Making Waves (Mythological Lovers) (11 page)

“I can’t wait to see his face when we sit down. He’s always doing things for me lately, and it’s so nice to do something for him in return for once,” I gushed as the three of us gravitated to the door.

Pam smiled at me. “You found a good one.”

“Anyway. See you tomorrow, chica. Tell Dante we said hi,” Julia said.

“Shit. I forgot my keys on my desk.”

“Should we wait for you?” Julia asked. They lingered in the open doorway.

“Nah. I’m just gonna dart home to change anyway. Bye guys.”

I sprinted back to my office and yanked the keys off the desk. On my way out, I encountered Doctor Castlebury. He held a clipboard in one hand. The other hung limply at his side, a casualty of a shark bite in his youth.

How does that man wear a turtleneck in this weather? Hasn’t anyone told him he’s on a tropical island?
I wondered. Despite his ridiculous appearance, I forced a smile to my face and waved in passing. “Have a good evening, Victor.”

“And where do you think you are going?”

I paused at the exit. He gazed at me with such earnest and questioning in his face, I wondered if something remained overlooked.

“Did you unload the shipment?”

“Shipment?”

“Was I not clear?” Doctor Castlebury aimed a thin smile at me. “We’ve received over five hundred kilograms of uncured live rock requiring your attention.”

My hand dropped from the door knob. “From where?” My voice raised, cracking as I whirled to face him.

“We received a rather charitable contribution.”

Castlebury approached to offer a clipboard displaying an inventory of our recent arrivals. My eyes nearly bulged when I read the rest. An aquarium on the mainland had gone out of business, sending several hundred pounds of rock and a few dozen delicate sea creatures to us.

“Bubble anemone? Lionfish?”

“Oh, yes. They arrived as well today. It was a rather large shipment of animals. Such a shame the aquarium is no longer in business.”

“The time stamp on this list says you received it at noon, Victor. Noon!”

“It slipped my mind. Certainly you understand.” His smile made him look like a shark. “At any rate, I expect this to be done prior to your exit from the complex this evening. Good day.”

“This isn’t fair! Victor, it’s the end of the day. I can’t do this.”

“Leave it until morning then if it troubles you so deeply. The animals will simply remain in their shipment bags until your arrival.”

My eyes skimmed the list and read the names of many exotic creatures, some hardy and others too delicate to be risked overnight. I swallowed and remained quiet, shaking with rage. He’d done this on purpose. He’d risked all of these animals to teach me a lesson.

A single telephone call to Teo would have fixed Castlebury — but I didn’t want to abuse my friendship with the dragon. We typically reserved Teo for when a situation reached critical mass. Missing a date with Dante fell shy of reaching nuclear event status, but just slightly in this case. I had plans to sweep him away to a stupidly expensive reservation I’d never manage to pull off again at the most lavish seaside grill on Teo’s island.

This is going to take hours.
My eyes burned as I stared down at the intimidating list.

I worked hard and fast to initiate the time-consuming acclimation process for the most fragile new specimens. I was up to my elbows in saline water when Pam phoned me.

“Girl, where are you? I’m at your house with the shoes you wanted to borrow. Dante said you never came home.”

“Shit! I forgot to...” I sighed. With less than two hours before our dinner date, my chances of completing my impossible set of tasks had vanished.

“Forgot to what?”

A minute later, I’d given Pam the rundown on everything, and broken down into tears.

“That fucker. Girl, we’ll be right there. We’ll just clock back in to help you.”

I sniveled into the line and fumbled to tear a few Kleenex from a box on my desk. “I can’t let you do that, Pammie. You guys are done for the d—”

“See you soon.” The call ended.

Twenty minutes later when the doors opened, I hadn’t stopped sobbing into my tissues. I was so pissed, so irrationally and impossibly angry that the tears wouldn’t end.

“I told you guys, I can do this on my own.”

The scent of the open sea surrounded me with a pair of strong arms. I peeked up into Dante’s blue eyes. Pam and Julia stood behind him in the doorway, smiling at me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Pam told me what happened, so I came to help, too. I don’t know anything about the scientific side of ocean life, but if you instruct me, I’ll do it.”

