His gaze dropped to her mouth. His nostrils flared. Her nipples beaded. She sensed the wildness in him, churning deep below the surface, and an answering hunger uncurled in her belly, whetted by loneliness and lust. She leaned in, drawn beyond caution, beyond reason, pulled irresistibly closer by the promise of his kiss.
He bent his head and paused, his breath on her lips.
She felt a spark, a current arcing between them. His lips touched hers, and her heart gave a startled jump and flew up behind her teeth. He coaxed her mouth open with his mouth, pressing his tongue inside. He tasted wild and salty as the sea. She surged to meet him, meeting his tongue eagerly with her own, sucking it deeper, twining her arms around his neck. She was starving for the taste of him, for the feel of his man’s hard body against her body, for the touch of skin on skin.
She wanted . . . She rose on tiptoe, straining to get closer. She needed . . .
He broke the kiss, leaning his forehead against hers. His breath was hot on her lips, his skin warm and damp. She wanted to burrow under his shirt to touch him, his flesh. His erection was long and thick, pressed against her.
His fingertips brushed her cheek, her jaw, her throat. “Come away with me.”
Yes.
No.
“Where?” A silly, breathless sound.
“Does it matter?” He sounded impatient. Amused.
No.
Yes.
She wanted to pull him down among the broken corn rows, open his pants and straddle him. She swallowed hard. “It might. I don’t know you.”
“What better way to learn?”
He had the trick of answering a question with another question. Like a cop. Like Caleb. Like a man with something to hide.
“We could try talking.”
“Come with me,” he urged. “Away.”
The possibility pulled at her like an undertow. She almost staggered. “I can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“I have . . .” She searched for solid ground, reasons that would stand against the tug of his temptation, the demand clamoring through her blood. “Obligations. School. My father.”
“This is no place for you.” His voice beat at her like the sea on the rocks at night, whispering along her nerves, eroding her control. “This is no life for the woman you have become.”
She pressed her hands to her temples. Her body throbbed like a bruise. “You don’t know anything about what kind of woman I am.”
And he couldn’t.
No one must ever know.
“Tell me.”
Oh, God, she wanted to.
She stared at him, tempted, appalled, dismayed. Her heart pounded in her chest. This was what came of asking questions.
His eyes darkened and expanded until they filled her vision. Twin black whirlpools, drawing her in, dragging her under.
She could barely hear over the rushing in her ears. Her head buzzed. Her blood itched and crackled. She worked her tongue, trying to lick her words into shape. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He smiled slowly, the first time she had seen him smile. “Then we will not talk.”
“I should . . .” What? “Go home,” she managed.
“I will take you where you need to go.”
Take me. Yes.
His mouth possessed hers in a long, deep, drugging kiss that blanketed her brain like fog rolling in from the sea. She was lost in it, in him, in her rising need. His lips followed the trail blazed by his fingertips, the curve of her cheek, the hollow of her jaw, her throat. His hands pushed under her shirt to close on her breasts, and her knees folded like wet string. He shifted her, pulling her sweatshirt over her head, throwing it to the ground. Sliding his hands to her hips, he turned her against his body. His chest was fitted to her back, his erection pressed her buttocks. She panted with excitement, liquid heat running through her veins, surging through her body, melting her insides. She could not see his face. She could only feel, his breath hot at her ear, his arm hard around her waist, his solid body pulsing, rocking against her. His free hand unbuttoned her jeans, tugged on her zipper.
“Uh,” she said. Assent? Or warning?
Then it didn’t matter because his hand was there, in her panties, between her legs. His long fingers stroked her, pressing firmly and then delicately, making her hot, making her wet, making her shudder and cry out. It wasn’t enough. His beard rasped the side of her face. His hand was busy, making her mindless. She arched against him, frantic, pushing her hips into his hand, fighting the constricting denim.
“I need . . .”
More.
“Yes. Trust me,” he said.
