He frowned. “Of course not. I am selkie.”
She swallowed. “Well, I’m human. And humans take time to get to know one another before they . . .”
“Fuck?” he suggested very softly.
He was angry, she realized. Hurt? But that was ridiculous.
“Make a commitment,” she said.
“You said ‘yes,’” he reminded her. “In words, this time.”
She felt her face turn red. “I would have said anything you wanted to have you inside me.”
His nostrils flared. His eyes were deep and dark. “Then—”
She was miserably embarrassed. But she was even more determined to finish, to make him understand. “I would have done anything. Given you anything.” She took another deep breath, forcing herself to meet his gaze. “And that scares the crap out of me.”
He frowned. “Did I hurt you?”
“What?”
He examined her face. “I was rough. Did I hurt you?”
She was braced for his impatience. His unexpected consideration shook her heart. “I’m fine. You were . . .” Relentless. Overwhelming. “Incredible. But it’s not enough.”
He gave her a long, considering look. His mouth curved with wicked intent. “I can give you more.”
All the air left her lungs. Desire pinched her breasts, stabbed her womb. The temptation to give up, to give in to him, almost overpowered her.
She curled her legs under her and sat, smoothing her skirt over her thighs so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “Last night you accused me of not having the courage to take what you offered me.”
“I was angry.”
“You were right. I am afraid. I’m afraid I’ll give myself to you, and I’ll be left with nothing.”
“Lucy.” He laid his hand over hers, stilling her restless picking at the fabric. His hand was warm. Her heart turned over in her chest. “I gave you my pledge.”
“Because of the prophecy.”
“I gave you my pelt.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Which only proved her point. “We’re too different, don’t you see? There’s too much I don’t know about you. That we don’t know about each other.”
Conn released her hand and left the bed. She felt his loss like the pain of a missing limb, as if something warm and vital had been severed. The mantle of the fireplace framed the proud set of his shoulders. Today he wore gray velvet and lace at his throat. He looked like a portrait of an aristocrat in a book of eighteenth-century paintings.
Or like a king.
“The selkie are the children of the sea,” he said with his back to her. “We take our life and our power from the ocean. A selkie who gives up his pelt gives his power and life into another’s keeping.” He turned, tall, stern, and forbidding as ever. “And a human who takes a selkie pelt holds that power over its owner. As your father held your mother.”
Lucy stared at him, a terrible suspicion rooting in her brain. “You mean, against her will.”
He did not answer.
Her heart pounded as the foundations of her world rocked again. “My father loved my mother.”
Conn’s face was without expression. “He would say so.”
She didn’t know how to respond. What would it mean if all these years, all her father’s choices, hadn’t been governed by grief at all, but by guilt?
“And she . . .” Lucy’s voice shook shamefully.
“Cared for him, I believe. For a time.”
“Then Caleb . . . And Dylan . . .”
“Margred made the choice to live as human for your brother’s sake. As Dylan chooses to stay with Regina.”
But Maggie loved Caleb. No one who saw them together could doubt it. And Dylan was devoted to Regina.
Lucy’s heart beat faster. “What does that have to do with you and me?”
Conn’s face became, if possible, even colder and more remote. “I took your freedom. I gave you mine. What more do you want of me?”
Her throat ached.
Your love.
But of course she couldn’t say that. He had given her what he had. All he could. Could it be enough? She didn’t want to be like the little girl in the fairy tale, crying for the moon.
What did she want?
“I want to be part of a normal couple,” she said. “I want a regular relationship. Somebody to talk to and laugh with and care about. Somebody who is with me because he cares about me. Not because of a prophecy or a sealskin or anything else.”
He gazed back at her steadily with those cool-as-rain eyes. “I cannot change what I am or what I have done. I would not if I could. There is no going back for us.”
“I’m not asking to go back. I just want to slow down.”
“To what end?”
Doubt lodged like a splinter in her chest, pricking old insecurities. She couldn’t entice her live-in boyfriend to go out for pizza. Did she seriously think she was going to sell the three-thousand-year-old lord of the sea on the concept of dinner-and-a-movie?
“To get to know each other.”
“I know you.”
Sexually.
Yes.
The red marks of her teeth scored his arm.
She flushed and looked away. “You only know part of me. You don’t know my favorite color or my favorite flower or if I leave the cap off the toothpaste or whether I like Chinese food. You don’t know if I go to church or what side of the bed I sleep on or the name of my first boyfriend.”
“And you think these things are important.”
She stuck out her chin. “What they demonstrate—the trust, the closeness—is important. Yes.”
“Very well. Tell me.”
She was surprised into a laugh. “You want a list?”
“Yes.”
He was serious. The realization was at once completely ridiculous and oddly reassuring. “Getting to know someone doesn’t work that way. It takes time.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. “How much time?”
He was pushing at her, always pushing. Tentatively, she pushed back. “Worried about how many childbearing years I have left?”
His eyes glinted. “Not as long as I can spend them in your bed.”
Her pulse jumped. Desire was a whisper against her skin, a throb in her blood. How could she slow her rapid slide into dangerous dependence when he could arouse her with a look, a word?
