Betina Krahn (25 page)

By the time they climbed out of the water, dried, and collapsed on the blanket, Titus was reeling. His head was stuffed with sensations and his chest felt tight with conflicting emotions. He was excited, terrified, pleased, appalled … felt both tremendous satisfaction at having witnessed such unique events and dismay at how disturbing this new view of the ocean was. He lay back on the blanket, staring up at the clouds drifting overhead, feeling the midday sun’s rays pricking his skin and grappling with the subtle but pervasive tension in him.

“What did you think of it?” she asked.

He raised his head and looked at her. She was lying on her back, too, staring up at the clouds. She had taken her hair out of its braid and spread it on the blanket around her
to dry in the sun. He shifted up onto an elbow to look at her, and for a few moments simply absorbed the beauty of her.

“I don’t think I could have even imagined anything like that,” he said finally. “It is another world down there.”

“Yes, it is,” she responded, her eyelids heavy with fatigue and the sun’s drowsy warmth. “Everything about it is different, at first: the light, the colors, the animals and plants, even the way you have to move around in it. But after a while you get used to it and it begins to feel like …just another room in the house you live in.”

“I’ve never lived in a house with rooms like that,” he said, appreciating the feline contentment radiating from her, half expecting her to begin purring at any moment.

“Then perhaps it’s time you changed houses.” She laughed softly and he was seized by the most irresistible urge to
make
her purr.

Steam trickled up from his loins, condensing on the underside of his skin, warming it. He was instantly aware of every part of his body in proximity to every part of hers. Her smock draped her body so that he could clearly see the outlines of her legs, the curves of her hips, the hard-tipped mounds of her breasts. She had seemed striking when they first met; now she was nothing short of beautiful. She glowed with a unique radiance that came from clarity and self-assurance deep within. Her accumulated effect on him was nothing short of devastating, but just now there was no place on earth he’d rather be than on this blanket, beside her.

Every time he looked at her he glimpsed mysteries and intrigues. It was as if Lady Sophia’s ancients had taken a hand in putting her together, specifically to humble the likes of arrogant mortals who believed—as he had—that they knew everything. The sages of creation had knitted secrets into the very fabric of her being … the boldness of the human heart, the depths and range of the human mind, the dimensions of human courage. He suddenly wanted to know everything
she had seen, everything she had thought, observed, and concluded.

“Tell me”—he channeled his urge for her into a safer area—“about all the fish you’ve seen under the water.”

“If I do, we may be here until Christmas,” she said.

He leaned an inch closer and captured her gaze in his.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Her countenance brightened with a smile.

They lay side by side, looking up at the sky as she spun stories for him of her encounters with sharks and porpoises, squid and crabs, and massive schools of sardines and jacks. She spoke of seeing schools so dense they were like a wavering wall of flesh, of watching the mating dance of the clown anemone, and of witnessing the sea turn cloudy with the milt of spawning sardines.

He couldn’t resist tossing in a tidbit or two about the structure of fish scales as seen under a microscope. She brightened instantly and began asking questions. His descriptions of the laboratories and libraries at Oxford, including his wry descriptions of the academics who worked there, delighted her. When she learned that they had hundreds of specimens preserved and on display in the science hall, she moaned and closed her eyes.

“What I would give to be able to go to the university and see all of that.”

“It is quite an impressive display,” he said. “However, a goodly number of our finer specimens are on loan just now, to the Natural History Museum in Knightsbridge. I personally have preserved over two hundred specimens … and have a rather astonishing collection of items taken from the bellies of fish. You would be surprised what the buggers swallow. Gives us a clue as to just how indiscriminate some fish are in their feeding …”

“… of course I had no proof that they were human bones, but I had the professors and fellows at Christ’s Church look them over and they concurred that the things probably were from a human hand.” He realized she had
been silent for some time, and found that her eyes were closed and her breathing was slow and shallow.

