Sea Lord

by Virginia Kantra

Color climbed in her face. But she did not look away. “Where are you taking me now?”

  “Home.” He nodded to starboard, where the shore moved up and down with the rhythm of the boat. “To Sanctuary.”

  Her knuckles were white in her lap, but her eyes remained steady on his. “That’s not home. Not my home.”

  He did not wish to antagonize her. But the sooner she accepted her fate, the easier this would be for both of them.

  “In time, it will be,” he said.

  He hoped.

  “In time?” There was an edge to her voice like panic. Or anger. “How long are you planning to keep me there?”

  He did not answer.

  She captured the flying strands of her hair, holding it back from her face. Behind her, the white wake dissolved against the deep blue sea. “How long?” she insisted.

  Something stirred at his heart, a worm of scruple or pity. He trimmed the jib, reluctant to meet her gaze. “You are the daughter of Atargatis. You serve the prophecy. As I must.”

  “Serve it how? I can’t do anything.”

  “Your own actions have proved otherwise.”

  “What, because I trashed the cabin? That was an aberration. A mistake. Like our having sex.”

  He narrowed his eyes. His own people would have trembled. This girl met his gaze, her eyes miserable and her mouth resolute. Whatever else she was, she was no coward. And no fool.

  “You gave me your body,” he explained. In little words, so she could understand. “According to your kind, we are bound.”

  “We had sex. That doesn’t make me your bitch.”

  Almost, he smiled. “Does it not?”

  Her mouth opened. Snapped shut.

  “You cannot deny your mother’s blood,” he said.

  “I don’t know why you expect me to feel some great loyalty to my mother. She wasn’t loyal to me. To us.”

  “Your mother returned to her rightful place in the sea. It was her nature. Her destiny. As it is yours to follow her.”

  “I am not my mother.”

  “Obviously not,” he said cuttingly. “Atargatis was a true child of the sea.” Restless, vibrant, subject to the whims of the moment and the tempests of her moods, confident of her beauty and her power.

  Yet he had never sought the selkie’s company, never taken her to his bed.

  Never wanted her the way he craved her tall, pale, stubborn daughter. Like the breath in his lungs, like the pulse of his blood . . .

  Conn froze. Bloody, buggering hell.

  He did not want her. She was merely a necessary means to a desirable end. Through her, he could preserve her mother’s bloodline and his people. But she was not one of them. She was not selkie.

  The wind splintered against the cliffs and shifted over the water.

  He looped the jib sheet around the winch. “We need to come about. Hold this end and pull when I tell you.”

  Lucy stretched her hand to obey him and then sank back on the bench. “Don’t you think that’s a bit much? Asking me to assist in my own kidnapping?”

  “The jib,” he said. “Unless after all you prefer to swim.”

  He watched her reach for her dignity, drawing it around her like the ill-fitting yellow coat she wore.

  “Now,” he commanded as they came about.

  The jib luffed and then filled. Grabbing the rope, she yanked it taut.

  As if it were a noose around his neck.

  She cranked the winch, trimming the sail. “So she returned to the sea. Then what? What happened?”

  He thought she knew. Surely her brothers had told her? “She died.”

  “You said the selkie were immortal.”

  Conn eyed her bent head, pity mingling with his irritation. Had she thought to see her mother again? Foolish, human hope. Even if Atargatis were reborn on the foam, in the manner of their kind, she would retain little memory of her infant daughter.

  He adjusted course. “We do not age and die as humans do. But we can be killed.”

  Lucy removed the winch handle and stowed it carefully away in the cockpit. She claimed not to sail, but growing up in a fisherman’s household had clearly taught her how easily items could be lost overboard. “What killed my mother?”

  “She drowned. Trapped in a fisherman’s net within the year after she left you.”

  Lucy raised her head, her eyes like the sea on a cloudy day. “Then her destiny didn’t do her much good, did it?”

  He had no answer to that.