“We need to compromise. I’m willing to give you—us—a chance. You need to give me space.”
He raised his brows. “This room is not enough for you?”
Haha. “I meant emotional space.”
“Agreed. During the day, you may take all the time and talk and emotional space you require. But at night, we share the bed.”
Her pulse beat in her throat and between her legs. “That’s your compromise?”
His lips curved. “Yes.”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip to contain her answering smile. She wanted to sleep with him, yearned for a body beside her in the dark to provide an illusion of intimacy and keep her dreams at bay. She wanted more than that. Even now, with her body slick and tender from his assault, she craved him in ways and places that shocked her. That would probably shock him, if he knew.
Her gaze flickered to the bite on his arm and away, sliding over him like a hand, greedily gathering up impressions: the column of his throat, his long, strong, broad body, the pillars of his thighs. She recognized the slow uncurling of desire in her stomach with delight and despair. His rough possession had released her sexual appetite like a genie from a bottle. How would she ever wrestle it back under control?
I wish . . . I wish . . .
“Tell me his name.”
She jerked her attention back to his face. “What?”
“The name of your first boyfriend. The one you think of when you look at me.”
“Oh.” Hot blood flooded her face. “It’s not important.”
Conn regarded her steadily, immovable as his
tower, inexorable as the sea. “The trust is important,” he quoted softly back at her.
Her heart raced. Trapped.
“His name was Brian.”
Conn waited.
Crap.
“He, um . . . We met my sophomore year. At a party?” She snuck a look at him to see if he understood. Just a typical Saturday night, open doors and open bottles at a friend of a friend’s apartment. Watching other people get wasted usually didn’t appeal to Lucy. She’d had too much of that growing up. But Caleb had recently deployed to Iraq, and she had felt anxious and itchy, cut off and almost unbearably lonely. So she’d let her roommate nag her into going.
“You had sex with him,” Conn said.
“That night?” Lucy winced. “Yeah.”
Hookup sex. Her first time. Brian was drunk and she was nervous. She recalled fumbling and hunger and pheromones trickling like a cocktail through her veins, heady and addictive. She’d stumbled home giddy with hormones, almost believing in love at first sight.
“And after?”
“Sometimes.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, we, um, lived together for a while.”
She’d never told Caleb. She never told anybody, except her roommate. She had visions of her brother coming home from Iraq and field dressing her boyfriend. So there had been no one to confide in, no one to advise her. Fermented by time, the words spilled out like acid, thick and corrosive.
“Sometimes he couldn’t . . . He didn’t want to . . . Well, look at me.” She hunched her shoulders in irritation and embarrassment. “I’m hardly a supermodel. And he was taking some really hard courses, he was too tired to . . .”
“What are you, some kind of freak?” Brian had protested sleepily, irritably, when she reached for him the fourth—or was it the fifth?—time. “Get away from me.”
Lucy winced at the memory. “He didn’t like it when I made demands.”
“Made demands”?
Sodding angels. Blood flooded Conn’s brain and his cock. He’d like her to make demands of him. He wanted to throttle the young fool who had taught her to devalue herself, who had cheapened her sensual selkie nature.
“Look at me,” she had said.
He did. He saw her thick, springy hair, her lean, strong face, the thick sweep of her pale lashes. She was not an exotic beauty, not an obvious one, but subtle, clean-limbed, and lovely. Her clear eyes reflected the moods of the sea. Right now they were the color of storm, gray washed with moisture.
Lust transmuted to tenderness, flooding his chest and tightening his throat.
“I see you,” he said.
She braced.
“I want you.” He held her gaze, held his arms away from his body, palms upward. “I am at your service. Command me.”
Her lips parted. He saw the possibilities work into her imagination and bloom in her eyes, deep, disturbing, exciting. But she did not have the confidence to command or even to ask. Not yet.
So he crossed to the bed and bracketed her face in his hands. Her skin was warm and faintly flushed. With his thumb, he smoothed the thick, stubborn line of her brows, the subtle indentation of her chin. She closed her eyes, and he kissed her quivering lids and the slope of her cheekbone and the corner of her mouth.
Her breath escaped on a sigh. Carefully, watching her, he moved his hands to the fastenings of her cloak, undoing the long row of buttons one by one. His knuckles brushed her breasts. She trembled.
“Beautiful.” His whisper vibrated between them.
She opened her eyes, the gray depths swirling with yearning and denial.
“Like the sea at dawn,” he said.
She snorted in disbelief.
Anger stabbed Conn’s gut. Anger at her human lover, who had taken her and left her in such doubt.
Anger at himself, for doing the same.
Yet for all that he had taken, he could give her this. He continued to undress her, taking time, taking care, pausing to admire each part. His sex words made her blush and squirm, so he told her without words how exquisite she was, how firm, how fine, how delicately made. He set his lips to her shoulder, inhaling the perfume of her skin, tasting her salt. He traced the velvet tips of her breasts and bent to suckle them.
She made a sound of impatience low in her throat and reached for him.
He stepped back from her urgent touch. “Lady, I am yours. At your service.”
Her drowning eyes were lost. Confused. They tore his heart. “So?”
