How to be a Mermaid (The Cotton Candy Quintet #1)(32)

I shivered at the thought. It was all so dangerous.

“I had no idea that being a mermaid was like this,” I said. “I never really knew how to be a mermaid, did I?”

He grinned at me. “You’ve been doing a good job of it so far, Mermaid Tara.”

I couldn’t tell you what came over me. I leaned forward and caught his lips with mine, surprising both of us, me most of all.

Our lips were wet from the salt water and slightly slippery. My eyes closed and my heart fluttered. A warm feeling spread throughout my chest, down to my fingers and fins. If I had knees, they would have turned to jelly at the caress of his lips against mine.

It was the best kiss I’d ever had.

It should be said that I have little experience kissing. Other than kissing my date to my senior prom and kissing my neighbor Bradley Sanders when I was six, I had no idea what made a kiss good or bad.

This one was great. It felt like sunshine and beaches and everything marvelous all at once in one sublime kiss.

Our lips parted. His hair swirled around his eyes as he searched my face. He gently brushed his lips with his fingers.

Panic overtook me as I came to my senses. Oh no. He wasn’t really into the kiss. Or into me.

What the hell was I thinking, kissing a merman ? A prince for God’s sake! Even if he was gorgeous and was looking after me. That was his job. I shouldn’t really get my hopes up for anything.

“Sorry,” I spluttered, trying to salvage the situation. “I shouldn’t have kissed you!”

He looked at me with wide eyes. “So that was a...kiss?”

If I imploded into sea foam in that instant, that still wouldn’t be fast enough for me to die of embarrassment. I had kissed him like a human when apparently that wasn’t what merfolk did.

“That was bad of me, and I didn’t know that you didn’t do that sort of thing-”

Then I saw the wry smile between his fingers as he shyly said, “I liked it.”

The world stood still for me as I floated there, dumbfounded.

His smile turned into a cheeky wide grin. “I want to do it again.”

This time, he made the first move. He pulled me to him by my shoulders, his lips crashing into mine like waves against the shore. My eyes fluttered wide at this sudden turn, then I closed my eyes and lost myself in it.

For not knowing what a kiss was, he was really good at it. His hands moved from my shoulders to my lower back, holding me against his body. Then his hands slipped over the curve of my hips, down to my tail...

The best thing I found about kissing underwater, was that I never needed to stop the kiss for air: my gills took care of that. Still, I felt like it had stolen my breath away in the best possible way.

I could get used to this.

“Tara,” Finn whispered, caressing the side of my face. He opened his mouth to say more as the door opened and Ponce poked his head in. We reflexively moved further apart, although if Finn had no idea what a kiss was, I was one hundred percent sure that the snapper wouldn’t either.

“Prince Finn?” Ponce sounded meek and afraid. “The shark guards are starting to call me ‘Bait’ and I would very much like not to be bait. Plus, it’s getting to be nighttime and I’d like to hang out here with Tara.” If fish could grin, he was smiling at the thought of it. “She’s so weird. She peels away her skin.”

Finn let out a breath, heaving his chest once before he gave himself a slight shake. I wanted to reach out and caress his mass of hair when he did that.

“Of course,” he said, his voice slightly strangled. As if coming to a decision, he looked back at me. “Nereia should be back tomorrow morning. We’ll figure out how to turn you back to normal tomorrow.”

I nodded. “Sounds good.”

No it didn’t sound good. Why the heck was I so torn? I wanted to say so much more to him. What good would it do? It would only hurt us.

Finn swam to the door and looked back at me, as if he wanted to say something else. Again, he seemed to talk himself out of it.

“Have a good night,” he said.

Then he was gone, leaving me alone with Ponce.

“Tara? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. And for once, I was glad that the ocean covered up my tears.

***

As I learned that night, mermaids don’t really sleep. While Nereia gave me a potion to help me sleep the night before, which had knocked me out, I had actually never tried to sleep as a mermaid. I kept floating up to the ceiling and bumping up against the stone walls. It reminded me of astronauts floating in space.

I wasn’t tired at all, and I remembered reading that dolphins slept by turning off half of their brain at once. Maybe that’s what mermaids did too.

Ponce was only somewhat awake, meaning that he was still swimming silently as he paced about in a three-yard space. I got the feeling that I shouldn’t disturb him for a few hours. My bikini bottom and fake mermaid tail floated around the cell, up to the ceiling, and back down again in an endless whirlpool.

I thought about everything and nothing. I crouched in the corner, caught my fake mermaid tail as it floated by, and wrapped it around me like a blanket as I considered what to do next.

I really liked Finn, but what did I know? I never had a boyfriend before, so why was I swooning after this one? Just because he was the first guy to really sweep me off my feet didn’t mean that this could be a long term solution. Sure, he’d been a jerk when we first met, but that changed quickly once he knew the circumstances. After that, he was really kind to me.