For the Taking (5 page)

“If I have to,” he said. His teeth were clenched.

Lass went white and clutched her hand to her throat. Loucan felt as though his heart had just dropped to the pit of his stomach.

“Hell, I didn’t mean it like that!” he told her. “We need more time, that’s all.”

“We don’t!”

“I don’t want you to tell me to get lost just yet. There’s more that I want from you.”

“What
more?
” she asked in a hard voice. “What more, what harder thing, could you possibly ask than
for me to go back to the place where my mother was killed, and where my father, you’ve told me, died in a pitched battle that I knew nothing about?”

“Mine, too, Lass,” he reminded her quietly. “My father died, too. Don’t forget that.”

She ignored him. “You want me to go back to the place where I’ve believed for twenty-five years that I’d be killed, too, if I returned there without my father’s protection.”

“Cyria has made you too afraid.”

“It wasn’t just Cyria.”

“Then what was it?”

But she shook her head. “I’m too tired for this tonight.”

“Then we’ll leave it.” He masked his frustration. “I’ve been too impatient, Lass. I can see that. We’ll phone Saegar and your sisters, and then I’ll go. But I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to you again soon, Kai. Yes, I know. Me, too. I can’t even put it into words. Yes…oh, yes. Soon. Bye.”

Lass set the phone carefully back in its cradle. Her eyes were shining, Loucan saw. She didn’t try to hide the tears.

“Whatever…” She cleared her throat and tried again. “Whatever I might feel about the possibility of going back to Pacifica, Loucan. The
dread
I felt when I first found out who you were, and that I’ve felt since…this makes up for it. I’ll never forget that you brought me news of Kai and Phoebe and Saegar.”

Her tears spilled, but she was laughing, too. And
her laugh was more free and less rusty than it had been just an hour or two ago.

“I woke them up!” she said. “I woke all three of them up! I forgot that it’s the middle of the night in America. I think Phoebe thought that Kevin had been dreaming when he passed the phone across to her and told her it was me.”

She laughed harder, more tears came, and she was shaking.

Loucan hadn’t intended to take her in his arms. It just happened. With her shoulders jerking and her teeth chattering and tears flooding down her cheeks, what else could he do? He slid his arms around her, cradled her head on his shoulder and soothed her like a little child.

“Shh! Stop this! It’s okay. Relax!”

But she didn’t. She couldn’t. He could feel how stiff and tense her muscles were, and her fingers were digging into his back like crabs digging themselves into the sand. She had her forehead pressed hard into his shoulder, and he just
had
to get her to slow down, let go. Breathe, in fact.

“Criminy! You’re at the end of your rope, aren’t you?” he whispered. “What can I do? What the heck can I do to get you to let go a little?”

He stroked his fingers lightly over her head, releasing the sweet smell of her shampoo into the air. He did it again, sensing an infinitesimal easing of those knotted muscles. Her neck was warm, the skin there tender and covered in a light down of hair.

It was a long time since a woman had needed this tenderness from him, and a long time since he’d allowed himself to give it. When his hand reached the middle of her back, she turned her head a little, and
she wasn’t burrowing anymore, nor was she butting his shoulder like a lamb with sore horns. She was nestling.

And still shaking.

“Shh,” he whispered again, and pressed his mouth to her temple.

She made a little sound in her throat. At first he thought it was a sob or a protest, but then he realized, no.
No…
This was the thing she needed. Not words. Not even sleep. And certainly not solitude.

This.

He turned her face up to his with a hand cupped around her jaw, and kissed her, pressing his mouth on hers, imprinting her lips with sensation. She made another sound, stronger, and he felt her lips part, sighing a puff of warm breath into his mouth.

Her arms wound around his neck and she swayed, suddenly heavier against him as she let his strong body take her weight. He held her, touched to his depths by her need. Her stomach was pressed against his arousal, and yet she seemed unaware of it.

That wasn’t possible, was it? Could she be so very innocent, at the age of thirty-three?

