For the Taking (7 page)

She hadn’t expected it to be a match-winning question, but she could see at once that it was. She’d got
ten through to him. She’d distracted him. Was it possible that she’d actually
hurt
him?

His silence was so significant that even the noisy bushland seemed to go still. A group of kookaburras in a distant tree stopped their laughing, and Willoughby lifted his head from the grass to listen, as if suspicious of the change in atmosphere.

“No, I didn’t tell her,” he finally said. “But still, after more than sixteen years, I wish from the bottom of my heart that I had.”

The grief and anger in his face shocked Lass. She wanted to probe more deeply, but something told her not to. Painfully aware of her own vulnerability as she was, the last thing she’d expected to find at the core of a man like Loucan was a well of regret and pain this powerful.

She began to understand that at some level, despite his outward strength and success, the regret made him as vulnerable as she was.

“O
h, Cyria, I think you kept everything!” Lass whispered aloud.

She brushed tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand, then fumbled in her pocket for a tissue to do the job properly. She had been through her guardian’s things before, but not this thoroughly. This time, Lass opened every box, every packet and every envelope, and came across hoarded memories of her own childhood that threatened to overwhelm her.

Every merit certificate from gymnastics or piano, every school report card, every clumsy handmade craft item, had all been carefully preserved, labeled and put away. There was her costume from the school play when she was ten years old, wrapped in blue tissue paper. And a photograph of her shaking the principal’s hand and collecting an award.

But no matter how hard she looked, there was nothing about a Pacifican key. No cryptic message. No small, insignificant box that had escaped Lass’s atten
tion in the past. Completely satisfied of this fact, she packed the boxes away again. She would break the bad news to Loucan as soon as she saw him again.

“Whenever
that
happens to be!” she muttered aloud to the contents of her attic storeroom.

The day before yesterday, after their ride, she’d gritted her teeth in preparation for dealing with him for the rest of the day, but he hadn’t stayed.

“I’m leaving,” was all he had said. “I’ll be back.”

But he hadn’t said when.

It was getting to her, fraying her already tightly wound nerves. Where had he gone? All the way back to Pacifica? To America, to see her siblings? Or could he be in trouble—even in danger?

Lass came down the narrow stairs from the attic and closed the door. The low space was directly beneath the roof and stifling hot in the late afternoon. She was damp all over, and the airless atmosphere had made her feel queasy.

The queasiness was nothing to do with any concern for Loucan’s safety, she told herself. The life he’d led surely proved that he could look after himself.

But she could remember Joran more clearly now. Old memories had been disturbed like roosting bats, and had swarmed back into the light of her conscious mind. Joran must only have been around eight or nine years older than Loucan himself. He was a cocky, intense and highly intelligent young merman who’d somehow captured her father’s interest with his wild ideas.

Yes, she remembered being jealous of him as a child. Her father was always locked in endless conversations with him. He’d never had time, anymore, to tell her the wonderful stories she loved. If she tried
to get King Okeana’s attention, or to make him laugh, Joran always told her with an insincere smile, “Run along, sweet little princess. Your daddy has more important things to do right now.”

Lass shivered suddenly, despite the heat. No, she’d never liked him.

Surely, though, he was no match for Loucan’s strength and drive and knowledge!

The possibility of a bloody encounter between the two men, in Pacifica itself or somewhere at sea, haunted her too vividly, and she felt another wave of nausea as she went out into the hot sunshine. Loucan had made her care so much in such a short time. If something had happened to him and he just never showed up… If she had to go on with her old life, never knowing what had become of him, and exiled from Pacifica…

Exiled!
What a word to use! She’d never felt that way before. Even the possibility of seeing her siblings again and starting to build a relationship with them couldn’t fully make up for the devastating effect Loucan had had on her, and on the way she felt about her life.

He was right in what he had said to her two days ago.

There was no going back.

For no good reason, she went across to the tearoom and opened it up. Today was Tuesday, the one day in the week when the place was closed. Susie and Megan had stayed late last night, and they were very thorough. There was nothing that needed to be done before tomorrow, nothing with which to occupy her restless hands.

