by Sela Carsen
“Mrs. Toab likes you,” Meriel said, watching the sky change hue over the water.
“She’s about the only person in town who likes me. Everyone else thinks I murdered you. They wouldn’t throw me a rope if I was drowning.”
She punched him on the shoulder. “Hey, I didn’t throw you a rope, either, buddy.”
“That’s right, you didn’t.” Ronan stopped. “Have I thanked you for that? For saving me?” His dark eyes were serious as he stared down at her. She was here for a day. Dawn to dawn. And in the space of a few hours, she’d lost her heart.
Stupid Selkie.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand and dragging her behind him.
“What? Wait. Where are we going?” She’d hoped for another kiss, not the Bataan Death March. Soon, however, they arrived at a familiar patch of beach. Sandy steps rose in front of them and Meriel tilted her head back to see the bulk of the Burbank mansion.
It was an impressive place, built at the turn of the twentieth century, and uniquely American, unlike the Roman, French and English revivals that influenced other mansions of the time. A Yankee clapboard house on a gigantic scale, it towered over the cliff in simple splendor.
“Ronan?” He led her into the mansion. They entered through a huge kitchen and he opened the refrigerator to deposit dinner fixings inside. He’d have kept going, but she went back to the fridge to take the wine out and set it on the countertop.
“Red wine likes room temperature.”
“Mer, it’s a six dollar bottle. With a screw-top.”
“So? It might surprise you. Haven’t you learned by now that appearances can be deceiving?” She grinned at him and he shook his head.
“Got any more clichés you’d like to spring on me?” He took her hand again and set off through the rest of the house.
“Money can’t buy happiness.”
“True, but poverty sucks.”
“Beauty is only skin deep.”
“That’s disgusting, considering I know where your skin is.”
“Ok, yeah. That’s gross.” It was covered in dust bunnies. She hoped they wouldn’t itch when she had to put it back on.
Ronan Burbank was a determined man, she realized as they crossed room after room, each one devoid of furniture and decoration. The stark simplicity, however, emphasized the true grandeur of the home. This place didn’t depend on decoration for its beauty. It had beauty built into its bones. Like its owner. Ronan was as stripped down as his house, but his inner strength was undimmed. Right now, he had one goal in mind and didn’t intend to deviate from his course. He was so focused, he wasn’t even answering her. She was curious enough to let him keep going. For a while, at least.
Finally, he brought her into a dim hallway, illuminated only by what little sun could reach into the shadows. Before he could open the door, however, she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Here’s one. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
He looked down at her, his face indistinct in the darkness.
“We’ll see about that.”
Ronan opened the massive oak door with an appropriately eerie creak. They stepped into the black.
“Stay right there for a sec.” He left her standing in what could only be called stygian darkness, but that was a little too close for comfort, considering her already otherworldly circumstances. The prickly fingers of self-inflicted terror crept up her neck as his footsteps abruptly disappeared.
A metallic jingle sounded from far ahead of her, then light. Ronan drew back the heavy velvet curtains and thick motes of dust danced in the sudden sunlight. They were in the library.
But not any library. It was the kind she’d read about in Gothic novels. Floor to ceiling shelves crammed with leather bound tomes, odds and ends of natural history, and a few rows of paperback novels. There was even a rolling ladder attached to a brass rail at the top so readers could climb up to reach books on the highest shelves. A bibliophile’s dream come true.
Meriel drew in a deep, wondering breath and choked on the dust.
Ronan pounded her on the back until she held up a hand in surrender. “I’m fine. But this…this is amazing.” Meriel straightened and walked to a shelf to run her fingers over the spines.
“It’s pretty impressive, but a lot of it’s for show. There are six sets of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, all in different covers. My great-grandfather thought they looked important.” His eyebrow quirked, letting her in on the cynical joke, and she laughed. She had to. The library that looked like a fantasy really was one.
But not entirely. She could tell that people had used it. Her eyes were drawn to the paperbacks and she discovered title after title by Georgette Heyer.
“My aunt.” Ronan’s voice came over her shoulder. “I mean, Georgette Heyer wasn’t my aunt, but my aunt loved those books. Said they made her happy.”
“I’ve read a few,” Meriel answered. “They made me happy, too.”
“I tried one, and it was kind of fun, but, you know, a guy reading romances.” He looked sheepish at his admission.
“Which one did you read?”
“I can’t remember the title. I remember she shot the hero. That was cool.”
Meriel laughed again. The room absorbed the sound as though hungry for it. Every time she laughed, it felt as though some oppression lifted.
“So if we’re not in the library to admire your aunt’s collection of Regency romances, why are we here?”
“You.”
“What about me?”
“Your curse. We can’t play all day, Meriel.” He looked so serious, his dark eyes focused on her.
“We haven’t played all day. We fought until lunch time.”
“And other things.”
She felt her face flush. Yeah. Other things. Things she’d much rather be doing now than scouring through a library for the solution to a curse that was mostly forgotten.
