Ros Baxter goes under the sea…

You know, I never thought of mermen as particularly sexy.  Fish, right? You know, cold-blooded, kind of slimy. Mermaids, sure.  Topless, long-hired sirens, luring hapless sailors to their doom. But the guys? Not so much.

That was until the underwater kingdom of Aegira moseyed into my imagination. These underwater people are less fish, more God.  They’re hard-bodied, blonde heroes with a capital H. Problem is, we all know we like our fantasy guys kind of dark and alpha. In contemporary stories, we might come at a nice guy, but in Monsterville, the last thing we want is a sweet supe. We want them to suck our blood,  spank our arses, and generally, in the words of Jace Everett, “do bad things to you”. And Aegiran men are… well… pretty vanilla.

Except for one.

Carragheen.

The deep-sea dwelling bad boy with indigo eyes who likes women, liquor and a good brawl.

…this man who was looking at me in that direct, arrogant way tall, dark, mysterious strangers have been using to mess with women’s heads for centuries. He could have been Mr Darcy or James Dean or Antonio Banderas in Interview With A Vampire.

But he wasn’t.

He was a merman, and they’re not supposed to look like this. They’re polite. They touch your eyelids and murmur ritual greetings. They establish lineage.

But it looked like no-one told him the rules.

Carragheen’s the original tortured bad boy, full of secrets and contradictions. Prone to issuing commands, picking fights with nine-feet tall, poison-spitting Treppalows, and pinning you against the sweet, outrageously-hard length him.

And just think for a moment about all the things a merman could bring to the romantic smorgasbord.  Let’s see… The power to hold his breath for a really long time – that’s got to come in handy, right? How about taking you on a first date to see a hundred thousand deep sea dolphins frolic in the moonlight (kinds beats checking out the latest Steven Segal)? Then there’s hydroporting – the capacity to move between earth and sea via a single, perfectly-sung note and a whole lot of magic.  Perfect for those moments when you just need to get away from it all.

Sigh. It’s enough to make getting wet seem like a very good idea.

If you want to get a bit wet and wild, check out Ros’s book, Fish out of Water.