Testing the idea, he dropped his hands to her hips and pulled her gently but firmly closer. He kept on kissing her at the same time, running the tip of his tongue across the sensitive inner skin of her lower lip, softening his mouth on hers so that he could drink her sweet taste.

Her response was immediate and strong. She deepened the kiss and slid her fingers back through his hair, loosening its customary braid until the strand of leather knotted at the end of it slipped off.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who could still be
tray her innocence, he thought, stunned at the way she was touching him.

He’d made love with more than one woman. He’d been married, and yet he’d never known that his scalp was such an erotically sensitized part of his body. Her fingers were cool and gentle, combing through his hair so that it tickled his neck and shoulders.

Still, she gave no sign that she was aware of the extent of his arousal.

For a few moments longer, she remained lost in their kiss. Her breasts were full and soft against his chest, and he was so tempted to dip his head lower and cover the swollen shapes with the heat of his mouth, through her thin, clingy tank top. Resisting the temptation, he pulled her closer still, and rocked his hips from side to side in a slow arc.

Suddenly, she went still and then stiffened. At last she’d registered the significance of the ridge of pressure bumping her stomach. She tore her mouth from his, looked down for half a second, then up into his face, her eyes wide. Her pupils were huge and black, and her breathing high and shallow.

He didn’t know what he had expected. Another kiss, maybe? Even longer, deeper and better than the first. An apology? Instead, she fought her way out of his arms without a word and backed away, one hand closing against her throat as if she could barely breathe.

“Lass—” he began.

“Please leave.”

“Not like this.”

“Yes.
Yes.
I don’t want this. I can’t do this. I don’t know how.”

She turned and fled from the room, and a moment later he heard a door slam at the end of the corridor.

Standing in her room in the dark, Lass watched Loucan’s taillights disappear through her open gate and turn onto the road leading to the highway.

“He must think I’m crazy!” she muttered to herself. “Why did I react like that? I’m not crazy, but I’m a fool!”

A fool to have let him see how much his arousal had shocked her. And why had it?

Reasons aplenty.

She’d been shocked at the fact of it, first of all, with its offer of proof that she wasn’t the only one feeling like this. For her, it was about an awakening that she knew was long overdue.

She’d been telling herself that it was only because he was mer. She’d told herself that it had nothing to do with any specific chemistry or personality, nothing to do with
him,
Loucan, at all. Instead, she’d begun to convince herself that it had everything to do with how tightly she’d locked her own sensuality away, for the whole of her adult life.

But that couldn’t be right, if he felt it, too….

Secondly, she’d been shocked at how long it had taken her to realize what was going on. She’d been so lost—
so lost!
—in their kiss. Even now, in memory, the power of it almost knocked her off her feet like a rogue wave surging against her body. There hadn’t been room in her for any conscious thought, until suddenly the melting, swelling sensation deep inside her had struck the vivid contrast of something hard and firm, and she’d understood.

Far too late.

Finally, she’d been shocked at her immediate, incongruous sense of simultaneous longing and exultation and fear. Exultant that it was happening. Longing for it to go further. Absolutely terrified about this level of intimacy.

No one should be this inexperienced at the age of thirty-three.

“What have I done to myself?” she whispered.

It wasn’t fair to blame Cyria. It wasn’t even right to blame the horror Lass had witnessed as an eight-year-old child.

I made my own choices,
she thought to herself.
I took what life gave me, and I chose my response. Not everyone would have ended up like this. A thirty-three-year-old virgin who turns wild with need the moment she lets her guard down a fraction, and then clams up again and runs a mile. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know what to do. What if he thinks he can get what he wants from me this way?

She dreaded the thought of his return tomorrow.

“I
wondered if I’d find you here,” Loucan said.

Lass was with the horses, and it was still early, just seven in the morning. Having heard the distant slam of his car door a few minutes ago, she was prepared for his arrival, but not for his immediate effect on her senses. Her heart began to beat faster as she watched the last few strides of his approach. Her perceptions were heightened and time seemed to slow.

