Free Immersed in Pleasure by Tiffany Reisz Page A

toe?” Christian asked.
     
    Derek nodded. “I know. Sounds crazy, right? Gets crazier.”
    “What happened?”
    “My table caught on fire,” Derek said. “She saved me.”
    A man of about thirty-five with dark hair pulled back into a roguish ponytail sat with the girl. He wore a dark gray Victorian-era suit and riding boots. Derek rarely noticed other men, but he couldn’t deny that the unusually handsome man the wet-haired girl sat with had an aura of power and mystery about him. The man snapped his fingers and the girl immediately turned her head to the sound. She drew close to him and the man whispered something in her ear.
    Smiling, the girl pulled away. Derek’s stomach tightened as she left the VIP area and walked gingerly down the steps headed toward his table. In her skintight skirt she came to him, her steps nervous and delicate. As she walked, he noticed for the first time that she wore no shoes.
    “Hello,” Derek said as she sat across from him.
    The girl stared at him for a moment.
    “Your table’s on fire,” she said. Derek tried to discern if she was joking. He saw nothing in her eyes but innocent sincerity.
    “What?”
    She pointed at his centerpiece. A black candle and a blue rose decorated every table in the club. His rose had dipped its head too near the flame and now quietly smoldered.
    “Holy shit.” Looking around wildly, he started to reach for his glass, but it contained an old fashioned. Alcohol plus fire equaled a nightclub in ashes.
    The girl laughed a soft tinkling laugh. Slowly she rose and leaned over the table. Taking her long brown hair into her hands, she twisted it, wringing just enough water out to douse the burning rose.
    Because he didn’t know what else to do, he laughed.
    “I’m glad this club has such gorgeous firefighters on duty.”
    She ran her hands through her wet hair and separated it into three sections.
    “I’m not a firefighter.” She hummed as she braided her long hair with nimble fingers.
    “What are you then?”
    “I’m a mermaid.”
    She stretched out her leg toward him. Derek didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking at, but then he saw them. At first he thought her feet sported silver foot jewelry of some kind. But no, metallic silver tattoos of fins adorned the tops of her small, pale feet.
    “No way,” Mark interrupted. “She was one of those mermaids?”
    “She was,” Derek said, taking a sip of his drink. “I didn’t think they were real either. Not until that night.”
    The Manhattan Mermaids. Believed to be the most beautiful women in the city, they entertained the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world. Kingsley Edge didn’t just own Cirque du Nuit, he owned four or five other clubs, some of them so secretive they didn’t even have names. One of the most exclusive was known as Fathoms. Fathoms supposedly had the usual sort of chichi-nightclub stuff—cocktail waitresses, ridiculously opulent decor. But in addition to that, Fathoms had one thing no other club in the city had—mermaids. One could tell a mermaid if you met her on the street by two things, Derek had heard—they wore little silver mermaid pendants around their necks, and they had silver-and-blue metallic tattoos on their feet and ankles. Derek looked the girl up and down—check and check.
    “You’re a real mermaid?”
    She gave him a mischievous grin.
    “Come find out.”
    Just then Ireland decided to make her appearance—an hour late. For almost the entire hour he’d been desperate for her to show up. Now that he saw her breezing through the door and heading his way, he fervently wished he’d been stood up.
    “I can’t,” he said.
    The tiniest glint of disappointment shone in the girl’s midnight blue eyes. In such an open innocent face, the sadness rebuked him. He felt as if he’d knocked a baseball through a stained-glass window.
     
    “Then goodbye.” She sighed. “I’ll never see you again.”
    She said the words with such earnestness