Marriage & the Mermaid (Hapless Heroes) by Louise Cusack Read Free Book Online Page B

immobilized. Eventually he’d collapse, he suspected, if his heart failed to restart. Would that wake his father up? Or would the girl’s quiet rustling do the job before he’d managed to have a heart attack and lose consciousness. Baz hoped it would be the former, because he really didn’t want to be awake when his father saw a wet naked girl rifling his papers.
    Then she looked up, saw Baz in the doorway, and smiled.
    Her blaze of dazzling white teeth and sexy tilted eyes completely evaporated the ten percent brain function he’d been struggling to retain.. His shorts tightened instantly and he had no hope of fighting it. She was sex on very–long legs. But somehow he didn’t pounce. A shred of self–control he hadn’t known he possessed saw him put a finger to his lips and set off towards her, hoping the polished floorboards wouldn’t creak. They didn’t. He reached her side and leant down to whisper, “Don’t say a word,” in her ear. She turned to look into his eyes and for Baz, who was already pushed into hyper–arousal by the mere scent of her skin, the bottomless clarity of those big baby blues was petrol on a bonfire.
    His lips came open and for all of three seconds he forgot to be fearful of his father waking up, forgot that the police were on the way, in fact, forgot completely where he was on the planet. He was simply in her thrall. The combination of her sexy nakedness, an aphrodisiac drug, and the innocence he saw in her eyes undid him. He didn’t remember consciously deciding to lean forward, but he could see her eyes growing larger, and he could smell her warm breath on his face. He almost imagined he could taste her skin, and knew it would still be salty despite her bath. In fact, Baz couldn’t stop himself imagining a whole range of skin flavored activities.
    And then his father farted.
    Incredibly, in the middle of a slow–motion sequence Baz would probably dream about for years, a loud, foghorn fart emanated from the recliner opposite them and Baz had one of those emotion shifts that are completely irrational and impossible to circumvent. Intensity morphed into hysteria and he started to giggle.
    When she whispered, “What was that?” he knew he was about to break up, so he started backing out, gesturing for her to follow.
    She untangled her coltish legs and stood, allowing the bundle of loose papers to squabble with each other on their way to the floor. Miraculously, his father slept on. Baz reached out both hands and she took them, leaning on him heavily as he backed out the door. They were quickly into the hallway but Baz wasn’t allowing himself any relief until he’d marched her back around to the guest suite and parked her on her bed, then he returned to the library and hid the papers and the satchel under her chair. He ran back to ensure she was still where he’d left her and thankfully by then the hilarity of the fart was a long–distant memory.
    She lay sprawled out on her back and Baz was so overcome by the combination of desire, frustration and fear that it took him a minute to work out what to say. Eventually he spluttered, “What were you doing?”
    “Exercising my legs.” She sounded tired, but that didn’t halt his interrogation.
    “In the library?”
    “I got tired and sat down.”
    “And the papers?”
    “I was curious.”
    It all sounded so logical, and she looked so innocent it made him want to bash his head against a wall. “You shouldn’t walk around naked,” he said at last, trying to keep the hysteria out of his voice. Failing. “If my father woke up and saw you there he’d …” What? Baz closed his eyes momentarily, trying to rid himself of the image of Theodore Tiberius Wilson having a massive coronary on the Persian rug.
    “That man’s too old to make a baby with,” she said, and Baz got an entirely different mind–picture that turned his stomach.
    He shook his head to clear it. “The police are coming,” he reminded her.
    “Can I have