Asleep. He reddened. It was true that his sort of science might not be glamorous or thrilling, he thought defensively, but did she have to fall asleep? He sighed. It was probably his own fault … rambling on and on about the contents of fish guts. He hadn’t a decent story to tell that didn’t involve stomach contents or somebody being “caught out” for defrauding the public with some absurd invention or idea, neither of which would probably endear him to her.

But as he studied her and saw around her eyes evidence of the fatigue that had claimed her, he felt a protective tenderness invading him again. Swimming, diving, dealing with cantankerous dolphins, and giving cranky professors swimming lessons in the dead of night … she had every right to be exhausted.

He lay back on the blanket beside her, shading his eyes and listening to the rhythmic sloshing waves and the caws of the gulls circling overhead. He felt strangely tired himself.

Celeste awakened, some time later, to discover the sun going down and Titus asleep on the blanket beside her. It took a moment for her to orient herself, then she smiled and propped herself up on one elbow beside him, absorbing him with her eyes and finding that he had quite an impact. His tousled hair and sun-bronzed features made her lips grow sensitive and the pulse at the base of her throat begin to flutter erratically. How long would it take for him to finally come over to believing in her sort of research, so that they could get on with more enjoyable pursuits? On impulse, she leaned closer, intending to brush his lips with hers, and his eyes popped open.

“What are you doing?”

She sat bolt upright, scrambling for an excuse. “There was a … a fly on your face and I was merely brushing it off.”

He gave her a look that was accusing, but his charge was
hardly what she expected. “You fell asleep on me. And you snored like a bear in winter.”

She clamped a hand over her nose, sounding quite nasal. “I don’t snore.”

“Since it is categorically impossible for a person to listen to herself sleep”—he managed a professorial tone even while lying down with his arms behind his head—“you cannot say, with any reasonable certainty, that you don’t snore.” He looked rather pleased with his logic and turned his head toward her with a smug expression. “I thought it rather rude of you, actually, nodding off just when I was getting to my story about the tar who lost his wooden leg to a shark.”

“I’m sure it would have been enthralling,” she said tartly.

“I’ll have you know, my lectures at Cardinal College have always been considered a cut above the usual academic drone. I might even say, without boasting, that I am something of a favorite amongst the undergraduate crowd.” He turned his face away and sniffed. “Now that you’re awake, I ought to make you listen to every last word.”

He made it sound like a dire fate indeed.

“Very well, then, tell me.” She lay back down, wriggled to get comfortable, then folded her hands. “Every last word. I want to hear it all.”

“You do?” He seemed a bit puzzled by that. “Why?”

“Because I might never have another chance to hear a university lecturer.”

Acknowledging her logic, he settled back with his hands under his head to tell his tale of a sailor with a wooden leg who worked on a fishing trawler.

As he talked, she watched with a warm light in her eyes, grateful that he wasn’t looking at her just then. It wouldn’t be wise to let him see how much she had enjoyed going to sleep to the sound of his voice and waking up to the sight of him sprawled on the blanket beside her. Even now, listening to his somewhat predictable story, she found herself drawn to every word.

She liked listening to him speak about the university and
the characters who inhabited his world every bit as much as she enjoyed telling him about the things she had seen and discovered. It had been a long time since anyone had sat down to listen to her stories or to share the joy of her discoveries with her. Nana was immersed in her own work; the other members of the Atlantean Society were either too aged or too rheumatic to go near the water; and Ashton House was so off the beaten path that they never had visitors. It struck her forcefully that until now, her life had been astonishingly solitary.

It had always been that way. She had grown up an only child in a house of adults, and she had come to terms with it early on, accepted it. But without anyone near her own age to talk with, without someone to share her ideas and concerns with, it had been … was still …
lonely
. And she hadn’t realized just how lonely until Titus Thorne had come doubting and scoffing his way into her life.

