Read Online Dead Over Heels by MaryJanice Davidson - Free Book Online

face was set in a frown. “I think you have been exposed overlong to the sun.”
    He stuck his hand over the side of the boat. She stared at it. “I’m Con Conlinson. Well. Just Con.”
    Tentatively, she reached up and brushed his fingers with her cool, wet ones. “I am Reanesta.”
    He burst out laughing. Maybe he had been in the sun too long. “Seriously? That’s your name? Reanesta? It sounds like a prescription sleeping pill.”
    “I do not know what that is. And you have not answered my question, which, in a way, answers my question.”
    “Huh?”
    She disappeared with a flip of her silver tail and reappeared seconds later on the other side of the boat. She shook her head so that her long hair fell back, and blinked water out of her eyes. “Your craft is intact,” she announced, startling him so that he nearly fell overboard. “And you have the means to propel yourself elsewhere.” She gestured to the oar. “So are you harmed? Or ill?”
    “No, I’m fine.” Also: dazzled, besotted, horny. Those eyes. That hair. Those—
    “Then why are you still here?”
    “Where am I gonna go?”
    She seemed taken aback and made a vague gesture, one encompassing the ocean. “Where would you not go?”
    “Uh . . . I don’t have a tail. Not that I have anything against tails. Particularly yours. In fact, yours is gorgeous,” he hastened to assure her.
    “Gorgeous?” she repeated doubtfully.
    “Gorgeous.” It was the color of candlefish, all sleek silver, wider at the hips and narrowing to wavy silver fins. “In fact, you are really gorgeous.” And those tits! He was having a terrible time maintaining eye contact. She was delectably curvy, and her breasts bobbed sweetly in the water, the nipples so pale a pink they were almost cream colored. She was like a ghost . . . or a dream.
    “No, I am ugly,” she replied simply, as if she were explaining that two and two made four. “And I think you must be ill. Perhaps you should rest. Or eat.”
    “Ugly!” He nearly toppled out of the boat again. “Are you shitting me?”
    “I . . . do not believe so.”
    “You’ve at least got some meat on your bones, unlike all those anorexic big-mouthed Hollywood brats. Your hair—your tail—your eyes—your ti—your brea—you’re the best-looking woman I’ve ever seen. Ugly! Sheee-it!”
    “Well,” she said, swimming idly around the boat, “my blubber does keep me warm.”
    “We’re in the South Pacific,” he said, feeling stupid. “What do you need to keep warm for?”
    “I travel all over. And if you swim to the bottom, it can be chilly. But my coloring is bad. My friends are yellow and blue and green and anything you can imagine. I am”—she looked down at herself—“I’m a noncolor. I am practically not here.”
    “Noncolor, my Alabama butt.”
    “Your—what?”
    “Where I come from, silver’s just about the most precious thing there is. We use it for money. It’s really valuable. And pretty.”
    “The habits of bipeds are not known to me,” she admitted, rolling over on her back. She idly splashed with her tail, and yawned. “That is why I followed you for the last two days. When you seemed, ah, confused, I thought I might offer assistance.”
    “Well, that was nice of you.” Two days? “Appreciate that.”
    “Due to recent events among my people, we are allowed to show ourselves now.”
    “Get outta here!”
    “I beg your pardon.” She splashed, harder, and he was instantly drenched from eyebrows to belt buckle.
    He coughed for five minutes while she watched impassively and finally wheezed, “Sorry, it’s a biped saying meaning to express shock or amazement. I remember, I saw it on CNN! You guys have been in hiding for, what, centuries?”
    “Indeed. But our great king, in his wisdom, has decreed that if we wish to show ourselves to surface dwellers, we may. But you are the first one I’ve seen so close.”
    “Well, I’m honored.”
    She seemed oddly pleased. “Thank