For the Taking (15 page)
Authors: Lilian Darcy
Tags: #Romance: Modern, #Contemporary, #General, #Romance, #Romance - Contemporary, #Fiction, #Fiction - Romance, #Historical, #Adult, #Romance - Adult, #Juvenile Fiction, #Mermaids, #Legends; Myths; Fables
“Swim, Lass.” Loucan yelled the words, creating only a meaningless, muffled sound in the water. “Get away.”
She understood, but she shook her head. She’d grabbed Joran’s tail, but he was lashing it wildly, and she lost her grip. The powerful fin caught her across the face, drawing blood like a cat’s claws, and she jerked sideways and sank to the ledge below. At the same time, Loucan went for the knife, but in the struggle both men lost it and it sank quickly out of sight. He didn’t think it had gone far. Lass might have found it if she’d looked, but she was focusing her energy elsewhere.
Loucan didn’t have time to work out what she was doing. Although Joran was smaller and less powerful, he was agile in the water, and very fast, and he used his tail as a weapon. Feeling the sting of it against his body, Loucan realized that Joran had pierced his
tail fins with deadly metal barbs, the way people on land wore piercings as jewelry.
Joran had always worked that way, substituting cunning and trickery for what he lacked in overt strength. He might win this, if he drew enough of Loucan’s blood….
No.
No.
And leave Lass in his hands?
No.
Joran would do anything for the key. Lass’s life would be worth nothing.
And so would my life, if I lost her.
Loucan fought harder, willing himself to overcome the fatigue brought on by nights of sleeplessness. He felt Joran tiring, but those barbs were still doing their damage. He surged back against the rocks, readying himself for a decisive lunge, felt Lass pulling him sideways, then lost vision as the water churned and blurred with debris once more.
He glimpsed Joran, and readied himself to continue the fight. Couldn’t understand, at first, why the other merman was thrashing his body like that, yet not coming any closer. Then he realized that Joran was trapped. The full thickness of his tail was wedged among the rock fall that Lass had triggered, unnoticed by either man in the frenzy of their fight.
Loucan felt Lass signing frantically beside him. There was blood in the water, but she ignored it.
“…didn’t dare hope…go now, before he breaks free…want to use the key and make what’s in my father’s cave free to everyone in Pacifica…can’t be used as a weapon like this…what I’ve decided to do.”
“No,” Loucan told her. “I’m not leaving him. It can’t end like this. Our people need something decisive. Punishment.”
“Exile.” Joran was speaking and signing at the same time. “I choose exile.”
“It’s not your choice, Joran,” Loucan said.
“Yes, it is. It
is.
”
He had found the fallen knife among the debris, and they saw him stretch his arm out and just manage to clutch it. Immediately, he began slicing at his tail, going deep into the membrane with one long, fast, powerful cut from where the scales first formed to where they merged into his barbed fins.
Loucan felt Lass grip his arm. “He’ll kill himself, cutting that deep. Won’t he?” she signed in agitation.
“No, but he’ll never grow his tail again. He’s cutting away the cells that make the transformation. Like Saegar, he’ll have to live on land.”
“Yes. I told you I was choosing exile,” Joran repeated. He freed himself as he spoke, and his tail sagged, lifeless and still trapped, against the rocks. His legs were white and thin, and he moved them like a frog, in a jerky motion, as he began to swim upward and away.
“If I’d focused, years ago, on getting rid of you, Loucan…” he signed. “But I underestimated you. I never thought you’d unite the mer the way you have. I thought that anyone who’d lived as long on land as you would be too weak…. My mistake. Interesting that this is the way I’ll have to pay for it, living there, too.”
“You could go after him, Loucan,” Lass said. “He’s powerless now.”
She ran her fingers along Loucan’s strong arm, certain that he must regret the way Joran had taken his destiny into his own hands. For Loucan’s sake, she had begun to crave a more decisive victory, too. In
her peripheral vision, she saw Carrag and the rest of the patrol approaching, and then Ben and Kai. Ben was taking pictures with his high-tech underwater camera, of Joran’s thin, ungainly body swimming frantically toward the ocean’s surface and away over the battle-scarred reefs.
“Yes, he’s powerless,” Loucan agreed. “And everyone can see it. Which is why I’m not going to go after him. Let him choose a life of exile among the land-dwellers he despises. I’ve got something more important to do, Lass. With you.”
He turned to her, and answered the concern in her touch by holding her in his arms. Drifting with him toward the surface of the water, Lass was barely aware of the crowds of mer people beginning to gather at a respectful distance around them.
“What is more important to you than Pacifica, Loucan?” she asked him urgently. “This is a decisive moment. Whatever you have to say to me can wait.”
She traced her fingers across his lips, sealing the promise of her new patience.
But Loucan shook his head, his blue eyes bright and sure. “It’s waited long enough. And you’re right. This is a decisive moment. In Pacifica’s history, but more importantly in ours.”
They reached the surface and came up into the strong sunlight. It danced on the water and made the whitecaps, stirred up by the tropical breeze, look as clean as snow. A dark spot in the distance might have been Joran’s head, bobbing above the water, or it might have been a piece of driftwood.
“I love you, Lass,” Loucan said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you threw the words back in my face, but I have to say them. I love you. I should have
understood how I felt, and told you on the boat. I shouldn’t have needed the sickening fear I felt today when I realized Joran had you. You’ve been angry at my priorities—”
“Not anymore. I owe it to Joran, just as you do, Loucan, that I’m seeing the truth more clearly now.” She brushed the dark, wet strands of his hair back from his strong forehead and stroked his smooth brown skin. “He could talk about killing me and making me his wife in the same breath. It was—” she shook her head “—crazy. All you’ve ever shown me was respect and honesty and care. I love you so much.”
“And I love you. More than I ever dreamed possible.”