She struggled to turn, to face him, and he used the break in her balance to sweep her off her feet and onto the ground. The sun dazzled her eyes, silhouetting his head. He came down hard on top of her, still fully clothed. Her hair spilled among the leaves and vines. The smell of rich, ripe, growing things enveloped them.
Hooking his thumb into the neckline of her tank top, he dragged it down, exposing her to the cool air and his heated gaze. The stretchy fabric caught beneath her breasts, pushing them upward like an offering. The sun glinted on her navel ring.
He paused. With one finger, he touched the tiny aquamarine sparkling like a tear against her belly. “Beautiful.”
But she was too far gone for compliments. Or delays. Grabbing his head, she guided it to her breasts. He suckled her strongly, his mouth hot and wet. She tangled her fingers in his sleek, warm hair, feeling the pull all the way to her womb. The earth exhaled as the sun poured down like honey, sealing her eyelids. It still was not enough. Never enough. Something had seized her, a hunger, a fever. She rose to meet him, her heels pressing the earth, feeling the clods cool between her shoulders, the soil damp beneath her buttocks, and then—yesss—his erection, hot and hard against her thighs, against her entrance. He had yanked his pants open. Her jeans and panties were down around her knees. She strained upward, her body taut and ready as a bow. He reached between their bodies to the place where she was slick and wet and aching for him. Now. He pushed, and she sucked in her breath at the sudden invasion, the startling fullness.
It was too much. It was not enough.
His weight pinned her, trapping her firmly in her body, fully in the moment. She was swimming in sensation, swept away by desire. He hunched into her, working her with long, firm strokes, thrusting into her again. And again. The musk of earth, sweat, and sex rose around them, the slap of flesh on flesh, wet and raw. He pounded into her, deep, deeper. She clenched around him.
His hand gripped her jaw.
Startled, she opened her eyes. His face was dark and intent above her, haloed by the blue, blue sky.
“Come with me,” he commanded. “Come.”
She was helpless to resist. The tide rose in her body, drowning will, swamping thought. The ground rolled under her like a wave as her crest took her. Above her, within her, Conn’s body plunged. Shuddered.
And the dark carried her away.
Conn levered himself from the girl’s long body, lying among the green vines and dry husks. Her palm lay curled half-open like a flower. Her scent—sun-warmed skin, soap-washed hair—mingled with the smell of crushed stalks and turned soil.
Gazing down at her pale face and thick, fair lashes, he allowed himself a moment’s regret. He would have preferred her cognizant.
And walking, he acknowledged ruefully.
But he had already been gone too long from Sanctuary. He needed her to propagate her mother’s line and secure his people’s fate. He did not choose to become mired in days of delay and endless explanations, with the risk of her family’s interference and perhaps her own refusal at the end.
So.
He had bound her to him by the simplest, strongest means at his disposal. She had not been unwilling. He had experience enough to achieve her seduction, skill enough to compel her response. Magic enough to throw her brothers off the scent should they feel obliged to follow.
Everything had gone according to plan.
Except his own reaction.
Conn frowned. She had moved him. He did not know why. He had enjoyed other partners who were more beautiful and certainly more inventive. Eager partners. Selkie partners.
Not recently, though. He adjusted his clothing, tucking himself away. Perhaps the girl’s charm lay in her novelty. Perhaps what he was experiencing was merely relief after a long abstinence.
And yet . . . He glanced down at her quiet face, her fair hair rioting over the ground. When he was in her, when her body rose to meet his, he had felt a power, a control, a hunger to match his own.
Absurd, of course. She was only human, no matter who her mother was.
He slipped off her shoes; reached under her to remove her jeans. Beneath her garments, she was lovely, clean-limbed and strong, pale and smooth as willow with the bark peeled away.
He laid her back down among the pumpkins, his hands skimming her ribs as he tugged her skimpy top to cover her pink-tipped breasts. Unexpected hunger tightened his belly. Stiffened his cock.
