“It’s a siren song! Use your magic to shield your mind from the sirens before they have you fucking anything that moves!”
Zane ripped the merman away from me and dragged me across the room, shoving writhing couples aside despite their protests and groping hands. Most of them were naked.
I wanted to get naked too.
It looked like fun.
“Oh, my sweet pet, I want you naked, trust me, but we need to get the fuck out of this room before you’re lost to the sirens’ lust.”
He pushed me through a heavy wooden door, out into a cool corridor. The moment the doors swung shut and the music faded, my sanity returned.
Oh my goddess! What had I done?
Kenji appeared beside me.
“The siren song is hard to resist,” he told me, not unsympathetic for once.
I cringed, utterly mortified that I’d embraced my inner ho in public. Goddess save me, if Zane hadn’t removed me from that room, I’d have done something terrible. Like fuck a random merman.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen, my pet,” Zane assured me. “Now wait here while I grab the other two idiots.”
He pushed the doors open, letting some of the siren song out. Almost immediately, I wanted to follow him, but Kenji sank his sharp teeth into my ankle. The stinging pain blocked the effects of the siren song, and I shrieked in shock.
“Ouch!”
“It’s for your own good. You’d never forgive yourself if you did the horizontal rumba with a random merman, and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to act as your emotional support kitsune when morning-after shame hits hard.”
He was right, but the deliveryneeded work.
I moved away from the door to avoid being hypnotized again. The corridor remained empty, curiously free of guards.
Magic lights glowed in shell sconces, and paintings hung at intervals, all of them artistic representations of the mer queen posing in different gowns, dripping in jewels.
Goddess, that female loved herself way too much.
It was a miracle my merman hadn’t grown up into a raging narcissist monster like his mother.
The doors of the banquet hall swung open again, and I quickly slapped my hands over my ears to block out the dangerously hypnotic siren song. Zane appeared, dragging Maverick with Rasmus close behind. All three males were in a state of undress, and Maverick’s face bore several deep scratches.
White-hot jealousy flared as I surveyed them all. Had they succumbed to the mermaid temptresses? If so, we were five seconds away from a raging massacre.
“Relax, pet, they’re fine.”
Rasmus shook himself and shuddered. “Even vampires find it hard to resist a siren’s compulsion.”
“Did any of them touch you inappropriately?” I needed names and physical descriptions.
“They tried, but Zane got us both out in time.”
Maverick scrubbed his face and groaned. His shirt hung off him in strips, and while the deep scratches were healing fast, he refused to look me in the eye.
I could sense the shame and confusion from my bear. He thought this was all his fault, but I didn’t blame him. The only person at fault here was the bitch queen.
Yes, my mother-in-law and I had gotten off to a very rocky start, and unless she did something exceptionally amazing in the next minute, I was cutting her from our family tree.
My grandkids did not need a manipulative, narcissistic, cuckolding grandma.
But we weren’t thinking about babies.
