Lords of the Deep (4 page)

“She does seem a lot more intelligent that I would’ve credited,” Miles admitted reluctantly. “But she’s still probably very primitive.”

Grudgingly, Damien admitted the possibility, but there no getting around the fact that it made him feel a hell of a lot better that she was of higher intelligence since he couldn’t seem to control his lust for her.

And it was lust, there was no getting around that.

She was beautiful in a totally exotic way. Odd that her strange coloration didn’t really bother him, in fact, just the opposite—it fascinated him almost as much as her little face did with its big blue eyes, and the graceful lines of her body. He studied the bright caplet on her head that ended just at the top of her globes, trying not to think about the matching thatch between her legs.

Their catkins certainly didn’t have anything like that—not that color. He’d never seen anything like it. “I wonder if they all look like she does?” he said musingly.

“You may get to find out … if she doesn’t survive.”

Anger and denial flashed through Damien. He turned to glare at Miles, ready to blast him with his temper. The look on Miles’ face stopped him.

Miles dragged his gaze from her with an effort and looked at Damien. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but you have to face the fact that we don’t know a damned thing about her. Look how fragile she is. What if she won’t eat? She isn’t going to last long if she refuses the food … or if we can’t figure out what she needs.”

Feeling his throat close at the comment, Damien turned to look at her again. After a moment, he looked down at the food on the tray. “What is this shit, anyway, Miles?” he asked, irritated.

“I just grabbed some leftovers out of the preserver,” Miles said, indignation clear in his voice.

Damien picked up a dried, unidentifiable ‘thing’ and looked it over. “Gods! I wouldn’t eat this shit, myself. Is this
murrs
?”

Miles leaned closer to the glass and peered at it. “Hmm, maybe.”

Damien rolled his eyes. “This looks like one of your experiments—that didn’t make it. The scavengers might eat it, but I doubt any of this would appeal to her. Isn’t there anything in the myths about what they ate?”

“They’re just … stories, Damien,” Miles said dryly. “Mostly made up to entertain children.”

“She’s real enough,” Damien murmured.

Miles studied her assessingly. “You know there might be some truth to some of it,” he said musingly. “It was said they were so beautiful, so desirable, they could lure Mermen to their death. I don’t know about you, but she’s been having a damned strong effect on me.”

Damien shot him a narrow eyed look.

Miles blinked. “Oh, yeah. I
do
know about you.”

Damien studied her speculatively. She didn’t look dangerous to him, but there was no denying he’d been having trouble with his cock, and thinking clearly, and he rarely had a problem either—off season. He didn’t figure he was any worse than any of the other okeans, though, when the catkins were looking for breeding mates.

He shook his head at his thoughts. “I doubt its anything ‘magical’ whatever the myths say … or any kind of special abilities. That sound she emitted when I frightened her nearly deafened me, but I didn’t feel any of the heat I’ve felt around the dolphins. As for luring … I don’t think she’d have to try too damned hard to do that, but she hasn’t shown any interest in doing it, even if she did flash several times.”

“Maybe that was because you hid it from her?”

Damien ground his teeth. For all that Miles seemed to be off in his own little world half the time, he was gods damned observant when one least wanted him to be.

“She looked uneasy about it,” he muttered.

“Did she? Show it to her again and let’s see what she does.”

Damien sent Miles an indignant glare. “I’m trying to gentle her, gods damn it! If it makes her uneasy that’s going to make things a lot more difficult.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you try to mount her,” Miles said testily. “Obviously, she isn’t in season. She didn’t try to approach you when you waved it at her before. I just want to see how she reacts. I wasn’t watching her face before.”

If it came to that, he hadn’t really paid that much attention to her expression. Mentally shrugging, he shifted his foot to release his cock. It immediately stood straight up, and began to weave and point directly at her—which didn’t surprise him since he knew it was entirely because of her.

It seemed to startle the hell out of her, however. She stared at it as if it was a … snake, her eyes round and following the movements. She flashed him again and his body instantly reacted as if she was flashing her interest in mating, his heart revving into overtime, his brain function slowing.

She wasn’t smiling, though, or giving him the sultry look of desire he was accustomed to seeing.

If he was a betting man—which he wasn’t—he would’ve said she was looking at him with horrified fascination not desire.

The moment the thought popped into his mind, his cock ducked and hid.

So much for that little experiment, he thought disgustedly. He sent Miles a resentful glare.

Miles was studying her thoughtfully, though, and missed it. “Just as I thought,” he murmured after a moment.

The comment roused a good deal more resentment in Damien. “What the fuck do you mean by that, gods damn it?”

Miles looked at him. “She’s not interested. Obviously the flashing has nothing to do with mating.”

Damien got to his feet abruptly, snatched the tray up off the floor, and stalked out of the cell, locking it behind him. Slamming the tray down on the nearest bench, he bent a furious gaze on Miles. “Next time you want to check it out, wave your own fucking cock at her! Maybe she’s more interested in yours than mine!”

Miles lifted his brows in surprise. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Grinding his teeth, Damien stalked toward the door. “I’ll go see if you have any food that’s actually edible.”

* * * *

Angie flinched when the ‘man’ who’d called himself Damien surged angrily to his feet, but she realized immediately that whatever it was he was angry about had to do with the one he’d called Miles.

She glanced uneasily at the window when he’d left, wondering if they would fight, but although they seemed to exchange angry words—or at least Damien said something angrily, to her relief, they didn’t.