She had plenty of opportunity to see the way his body moved beneath his jeans and blue chambray shirt, plenty of opportunity to observe the dark gold highlights the sun brought out in his hair. It was like the grain in some rich, polished wood, and as usual he had it pulled into a low, tight braid on his neck. She was suddenly sure that somewhere, way back, he’d had a pirate ancestor.

“Some days, at this hour, Loucan, you would have found me in bed!” she retorted.

Her stomach sank. Was that the best thing she
could come up with, having groped several seconds for a reply? Would he think it was a deliberately suggestive line?

She hated reacting this way, but she was on a hair trigger where he was concerned. Her memory of their powerful kiss and her anguished uncertainty about the meaning of her response to him had overshadowed her joy at rediscovering her siblings. Her stomach began a familiar churning.

To her relief, however, Loucan took her words calmly.

“I woke up early,” he said. “I always do, on the boat. There’s a king tide running this morning. It’s spectacular. I swam for over an hour, just as dawn was breaking, watching the waves crashing and foaming onto the headlands and the beaches. There’s a little island offshore, just south of Seaview.”

“Mullaby Island. Off the end of Possum Point.” Lass knew it well.

She’d done the same thing he’d just described many times—naked, since the mer transformation had to involve shedding her swimsuit. Loucan would have been naked in the water, too, his body sleek and powerful, his skin tanned like cinnamon-colored silk.

“I lay out there, in the first rays of the sun,” he said. “Felt like it was next door to heaven.”

“Today, I’d rather ride,” she stated, turning back to the feed trough she was filling. The horses stamped impatient hooves.

Loucan was doing it deliberately, she was sure—using the power of her need for the sea to break down her defenses and remind her of everything they had in common. She was determined it wouldn’t work,
and could only hope he wasn’t aware of her body’s growing need for him.

“Got a horse for me?” he asked.

“You ride?”

“Not for a long while. I used to at one time.”

“These guys are all pretty frisky,” she warned.

There was her own chestnut gelding, Willoughby, and four more horses that she boarded on her land. She fed and watered them and kept an eye out for any problems, in return for a fee. Milo’s owner was away at the moment, and Lass was supposed to ride him occasionally. Unfortunately, he was big and young and the friskiest of the lot.

“Try me,” Loucan said, and Lass saw the gleam in his eye.

Her heart sank. Did she really think she could scare him off with the threat of a lively horse? His whole personality shouted the fact that he was born to command, and a horse would read and respect the signals as clearly as a human being.

She tried one last time to put him off. “You must be hungry after all that cavorting in the ocean. You don’t want to eat?”

“You’re bringing a picnic, I notice. I’ll wait for that.” He gestured at the backpack she wore. It had a flask of hot coffee and two thickly filled bread rolls sticking out of the top. Her brunch.

“I’ll be pretty hungry myself soon,” she said. “There isn’t enough for two.”

“You saddle the horses and I’ll stretch the picnic with a few more things from the kitchen. Don’t fight it, Lass,” he added in a lower tone.

The fine hairs on her arm stood on end. “Fight what?”

Had he read her mind? Or just her body language? She was so aware of him that her heart was pounding in her chest and her knees wobbled. He smelled cleanly of soap and seawater, and his square jaw was freshly shaved. Her fingers itched to stroke his face, to discover if his skin was as smooth there as it looked on the rest of him.

She was determined he shouldn’t guess how strongly she responded to his presence, but this petty fighting wasn’t the way to achieve that.

“Never mind,” she added. “Don’t answer that. Sure, pack some more food, come for a picnic and a ride. Fruit and cheese and crackers, or whatever you can find. I already have rolls and a flask of coffee and some of yesterday’s chocolate mud cake from the tearoom.”

“Chocolate mud cake? Yep, you’re right,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

A laugh bubbled out of her. She didn’t normally laugh so readily, and it wasn’t a particularly funny line, but somehow he did this to her. He made her laugh. He’d made her cry more than once, as well. All her emotions were extra close to the surface since they’d met, and while she could think of other reasons for why this should be so, she knew what the true reason was.

