Sleeping with the Fishes (9 page)

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.

"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.

"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.