To the right, standing near the raised deck’s edge, Ivar stood wearing nothing but a pair of pants. His chest and back were bare, exposing his tattoos for my observation. Darkened lines ran over his skin forming intricate runes and images spanning the length of his back and chest. The depictions reminded me of a great battle and I wondered if it was so. I knew he’d known his fair share of war. The others I imagined were protection runes, but I couldn’t be sure. It was sexy as sin, but I tried to cover my interest. I had to remember that this wasn’t what he’d wanted. It didn’t matter how badly it stung to be so soundly rejected by him.
Like a moth drawn to the flame, I stepped toward him before I could even stop myself. Thankfully, I regained composure quickly before I made it to him. He was standing beside the rail, staring up at the moon like a snake basking in the sun. Unknowingly, I began to feel like I was intruding on something wildly personal to him…something I wasn’t meant to see.
Thinking better of it, I moved to step back and go back inside to give him his space as soon as it became apparent I’d been wrong. As soon as I moved, Ivar’s faced snapped in my direction. His eyes glistened with moisture, driving home the revelation that I’d intruded on an intimate moment.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bug you. I’ll, uh…yeah,” I murmured, throwing a thumb back over my shoulder as I pulled the oversized t-shirt down lower over my bare legs and made to leave.
“Don’t go,” Ivar said gruffly, rooting me to the spot.
Something in his voice called to me, connecting with my own demons that were lurking under the surface. My nightmare was still fresh in my mind. My team’s cries for help still echoed in my ears like they had just spoken to me from beyond the grave.
With a small nod, I stayed there with him. I didn’t venture closer, wanting to give him his space to finish. When he was convinced that I wasn’t going to turn tail and head back inside, he turned back toward the trees and faced the moon. Ivar stared at it reverently.
“My daughter, Siri, used to stare up at the moon before she would go to bed. She would say Papa? Why does Máni never wish me a goodnight back? And I would tell her that he does, she just had to listen hard enough and pay attention to her dreams. I think she would have liked this one,” he revealed, his voice growing quiet at the end, just barely above a whisper.
My heart shattered at Ivar’s words. Not only had he been forced into a curse only partly of his own making, but he’d had to endure it all knowing that he’d lost his family along with his legs and his life above the waves. Lowering his face, he glanced back at me and gave me a small smile.
“You know, I think she would’ve liked you a lot. She always had more interest in playing swords and pretending to go on adventures and raids than anything else. She wanted to be a shieldmaiden, sort of like you,” Ivar confessed.
I stepped closer and came to stop beside him at the rail, abandoning my modesty and resting my elbows on the ledge. The breeze was cool, but it was still warm in the summer heat.
“Well, that makes sense. She was your daughter, after all,” I teased, trying to lighten the moment.
He chuckled once with that same small, sad smile and nodded his agreement. Ivar pulled his stare from the darkened forest and locked his gaze with mine. It felt like it was the first time he had really and truly looked at me, or maybe he was seeing something in me that he hadn’t seen before.
“I’ll give you that one,” he relented, his eyes dipped lower and raked over my semi-exposed length, lingering on the hem of the shirt a little longer than the rest.
He was far away, I could tell by that glassy-eyed stare. Relaxing more than I’d ever seen him, Ivar rolled his head as he stretched his neck and then leaned onto the railing, resting on his elbows. He stared into the black shadows under the trees where the moonlight didn’t reach and he sighed heavily. His body was so close to mine that I could feel the heat emanating from his forearm.
What was going on in that beautiful head of his? I wasn’t naturally the type of woman who was comfortable in the long silences, but I could tell Ivar wasn’t much of a talker. There was his stony-faced demeanor too. I just couldn’t get a read on him. A beautiful mystery- that was him.
Trying to follow his lead, I stared out into the trees and tried to make out the faint lines of tree trunks and ferns. Somewhere, not too far into the trees, an owl’s call cut through the night to join the chorus of crickets and buzzing insects.
Quietly, I wondered if things would’ve been different for us if we’d been from the same time. Maybe timing was just our problem. Glancing at Ivar from the corner of my eye, I knew that wasn’t really true either. Timing was absolutely our problem, it just wasn’t the centuries that separated us that was dooming us for failure before we could begin. It was the fact that I hadn’t captured his heart first. The ghosts of his family haunted him like my fallen brethren did me.
Never in my life had I been one of those women who hated every single female who had come before me. It just never occurred to me to dislike them for having loved the same man I did.
Wait…love? Certainly not. I couldn’t. It was too soon. Maybe love was too strong a word. Sure, there was carnal desire and an undeniable attraction between the two of us. I needed to remember that I had to keep my hopes anchored firmly in reality.
Although, doing that was a lot harder when your reality was blown to shit, and suddenly thousand-year-old Viking mermen were offering forever. My five-year-old self would’ve thought our every dream had been answered in one day. At twenty-eight, I knew that love and matters of the heart were so much more complicated than that. Hell, men were complicated.