This awakening in her body, longed for and unwanted at the same time. Frightening and seductive. Making her heart and her stomach behave strangely even while her jaw began to ache with the effort of bottling in her feelings.

While he was inside the house gathering the extra picnic things she’d suggested, Lass saddled Willoughby and Milo and turned the other horses loose
in their big, grassy field. They cantered away, then slowed to crop the fresh grass, which was still drenched in cool summer dew. The morning sun brought out the rich chestnut and ebony-black on their flanks.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the horses seemed to appreciate the fact as much as humans did. Willoughby made a snickering sound, and Milo flicked his black tail and pricked his ears forward.

Lass was thankful for the time alone, and for the horses. She was familiar with them. They gave her strength, as they always had, reminding her that she wasn’t just a prisoner of her heritage and her past. There was more to her than that—a whole lot more to her than her unusual innocence and her haunted relationship with the sea.

When Loucan emerged from the house, Lass was already mounted and leading Milo alongside Willoughby in the direction of the kitchen door.

“All set,” he said. He was wearing the second backpack she kept on a hook behind the door, and he carried a battered object in his hand. He held it up. “Is the hat okay?”

“To borrow it? Sure, why not?”

He’d found her old Akubra—the traditional Australian stockman’s hat, equivalent to a Texan’s Stetson and made of felt. Lass almost always wore it outdoors. Last year, she’d bought herself a new one in dark gray, but secretly she still preferred this old brown one with its creases and its worn places. An Akubra wasn’t a real hat until it had traveled a few hundred miles on horseback or a few thousand in a farmer’s pickup truck.

On Loucan it looked like a classic, creases and holes included, and she couldn’t help telling him so.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

He drawled the words like an American cowboy as he tipped it into his hand, then slapped it low onto his head once more, climbed through the post-and-rail fence and swung himself into Milo’s saddle. The animal shifted his feet a couple of times, then settled as if he recognized the feel of experienced hands on the reins.

“Where are we headed?” Loucan asked.

“Across the paddock.” She used the Australian word for field. “Through the gate and onto one of the forestry trails. It leads to a creek. I like to stop there and…well, listen to the birds, and to the water. It’s nothing like the sea,” she added, and knew that she sounded far too defensive. “The sea sighs and roars. The creek gurgles over the rocks. It’s less dramatic, but more musical. We might hear kookaburras laughing, too. They’re only birds, but they sound exactly as if they’re all enjoying a great joke.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I love the smell of the air here.”

“It’s the eucalyptus. The leaves release some of their oil into the air. I’ve heard that’s what makes the skies so blue here, too. The oil in the atmosphere intensifies the color.”

“It’s true I’ve never seen skies quite as blue as this.”

They rode in silence until after they’d passed through the gate. Lass dismounted and opened it, and Loucan led Willoughby through, managing with ease what could sometimes be an awkward maneuver.

“You must have ridden a lot, at one time.” It wasn’t quite an accusation on her part, but almost.

“When I was married,” he answered. “My wife was an Arizona rancher’s daughter.”

“You’re married? Or, no, you
were.
Once.”

“We were divorced a long time ago,” he said. “It’s been, what, around seventeen years since I sat a horse. For a couple of years, I rode nearly every day. I got to like it. It was one of the few things that made up for how much I missed the sea.”

“Tell me what else you want from me, Loucan,” Lass begged him suddenly. “It’s too hard like this. Just waiting for you to say it. Hearing the way you keep bringing the sea into our conversation. You want me to go back to Pacifica and I’ve said that I—”
Can’t,
she almost said “—won’t. What else could be important enough to keep you away from the place, when you’ve told me that the situation there still isn’t stable?”

He looked across at her for a moment, the wide brim of the hat shadowing his brilliant eyes, then said, “Okay. You’re right. It’s time to say it. And it’s quite simple. I want your quarter of the key. I thought you might have guessed.”

“Key? What key?”