They weren’t men. She didn’t know what they were, but she certainly knew what they weren’t.

She felt perfectly blank about the cock. It hadn’t just stood up, it had … danced, as if it was prehensile. Discomfort rippled through her as it dawned on her that she’d watched it like a snake charmer might a serpent.

No doubt both of them had noticed.

It dawned on her that the dolphin penis was prehensile.

They sure as hell weren’t dolphins, though!

She decided after a few moments to move closer to the round window in the other wall and see what she could. Maybe, she thought, it was like an aquarium?

Her belly seemed to flip over when she looked out. Despite the dimness … maybe because of it, she realized she wasn’t staring into an aquarium. She was looking at the sea bed. It was far too vast to be an aquarium.

She was at the
bottom
of the ocean!

The fear that had never been far away from the time she’d awakened rose to precedence again, and the coldness of shock went through her despite the warm air they were feeding into the room.

She was still damp, she told herself, but she knew she’d had too many shocks too close together. She needed to try to stay calm and to try to reason out what had happened to her.

Having no clothes should’ve been the last of her worries, but it was a comfort thing. Without them, with the way the men studied her, she felt more vulnerable. Looking down, she studied what was left of her shirt. Unlike the shorts and panties, which he’d cut off, he’d merely cut the front of the shirt in two—unfortunately not a straight line. The cut almost went diagonally across the front. Pulling at it, she managed to stretch the knit enough to tie a couple of precarious knots to hold the two sides together. That left her with the square of cloth she’d managed to take from Damien.

She held it up, examining it, but she could see without trying that it wasn’t big enough to go around her hips and give her even a modicum of modesty.
Maybe
it would go about half way around her, but that would still leave half her butt and half her cooch hanging out.

Lifting it, she studied it. It actually didn’t look like cloth, she realized. Even though it felt very much like fabric and it appeared to be woven, the fiber it had been woven from wasn’t anything she was familiar with—not that she was any sort of expert on fabrics! Shaking that off, she used her teeth to start a tear and pulled a strip off. Tying it to one corner, she wrapped the tie around her back and tried to tie it to the other corner. Disgusted when she saw it wasn’t quite long enough, she lifted the cloth and tore off another strip, tied one to each corner and then made a bow behind her back, wearing it like an apron.

Miles, she saw when she turned around, was watching her intently. The sense that she was a zoo animal as far as they were concerned, or worse, a lab animal, washed over her again.

She banished the second possibility, despite the evidence she’d seen to the contrary. It didn’t bear thinking on. It was bad enough to think she was just going to have to put up with being stared at.

The fear the thought had raised in her mind wasn’t as easily banished as she’d hoped. Hysteria clawed at the back of her mind, but she resolutely refused to give in to it. That was the worst thing she could do, she was sure, to begin to behave so erratically that it bore up their certainty that she was some sort of lower order animal.

She would’ve liked to think that was just her imagination, but she didn’t know what they were and obviously the reverse was true. Everything they’d done so far pointed to the sort of behavior humans exhibited toward captive animals.

She supposed, given that they didn’t look that much different than humans, it was sort of like the way humans looked at apes—as an intelligent animal, but still an animal.

She couldn’t afford for them to continue to think of her that way if there was anything she could do to convince them she was as intelligent as they were—whatever they were.

Alien popped into her mind.

Not that she thought there was any possibility that she wasn’t on earth anymore. She was definitely still in the Atlantic. The things she’d seen from the porthole were indigenous to Earth and she doubted anything that similar would be on another world.

So—she was just at the bottom of the sea with beings that looked almost human but weren’t—whether they were alien or not.

Clearly, now that she’d had a little time to observe them, they were creatures of the sea, not just down here in ships—maybe hiding—but
of
the sea. Once she’d calmed down enough to actually take in the information her senses were feeding to her, she’d noticed that Damien’s hair didn’t actually appear to be hair—not in the same sense that hers was, anyway—close, but different. He’d been in the water with her. Her hair was still wet. His, she recalled, hadn’t looked wet even in the water and didn’t now. The skin of his upper body wasn’t entirely the same as hers, she didn’t think, either. There again, close, but not entirely, although he certainly didn’t have scales, not even on his lower body. He did have fins, however, to help him glide through the sea. He also had faint markings—the sort of markings one might expect to find on anything that had evolved with a need to blend in to their surroundings, although most of the coloration seemed to be on the lower part of his body.

The one along his temple was different—not natural, but something like a tattoo.

She wondered if it had some sort of significance, because she’d noticed Miles also had one—except it was different.

Humanoid—mammals. Considering the ‘equipment’ both men were packing, she was pretty sure they were mammals.

There were other mammals that lived in the sea, but
they
had been identified. How could these exist—have existed long enough to evolve the sort of technology she’d seen—and still be completely unknown?

She knew it was possible, however unlikely. After all, she’d been with a crew searching for giant squid—which weren’t believed to exist until fairly recent history.

Even so, it was easier to think they might be alien in origin, but she couldn’t see how knowing that either way would be of any help to her.

They seemed just as disconcerted to discover her. She didn’t have to understand what they were saying to figure that out. They behaved as if they didn’t know quite what to make of her. The way they kept glancing at her and discussing her, she was sure—their expressions of surprise and puzzlement.

The question was, if she could convince them that she was from an intelligent race similar to theirs, would they let her go? Or put her back?

Damien had pulled her off the boat when she’d tried to help him climb aboard, she remembered abruptly.

He’d
known
she couldn’t be one of them.