With direction, Dante wasn’t a bad worker. I tried to offer him gloves for handling the live rock, but he waved them off and reached in with his bare hands. I chalked it up to male bravado until he whispered the secret to me: fish toxins and aquatic animal stings didn’t pose a danger to hippocampi. It was part of their magic, in and out of human form.

I let the girls giggle over his badassery and carried on with the tedious water samples on the holding tank. All parameters appeared to be in order, saving me the time I would spend buffering with chemicals.

“Aren’t your reservations at eight?” Julia whispered to me. “You have twenty-five minutes to spare.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t dressed for a romantic dine-in. I looked down at my damp shirt and frowned, unable to ignore the fishy scent on my clothes.

“Go. We’ll finish up. Grab Dante and get out of here.”

I shook my head. “I can’t leave you guys here to fix Castlebury’s mistake. He did this to punish me,
remember
?”

“Technically we’re department supervisors and you’re the assistant manager, which means we’re your flunkies to boss at will,” Pam reminded me.

“Whenever Castlebury pulls shit like this, we all have to own it. Not only you. Being his assistant doesn’t make you his bitch,” Julia said.

I snuck a glance at my man. He learned quickly, running another aeration hose into one of our barrels designated for uncured live rock.

“Why am I putting rocks into a barrel?” he asked suddenly. “I don’t mind, but I’m curious.”

“If we didn’t take these steps, sediment and dying flora will pollute our marine environments.”

We giggled at his blank stare, then Julia broke it down into something he could understand. By the time we finished, Dante and I were long overdue for our reservations, our table was gone, and I didn’t feel sexy enough to pull off a last minute appeal for a spot in the restaurant.

So we went home instead. I soaked an hour in my clawfoot tub while Dante fetched dinner from Abuelo’s. We feasted on fish and salsa verde then he painted my toenails neon green as I sprawled lifelessly on the sofa. I kept my feet on his lap when he finished.

Dante idly plucked grapes from a bowl with one hand, while the strong fingers of the other caressed my silky thigh, giving me shivers. At least my leg wax wasn’t wasted. “Why do you look so glum, Alessa?”

“I wanted to have a romantic night with you,” I admitted. “Now I’m too exhausted to even put my mouth on your cock.”

“We
are
having a romantic night,” Dante reminded me with an uncertain grin. “And you can always save your energy for the morning. I won’t mind.”

I leaned forward to swat him. “You’re painfully good at painting toenails, but this was supposed to be a date out as a surprise for
you
. Instead, you’re only doing something else nice for me.”

“Eh,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Making you happy makes me happy. Want some more grapes?”

“All I’m missing is a naked man with a feathered fan.”

Dante chuckled and kissed my brow. “I can always ask Lycus to come up and assist. He’s quite taken with you and upset you’re without a sister.”

“Nope. I’m good, but I do have a cousin. One hottie hippocampus is all I need.”

And one hippocampus was the only one I wanted.

~Alessa~

M
om was due to reach the island on a lazy Sunday afternoon and according to last week’s failed test, I still wasn’t pregnant. I didn’t know what to tell her about Dante yet, and I didn’t plan to give her all of the gritty details. Around noon, I woke up with him beside me, struck by the urge to clean my small home from top to bottom. Again.

I opened all the windows to let in the fresh ocean breeze then tackled the bathroom and living room before my lover sought me out, naked as usual as I preferred.

“Should we be married?” Dante asked. His question came out of the blue, startling me as I scrubbed the stove to prepare for my mother’s arrival and their inevitable introduction.

I arched a brow. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know where your thoughts have gone. Normally when humans live together they’re married, aren’t they?”

“Not everyone.” He eased his body behind me, more affectionate than lusty, and wrapped his arm around my middle. The pressure of his chest to my back warmed me.

“Does it mean something to you?” he asked.

“Well...” I bit my lower lip. “My parents weren’t married when they had me, and that’s okay. When I was a kid, I used to wish things were different. All of my friends had two parents and their dad’s last name.”

“Ours will be a strange family. What will you tell people?”