  Lucy’s hands gripped the rope around the dinghy’s inflated sides. Her stomach rose and fell with the gentle chop of the waves. Her feet curled under the seat, away from the seal pelt bundled on the floor. Like a cat in the rain, she kept one eye on the water and the other on the approaching shore.

  Dry land. Solid ground.

  At last.

  The past few days she’d felt trapped belowdecks, breathing stale air, heating canned soup, washing her dishes in the tiny galley, sleeping in the claustrophobic cabin. Trying to ignore the sealskin she’d folded and stuffed into a locker. She couldn’t lie under it knowing what it was.

  What Conn was.

  She didn’t know where he slept. Or if he slept at all. When she woke in the morning, she sometimes thought his scent clung to the sheets. To her skin. But the pillow beside her was never dented.

  The oars dipped, dripped, flashed. Conn reached and flexed, his knees thrusting into her space, his skin gleaming with sweat and sunlight. The wind ruffled his hair like a lover’s hand. In Dylan’s tight dark suit pants, with his white shirt open to the waist, he looked like a movie pirate.

  Her gaze skimmed his broad chest; jerked away from his stomach.

  She panned the quiet cove behind him, the tumbled shore of sand and shale, the faded hills climbing in a jagged circle like the broken edge of a cup. Stark and proud on the cliffs above rose the round, crenellated towers of a castle.

  A white bird with sharply angled wings rose like a kite on a draft. Sunlight sparkled on the quiet water. A shadow broke the surface and subsided before she could identify it. A fish? A seal?

  Her lips tasted of salt. She quivered with cold. Fear.

  Excitement.

  The dinghy rolled as it caught the lip of the surf and scraped into shore. Conn shipped oars and jumped out, his bare feet and strong calves splashing in the foam.

  She looked at the line of his muscled back as he bent to the boat and felt another inconvenient quiver in the pit of her stomach.

  She averted her gaze. She knew better. She did.

  The last time she’d let down her guard, she’d wound up unconscious and kidnapped in the middle of the ocean. She couldn’t imagine what Conn would do to her if she let him near her again. Her breath came faster. She didn’t want to imagine. To remember. His breath hot at her ear, his arm hard around her waist, his solid body pulsing, rocking against her . . .

  Her blood pounded.

  Oh, God. She was a freak. She closed her eyes.

  The dinghy wallowed in the shallows, grating against the bottom. Spray shot over the side. At the splash, she flinched and opened her eyes.

  Conn tugged the raft toward shore. Not very far. Her weight anchored it in the water.

  He held the dinghy steady in the swirling foam. “Get out.”

  The water boiled and reached for her.

  Her heart pounded. Panic dried her mouth. She never went into the water. Never. Not since she was a little girl. Not since . . . “I can’t.”

  He didn’t question her. He didn’t argue. Letting go of the raft, he plucked her from the bench, grabbed at the seal skin, and strode with them both out of the water.

  She cried out in relief and alarm, clutching his neck. He was warm and solid. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea . . . “Wait!”

  He looked down his nose at her. “You would prefer to get wet?”

  “No, but . . .” She twisted in his arms, casting a desperate look over his shoulder as the dinghy bumped away. “The
raft!”

  “We no longer need it.”

  “We might!”

  He set her feet on the cold, packed sand. Even in her worry, she noticed he kept his arms around her while she found her balance. “Why?” he asked.

  “To . . . get back to the boat,” she said. To go home.

  “Too late,” he said.

  She stared at him, speechless.

  “The northern crossing will be almost impossible in another few weeks,” he said stiffly. “Even if—”

  But she wasn’t listening.

  The dinghy drifted and slithered away, trailing its rope behind. Her stomach dropped.

  “Oh!” she cried. “Get it. It’s floating away.”

  “Let it go.”

  But she couldn’t.

  The water hissed and curled. The dinghy bumped and rattled in the shallows.

  She grabbed at Conn’s arm. “Please. Hurry. It’s getting away.”

  He stood like stone.

  The raft caught a wave and slid out to sea, carrying with it her chance of escape. Her way home.

  With a squawk of rage and fear, she plunged into the water after it.