His hands, big and rough and warm, gripped her shoulders. “Hey, if it doesn’t work, at least this way you can say you tried. And if it does work…” He tipped her chin up with a finger and his gaze heated. “Wouldn’t you like to stay and do…other things for a while longer?”
Ronan’s head dipped to hers and stopped a heartbeat away. Her choice. She closed the gap in surrender. He tasted good. Like home, but not her old home. A home she dreamed of. The tang of toothpaste had faded and all that was left was Ronan. Rich, like dark chocolate and red wine. Under her fingers, his hair curled and clung like silken ties, binding her heart to his.
He wrapped his arms around her and she leaned on his strength, soaking it in because she needed it. Needed to feel his hard body against hers.
“Ouch!” Her cry was muffled against his mouth and he let go abruptly.
Meriel rubbed at her breast—not exactly ladylike, but darn it, something had poked her in the boob. The jeweled amulet from the ocean had nicked her. What a metaphor. Stabbed by magic.
She took the brooch off and laid it on the table.
“What is that thing, anyway?” Ronan bent down to examine it. He touched it and then jerked his finger away with a hiss.
“What happened?”
“It shocked me.” He brought his finger up to his mouth and sucked on it for a moment. “Like I touched a live fuse. Not a bad shock, but it got me.” He looked at the brooch in disgust. “Maybe it doesn’t like me.”
“I don’t know if it likes you or not, but it saved your life.” In the stillness of the abandoned house, the aquatic song rushed again in her ears.
“What?”
“When I hauled you out of the water, you weren’t breathing. It wasn’t fair.”
“Fair?”
“I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m already cursed. But watching someone die in the water where I changed seemed infinitely more awful than I could handle. So I called on the ocean to save you. The amulet washed up on shore. I laid it on your chest and mercy was granted, but at a price
. The magic said that your destiny was now tangled in mine. Then you came back.”
It sounded ridiculous when she put it into words. Ronan’s eyebrow was back up, too.
“Don’t look at me like that. Like you don’t believe me. I’m a Selkie, for crying out loud. And you’re here. Not dead.”
Ronan pulled a chair out from the table and sat down backwards, resting his arms on the ornate back. Meriel sat as well, precisely, knees together, ankles crossed. She needed to get this right so he would believe her.
“Ronan, there’s a world under the water you can’t imagine. Deeper than humans can understand. After seven years, after all I’ve seen, I still don’t understand it. If I live forever, I never will.”
She touched the amulet, tracing her finger around the wrought seal—stark and fantastic.
“I didn’t even believe this existed.”
“What is it?”
“This is the Heart of the Sea.”
The Heart of the Sea. A fairy tale. A myth. But a powerful one. The name resonated in Ronan’s head with the buzz of truth.
“It can’t be.”
Meriel looked at him sideways.
“What do you mean, it can’t be? Do you know what it is?”
“The Heart of the Sea. It’s just a story. It doesn’t really exist.”
She opened her mouth, but he stood up, cutting her off. Where was it? Ronan tried to remember. He’d been about ten years old. Grounded again for God knew what reason, so he decided to check out the library. It couldn’t be any more boring than his room.
He walked to the door and turned around, surveying the room, trying to see from a child’s eyes. It had been up high, which was part of the attraction. Something about the cover had sparkled, catching his eye. There was gold leaf on the spine, but now everything was coated with a thick layer of dust.
Ronan climbed the ladder and shoved off, the way he had back then. But he was heavier now and the rail was spotty with rust, so he only creaked over a few inches.
“Meriel, can you give me a hand? Just push. I know what I’m looking for.”
She looked up at him for a moment, no doubt questioning his sanity, but she pushed. She trusted that he’d find it. She trusted him. He pulled along the rail until he was there. Right there. The spine wasn’t perfectly aligned with the other books and it stuck out a little. Tales of the Cold Sea.
“Found it.” He climbed back down the ladder, and took Meriel’s chin in his free hand. “Thanks, Mer.” He kissed her quickly and her eyes widened, so he smiled and kissed her again. Slowly. With his eyes open, watching her watch him until her lids fluttered shut. He shouldn’t get distracted. There was no time for it, but he couldn’t help himself.
Her lips were cool against his, her cheek smooth under his hand. The scent of the sea went straight to his head and he wanted to kiss her in the water, float next to her, touch her wet, bare skin and feel her slide against him.
She was pressed to his side and he nudged his thigh between hers, needing to feel her response the way he had earlier. She took his invitation and purred as she rubbed against him, layers of denim in their way. A whimper of frustration left her—God, he loved listening to the sounds she made. The book slipped from his hands and landed on the floor with a sharp smack.
The sound startled her out of his arms and they both laughed.
“Maybe we should work on this,” he said as he bent to retrieve the book.
She cleared her throat and pushed her dark hair behind her ears as she opened the pages and began to read. She’d brushed it before they left the house, but playing on the beach had whipped it into a carefree style, individual strands set free to catch the sun. Layers of color shot through the brown and he watched gold and red intermingle.
Ronan knew the woman in front of him wasn’t model gorgeous. She was better. She was real. And until dawn, she was his. The idea nearly made him grab her and take her right there on the table. So tempting to step back between her legs, strip her naked and indulge himself between those beautiful thighs until the sun broke the sky again.
