Stranded E-Book

Lauren Smith

• Herausgeber: Lauren Smith
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Shell Habor Mermaids
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 90

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Mermaids aren’t real…because if they are…they killed his parents.

At least that’s what Hudson Clark believes until an injured mermaid washes up on his yacht during a storm. The moment he uncovers a half-naked woman in a bed of seaweed and sees her eerie not quite human aquamarine eyes gazing up at him in pain, he’s drowning in her gaze. Learning the truth that mermaids are real…he knows he should hate this beautiful creature, should fear her, but all he wants to do is kiss her…and a whole lot more.

Talia wasn’t born a mermaid. Two years ago she’d been a human woman who’d fallen from her boat during a party and hit her head. But after agreeing to a bargain with the sea, she’s been cursed…with fins. The only light that pierces the dark depths of her watery world is the glimpses she steals on the surface of Hudson. Tall, dark and handsome, he fits every forbidden fantasy she has, because he’s human and she isn’t. After she seeks refuge on his yacht to escape sharks during a storm, she can’t resist staying away from him, can’t resist kissing him. What’s a mermaid to do when a human lures her out of the water and onto land?

Leseprobe

Stranded

A Shell Harbor Mermaid Romance

Book One

Lauren Smith

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Epilogue

About the Author

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Stranded © 2024 by Lauren Smith

Cover by Ashely Slaughter - Cover Couture

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-962760-63-8 (e-book edition)

ISBN: 978-1-962760-64-5 (print edition)

One

Hudson Clark didn’t believe in mermaids. Surely no one in the twenty-first century could… but if he did, he would have to face the fact that mermaids had killed his parents. But mermaids were a myth. The dark, turbulent waters of the Atlantic always made people see things that weren’t there, like shapes just beneath the water that looked too much like things that weren’t real.

He peered into the black waters while he guided his yacht through the churning seas, attempting to get back to land. He was seeing things that shouldn’t be there. Unable to shake the feeling that something watched him from the obsidian waves. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, warning him that he wasn’t alone. The chill in the air and the darkening evening skies seemed heavy with a danger of another kind. Hudson regretting going out so late in the day, not when he’d had a sailor’s sense the wind would shift and the skies would darken.

It was easy to get turned around and become lost in the North Atlantic when one lost sight of the shore during storms, especially at night. His eyes had started to play tricks on him in the last half hour. One minute he’d see a flash of silver upon the water or hear a piercing wail from beyond the glow of his boat’s electric lights. A few times he could swear he heard his name echo across the water. But the sea played tricks upon men, and had been doing so since mankind first looked out across the endless blue ocean and asked themselves: What if...

His yacht hit a wave hard, and the impact jarred through him, making his very bones ache where he stood on the bridge.

“Hudson…” His name came as a whisper despite the wind howling across the deck.

His uncle had warned him never to sail in the dark, not after the storm and wreck that had taken his parents and nearly claimed his uncle’s life.

They’re out there, Hudson. Waiting, watching. If they call your name, It’s already too late.

He could still see his Uncle Jason’s dark-brown eyes glinting with a hint of madness as he whispered those words, lying in a hospital suffering from dehydration and exhaustion. Jason had been on the sailboat with Hudson’s parents the day a nor’easter struck the coast. The sailboat had been pushed too fast toward shore by the storm and struck a rocky area where it sank.

Jason had been unable to get the cabin door open to save Hudson parents, barely managing to escape himself. He’d floated on a piece of wreckage for two days before the Coast Guard found him. By then he was suffering from delusions and screaming about mermaids. That had been seven years ago, but it felt like a lifetime to Hudson. He was twenty-nine now, and losing his parents at twenty-two, just when he’d gotten out of college and was supposed to have a bright future ahead of him, had aged him and changed the trajectory of his life. He’d given up the investment banking job he’d been offered by one of Manhattan’s top firms and instead took his inheritance from his parents and returned home to Shell Harbor be near his uncle and the sea which had taken so much from him already.

Jason refused to go anywhere near the ocean now. He’d left his job catching lobsters and bought a restaurant in town to run during the tourist season. Jason never went to the beach anymore and certainly didn’t get on anymore boats. When storms blew in, he hunkered down at his restaurant or at his home, practically barricading himself against the raging winds as if he could escape his past.

