Wish Out of Water

Book excerpt: Brook Williams was raised to avoid drawing attention at all costs. At twenty-eight, she wonders if her mermaid mother’s paranoia isolated Brook and her siblings from society to a harmful extreme. When Brook intervenes to save a stranger from a careening truck, however, she quickly learns her mother’s obsessive concerns were entirely justified. There’s just something about Brook that Cooper Koning can’t get off his mind. At first, he thinks his infatuation is due to the concussion sustained when she shoved him out of traffic. Then he realizes that she’s simply perfect…perfect to free him from a looming future being the king of Souersland. His candid Hail Mary proposal comes with few strings attached: Brook marries him, he’s tossed from the line of succession, she gets a wad of cash for her struggling swim school, and they go their separate ways. Of course, Cooper soon realizes that he’d be foolish to let her go. Now that she’s left her little world, though, the mermaid skeletons in Brook’s closet can no longer stay hidden. Her mother left the sea to escape a burdensome duty, and now that duty is Brook’s. And in a strange twist of fate, that mantle may mean that it isn’t even Cooper’s human family who should rule Souersland, but Brook’s magical one. Can a relationship built on fables endure? Or will the star-crossed spouses quickly decide their differences are too tremendous to overcome?