There was not another living soul who had seen what she had seen … off the coast of the Azores, under the waters of the cove, and in the wider bay. By all accounts, there wasn’t another person in all of Britain who swam with and studied dolphins … or who dived in ocean waters to glimpse living things in their natural settings. But there was one person who wanted to share her underwater visions. Titus Thorne. An ichthyologist who hated the water, but intended to brave it in her company, so that he could see what she had seen.

“… and there the blessed thing was, smack in the middle of the shark’s belly,” he declared with a dramatic flourish. “It was covered with blood and guts, but otherwise none the worse for wear. We pulled it out, washed it up. The fellow stuck it back on and stomped out … without so much as a word of thanks.” He turned with a defensive scowl to collect her reaction to his rather grisly tale.

She was beaming.

•        •        •

T
HE FISH WITH
the spectacular tail was back in Titus’s dreams that night. This time he was digging his way through the water after it, half running, half swimming, trying desperately to catch it. He gradually closed the distance and just as he put his hands on it, he realized he was totally submerged, panicked, and popped to the surface like a cork. He still had the tail in his grip, however. All he could think was that if he could just get it back to his laboratory …

Suddenly, he
was
in his laboratory with that fish on his dissection table. Beautiful colors in its tail … light coming through prismlike scales again. It was an exotic new species, he was certain of it. He picked up his scalpel and, with a pang of regret, cut into that marvelous tail.

There were ripping, popping sounds, almost as if he were cutting through fabric. Puzzled, he cut more. Then more.

Peeling back the outer layer, he saw legs inside. A woman’s legs. He groaned, sensing what came next.

The fish sat up, glared at him, and gave him a powerful smack across the face with its heavy, ornate tail. Then it hopped off the table, gathered its droopy flukes, and stalked indignantly out the door on two human legs.

He awakened to his heart pounding wildly and grabbed his chest, only to find that part of the pounding he was hearing was coming from the door. “Titus—wake up!”

When he flung open the door, Celeste was standing there in her long smock clutching a stack of toweling. “They’re here,” she declared, invading his room and rushing to the window, pointing. “The whole group—they’ve finally come!”

He hurried to look down at the cove and—sure enough—spotted two or three dolphins leaping out of the water at a time. He blinked, then looked at her. “I don’t know why this should surprise me. Nothing you do should surprise me.”

“Quickly—get into your swimming clothes.” She smiled as she headed out the door. “We have work to do!”

Nearly an hour later, he stood on the dock staring at a
veritable orgy of jumping and splashing going on in the cove. The water was teeming with dolphins. Celeste tried to count them, but kept losing her place as they continually submerged and reappeared in another part of the cove. Then she dragged out the logbook in which she kept descriptions of the markings of specific individuals, and tried to identify some of the creatures. Making notes in the margins near some drawings, she went on to write a brief summary of the group’s appearance and general behavior.

Titus watched, reading over her shoulder and trying to identify them from her drawings, but soon gave up. He had difficulty even picking out Prospero among that boisterous group.

“Every year the group changes. Some don’t return and there are always a few new ones,” she explained, watching their rowdy play with an indulgent eye. “I can’t see Charlie or Thunder, who were here only three weeks ago, and there are three or four new ones I don’t recognize.”

“How can you tell?” he asked, shaking his head. “It’s all one huge twisting, turning mass of fins and flukes.”

“Time and patience,” she said. “Over the years I’ve seen and recorded quite a number. As I wrote in the book, the ones you see frequently take on characters of their own and you can spot them more easily. Come on—” She tucked her journal under her arm, grabbed him by the hand, and started for the boat.

When he saw what she intended, he dragged her to a halt. “We’re not going out there?”

“We have to get close enough to see who is here.” She flashed a mischievous smile. “Unless, of course, you’d rather climb right into the water …”

They nudged the boat out into the cove and dropped an anchor line. Soon a dozen dolphin heads were sticking up from the water around the boat, and Celeste was talking and stroking them as she greeted old and new friends. He was grateful to be seeing it with his own eyes, because he would never have believed it possible otherwise.