I’d had boyfriends off and on since I’d been in high school. The last serious relationship I’d had ended about a month after I got out of boot camp when I’d first enlisted. At the time, the weasel I’d been dating apparently thought it was too strenuous on a relationship to “do the long-distance thing” as he’d so eloquently put it, right before I found out through friends that he’d moved on the day I’d left. Since then, I just hadn’t found someone I really wanted to spend the time on it. No one had even seemed worth it…until Ivar.
His broken pieces matched mine in ways that I hadn’t realized were possible before. When I was with him, I didn’t feel quite as broken as I had felt before. Maybe that’s what I’d been looking for all along- someone who didn’t see a project to fix when they looked at me. Perhaps it was hope, or maybe the insanity that had created the man and the myth beside me, but for the first time since I’d been home from Syria, I wanted to fight for something. I wanted to fight for him, for a future for us, and for the life he’d sacrificed to pay for his people’s crimes. He deserved that and as much as I didn’t think it sometimes, I deserved to have a happy future too.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I asked, disturbing the comfortable calm which had fallen over us.
He drew in a deep breath and lifted his head to stare at the moon again. I could see him watching me from the corner of his eyes which betrayed the turmoil he was battling inside.
“That moon has taunted me all these long years, keeping me imprisoned in that lake and giving me only the briefest taste of freedom to make my sentence sting all the more. It was a reminder that there was a world beyond these shorelines, a world that had long since forgotten about us, the Cursed Ones. After the first hundred years, I realized everyone I had ever known or loved had lived and died while I stayed stuck under the waves. For so long, I wished and prayed for an end to the suffering, yet the gods weren’t so merciful. If I would’ve taken my own life, I would never have a chance to enter Valhalla…never see those I loved,” Ivar explained, his voice growing quiet at the end, clearly a little emotional.
I didn’t need him to say the words to know he was thinking of his daughter and the family he’d left behind. Guilt had been eating away at him for close to a thousand years and I only hoped there was still enough left of the man inside to save.
“So, you stayed,�
� I finished for him.
He nodded solemnly.
“Can I ask why? Not that I’m complaining, I’m glad you’re here, now,” I babbled, rushing out the words to correct myself before I really embarrassed myself. “It’s just that you don’t seem like you want your curse to be broken.”
It was a bold observation to make, but it was true so far as I could see it. If there was ever going to be any headway made with Ivar, I had to quit letting him make excuses. I was standing right here offering him something more than the bleak existence of eternity beneath the waves of Sapphire Lake. His stormy gaze bored into me like he was half expecting me to back down and not demand the answers I wanted. That wasn’t the type of woman I was. My mother had told me frequently that I was like a dog with a bone when I set my mind to something I wanted.
Now, I wanted Ivar and I wanted him to want me back.
Straightening to his full height, he looked to the moon again before his gaze returned to me. Resting his elbow on the rail, he lifted his other hand and tucked a stray lock of hair that had blown free with a light breeze and tucked it tenderly behind my ear. His touch lingered longer than necessary, but I was grateful for it. Where our flesh met, it felt like an electric current running between us, lighting every nerve ending like it was the Fourth of July.
“For so long, I thought the curse was a sick joke from the gods. What could be worse than to give the damned a hope of salvation when there is none? Now, I don’t know what to believe. It’s hard to let go of everything I’d known to be true for centuries, but what can I say? Here you are. You saw my mate mark and you bore witness to my people’s shame. If I could shrug off those as mere coincidences, I doubt I’d still be here, but none of that can explain how in such a short span of time, you’ve set your hooks in me. When I close my eyes, yours is the face I see. When I think of the future, I can see more than the bleak existence I’ve had. I can’t deny that I feel something for you and that scares the hell out of me.”
Great.
A Viking merman with commitment issues. Tamsin and the gods really had a sense of humor when they set the curse into motion. Being cursed wasn’t enough, they had to go and make it even harder to find love. Then again, it was never meant to be easy. It was their punishment. Ivar’s admission was real, and I hung on every word, hoping to discern his meaning.
For the first time, I really began to fear that he was rejecting me. We were still practically strangers, save for the small bit of information we had that we were soul mates. The ghost of his family haunted him, and I began to worry that they would never stop and if they wouldn’t give him the peace he so desperately needed, I feared we really were doomed to fail from the start. I wouldn’t be his consolation prize, I was worth better than that. Now, I had to make him see that too.
“It’s scary for me too, you know. Until yesterday, mermaids were a myth and Viking warriors were relegated to the pages of history books, but here you are. I’m not good at love either, not that I’ve ever had someone that I could say I truly loved. Infatuations and lust don’t last like love does,” I whispered, confessing my ineptitude.
Ivar’s gaze was fixed on me like he was weighing the truth behind my words. The corners of his mouth turned down in a slight frown as he contemplated something silently.
“When you love someone, you open yourself up to being hurt irreparably. Likewise, you hold the power to completely shatter someone’s world,” he said sagely. Ivar reached forward and slid his hand into mine. Strong fingers wrapped securely around mine and my body responded to his instantly, twining with his and holding firm.
