guys could work together.”
“Ummmm,” Thomas said, eyeing Artur. “That’s pretty interesting. I’s’pose you guys would notice that stuff way before we did. What, you live around here?”
“No, I live on the other side of the planet. Some of our folk were in the area and reported what they sensed. When word reached my father the High King, he set me this task.”
“So the royal palace or coral reef or whatever is in the Black Sea?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why word took so long to—”
“There are only a million of us on the planet.”
“Oh. Ah. Hmm. And with the planet being mostly water—”
“Exactly.”
Exactly indeed. It explained why Fred had never bumped into another of her kind, though at one point she’d swum along the entire eastern sea shore. Telepathy, she supposed, could only reach so far.
“Then how—”
“You know, I just did this with Jonas not half an hour ago,” Fred broke in. “You two run along and get acquainted.”
They both frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”
“The question of my lodging has not yet been settled.”
“Yeah, but now you have someone new to settle it with.”
They frowned at each other, then turned their sour expressions back on her. She elaborated. “Uh… you guys team up, like Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Or Owen Wilson and everybody. Solve the case. And I’ll—” Get back to my life, was her thought. Her nice, boring, controlled, uncomplicated life.
Why didn’t it feel as appealing as it had this morning?
“But you have to help us,” Thomas said at the exact same moment Artur commanded, “It ill becomes you to set aside your duty.”
“Aw, no… not both of you at once…”
Thus followed a lecture, from both of them at once, about the sanctity of the seas and her duty as a scientist as well as a mermaid and how three heads were better than two and how her duty was to her prince and her career, yak-yak, until finally she was almost shouting, “All right, all right, I’ll help, just cut it out!”
Thomas sat back and smiled. “Alrighty then.”
Artur was also smiling, which wiped Thomas’s smile away. “Yes, well said.”
“So it’s settled.”
“Indeed; and well said.”
Fred briefly toyed with the idea of leaping into the harbor, striking out for the horizon, and never looking back, not once.
Chapter Seventeen
“So here it is,” Thomas announced, zipping his key card through the slot and throwing open the door to the Presidential Suite. “It’s not home, but it’s much. I stole that,” he added cheerfully, “from Olivia Goldsmith, God rest her lipo’d soul.”
Fred, raised by far-from-poor parents, and Artur, son of royalty, were both impressed, and said so.
Thomas shrugged. “Well, like I said my first day… You remember,” he said to Fred. “I write romance novels.”
“Of course I remember. It was—” She looked at her watch. “The day before yesterday.”
“Right. Has it really only been two days?”
“Tell me about it,” she muttered.
“Well, when I’m running around doing this stuff, I try to pay for my own lodging. It’s not much to me, but sometimes it helps them. You know how the water programs…”
Fred nodded. At Artur’s puzzled look, she elaborated. “A lot of the programs for water fellows got their government funding slashed. Or don’t have much to begin with. Not just the water fellow programs, either. Just about every aquarium in the country depends on private contributions.”
Artur’s mouth thinned. “I was not aware, but I am not surprised.” In unison, they said, “Bipeds.”
“Now cut that out,” Thomas said, tossing his key card on the eight-foot-long mahogany dining room table. “We’re not all like that. I’m the one who came out here to try to fix the toxin problem, remember?”
“Congratulations,” Artur said silkily, wandering around the suite. “One out of a thousand bipeds maintains awareness that the planet is not yours to ruin.”
Fred snorted and Thomas said, “Now you’re just being mean. Uh, the other bedroom is back there, on your left. There’s another bathroom back there, too.” As Artur disappeared from sight, Thomas beckoned.
Curious, Fred walked over to him. He put his warm hands on her shoulders, leaned down and whispered, “There’s plenty of room for you, too.”
She grabbed his hands, ignored his yelp of pain, and wrenched them, off of her body. “Tempting, but no.”
“Ow ow ow. I meant the couches are all fold outs.”
“Oh, that’s even more tempting. Sleeping on a bar while you two save the world, refreshed from sleeping on queen mattresses.”