“I’ve noticed you’re not wearing it, but you were when you left Pacifica, and you must have it somewhere. Okeana had it strung onto a necklace. Cyria would never have let you lose it.”

She frowned at him. “I’ve never had a key from Pacifica. Or a necklace.”

“Okeana wanted you to wear it always,” Loucan said, persisting in spite of her denials.

His thought processes seemed sluggish to him this morning. Maybe it was that eucalyptus tang in the air.

Or maybe not.

He hadn’t been sleeping well since he’d found Lass. Between his impatience to get back to Pacifica and his realization that he had to take things slowly with Lass, his nerves were stretched tightly.

“But I don’t have it,” Lass said. “I know nothing about a Pacifican key.”

Her blank face disconcerted him. Phoebe, Kai and Saegar had each been wearing their portion of the key like a talisman, even though the twins hadn’t had any inkling about the significance of the unusual piece of jewelry. Lass, on the other hand, the only one of Okeana’s children old enough to remember leaving Pacifica, claimed not to know anything about it.

Unless her apparent innocence was a pretense… Loucan wondered. Mistrust could cut both ways. So far he’d spent all his energy trying to overcome her doubts and fears. He’d been so busy trying to gain her trust, he hadn’t questioned whether he had any reason not to trust her in return. A flash of suspicion darted into his mind. Could she possibly be in touch with Joran?

There were so many contradictions to what he’d seen in her so far. Thirty-three years old, and so innocent she didn’t recognize when a man was aroused? Able to surf joyously among a school of dolphins, yet so guilty about her need for the sea that she spent half her life fighting to pretend to herself that it didn’t exist? Maybe all her fear and doubt was a performance, designed to throw him off.

She
had
to know about the key…didn’t she?

Then he remembered another, long-ago line of Cyr
ia’s. “For your own good, my little princess.” Another possibility occurred to him.

“Cyria could have kept it for you,” he said aloud. “Kept it secret, hidden among her things. She might have taken the necklace from you without telling you of its significance, and in time you forgot that it even existed. But one of you must have had it. Must still have it.”

“No, Loucan.” Lass shook her head, sounding very sure of her ground.

He kept on pushing. “It’s in the shape of a quarter circle, about two inches across. She died nearly thirteen years ago, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. When I was twenty.”

“And she left you all her possessions, in her will?”

“Yes. I was astonished,” Lass said.

She frowned and shook her head, and Loucan watched the way memory unfolded on her face. A tinge of pink came into her cheeks, her green eyes seemed to darken, her lips parted a little and the tip of her tongue touched her upper lip for a moment. For a woman who had spent so much time and effort on hiding who she really was, her emotions showed very clearly. Or was that something new, something to do with him?

Milo quickened his pace and Loucan held him back so that he could still see Lass’s face as she talked. The sun caught the side of her jaw, emphasizing its strong yet graceful line. The air was filled with the scent of the Australian bushland and the percussive sounds of the horses. It was one of those days when it was good just to be alive. Briefly, Loucan wished he could simply enjoy the feeling, and forget the goals that drove him so hard.

“We’d always lived so frugally,” Lass was saying. “I thought we could barely make ends meet. Cyria worked cleaning houses. Wouldn’t consider retirement, even when it began to get too much for her. She was so stubborn, and always thought she knew best.”

“I remember that,” Loucan said. “I wondered if that trait might intensify, over the years.”

“She was determined I should get a business degree so I could look after myself. I assumed that was because we had nothing to fall back on. It always seemed strange to me that my father would have sent us away with nothing to help us.”

“But Lass, he didn’t.”

“No, I realized that after her death. Cyria herself never mentioned the subject, and any questions I asked, she deflected. She gave me a watch for my sixteenth birthday, the kind that’s set in a solid gold bangle. It was the only expensive gift she ever gave me, and I thought she must have saved for months to buy it. I was so touched by that. Then when she died and I found she’d left me thousands of dollars worth of gold and pearls—enough to buy the old dairy and the farmhouse and several acres of land, restore the whole place and set myself up in business—I was just
astonished!
”