Betina Krahn (41 page)

Bentley edged closer to her, his handsome eyes now hard with purloined power. “Perhaps you could do something about that, Celeste. I might be persuaded to cosset the beasts … if the Lady Mermaid would come and appear with them … to enhance the educational aspect of the exhibit, of course.”

“Appear with the dolphins?” Celeste was stunned.

“As the Lady Mermaid,” he clarified. “I can see you now … in a sequined tail and delectably discreet mussel shells
… your hair swirling about bare shoulders.” A chilling smile appeared as he watched the desperation in her face. “If you made them do a few tricks for my customers, I might be willing to improve the beasts’ food … perhaps find money to build them larger tanks …”

“She’ll do no such thing, Bentley.” Titus stepped in, pulling her against his side. “That’s blackmail.”

“No, Professor”—Bentley smirked, eyeing Titus’s protective impulse and her acceptance of it—“it is business.”

“Please, Peter,” Celeste said, pushing from Titus’s protective hold. “You must know that they’re not faring well. How long do you think you can keep them like this? Poor Ariel has banged into the walls of that cramped tank so often she cannot even remember who she is, much less who I am!”

“Perhaps she cannot recall who you are because she doesn’t know you, Miss Ashton,” Bentley said with disdain. “One dolphin looks very much like another. But I would have expected you, as an ‘expert,’ to know that. These are not
your
dolphins. I can produce the sea captain and fishing crew who helped me catch these dolphins, to prove that I caught them myself I have bills of lading for their transportation and the testimony of the workmen I employed, to prove that I had them hauled here at considerable expense.”

“You know these dolphins are mine,” she charged.

“What proof can you offer, Miss Ashton, that these dolphins are the ones you say they are? Or that they belong to you?” He dropped all pretense of civility. “
None
. I must insist that you leave the premises, both of you. You and your aged cohorts outside have put me to considerable inconvenience. Count yourself fortunate that I do feel a debt to you. After all, you taught me just what I wanted to know about dolphins:
how to call them.”
His smile was positively malicious. “I would never have known how to catch these magnificent specimens without you.”

His words struck Celeste like a slap. Shocked to the depths of her soul, she couldn’t respond on any level.

“You haven’t heard the last of this.” Titus’s voice dropped
to a menacing rumble. “If any harm comes to these dolphins, I promise you, you will pay for it.”

Titus pulled her through the canvas partitions and up the wooden ramp to the exit. Outside, they found the members of the Atlantean Society huddled under the watchful eyes of two more constables. When they appeared, the Atlanteans came to attention and demanded to know what had happened. It fell to Titus to tell them that the dolphins were not faring well and that Bentley had threatened to set the law on them if they didn’t leave peacefully.

With a meaningful nod to Celeste’s anguished expression, he suggested they go back to the hotel to regroup and get some rest.

Once in the cab with Titus, Celeste could no longer contain the tears that had been building in her from the moment she saw Prospero.

“How could anyone be so vile and inhuman? Stealing my dolphins and then threatening to set the law on
me
for trying to see to their welfare,” she said, wiping away tears with bare hands. “He thanked me for making his theft possible, for teaching him how to ‘call dolphins’ … knowing all the while that if they came to that call, they must be
my
dolphins.”

Titus watched her eyes darken with recriminations and self-loathing, and felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. There wasn’t a more earnest and caring heart in all of England than Celeste Ashton’s, and now that loving heart was paying the price for another’s callous disrespect for life.

“It’s not your fault, Celeste,” he said, reaching for her hands.

“Yes it is.” Fresh tears rolled down her burning cheeks. “If I hadn’t published my journals and writings to tell people about dolphins, Bentley would never have known about them. I was so isolated … I grew up with Nana and Grandpapa and Ned and the Basses and Miss Penelope and the reverend and Anabelle … It never occurred to me that people in the rest of the world would be different …
would see my dolphins as mindless ‘fish’ and try to own them or exploit them or harm them. All I could see was the beauty, the joy and wonder they had brought into my life. All I thought about was sharing that goodness and knowledge with the rest of the world. How could I have been so stupid?”

