Read The Sea Queen (The Dark Queens Book 1) for Free Online Page B

many lifetimes.
    Blood rushed between my thighs at the thought of laying her down beneath me and filling her body with my heat and need.
    I clenched my jaw. “In two weeks, I leave. I don’t know what you expect me to do for her. If she does truly wish to shed her virginity, then perhaps she should consider one of the other gods.”
    But the thought of any of them—Zeus, Apollo, or even Poseidon (who’d once been her betrothed)—made me want to throttle them all and toss them into the River Styx.
    Betrothal meant nothing to my kind. Zeus was married to Hera and still found time to sire at least a thousand bastards a year. Poseidon was rumored to be sleeping around with a bevy of selkies, and Apollo...well, he wasn’t much competition. Unless Calypso suddenly sprouted a one-eyed snake, the God of the Sun would hardly notice.
    Swiping my tongue across my lips, I still tasted a salty hint of her on them.
    I glanced up when I felt the heavy press of Aphrodite’s eyes. Her smile was broad.
    “Do you not know, God of the Underworld, that still waters run deep? The sea can bring life and redemption. Remember that.”
    “Yes, and it can also drown a man.” I thinned my lips.
    She chuckled. “She is a tempestuous beauty, to be sure. But no one ever said falling in love with the Sea came without its share of hardships.”
    “Falling in love,” I scoffed. “If she wishes to bed me, that I can accommodate, but nothing more.”
    She shrugged. “Your funeral. Anyway, beast, gotta jet. Hephy’s making me eyeball stew for dinner. Mm.” She rubbed her stomach, laughed, and disappeared in a glittering shower of gold dust.
    “Bloody women.”
    ~*~
    Calypso
    A hand grabbed my ass and squeezed.
    I squeaked, jumping nearly off my tail fin at the rough treatment to my now-throbbing backside. Twirling, I nearly snapped the human man’s hand off but then remembered I was in disguise.
    Grinding my teeth, I gave the male a waspish smile. I knew him well. He was a troll of a man. One of the maidens had brought him down to sire a child late last year, but still they’d made no fry yet.
    Jeffery, as he was called, was a short, round man with boring brown hair but pleasant-enough-colored eyes—a soft green, his most attractive feature to be sure—but he had the manners of a pig.
    He was always sneaking about Nim’s castle, harassing the staff.
    “Jeffery,” I snarled, “don’t ye belong back wi’ Merida? Last I checked, she were headin’ for home.”
    Jeffery, the scoundrel, smiled a pudgy-cheeked smile and shrugged. “She can do as she pleases.”
    He had a willing maiden and yet here he was, day in and day out. I hadn’t mentioned him to Nim yet, mainly because while he was a rat, the man was harmless. But now he was annoying me.
    I aimed to teach him manners and didn’t want my daughter-in-law involved in what would surely be a bloody affair. Bruce, I was sure, was quite hungry today, my poor little beastie.
    My head was full of visions of evisceration when the doors of the kitchen were flung open and a heavily pregnant Nimue waddled in.
    My heart was full to bursting to see her thus. I’d never dreamed that someday I’d actually become a grandmother. I’d felt the life pulse of the babes and knew something my Nim did not.
    She was having twins. One boy, one girl. One would only ever have human form, but the boy, the boy was a changeling. The first mer-male born since Sircco eons ago.
    Of course, I couldn’t tell her these things, as she had no idea who I really was, and then the peg would be up, as they say.
    Was it peg? Oh well, whatever.
    As she swiped at her long hair, Nimue’s eyes found mine immediately.
    “Janita!” She smiled serenely.
    The pregnancy had her fair skin glowing like porcelain. She’d already been lovely, and now I could only find her doubly so.
    “You are here. I’d hoped you worked a shift today.”
    I curtsied quickly. “Consort.”
    Her smile quickly vanished, however, when she spotted