He was my anchor, keeping me steady in a hurricane of emotions, hope, and uncertainty. I couldn’t ignore the effect he had on me. When he’d spoken low in my ear as he taught me how to throw an axe and reminded me of what I’d survived to get there, he’d chased away the demons which were threatening to swallow me whole. When I was around him, the world didn’t feel like it was so dark anymore. It was refreshing and for the first time since I’d come home, I felt alive and in-the-moment, not trapped back in Syria. My counselor back in Maine had told me that I needed to let go of my guilt and that I’d come home for a reason and now, it was up to me to discover what that reason was. I didn’t need to know any more about him than I already did to know that Ivar was my reason.
Maybe he always had been.
“You might have the power to shatter me, but you’re not that man, Ivar. All that guilt you’re feeling? It serves no one now. Ingrid and Siri are gone and I’m so sorry for it, but I’m here. You have a shot at a future and maybe even a happy one. I happen to think I’m a pretty great catch,” I shrugged, trying to keep my threatening tears at bay. Rolling my eyes to the heavens, I couldn’t brave looking at him when I bared my soul and asked him to give this a chance. I waited for his anger and outrage at the mention of his previous family, but it never came. He stayed quiet and waited for me to continue. “I need you to think about what it is you want here. Am I someone you don’t think you can live without? I know I don’t want to live without you now that I’ve gotten a chance to know you a little better, but if I have to, I will. It’s better to break things clean off early before things get messy and complicated.”
The mists were gathering at the mention of leaving Ivar and the possibility of going home to Maine after everything I’d experienced in Aurora Falls. Magic really did exist. Mermaids too. More than anything, I’d been offered the chance to be loved by a man who didn’t see the broken little thing I did when I looked in the mirror. Going back to the way things had been before wasn’t an option, but I couldn’t force him to pick me back. I had to trust him, and that realization was one that was both painful and terrifying.
Soul mates or not, Ivar had to choose his own path and I couldn’t pick it for him. I just wished that when the dust settled, I wasn’t so broken that I couldn’t be put back together one day.
6
Ivar
Makenna turned her face away from me, so I wouldn’t see her wipe away the tears which had begun to fall. I’d noticed regardless, and it only reaffirmed what I knew to be true: I was the absolute worst kind of man. Everywhere I went, I hurt those I cared for. Back home and in this new land both. Makenna was a strong woman and here she was, reduced to tears by me. How many lives was I responsible for ruining?
Guilt was gnawing away at me, eating me alive from the inside out. She sniffled and bit her lip to keep her from saying more. In the span of a day and a half, this tiny woman had managed to wrap me around her little finger. Before I bothered to think too much about what I was doing or what would happen next, I pushed up from where I leaned against the rail and reached for her. She didn’t resist as I pulled her against me and buried my face in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, knowing she heard me anyway. “Don’t cry.”
This was all my fault.
Like magnets, she clung to me as soon as our bodies made contact. She smelled like the fresh air right after a summer storm when there was still a charge of electricity clinging to everything. Her body fit tightly against mine, sending every nerve into overdrive. Gods, it had been a long time since I’d known the comforts of a woman. Too long.
However, I wouldn’t do that to Makenna. I wanted her, I couldn’t deny that any longer. That didn’t mean I could have her. I wouldn’t ruin her too.
“What’s wrong with me?” she whispered. I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or to herself, but her small, broken voice set something inside of me ablaze.
“Not one god damn thing, astín mín. I’m sorry for ever making you feel like you were lacking. This is not in any way a problem with you,” I admitted, squeezing my eyes shut like it would make the world fall away and grant me the peace I needed to let go of my past.
Makenna’s hands smoothed over the planes of my back, holding firmly. With every stroke of her hands over my flesh, the tension eased a little more. The stirring of that long-forgotten feeling sent warm tendrils coursing t
hrough my blood, making me cling to the woman just as desperately as she was to me.
Happily ever after wasn’t in the cards for a man like me. I’d done horrible things in the name of my jarl and for myself. I wasn’t blameless in this curse. I’d done my share of plundering and killing, even if I hadn’t been the prick that fucked our entire envoy into oblivion. To be given a woman like Makenna, who despite all she’d been through, still wanted to help people…it just didn’t make sense to me. In my very long existence, I’d come to learn a few things about the way the universe and the gods worked. When things seemed like they were too good to be true, they generally were, and in the end, the innocent are almost always the only ones hurt.
“I’m not ready to give up on you, yet,” she whispered, pulling back enough to look up into my face.
As I stared into her dark eyes, I saw every bit of determination, admiration, and stubbornness she had. She’d meant every word of it and I didn’t doubt her. Makenna stared up into my eyes and that tempting tongue swiped over her lower lip, wetting them invitingly. Then, those seductive orbs trailed down to my lips with expectation. There was no question she was waiting for me to kiss her and by gods, she was fucking devastating to behold.
Under the full moon, I was but a mere mortal man and hers was the call of the siren- one I was helpless to resist. I wouldn’t ruin her, not by taking her to bed and sealing the bond, but I refused to live eternity knowing who my mate was and not having tasted her. Gripping her a little tighter, my resolve crumbled as I felt her hot pliant body wriggling needy against mine and I swooped in, claiming her lips before I could convince myself it was a mistake.
Warrior’s Kiss- Mountain Mermaids Page 5