  Shock.

  Cold. Grasping her feet. Gripping her bones. Twining up her legs and about her torso, big, fat ripples wrapping around her, uncoiling inside her, squeezing her chest. Her gasp slid into her lungs like a knife. She staggered.

  The raft bobbed farther out of reach.

  She sobbed and set her teeth. She would not go down. She would not. She pushed everything down, shoved it aside, and waded forward. Her slicker flapped and dragged around her. The water clutched her knees. Her thighs. Her hips. The ripples stirred, like a fat snake waking.

  There. Just there. She flung out her arm, stretched out her hand, reaching, reaching . . . The rope slid just beyond the reach of her fingers. Something crumbled inside her, hope or a wall, and whatever lurked on the other side pounced on the opening and poured out.

  The water sang. A wavelet surged. The rope moved, lifted, floated to her waiting hand.

  Got it.

  Her flare of triumph crowded out everything else.

  She turned in water almost to her hips. She was cold. So cold. Her limbs shook. Her fingers and toes felt numb.

  Conn watched from the beach, looking oddly shaken.

  Was he worried about her?

  The possibility created a warm glow beneath her breastbone.

  She unclenched her chattering teeth enough to call, “It’s okay. I’m okay. I, um, got it.” She waved the end of the rope.

  His cool-as-rain eyes lit from within. “So I see.”

  She slogged toward him, the raft bumping at her back like a repentant pony.

  “You are wet,” he observed.

  Wet and shaking with cold and triumph.

  “I’m freezing,” she admitted frankly.

  The water sloshed around her ankles. Her feet were blocks of ice.

  “Here.” Before she knew what he was about, he swung the sealskin up and around her shoulders.

  She shuddered in rejection and relief. His pelt was so heavy. Heavy and warm. Her fingers curled into the thick fur even as her insides rebelled. It wasn’t desire. Or not only desire. Adrenaline, nausea, hunger . . .

  She pressed her legs together to keep them from shaking, to keep herself upright.

  He moved closer, tugging the pelt around her. She looked down at his wrists, strong and square. Her breasts tingled.

  She drew a sharp breath.

  His gaze dipped to her mouth. His nostrils flared. Was he going to kiss her? She didn’t want him to.

  Her heart banged against her ribs. Did she?

  His words drummed in her head. “It was hardly a rape, my dear. You are no defenseless virgin.”

  She took a short, very definite step back, nearly stumbling on the cold sand.

  His hands dropped.

  They stared at one another. Her breath rasped. The silence rushed between them, cold and insistent as the waves.

  She was the first to look away.

  7

  CONN WAS HOT AND HARD WHEN HE NEEDED to be cool and steady. Shaken. The little witch had shaken him.

  Not because of her gift. Though, by God, his senses still stung from the snap of power she’d released when she called the rope to her hand.

  He hefted the wet raft and hauled it up the beach, out of reach of the tide, away from the slim girl shivering on the sand. If his body betrayed him, his face, at least, would give nothing away.

  He dropped the dinghy at the bottom of the cliff.

  She had turned from him. Again.

  He bared his teeth like the animal she had called him. Even with the magic still surging through her blood, even with his pelt covering her, she had spurned him.

  He had anticipated her rejection. Perhaps, by her lights, he had even earned it. But here on Sanctuary’s soil, her unwillingness to accept him had an unexpected sting. A deeper significance. Beneath his injured pride, a profound unease stirred. Sooner or later, she must surrender to her fate. His people needed her.

  A thought whispered: He needed her.

  He did not want to acknowledge the feeling. He did not want to have any feelings at all. But there it was.

  “I . . .” Her voice scraped behind him. “Where are we? On the map, I mean?”

  Conn stowed the paddles along the dinghy’s sides, giving himself time to assume his familiar mask. “West of the Innse Gall. The Strangers’ Islands,” he translated.

  He looped the tow rope around a rock. He hoped the damn thing floated away. But remembering her courage in going after it, he could not dishonor her by leaving it untied.

  “Ireland?” Her voice was thin.