It was a question I’d been asking myself for a while. “Honestly? I have no idea. Before we... bonded, I thought I’d tell them all we decided it wasn’t working out and we were sharing custody.” I smoothed my fingers over his dark waves, brushing errant strands from his face. “So maybe I’ll tell everyone it’s none of their damned business.”

“Will your mother like me?”

“What’s not to like?”

“Everything,” he said with a grin.

Dante helped me tidy the rest of the house until the counters gleamed and the floors shined. The smell of citrus permeated my secondhand kitchen table, and he moved the sofa so I could vacuum beneath it.

If I didn’t clean house thoroughly, my mother would do it during her vacation, and at my age I was too old for her to tidy behind me.

“Where will I sleep now?”

“At your own place with your grandfather,” I teased.

Dante frowned. “I like sleeping beside you.”

“And I love it when you sleep beside me.” I kissed him then scurried away to pull on a pair of jean shorts beneath my t-shirt. “Okay, I’m gonna go down and pick her up. She and I have plans to eat at the hotel cafe for dinner so why don’t you come by tomorrow for lunch.”

“I have lessons booked all day. The group from Sweden.”

“Oh yeah. They’re coming to my afternoon performance. How about dinner after the show?”

“I’ll be there.”

Despite the big inconvenience of her decision to visit during the summer, my official time with Dante, I was glad to see Mom. I rushed into her arms and hugged her tight the moment I picked her out among the tourists disembarking from the ferry.

“You cut your hair!” Shock failed to sum up my feelings about her shoulder-length bob. Old photos of my mom revealed an incredible similarity in our appearances, as if I’d been taken and cloned directly from her. I had her red hair, my grandmother’s red hair, and my great-grandmother’s red hair — a family trait passed down each generation without fail.

“I wanted a change. Now, let me look at you.” Mom held me out at arm’s length. “You have such a lovely tan this year, but you’re looking slimmer than you used to.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “Too slim.”

“Mom,” I groaned. “Believe me, I’m not starving myself.”

“Are they working you too much?”

Between Castlebury’s demands, the swim show, and my romping with Dante, time had become a valuable commodity. “No, nothing like that. I’m filling in for the mermaid program this season, is all,” I fibbed.

“I thought you didn’t do that anymore.”

“One of the girls had a death in the family so she took an extended leave of absence. The owner of the resort personally asked me, begged me really, to take her slot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” My mom frowned at the news.

“Yeah, she’s missed. So I’ve been getting extra exercise.”

Mom sniffed. “Well, you’re beautiful the way you are.”

During the ferry ride to the resort we chatted about her recent promotion, gossiped over scandalous relatives, and eventually reached my house where Mom was eager to relax after a long flight. While she cozied on the couch, I fetched cold glasses of pineapple juice. When I turned, I saw her inspecting a bold, tropical print fabric beside her head. The kind of colors only Dante could pull off.

Shit!
One of Dante’s shirts, much too large for me to reasonably wear, hung over the back of the sofa in plain view of my mother. She plucked it up before I could hurry over to stuff it behind a loveseat pillow.

“This doesn’t belong to you.” Mom turned her gray eyes to me. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Whelp. Cat’s outta the bag now,
I thought. “I do and you’ll be meeting him at dinner tomorrow. He’s busy with his grandfather this evening.”

“You never said anything. Does that mean it’s not serious or... it
is
serious?”

“You did just find his shirt. In my house. So...”

“Well, sit, spill it. What’s the boy’s name?”

“Dante.”

Mom’s eyes grew large. I giggled and tucked my chin, nodding. “Well. I’ll finally get to meet this elusive Dante.”

“Is that why you decided to pop up over during the summer this time?”

“Maybe,” Mom said mysteriously. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled and faint laugh lines creased her freckled face. I wanted to age as gracefully as her. “You always talk about him. So is this a recent thing?”

“Yeah, it’s a recent development. I think you’ll like him though.”

Despite Dante’s concerns, no reason existed for why my mother wouldn’t like him. I beamed proudly and showed her a photo of us together, taken only a week ago by Marcy at her son’s birthday party.

“He’s a handsome man,” Mom murmured in approval. “But is he good to you?”

“The best. Doesn’t let anyone disrespect me, cleans up after himself, and even cooks me breakfast in bed.” I left out the naked part.