Shit. Eight times four is thirty-six. The United States has won twenty-eight of thirty-two America’s Cup yacht races. The Block Island Race was established in 1946 and George David’s ninety-foot boat, Rambler, took top honors there this year. Ronan’s breath slowed as he cited statistics. If he lost control now, Meriel would be gone at dawn. But if they could find the answer to her curse, she could stay.
In a way, he felt responsible for what had happened. If she hadn’t come to work for him, she never would have come to the company party, never would have come near that cliff. If not for him, she would never have been forced to live out a curse that wasn’t her fault at all.
A low gasp drew his attention.
“Ronan? I think I found it.”
The illustration on the front page of the story was an almost perfect replica of the brooch on the table.
The story told of the Viking ocean god, Aegir, who loved his wife, Ran, so much that he wished to travel to the depths of his domain to bring back the most perfect jewel in existence. However, even Aegir, with all his power, could not swim as deeply as he needed to find the jewel, so he asked a Selkie to help him. In return, the sons of Ivaldi, dwarves and master craftsmen, molded the setting in honor of the seal-folk.
“Okay, so what does that say about the power of the jewel?” he asked when they finished reading.
Meriel groaned and laid her head on her arms. “I have no idea.”
“So we’re not any further along than when we started.” Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. He wanted to help her, not make this puzzle more difficult.
“There’s got to be something there, but it’s not on the surface. Maybe it’s like analyzing literature back in high school. A deeper meaning, some symbolism that we’re not seeing.”
“Mer. I sucked at analyzing literature.” He did remember that Mr. Connor had always worn his pants hiked way up above his waist, but that wasn’t very helpful right now.
“Well, I didn’t. I was good at it. It’s like those puzzles where you have to focus your eyes just right to see the picture. We need to adjust the way we’re looking at it.”
Ronan rose to his feet and stretched. “Let’s bring the book back to the house so we can think and eat at the same time.”
“Multi-tasking. You’re a man of many talents, Ronan.” She smiled at him and he stared. She fit. Here, in this house he loved so much. Sitting in the library with dust on her cheek and the sun in her hair. He wished he could give her what she needed. The very least he could do was feed her. He held out his hand.
“Come on, Meriel. Let’s go home.”
Chapter Seven
They ended up with a decent meal, considering that Meriel hadn’t cooked in a while. Ronan had learned a few things about making do for himself, and they bumped hips in the kitchen. They ate playing footsie under the table with their sandy toes, her body growing tense with anticipation.
“I’ll wash, you dry,” he said and Meriel nodded. She cleared the table while he filled the sink with soapy water. She tried to keep her mind on the story they’d read, but she couldn’t concentrate. She had nothing, although that wasn’t quite true.
She had the rest of the night with him.
Twice while they worked, she opened her mouth to say something. Anything. But then her mind blanked out. She couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound lame or desperate.
Finally, she put away the last dish. The towel in her hands was damp and she folded it. Then folded it again. The edges had to be just so. Because if they were perfect then he wouldn’t notice how nervous she was, right?
It was odd. She’d never been a particularly sexual person before she changed. She’d had boyfriends, some more serious than others. She’d even indulged in a fling or two. And this…this was a fling, right? Just sex?
She didn’t really know him, he didn’t know her. Though that wasn’t true anymore. She knew m
ore about the real Ronan Burbank now than she had learned after weeks of moon-eyed day-dreaming and mild obsession. And he was the only person now who understood what had happened to her. What she’d become.
This wasn’t as simple as she wanted it to be. But the dish towel had perfectly square corners.
Ronan took it from her, opened it, undoing all her work, and laid it out over the dish rack. She couldn’t look at him, so he tucked a finger under her chin.
“We don’t have to do this, Meriel. We can wait.”
She shook her head, tears starting. “We can’t wait, Ronan. The curse is impossible to break. I go back to the sea at dawn to be a Selkie forever. And I want this. I want you. But I also want time. The one thing I can’t have.”
“Then we’ll make the best of the time we have.”
The kiss in the kitchen was followed by a kiss in the living room. They kissed again in the hall and stumbled through the door to his room.
“We’re changing the sheets first,” she said. At least it smelled better than it had that morning. He eyed the rumpled bed and the chaos on the floor.
“Fast. We’re changing the sheets fast.” He went back out to grab a set from the linen closet in the hall. She shoved the piles of clothes into one towering mountain in the corner and stripped the bed with a yank. The magic of her skin under the bed called out to her, but she ignored it.
Hurriedly, they tucked the fitted sheet on the bed, tossed the top sheet over and stuffed pillows into fresh cases.
“I’m not making hospital corners for you, woman.”
“What? Not interested in doing the job right?” she teased, seeing the tension in his body. Somehow, it made her feel better that she wasn’t the only one running on nerves tonight.
He dropped his pillow onto the mattress and crossed around the bed in two strides. “Oh, I plan to do one job right tonight,” he growled. She shivered at the sensual promise in his words.