“King. And hey, I didn’t want to team up with Aquaman,” he growled. “That was your idea.” Then added hastily, “Not that I mind. I’ve got about a thousand questions for him. Think he’d let me run an MRI on him?”
“I doubt it. But go ahead and ask.” Out of sorts, and not really sure if she should stay or leave (and even more out of sorts that she was wondering… usually if she had to leave, she left, and didn’t waste a second wondering about it, either), Fred wandered around the suite.
Gold brocade couches, ankle-deep carpet, dark wood everywhere, three phones that she could see, a bar, a plasma screen, four tables and a fireplace… and that was just the sitting room! She could just imagine the master bedroom.
“Little Rika,” Artur called. “Come!”
Thomas sniggered. “You know, I just have to wait him out a day or two and—”
“And what?”
“Never mind.”
With a warning glare over her shoulder, Fred stomped into the back. The only reason I’m going is to show the other one that—what? I better think about this for a minute…
“Do not call me like a dog,” she began, pushing open the bathroom door. “And…” She fell silent. Artur, spectacularly nude (maybe there was something to her mom’s “nudity is natural and beautiful” mantra), was standing, hands on his hips, in front of a double head shower in a bathroom that looked slightly more complicated than the cockpit of Air Force One.
She prayed he knew how the toilet worked.
“I see the problem. Okay, you just turn this one here, and turn this one here…” She leaned in, felt his arms slip around her waist, sighed, adjusted the water level, grabbed the shower head, and squirted it at his head.
“Aaggghhkk! Very well, Little Rika, I will desist.” He groped blindly and she handed him a towel. While he blotted, he added, “For now.”
“Right. Well, you’re all set up for a while. In fact, it was awfully nice of Thomas to let you stay in his suite—”
“I am aware of my responsibility to my host,” he sulked. “I cannot help it if I preferred a different host.”
“Great. Work on helping it. I’m going.”
“Going?” Artur looked (and sounded) alarmed. “But there is sufficient room for you to stay.”
“Yeah, finding a place to sleep isn’t the problem.”
“Then what is?”
She gave him a look.
He smiled. “Ah. That.”
“Yeah. That. And so I bid you fond farewell, sweet prince.”
“The words seem correct,” he said suspiciously, “but the tone—”
“Can’t put one over on you, handsome.”
She turned and walked out,
ignoring his hollered, “So you do find me pleasing to the eye?”
Meanwhile, Thomas had emptied his pockets. She suppressed a smile; he carried around more junk than a little kid. Cell phone, spare change (from several countries), money clip, string (string?), earring (?), broken pencil, and T-pass. The debris was scattered all along a table she suspected was brought over on the Niña. He was jabbing at his cell phone but looked up when she walked in.
“Taking off?”
“Yes.”
“Already?”
“Finally.”
“I’ll walk you to the door.”
“The door’s six feet away. I can find it.”
“Now, what kind of a host would I be?” He hurried to her side. “Uh-oh.”
“Name of all the gods, now what?”
“Check it out.” He held something yellow over her head. “Mistletoe!” he said brightly, leaning in for a kiss. He caught her on the bottom of her chin, since she was looking up.
“That,” she informed him, “is a leaf from a maple tree.”
“It is?” the scientist asked. He yelped and leapt out of the way as she jerked the door open. “Aw, don’t leave already. It’s early. Hey, Artur! She’s jamming!”
“I am aware,” the prince’s voice drifted out.
“See you tomorrow,” Fred said and thought, to her credit, that she deserved full points for saying it without groaning.
Chapter Eighteen
Jonas got to the NEA just in time to hear Artur’s roar.
“I detest this puttering about! I insist on action at once!”
Whoa. Jonas practically scampered over to the jellies exhibit, where Fred had promised the three of them would be when the NEA opened the next morning. He waved his pass at the elderly woman staffing the cash register and ran past the penguins, his nostrils flaring at the fish-poop smell he knew he wouldn’t even notice five minutes from now.
Before he could triangulate their position from Artur’s scream, he was waylaid by a little blonde cutie waving a schedule of events at him.