He lifted her chin on his hand and caught her gaze in his. The suffering in her face caught his breath. “Celeste, you did nothing wrong,” he declared hoarsely. “You tried to bring something fine and wonderful to the world.”

“And look at the results.” Every word etched the sorrow deeper into her heart. “Don’t you see? I taught Prospero and the others not to fear humans. I taught them to come to my call, to see me and other humans as their friends. A dolphin’s only defense against humans is to avoid them altogether, and I took that away from them.” Her eyes closed and tears squeezed through her lashes.

“Worse—I introduced them to humans who would capture and abuse and mistreat them.” She pulled away and turned her face as if she couldn’t bear to have him look at her. “I took Bentley out in my boat and taught him how to call my dolphins … I helped him
practice
it.” She stared out the window, seeing into the recent past, remembering Bentley’s first visit. “He quizzed me about what they were like and how they behaved and how dangerous they were. I was so flattered … I shared everything I could … so eager to teach … so eager to …”

She crumpled on the seat and, without an instant’s hesitation, he pulled her into his arms and held her. Moments later, the cab stopped in front of the Bolton Arms. Hoping to spare Celeste a walk through a lobby full of gawking strangers, Titus had the driver pull into the alley that ran behind the hotel. There, he paid and lifted Celeste from the cab. He helped her up the stairs to her room on the third floor, and sat her down on the bed while he closed the door.

When he turned back, she had dragged her hat from her head and let it fall from her fingers to the floor, where it
rolled away. For a long moment, she just sat there … her shoulders rounded, her eyes downcast, looking as if the spirit had been drubbed from her. When she spoke, her voice was a hoarse whisper.

“It was wrong. It was all
wrong
.”

Titus felt her anguish seeping through him, her sense of loss invading him, and against all reason and logic, he welcomed those feelings into his emotion-starved heart. If he could, he would take more of them—all from them—from her—bear them for her. When he called her name, she raised her head and his heart stopped at the pain visible in her.

With sudden clarity, he understood her last words. It was not only her dolphins she was grieving; it was the death of her lifelong dream.

“No, Celeste, you’re
not
wrong,” he said, going to her. “And your dream isn’t wrong. It’s not wrong to want to share goodness and wonder with the rest of the world. If you let the likes of P. T. Bentley take from you your faith in humanity, your passion for discovering and sharing … if you let him kill your dream without a damn good fight … then he and all the other cheats and bullies of this world have won.”

He sat down beside her and took her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

“It’s true that we humans plod along, safe and smug in our illusions, convinced that we know everything there is to know … when what we really are is woefully, willfully ignorant that a whole, magnificent world lies submerged at our feet … a world that doesn’t operate by human rules or human ideas of superiority or morality. I know, sweetheart”—he smiled ruefully—“because I was chief among those smug ignoramuses.

“I also know that some of us can overcome our narrow minds and prejudices. Some of us can learn to see the world as a whole … made up of land and sea and all the life that is in both of them. But we need someone to teach us …
someone special … someone with a foot in each …” He raised her hand between them with a wry grin. “Or a flipper.

“You mean too much to me, Celeste, to let you give up now.”

He lowered his mouth to hers, offering back to her the strength and healing and hope she had first given him.

When he raised his head and gazed into her eyes, she realized every word of his confession was true. The turbulence that had so often clouded his gaze was gone. In its place she saw new clarity of being, a new inner peace, a new sense of purpose.

“You aren’t a failure, Celeste Ashton. I’m living proof. You and your love of the sea and your dolphins gave me back a part of me I had lost many years ago. My heart.” He stroked her cheek with awed gentleness and she felt that touch as if it moved across her very soul. “But I didn’t have much of a chance to get used to having it back, before I lost it again. To you.”

“Oh, Titus …” She bit her lip, her eyes luminous with pained hope.

“The jury is probably still out on whether I’ve gone totally around the bend … but I do know that I’m mad about you. You’re everything I could have wanted in a woman—if I had ever had the sense to want a woman. I want you, Celeste Ashton, Woman of Sea, more than anything else in my life.”

