Bastian sighed. “I am… mentally unfit for the family. I was cast out when my deviance was discovered. The only way I would be permitted to return would be to marry dragon royalty.”
“Deviance?” Saina pressed.
Bastian gestured with a hand, out to the ocean. “Water. I am a fire dragon, a creature of air and flame and fortune. But my treasure sense is… flawed, and I have an aberrant love of water that my kin could not accept. Worst of all, though I come from a proud lineage of warriors, I wanted to save people, and learn healing. I am in every way a perversion of dragonkind; they could not allow me to pollute the purity of the family with my association.”
Saina chewed on this. “And Keylor?”
“My younger brother,” Bastian said. “A proper dragon of fire and temper. He took my place as heir when I was thrown out. I haven’t seen any of them in three years.”
Saina turned back to the ocean to digest these revelations.
“What was that?” Bastian asked quietly. “Saina? What are you?”
Saina turned back to him. She believed that he’d told the truth about his exile, and she knew that her song had been unnecessary. He would have been genuine without her magic, she realized, and it shamed her that she had used it.
“Haven’t you guessed?” she mocked gently. “I’m a siren.”
He looked at her blankly and Saina sighed. “A mermaid, Bastian. I’m a mermaid.”
He continued to stare.
Did he have to be so handsome and innocent? Saina wanted to brush his unruly hair back from his high forehead and plant a kiss there. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
She took one unresisting hand and led him out into the water. She didn’t bother undressing, but waded out with him until the swells were chest deep, then she fell into the saltwater and shifted.
Chapter 12
Bastian let Saina lead him into the lapping waves, bemused by the depth of his own confession. He’d had every intention of telling his mate about his family disgrace, but he had hoped she’d have a chance to know him a little better before he divulged the extent of his exile and the depths of his depravity.
He certainly hadn’t planned to tell her like that.
But he’d been as compelled as if he’d had Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth wrapped around him, and she seemed to think that it was perfectly normal to be able to sing her will into anyone around her.
A siren, he thought in wonder. He’d been feeling so smug about how unknown dragons were, and she was something rarer and more mythical.
She is our treasure, his dragon said proudly. There is nothing rarer or more valuable.
Then, between one step and the next, she dived into the lightly lapping waves, and Bastian reached after her in alarm.
She surfaced beside him again, her long dark hair spilling back from her face, then swam beside him and flipped glimmering fins at him.
She was astonishing.
Her violet tail was more than just a simple flexible appendage; it was finery in jewel-faceted scales, longer than her legs had been by half. Feathery fins shimmered around her like veils, and when she moved, there were green and rainbow hues glittering beneath the patterned shades of purple.
Bastian had to swallow. Her breasts, bare, were as glorious as he’d imagined from all her various states of dress, and he had to remind himself repeatedly not to stare.
You should stare, his dragon urged him. She is ours, and she is beautiful, and we should admire her. (He was, not surprisingly, more impressed with her stunningly scaled bottom half than her curvy top half.)
“Come swim with me,” she invited. Her voice was musical, but there was no compulsion to it.
“Don’t sirens drown their victims?” Bastian said, trying to keep his voice light and the raging need in his blood from boiling over. He was grateful he was waist deep in the water now, because his erection would have been difficult to hide.
She raised an eyebrow at him, and while he was watching her face, flipped her fins to shower him with water.
Spluttering, he dived after her, to find that she had slipped further away, laughing and splashing.
Underwater, she was even more gorgeous than above, her graceful fins in mesmerizing motion, and she led him out to the wavebreak, and slipped over it into the surf.