Chapter 1
Iwas in the vegetable aisle of Lynwick’s poky little Co-op supermarket, disregarding the lying Ripe and Ready! stickers on the avocados and testing them one by one, when I felt him return that year.
Dave.
He was back.
I dropped the avocados I’d been squeezing, left the half-filled basket in the middle of the aisle, and bolted.
My Toyota Hilux was parked in the tiny carpark at the back of the shop, and driving would be much quicker than running.
I beeped the car open while I was still on the move, threw myself into the driver’s seat, and fifteen minutes later—I’d got caught up in traffic on the high street—I made it to my small private beach.
I dumped the Hilux at the side of the narrow, rutted access road, and went slip-sliding down the dunes and onto the loose and shifting sand.
I fell to my knees, scrambled up, and kept on running.
It got easier the closer I got to the water, where the receding tide had left the sand wet and firmly packed, strewn with mats of cast-up seaweed.
The tide was still on the way out. It would be a while before it turned.
Stopping at the very edge of the glittering sea, I shaded my eyes from the harsh sunlight and scanned the horizon, watching for Dave’s usual showy leap.
Rain was coming.
Thick, sullen clouds massed in the hazy distance and would turn the lovely spring day into a complete washout the moment they hit land. For now, though, it was bright enough to make me squint as the waves tossed out dazzling shards of light.
The wind picked up and I shivered in the thin grey hoodie that was all I wore other than a t-shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts.
I hadn’t bothered to grab my coat from the back of the car, not wanting to wait even as long as it took to lean over to the back seat and snag it.
I’d been halfway out the door before I’d even put the handbrake on.
In his merman form, Dave could move astoundingly, terrifyingly fast. He made a mako shark look like a lumbering walrus.
I had no way of knowing how far out he was when I’d felt that first deep, unmistakable pulse of his returned presence, when that strange something deep inside me woke up and reached for him.
For all I knew, while I was juggling avocados in the Co-op, he’d been in the middle of the North Sea. He could be miles away yet.
Or perhaps even further.
I paced up and down the water’s edge. There was no sign of him. I sensed him coming, but it was still very faint.
I must be getting better at it, I thought as I watched, smiling and all but bouncing on my toes with impatience.
It didn’t cross my mind that there could be another reason for our connection to be faint.
Why would it?
I knew exactly how the next six months would go, because it always went this way. It was us.
In the autumn, Dave left me and returned to the sea. In the spring, he came back. I ran down to meet him at the beach, he appeared from the waves like a sea god of ancient myth, and we spent the next week straight in bed. On the floor. In the garden.
Everywhere.
It was glorious.
It was—
A sleek, dark head broke the surface of the choppy sea about a hundred feet out. I must have been looking the wrong way when he leapt, and missed it.
“Dave!”
He ducked beneath the waves and re-emerged waist-deep in the surf.
The delighted grin dropped clean off my face and I stared at him for a long, stunned minute.
Shit.
Shit.
“Dave!” I hurled myself at him. “What happened?”
I was pretty good in the water. I should be. I spent damn near six months of every year splashing around in it with my merman lover. In my desperation to reach him, however, all grace and coordination went right out the window. I tripped and fell, thrashed up to my feet, and flailed on.
Dave huffed a small laugh as he moved to meet me. It was a shadow of his usual obnoxious, seal-like bark, and he immediately winced and sucked in a sharp breath.
I stopped in front of him, hands held out just short of making contact. I wanted to grab him and hold on, but I couldn’t see where to do it that wouldn’t hurt. “Oh my god. Dave. What happened? What did this to you?”
His muscular torso was criss-crossed with ugly, open gashes. The edges of the wounds were jagged, as if something had…had ripped into him. They were sluggishly bleeding.
That wasn’t even the worst of it. Huge, oddly circular bruises the size of dinner plates went from one side of his waist, tracking up and over his chest to the opposite shoulder. The spacing of them was chillingly regular.
He caught my hovering hands in his and gripped tightly, pulling me closer.