Grimly, he returned his gaze to her face. The children of the sea lived in the moment, following their whims and desires like the pull of the tides. But Conn had ruled for nine hundred years in human form from the tower of Caer Subai. He had learned—painfully—to control his nature, to weigh and calculate and decide. He would not be distracted from his purpose.
He slid his knife from the sheath at his knee.
Corn stood around them in patches, skeletons of summer among the stakes and twine. Conn gathered a sheaf in one arm and, bending, sliced it through in a single stroke close to the ground. He bound the dried stalks together with twine, tying them to form a waist, a neck, legs. The shock at the top he left loose like long, stiff hair.
He laid the corn maiden on the ground beside Lucy, measuring its length with his eyes. They were almost the same size. He dressed the sheaf in the girl’s clothing, forcing the jeans over the stalks of its legs, bundling its body into the shirt. He was sweating when he finished. Bits of dust and broken chaff clung to his skin.
Kneeling beside Lucy, he gathered her hair in one hand the way he’d gathered the corn, counting the strands across his palm, one, two, three . . . seven. Her face was still, her skin cold and pale.
An unexpected twinge caught him beneath the ribs. He used sex as a tool, a weapon. He did not expect it to turn like a knife in his hand. But his feelings, her feelings, could not be allowed to matter. He did what he must do.
Fisting his hand around the strands of her hair, he yanked it out by the roots.
Her breath escaped her lips in a silent cry. A drop of blood beaded at her scalp, but his magic compelled her to continue sleeping.
He set his teeth, touching his finger to the blood and then to the center of the bundled corn, the claidheag, where the corn maiden’s heart would beat. If such a creature had a heart. His fingertip burned. He felt the heat flow upward through his arm, power building and pulsing like a headache. He tied the seven strands of hair over the twine at the top.
“Know,” he commanded. The pressure hammered at his temples.
He blew into the featureless face. “Breathe.”
He pressed the heel of his palm between Lucy’s legs, still wet with her essence and his seed. The magic gripped his neck like claws, sinking fangs into his skull, squeezing his brain. He smeared his wet hand over the dry husks of the claidheag, anointing it with life. “Be.”
He felt the surge, the shock of focused power, leap from him to the sheaf on the ground.
Done.
The power ebbed away, leaving him drained, his head throbbing with the aftermath of magic, and the claidheag stiff and still.
Conn inhaled, holding his breath to fill the sudden emptiness of his chest.
Lucy slept, unknowing.
He lifted her body in his arms and carried her away, leaving his handiwork lying behind them in the field.
The dried stalks rattled together. Know.
The wind whispered. Breathe.
The earth radiated warmth. Be.
The breeze teased the bundle on the ground. The claidheag ’s hair, the pale gold of corn husks or straw, fluttered, smoothing, softening. Beneath the swaddling clothes, its limbs swelled and grew supple, taking on substance, taking on flesh.
From the branches of a spruce, a crow launched, squawking in protest or warning.
The corn maiden opened its eyes, the green-yellow of pumpkin vines. Lucy’s eyes, in Lucy’s face.
It lay in the field, watching the clouds chase across the sky, absorbing the last rays of the sun, listening to the chatter of the wind.
A catbird landed on a nearby stake, cocked a fierce, bright eye, and flew away again. An ant, wandering the furrows, traced a trail over the claidheag’s motionless hand. Slowly, thought formed, a pale shoot from a kernel of consciousness.
It did not belong here, cut down, cut off from the earth.
Not anymore.
Sighing, the claidheag rose on one elbow and then to its knees. To its feet. It should go . . . The word was buried deep, a fat, round word, moldy with disappointment. Home. It should go home.
Following the tug of blood, the stir of memory, it shambled toward the road.