It was a very private confession. Loucan’s arms crushed Lass against his chest, and she never wanted him to let her go. It didn’t matter where they were. Here in Pacifica, as joint rulers over a peaceful nation. Wandering the ocean in his boat, or running her little tearoom with its views of mountains and sea.
“I want to be with you forever, as your wife,” she whispered, and he kissed her while the words were still on her lips.
Around them, gathering in greater numbers every second, the mer people cheered. Lass blinked and laughed, then pillowed her head against Loucan’s chest as he slowly turned in the water and waved to the growing crowd. It was a regal gesture, but his other arm, around Lass’s waist, was purely the arm of a lover, caressing her. The crowd cheered again, and there were no dissenting voices.
Ben had his camera ready once more, and his div
ing mask pulled back. Kai was grinning beside him as he lifted the viewfinder to his eye.
“Since you don’t have wedding pictures,” he said, “you can have these instead.”
“B
aby pictures,” Loucan said to Lass.
He flung a packet of photos onto the table in the galley of the
Ondina,
and Lass stretched her hand out for them eagerly. “Oh, I was
hoping
they would have arrived! Kai said she would send them.”
Loucan had set up a post office box here to help her communicate more easily with her siblings in the United States. He and Lass had reached his boat last night. It was moored at a marina on one of Hawaii’s quieter islands, and they’d taken longer than usual to make the swim here, since Lass’s pregnancy had begun to slow her down. She was still feeling very tired, and they would take a few days to rest before flying to California to see the newest member of the Pacifican royal clan, and his proud parents, Kai and Ben.
The photos of baby Kean—pronounced Key-ahn, and named for their father, Okeana—whetted Lass’s appetite in a dangerous way, and she told her hus
band, “You know, I think we could fly out tomorrow, really. I’m feeling fine now.”
“I picked up the airline tickets, and our flight is three days away,” he answered, in a tone she’d learned to recognize—and accept. It was a tone that said,
I’m right about this, and if we’re both patient, you’ll realize the fact.
She sighed. “Okay.”
“Lass, if you can tell me you don’t need a two-hour nap each day, and that you didn’t get sick every time you tried to eat on the journey here, I’ll change the tickets.”
But she did need the nap, and she had gotten sick, trying to eat while on the move. Hardly surprising, since two mer doctors had recently confirmed her own intuition that she was carrying twins. Her due date was still nearly six months away, and they planned to be safely back in Pacifica by then, so that she could give birth underwater, in a special heated pool.
After visiting California, where they would also meet up with Phoebe, Kevin, Saegar, Beth and Ben, they would fly to Australia to finalize the sale of Lass’s property to Susie and Rob.
“Did it occur to you that Susie almost guessed, at our wedding, that there was something a little unusual about us?” Loucan asked as he put away the baby pictures.
“You want to tell them, don’t you?” Lass guessed.
“I want to show them. I’ve believed since Cody’s death that this is the way we have to handle it—opening up first to the people we trust. With peace in Pacifica now, the time has come to start the experiment.”
Lass thought of Susie’s warm brown eyes and
Rob’s thoughtful manner. She remembered their rapport with her horses, and saw in her mind the bird-attracting shrubs Rob had begun to plant in her garden. “We’ve got to recognize our kinship to all creatures,” Rob had said to her once, in his shy, quiet way. “We shouldn’t do anything to drive them away.”
“Yes,” she answered Loucan. “I think you’re right about opening up to people we trust. And even if I didn’t think you were right about that and most things, everyone else in Pacifica does. There’s been no sign at all that peace won’t hold.” She thought back on their swim across the coral reefs a few days ago. “Even the coral on the damaged sections of reef is starting to regenerate. Didn’t you think so?”
“In some places,” Loucan said. “It’ll take a while to look the way it used to.”
“Do you think Joran reached inhabited land safely?”
This time, she saw the way her husband hesitated. “There’ve been some rumors recently,” he said. “A sighting in Fiji, and one a few weeks later in New Zealand.”
“Who saw him?”
“First Carrag and Nacre, on their honeymoon. And then another long-time supporter of mine who’s wandering the world the way I once did.”
“You didn’t tell me. You thought it would upset me,” she guessed.
“Only because—”
“I might be pregnant, Loucan—”
“With twins,” he interjected, as if it made a difference.
“—but that doesn’t change who I am. Don’t you dare think you can—” She stopped abruptly.
He was laughing. Before she could harness her indignation into the proud, angry speech she wanted to make, he pulled her to her feet and into his arms.
“Give me a break,” he said softly. He brushed his mouth across hers. Her lips parted all by themselves, with her familiar need to taste him and return his kiss. “Is it wrong to treat you as if you’re precious? Ben treated Kai like glass when she was pregnant. That was how we guessed, remember? The day they arrived in Pacifica, after the whole mess with Joran was over? You’re
so
precious to me, Lass. You know that. So give me a break, and let me pamper you, the way I want to.”
“Oh, Loucan…” She laughed, too, even while tears filled her eyes.
“Just don’t tell anyone, okay? Might not be good for the whole of Pacifica to know that their king is totally nuts about his queen.”
“Loucan, they realized that months ago,” Lass told him happily. She realized it herself, but it was always nice to hear him say it.
“Yeah, I guess they did,” he answered. “Hey, are you ready to take your afternoon nap, by any chance?”
“Why do I suspect it’s not going to be all that restful today, King Loucan?”
“Can’t imagine, Queen Thalassa.”
He carried her to the newly refitted cabin, with its brand-new queen-size bed, and the rest of the afternoon evaporated in a haze of delight, which they both knew would last in their hearts forever.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Lilian Darcy for her contribution to the A TALE OF THE SEA series.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5888-8
FOR THE TAKING
Copyright © 2002 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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