“You wanted to slow down,” he reminded her wickedly.
A smile trembled on her lips. Her hands dropped to her sides.
Tension shivered through him. Not only to have her, but to return to her a measure of her feminine power. He shucked his own clothes hastily, tunic, leggings, and shirt. His cock jutted, rock hard and rampant, but he ignored his own arousal to focus on hers, brushing his hands up and down her arms, letting his touch drift from the angle of her hip to the curve of her belly. The tiny jewel, caught in gold, glittered against her skin.
He touched it with one finger. “What is this?”
She looked down. “Um . . . aquamarine, I think.”
“I mean, why do you wear it?”
“You don’t like it.” Her voice was flat.
What could he tell her? That it excited him? That it repelled him? Both were true.
“I have never seen anything like it,” he said honestly. “The selkie do not alter or adorn their skin. It is pretty,” he added.
“Gee, thanks.”
He traced a line from the piercing at her navel to the soft thatch below. “This,” he said, “is beyond gold to me.”
Her breath caught, a tiny betrayal. Her eyes were fathoms deep and dark. Outside the tower, the wind murmured and moaned.
He moved in, gliding his lips along her throat, feeling the beat of panic and desire, down her beaded breasts and the fragrant hollow between, down, down, following the line of his finger to the place where she was wet and waiting for him. She made a choked exclamation in her throat and fisted her hands in his hair, swaying closer, jerking away. Sweet. Hot. Her response maddened his blood.
The wind rattled the glass in the windows, sending shadows chasing across the floor. He was drunk on her. Her need became his need, her pleasure his desire. He eased her back on the bed, coaxed her to lie on his pelt. Her hair spilled over his sealskin, blond on black. Kneeling on the floor, his head between her long, smooth thighs, he harrowed her with lips, teeth, and tongue, feeling her response, feeding on it, until she undulated against his mouth and her breath came in sobs. Her beauty almost drowned him.
He dragged her up and held her hard against him as he reversed their positions, as he sat with her on his lap. Rain lashed the glass. The storm drummed in his ears, raged in his blood. Seizing her hips, he pulled her to straddle him there on the edge of the bed. Her knees pressed his flanks. Her breasts brushed his chest. Her gaze locked with his.
Shock held them both still.
They were touching but not joined, his body poised and probing, hers open and wet.
“Take it,” he said, his voice thick, and the words meant something different now. A benediction. A plea. “Take what you need.”
He watched her slim throat move as she swallowed. His neck was corded with strain. The room grew dark. She braced her hands on his shoulders and slowly, slowly, sank onto him, taking him into the heat and the wet. His teeth clenched. His breath hissed. He stretched out his legs as she wiggled to take him deeper, feeling her muscles flex and relax, feeling her body clench and release, a fierce internal milking of his shaft. Her eyes were bright and blind as she moved in awkward rhythm, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her body tight around his.
Lightning shattered the shadows as she gathered the storm, owned it, rode it. Rode him. Power pulsed inside and out. She shuddered. He groaned. He felt the crackle and surge as she closed around him, rising and falling like the sea.
His heart contracted. “I am yours,” he had told her.
But he had not believed it until now.
When the wave came, the swell took them both.
13
PALE YELLOW LIGHT FLOODED THE WESTERN wall of the inner bailey. The short turf dissolved in a tumble of rock and weed like a green wave breaking on shore.
Lucy lifted her face to the sun’s caress, incandescent with happiness. Every moment of the past three days that Conn had not been with the wardens, he had spent with her—most of them in bed. There was nothing he wouldn’t do and little they hadn’t tried. She felt exquisitely sensitive, achingly alive, her skin burnished by his constant attentions. She glowed, inside and out.
“Stones, it’s hot,” said Roth from the bench.
Lucy started, her attention jerked back to their lesson. The temperature in the courtyard eased a degree or ten.
Griff rubbed his jaw with one large hand. “Aye. Too hot to concentrate anymore today. Go enjoy yourselves.”
Three males looked at Lucy, their eyes dark with animal awareness. They knew, she realized. Even the boys.
She felt plunged in boiling water, scalded pink. “It does seem warm for October,” she offered.
Roth choked.
Iestyn dropped his gaze.
“It’s the current,” Griff said kindly. “Coming from the south. The island never gets so very cold.”
“Or so warm,” Roth said. “Usually.”
Iestyn kicked his ankle.
Lucy cleared her throat. “Good growing climate.”
“Good for oats and apples,” Griff said.
“Wild onion, too,” said Iestyn. “Under the orchard trees. And mint.”
Lucy’s gaze wandered back to the strip beneath the sun-drenched wall. Not that it was any of her business, but . . . “Wouldn’t it be more convenient to grow inside the walls? The herbs anyway.”
“Aye. Emma planted some bits of things by the kitchen, years ago.” Griff smiled ruefully. “They are not doing so well now.”
“By the kitchen?” Lucy frowned, picturing the outer bailey. “Not much sun there.”
“You could move them,” Griff suggested. “In the spring.”
Lucy jolted. Spring was months away. When she’d asked Conn for time, she hadn’t thought so far ahead.
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