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slowed, unable to risk getting closer.
“You go. My hair will look like a knotted fishing net given the
humidity.”
    He frowned, not letting go of her hand, and
stopped. “Come with me. Just for a minute.”
    “ Please don’t ask again. I
simply can’t.” A few feet to go. She all but yanked her hand from
his grasp.
    “ Women.” He muttered
something else over his shoulder, and whatever he said was lost on
the wind.
    She hadn’t been back to the ocean since last
month. She had mastered finding secluded places to park along the
uninhabited beaches, giving her access. This condition demanded her
return for renewal. Ever since puberty, if she didn’t heed this one
rule, her body had a cycle that wasn’t pretty. The couple of times
she’d put off her night swim, her body had weakened, painfully.
Rarely had she experienced such a dismal state.
    In a few hours, she’d come back. Always had
to come back.
    Each month. When the moon was full, she’d
swim naked, unfettered beneath the waves. Tonight, somehow, she’d
have to slip away from Wyatt under the cover of darkness. What
would it be like to swim with him in the surf, twine her arms
around him, pressing her body against his hard form?
    A spiraling vortex was alive inside her
body, being so close to the ocean, and unable to take the plunge.
Every month, she wondered if her strange condition would resolve
itself. Two legs disappeared, or rather, united, connecting her
pelvis and hips under iridescent skin. In the flick, if ocean water
touched her skin, these legs transformed into a long tail. Long
ago, she’d learned the boundaries of what she could and couldn’t do
to keep from changing into a form that was nearly impossible to
comprehend. Her parents had come here from a town bordering the
Norwegian Sea. Her father and mother had been the same, and that
was the extent of her knowledge about her heritage. Now, alone, and
with no one to help her comprehend her condition, she kept her
secret tightly locked away.
    An overpowering current surged inside her
blood. The ocean waves called to her. She longed to strip off her
clothes and return to the sea. A choice—with no coming back. Is
that what she wanted? The image of her family overtook her—netted,
captured, and killed.
    “ Don’t go there,” she
softly directed herself. She’d been too young to save them, and
reliving that day never lessened the pain or guilt of
surviving.
    She wrapped her arms around her middle to
keep her jacket closed. The spray from the ocean was enough to
cause her skin to begin to change. From smooth flesh, her
underbelly beneath this shirt itched and burned. She didn’t need to
touch her skin to know the outline of scales were near to erupting.
She retreated from the shore. A driving force she’d avoided, yet
could not escape.
    Wyatt’s shadow crossed hers on the sand.
“Hey, where are you going?” He moved in front of her, still wearing
her purse, and bent down, kneeling in front of her. “I didn’t even
see where I was standing down there. Honestly, I’ve seen so many
beaches, when one this enthralling is available, I tend to get
lost. I’m not as dense as I might appear.”
    “ I’m only glad you’re
pleased.”
    “ More than pleased.” He
grazed his fingers over her face. Flitting and fast. A rare moment
to share with another person so close to her real home. “If you run
off, I’ll find you. I promise.”
    Never before had she stood here with a man
she found so humanly appealing. His overreaching appeal made
loneliness stab her. Tears spiked her eyes: the only form of salt
water that didn’t force her to transform from human to partial
fish.
    No curse, no story, no painting could
describe what she’d become when wet. From human to a myth unlocked.
Not a tiny detail or glitch, her story came complete with
mythological proportions in the form of a sleek body, hard to miss
with the shimmering variations of turquoise, aqua, midnight blue.
What would he think about