Her Contract Enatails Ch. 04

"You have to understand that I'm not your wife," Carla shook her head. "I haven't come back from the grave to make everything okay. Probably you stumbling on me like that has just made your life a whole lot worse."

"I don't care," she could see from the look in his eyes that he was as serious as he could have been. "I came to terms with the fact that my wife was dead. It almost destroyed me, but I made myself go on and no matter what I did there was nothing that could really make me feel like my life was worth going on with. This is going to sound like I'm trying to blackmail you, and maybe I am. Maybe seeing a mermaid with the face of my dead wife has snapped my mind. But there's no half measures for me as far as you're concerned. Either you feel the way that I do and stay with me, or I walk into the sea and let myself drown. You saved me once before and you might do it again no matter what you think of me, but you can't watch me forever and I'll keep trying to take my life one way or another. I just need you to understand that without you my life lost all meaning and knowing that you are alive and out there now is not something that I can just go on living with lodged in my head."

For a moment he thought that he had gone too far, that she would simply slip away into the waves and be gone forever. But instead her eyes filled with tears and she looked out to sea, as if scared of something that lay out across the waters, invisible to all but her.

"You don't know how lonely life out there is, how hard as well. There were times when I almost died and times when I nearly gave up and tried to do the same thing as you. I never thought I'd miss human contact as much as I have, not after what I went through. But I can't come back with you and live in an apartment, not when I'm less than human."

The words were painful for Carla to speak for the genuine loneliness that she mentioned and also because she found that she truly wanted to stay with this quite, humble man who seemed to long for her mere presence. The loss of human contact that she had been forced to endure during the years she had spent living in the sea and along the coast had taxed her mind greatly. She had snatched the rare encounter with a human being in situations that she had been able to control and judge were worth the risk, seducing a lost and drunken wandered from a beach party whom she was sure would chalk her up to his state of inebriation and even taking advantage of a shipwrecked sailor on more than one occasion whom she had doubts would ever be rescued or believed if he were.

Now she had come face to face with a man who lived in her memories and was almost as singly devoted to her as she had been to her former master. Had there been anyway that she could have taken him with her then she would have done so. But how could she live in the small urban apartment that her former human self remembered?

"The apartment?" Jared sounded amused. "You really must be something other than human if you think I'm still living there! It's been more than a decade, things have changed since the days we lived in the city. How did you think that I came to be wandering along a beach out here?"

Carla gave him a look that seemed to urge him on.

"I got a new job pretty soon after you died," he shook his head and laughed. "I'm sorry, it just sounds so strange to actually be saying that to someone. Anyway, it was a hard job, but the pay was good and I made some headway into climbing the ranks before the whole thing came crashing down thanks to some corruption or scandal at the top. I was lucky enough to get out with a fair settlement, enough to buy myself a place not far from here that I planned to grow old in. It's not much to look at, but it backs onto the beach and the nearest neighbour is far enough away not to really count as a neighbour at all."

He looked at her appealingly.

Carla realised that there was nothing that she say to argue against his proposal. Here was everything that she wanted as well as everything that she needed in the form of a man whom she was sure possessed nothing but a good soul and an enduring love for the human woman that she had once been.

How could she refuse him?

She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye, but was surprised when he leaned forward and took her in a fierce embrace that resulted in a passionate kiss. Carla reacted to the contact with his body and found herself unable to do anything except return his affection.

"I can't promise a happy ending," she held his hands and imploring him to listen to her as she spoke. "We're both different people from the couple who were married all those years ago, but maybe we can make a fresh start as the people we are now and go from there?"

"I don't think I could have put it better myself," Jared bent to scoop the mermaid up from the sand and she was unable to stop herself noting the fact that he did so with little sign of trouble, hinting that he would be able to accommodate her needs when the time came.

"Might seem like an ungentlemanly thing to say," he glanced down at Carla's naked breasts as they he carried her along the beach, "but I can never recall these things being that large in the past."

"If you think those are something," Carla could not help laughing, "wait until you see the rest of the package."

"You don't say?

"Oh, but I do!"

As they made their way up the beach in the fading light, Carla found herself strangely delighted at the prospect of the discoveries that he was about to make. It would be a new experience for her to be making her own a man who was in awe of and worshipped her rather than using her sexuality as a weapon to control another.

This would be a voyage of discovery for them both.