Tears salted their next kiss, but couldn’t overpower its sweetness.

Somewhere in the midst of that steamy embrace, they sank backward onto the bed. And somewhere in the next two or three kisses, buttons twirled and hooks unsnapped and garments slid … all undone by her fingers. When he raised up onto his arms above her on the bed, his face was bronzed with desire and his eyes were dark with need. He grinned at the picture she made lying beneath him … her
jacket and blouse open, her skirt unhooked, and her breasts looking as if they might spill from her corset at any moment.

“I take it this means you would be in favor of a renewed ‘collaboration’?”

She gave his leg a stroke with her foot. “I think you’d better lock the door.”

When he returned to the bed, he had shed most of his clothes and Celeste had managed to rid herself of shoes, blouse, skirt, and petticoats. He helped her undo her laces and peeled her corset and stockings from her … pressing hot, urgent kisses on every inch of skin he exposed. She writhed and shivered and finally ended that delicious torture by pulling his head down and giving him a long, sultry kiss.

She surprised even herself with her hunger for sensation. Giving as freely as she took, she used her hands, her lips, and her body to pleasure and caress him. She wanted to know every part of him, to match and mate every part of her to the corresponding part of him. Soon she was trembling, taut, and hollow with need.

They rolled, entwined, and pressed their bodies hard together, absorbing the potent new feelings each shift of positions brought … until he came to rest between her thighs and deep, compelling hunger took control. He joined their bodies and they moved together, in instinctive synchrony … sea lapping earth … earth cradling sea … until every heated promise of pleasure had been fulfilled.

Afterward, they lay together, looking at each other in the rosy light coming from around the heavy curtains. She ran a finger down his nose and over his smiling lips.

“Say it again,” she said. She wanted to hear again what he had whispered to her at least a hundred times, over and over, like a caress, a prayer, a plea, and a celebration of rebirth.

“I love you.” He savored the strange mixture of satisfaction and pleasure that suffused him. He had never been this content in his entire life. It was her. She produced this curious mélange of emotion in him … especially when she
smiled at him like that … and rubbed her foot up the inside of his leg like that …

“I love you, too, Titus Thorne.” She beamed. “There is no one on earth I’d rather ‘collaborate’ with.”

A
SHORT WHILE LATER
, they descended to the lobby and found Nana, the brigadier, the reverend, and the Bass brothers seated in an out-of-the-way window nook, waiting for them.

“There they are!” The reverend was on his feet in a flash.

The others turned anxiously to greet Titus and Celeste, and all were struck by the new attitude between their Man of Earth and Woman of Sea. Whatever he had done, their Man of Earth had managed to stuff the heart back into Celeste and the Atlanteans beamed smiles of gratitude and approval as they quickly reseated themselves to make room for Titus and Celeste together on the settee.

“We have to decide what to do … and soon,” Celeste announced. “Prospero and Ariel don’t have much time.”

“Perhaps if we offered him more money,” Titus said, contemplating the idea.

“More?” Celeste stared at him in surprise. “Where would we have gotten two hundred, much less
two thousand
pounds?”

“I … have money.” He looked embarrassed to admit: “My inheritance. It was a considerable sum then, and has been accruing since I was small. I haven’t touched it.” He smiled ruefully. “I never needed it. Until now.”

“That’s wonderful of you, Titus.” Her eyes shone briefly as she slid her hand over his. “But you heard him say money wasn’t his entire point. I’m not sure he can be persuaded to let them go by any amount.” Then her expression darkened as if a shadow had fallen over it. “Keeping our dolphins captive is his way of punishing me for not helping him with his ugly little scheme.”

They thought of—and discarded—the possibilities of going
to the newspapers, attempting to buy the dolphins’ freedom through a third party, and even appealing to influential persons who might intercede. All of those would take time. And it appeared that time was the one thing that was in critical supply. They would have to take matters into their own hands.

“We have to go to the law,” Titus announced, “It is our only recourse.”

“Titus, there isn’t time,” Celeste said. “Prospero and Ariel aren’t eating, they’re kept in filthy water … they need to be released now.”