Hudson on the other hand, hadn’t avoided the water. Something about it filled him with a blinding rage, yet it drew him in, whispering briny apologies upon a gentle breeze. To make a living, he gave coastal tours on the yacht he bought with some of his trust-fund money. It kept him out on the water, every day going back to the place where his parents had died. And while that rubbed some salt in his wounds, it also kept his parents present in his memory.

The wind changed and he held onto the helm, holding his boat, the Splash, as steady as he could. Something hit the boat hard, in a repeated thudding, too quick and too steady to be waves.

His training perked up his senses and his sailor’s experience provided him with an answer and in a breath he was cursing as he realized he might have hit rocks. A blast of rain lashed the decks, blinding as the water reflected off his boat lights. He strained his eyes through the sheets of moisture outside of the cabin, looking for the lighthouse lantern that he’d been charting towards, but the conditions had obscured it completed now.

Suddenly the lights on his ship flickered, the moment’s quiet as the buzz of electricity halted serving only to heighten the sound of a wail as it rippled across the dark waters beyond the bridge.

Thud!

Before he could interrogate himself over what the wail could have come from, a black mass swept over the decks and deposited something hard on the bow ahead of him.

He cursed as a sudden blast of rain lashed the deck in blinding sheets. He couldn’t even see the lighthouse anymore through the windows on the bridge. The lights on his vessel flickered suddenly and a lone wail rippled across the dark waters just beyond the bow.

Thud! A black mass swept over the deck with the next wave, and something landed on the bow ahead of him. When the water receded and the boat righted itself, he glimpsed the shape again. It was still there on the deck. Had a large sturgeon landed on the boat? It wasn’t entirely impossible. They did prefer the cold water, and right now the Atlantic was like ice given it was late September.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t put it back in the water until he found his way back to shore. Whatever it was could wait. Another wave had him regripping the wheel and pushing against the swell that was tipping his yacht to the right, forcing him to face the fact that he had more important matters to attend to, like not getting capsized. Hudson turned the wheel of the ship, fighting for his life and the life of his vessel. Suddenly the wind and rain railing against the yacht began to ease off. And through the thinning storm, he saw a flash…was that a light? He squinted through the rain.

Yes, it was a light! It appeared on the horizon through the lessening rain. It was the lighthouse. The harbor was less than a mile away. Tension bled out of his stiff shoulders, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He steered the helm a little to the port side and aimed directly for the shining beacon of light. The rain and wind began to fade and it wasn’t long before he found his way back to the harbor. Now that the seas had settled, he felt like he could risk leaving the helm to go push the fish back overboard. He killed the engine, knowing the boat would drift a little but he could correct it soon enough. The waves here were soft and normal, nothing like the swells far back out to sea.

He grabbed a flashlight from where it was strapped to the wall by the yacht’s controls. Then he left the bridge and walked toward the bow. He shined a light ahead of him to illuminate his path. Seaweed was scattered on the deck and formed a large pile. Had that been what he’d seen? Just seaweed?

No, he glimpsed a soft slash of something pale in the middle of the blackish-green mess of the watery plants. It was a face. A human face.

“Oh God,” he gasped. A body had washed up on his yacht. He ran toward it, praying he had a chance to save the person, but knowing the odds were slim to none. He hadn’t seen any other boats nearby, so it was unfortunately likely that the body had been floating in the water a while. The horrifying sorrow that knowledge invoked made his stomach churn. Whoever it was … had drowned just like his parents had. Hudson fought off a violent shudder and forced himself to focus.

He crouched and began peeling away the lanky bits of seaweed to expose a woman’s face. Her features were delicate, beautiful, and lacked the swollen appearance of a body that had been in water for a long time. She looked young, so damned young it broke his heart. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, if he had to guess. He removed more of the seaweed and cursed at discovering her upper body was bare. She was naked.

What the hell had happened that she’d ended up in the ocean without clothes? Cuts marred her pale luminescent skin. He took note of each wound—one along her cheek, another over her breastbone, and a bleeding gash several inches long across her ribs. She was still bleeding … But dead bodies didn’t bleed. That meant she was alive.

He hastily dragged more seaweed off her so could see the rest of her injuries. But his fingers froze as they encountered the slick, silky feel of something foreign where her hip bone should have been. He moved the flashlight down her body to her lower half. His fingers rested not on skin … but scales. They were a greenish-blue color that seemed to shimmer and change in the light. Fish scales … beginning at the girl’s waist.

What the fuck?