4
CALEB WATCHED MAGGIE STIR ANOTHER SPOON ful of sugar into her mug. Less than twenty-four hours after their meeting with the selkie prince, they sat at their own kitchen table. The night breeze flowed over the sill, carrying with it the scent of the salt wood.
This was what he’d dreamed of, Maggie in his house and in his life, sharing their thoughts at the end of the day. After two months of marriage, he knew her tastes and her habits, knew she liked her coffee sweet and the windows open and sex first thing in the morning.
But he didn’t know how to give her what she wanted. Not this time.
“Maybe in a couple of years,” Caleb said. “When things settle down . . .”
She shot him a wry look. “When I am seven hundred and five?”
He reached to cover her hand on the table. “You don’t look a day over three hundred.”
“There’s a comfort.” But she smiled and turned her palm over, linking her fingers with his. “It’s all right, Caleb. I am happy here. With you.”
Some of the tension leached from his shoulders. “I’ll give Conn our answer in the morning, then.”
Margred curled her free hand around her mug. “What about Lucy?”
Caleb felt the stiffness creep back into his neck. “What about her?”
“When I first met her, I thought . . . I felt . . .” Margred shook her head. “She is your mother’s daughter, too.”
Everything within him rejected the idea. From the time Lucy was a toddler with fat baby legs and a “love me” smile, she had been his. He’d been the one to take care of her. To protect her. To fix her lunch and her scrapes, to read her stories and tuck her into bed.
“Lucy is human,” he said shortly. “She never Changed.”
Selkies retained the shape they had at birth until they reached sexual maturity. Seals lived as seals for three to six years; humans remained in human form until puberty. When Caleb’s brother, Dylan, turned thirteen, he Changed for the first time. His transformation had torn their family apart. Atargatis—Alice, their father had called her—returned with her older son to the sea, leaving her husband, ten-year-old Caleb, and baby Lucy behind.
“How do you know?” Margred asked. “You were not here.”
Caleb ran his hand over his short hair. “She called me at school to tell me she got her period, for God’s sake. You think she would have mentioned a little something like sprouting flippers and fur.”
“Would she?”
Caleb’s jaw set. “Lucy’s as human as I am,” he insisted. “If she wasn’t, you would know it. You would have sensed it. Or Dylan would.”
“Yes. But she is still of your mother’s bloodline. If she were to have a child—”
&nbs
p; He didn’t want to think about it. His sister was fresh out of college. Barely out of diapers.
“Let’s not borrow trouble,” Caleb said. “Christ, she doesn’t even have a steady boyfriend.”
“Neither did Regina before she met your brother,” Margred pointed out.
“What are the odds my sister’s going to get knocked up by a selkie? As long as Lucy sticks to her own kind, she’ll be fine.”
Maggie arched her eyebrows. “Really.”
Fuck.
He hadn’t stuck to his kind. And neither, thank God, had she.
“I only meant . . . You told me yourself most humanmer offspring are human. Lucy’s only half-selkie. If she marries a mortal, a human, their kids will probably be human, too. They’ll be safe.”
“Lucy’s human children would be safe,” Margred repeated.
Caleb frowned. “Probably. The demons have never gone after Lucy.”
“Then why do you assume our child would be in danger?”
“Because—damn it, Maggie, you’re selkie.”
“Not anymore.”
“You are. In your blood. In your genes. And I carry my mother’s genes. The combination . . .” Fear for her closed his throat. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Didn’t you say we should not borrow trouble?”
“Maggie, if you get pregnant, you might as well paint a bull’s-eye on your belly. The demons will come after you. You could die.” The thought ripped his insides. His hand clenched hers on the table. “I can’t lose you.”
“My dearest heart. My love.” Her voice was gentle, her eyes dark and tender. “All mortal things die. Now or five years from now or fifty . . . what is any of it, compared to eternity? Yet I would rather have one year with you than a millennium without you. I am human now. Let me be human.”
She was everything he’d ever wanted. And she wanted a family. With him.
Sea Lord Page 5