  He felt a moment’s pity, ruthlessly suppressed. He had already informed her he would not take her back. What difference to either of them if she was half the world and an ocean away from home?

  “Scotland.” He turned.

  She had tipped back her head to stare up the cliff face, exposing the long, pure line of her throat. In some lights—in this light—she was really quite remarkably pretty. “That would explain the castle.”

  Even cold and frightened, she refused to be cowed. His lips twitched, his own fears lightening. Perhaps her humor would help her make the best of her new circumstances.

  But then his gaze dropped, and his smile faded to a frown of concern. Beneath the sopping cuffs, her feet were the cold, blue color of watered milk. “We must get you inside.”

  She eyed the cliff again doubtfully.

  “There is a path to the tower,” he explained.

  His private entrance when he walked with the dog in the evening. His escape.

  She nodded.

  The bushes at the base of the tower rustled. A long, lean shadow appeared, tall as a wolf and graceful as a deer. Its narrow head lifted as it sighted them.

  She froze. “What—”

  A blue-gray blur streaked down the slope, cutting through the long grass.

  “Madadh,” Conn warned.

  At the last moment, the big hound flung itself on the ground at his feet, spine wriggling, four paws in the air. No dignity at all. Surprise—and something else—tightened Conn’s throat. Slowly, he crouched to scratch the beast’s wiry belly. Madadh gave him a look of pure adoration before scrambling upright and bolting down the beach.

  Lucy’s laughter brought a pang to his heart and his gut. The selkie laughed almost as seldom as they cried. The hound coursed in swooping circles, pausing occasionally to dash back and assure itself of his presence. “He’s certainly glad to see you.”

  Yes. Conn clasped his hands behind his back, almost undone.

  “I have never been away before,” he said stiffly. Never imagined that the dog would miss him. Never realized that the animal’s obvious devotion would affect him so. “Madadh, down,” he ordered as the dog galloped up with great sandy paws.

  It collapsed on its haunches, narrow tail whipping back and forth in the san
d.

  Lucy’s smile lit her face from within. The dog shoved a wet, bearded muzzle into her palm. She rubbed its head.

  Conn fought an instant’s jealousy. Of her? Of the dog? Either was ridiculous.

  “Is that his name?” she asked. “Mad Dog?”

  “Ma-dug. It means ‘hound.’ ”

  She turned that smile on him and took his breath away. “Very original.”

  “I used to name them,” he said abruptly. All of them. “They do not live very long. Nine or ten years. It became easier after a while to call them by the same name.”

  Her wide gray eyes considered his face, as if she saw a side of him that no one else looked for. That he preferred not to examine himself.

  Pride dictated that he not look away.

  “How many dogs have you had?” she asked softly.

  He shrugged. “Hundreds. After the fourteenth or fortieth, I learned not to become too . . . attached.”

  She tilted her head, her gaze still fixed on his face. “Then why bother with a pet at all?”

  It was a question he often asked himself. Every time he cradled a wasted old body in his arms or stroked a white muzzle. Every time he carried a hound’s carcass into the hills to bury it alone and in silence.

  “I have always had one. My father always had one. It is tradition,” he said. A way of keeping in touch with the past, of staying connected with the father who had abandoned him.

  “If you’ve had—hundreds?—you’ve had plenty of time to change the tradition,” she observed. “I think they’re company for you.”

  His hands tightened behind his back. He stared at her stonily, appalled. Found out. The selkie lived alone, free of human encumbrances and human emotions. They did not require companionship. He did not require it.

  “You of course may think whatever you like,” he said politely and swung her up into his arms.

  He felt the sharp intake of her breath. But she did not struggle.

  Progress? Perhaps.

  Her tangled fair hair was caught between them. He freed it gently, shifting her weight.

  “I can walk, you know,” she offered.

  “You cannot climb,” he said. “Not in bare feet.”

  “I’m tougher than I look.” She smiled ruefully. “And heavier.”

  Tall and graceful, with skin as pale as willow when the bark was peeled away.