I’m Jonah, a PhD student sent to Emerald Island to study merfolk. To save my dissertation, I mistook a dangerous male siren for a deep-sea merman who did not know how to court and taught him to sing and dance.
Then my advisor warned me: sirens did not woo their mates—they abducted them.
I fled the island, but Ash caught me, forced me to swallow a pearl, and locked me in an underwater cave. He insisted I had promised to return over ten years ago—a memory I had lost after a high fever.
When I finally remembered that he had once saved me and waited ten years for me, I stopped running. But Ash still distrusted humans and planned to send me back while I was pregnant, then disappear forever.
So I locked him in the research station, forced him to gain legal recognition as a sentient species, and proposed with his identity papers in hand.