“No!” I yelped, digging my heels in and resisting. “Don’t. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He bared his teeth and growled at me, continuing to exert pressure. The silvery gills that ran along the lines of his ribs fluttered as he gasped, then growled again.
I stopped resisting. “All right, all right,” I said. “Easy. We’re okay.”
We were not even a little bit okay.
Dave drew me in, stopping when there was a scant inch of space between our bodies. He curved his big shoulders and lowered his head, looking me over before he took my face between gentle hands, pulled me up onto my toes, and laid his lips softly on mine.
Oh.
Every time he came back to me, there it was. Right there: a dark, deep throb at my very core that rippled out through my blood and sang down every nerve. A realignment, a fundamental shift of my being. A click, a snap, a righting of my world.
It had never been like this, though.
Usually, he hauled me into his arms, wrangled me about, knocked the laughing breath out of me, rolled me under the waves, and then ran me up to the house to make love to me until I passed out.
Our reunion had never been slow and cautious. I’d never felt that realignment so clearly.
So deeply.
Dave made a soft noise into my mouth, that siren song of his.
Even this was different.
It wasn’t a teasing, bold, erotic pulse of sound to set me shivering and make me desperate.
It was a gentle sigh of homecoming.
And it was followed up with a pained, apologetic little grunt as his hands fell away, his mouth slid from mine, and he slipped beneath the waves.
“Morning, Joe,” Jerry said cheerfully when the arsehole finally called me back. “And may I say, it is a particularly fine Tues—”
“Where the hell have you been!”
“What—”
“I have been calling you.”
“All right,” he said cautiously. “I know that, I saw the notific—”
“For two hours, Jerry!”
“All right now, stop screaming at me, and I—”
“I am not screaming, I just need your fucking help if that’s not too much to fucking ask.”
“Wow, Joe. Calm your tits.”
I panted for breath. “He’s hurt, and I don’t…I don’t know what to do, okay? I need you. Please help me to help him, I don’t… Oh god, Jerry. He’s hurt. He’s really, really hurt.”
Jerry’s voice sharpened. “I’m coming. Where are you? Have you called an ambulance? Who’s hurt? You didn’t get in a car accident, did you? I told you a Toyota isn’t as good as a Land Ro—”
“It’s Dave.”
“He’s back?” I heard a car door bang, an engine start, and then an annoying bing-bing-bing sound. “Seatbelt, seatbelt,” Jerry muttered. “Okay, I’m on my way. Where are you? At the house?”
“Beach,” I said, scrubbing at my eyes. “I can’t get him to the house. Not on my own. It took me this long to get him out of the water.”
It had been almost impossible to tow Dave’s incredible weight those last few feet through the waves and onto the shore. He didn’t float. He sank to the bottom and lay there like a rock.
In the end, I’d taken a deep breath and dropped to my knees under the water. I’d remembered the phone in my hoodie pocket at the last moment and turned to wing it up the beach. I didn’t see where it landed, as I was already ducking under the waves.
Dave had come to rest on his back with his head pointing more or less landward.
I shifted off my knees and into an awkward crouch, wedging my hands under his arms. I dragged him up the shallow slope in fits and starts, pausing twice to break the surface for air.
Even when my head was above the waves, I struggled to breathe.
The water was as agitated as I was. It churned and heaved around us, constantly dashing spray into my face.
Almost as if it didn’t want to let Dave go.
Well, it had had him for the last six months. It was my turn now, and so I yelled at it as I wrestled his lax body through the surf.
I never did manage to get him all the way out and onto the sand. I got him as far as I could, dashed over to where my phone had landed in a wet clot of seaweed, and had been calling Jerry ever since.
Thank god he’d called back.
“You two hang tight. I’ll be there as quick as I can,” Jerry said, and disconnected.
“Hold on, Dave,” I said, for the hundredth time. “Jerry’s coming. We’ll get you home. You’ll be safe. I’ll keep you safe.”
The water lapped uneasily around us.
“Hold on for me.”