When Lass came out again, she saw the ocean spar
kling blue and bright in the distance, and it called to her spirit with painful intensity. She groaned aloud. On a hot day like this, in the middle of summer break, all the beaches would be crowded. The water would be warm and her tail membrane would form and thicken quickly. After dark it might be safe, but not yet.

Still, she couldn’t take her eyes away…until she saw a dark blue car coming up the road. Her heart lurched. Loucan? There were plenty of cars around like the one he had rented.

If he guessed how lost and empty and restless she had felt since he left, he would use the fact somehow, she was sure of it. All the same, she found she had to keep watching the car, almost holding her breath. It disappeared into a dip, then reemerged, climbing the hill. If it didn’t slow down soon, that would mean it wasn’t coming here….

But it did slow, at the last moment. It was turning. In another second she recognized Loucan at the wheel.

She began to hurry toward the house, pretending she hadn’t seen him, then flinched when he called her name a few moments later.

“Thalassa, wait!”

Turning slowly, she watched and waited, wanting to pour out half a dozen questions, and practically biting her tongue in order to keep them back.

What happened? Did you plan to stay away for so long? Where have you been?

She knew he had been somewhere, because she’d gone down to the harbor at Condy’s Bay to look for the boat he’d told her about. The
Ondina,
named after
his mother. It wasn’t there. He must have taken it out to sea, and now he’d returned.

“Here!” Reaching her, he didn’t give her time for questions, just dropped something cold and slightly ticklish into her hand.

“Loucan…?”

“It’s Phoebe’s key,” he said. His blue eyes held no light of awareness or pleasure at seeing her again. Instead, they seemed clouded and dark with his preoccupation. “I brought it from where I’d hidden it so you could actually see it and feel it in your hand. If you’ve even seen a picture of something like this. If Cyria ever doodled these markings somewhere, or—”

“I’ve told you,” Lass said in a cold tone. “I’ve never seen it.”

She didn’t look at the key, nor at the length of slippery metal chain it was strung on. Closing her fingers tightly around it, she felt it quickly grow warm with the heat of her anger.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Her voice rose. “Do you think Cyria was? I’ve just been through her things again, because you asked me to, this time practically with a magnifying glass. It took hours. And there’s nothing! How likely is it that she’d manufacture a clue so cryptic and well-hidden that I might throw it out with the paper recycling and never realize its existence? How clever would that be? Here I’ve been, worried that somehow Joran—”

“Joran?” Loucan exclaimed. “You’ve heard from him?”

“
No!
You’re completely single-minded about this, aren’t you?” He still hadn’t looked at her properly. Not the way she wanted him to, heaven help her, with
a warm light of pleasure and desire in his eyes. “It hasn’t occurred to you that I might have been concerned about your safety, after everything you’ve told me. That I might have been on tenterhooks the entire time because you never said where you were going,
why
you were going or when you’d be back.
Shoot!
”

Swearing didn’t help.

She covered her face with her hands, took several deep breaths in an effort to win back some control. She’d never let her emotions flood out like this, not in all the twenty-five years she’d lived on land. Willing her shoulders to relax and her awareness of him to subside to a manageable level, she looked up to find him watching her closely at last. He hadn’t moved.

“I don’t want you to care about me, Lass,” he said. The words were as hard and blunt as the old ax blade she used to split kindling wood in winter. “Not in any personal sense. That’s not what I’m looking for.”

“Good, because I
don’t
care,” she replied, wanting it to be true. Wanting to
make
it true. Her attraction to him was meaningless. It was purely the product of the solitary, mistrustful life she’d led. She
knew
that! “I just needed to know what was going on.”

“And I’m sorry you’ve lost sleep over it.”

“Did I say I’d lost sleep?”

“You look as if you have. There are circles under your eyes.” Stepping closer, he traced his thumb lightly over the sensitive skin there. She gave a little shiver of need, and tried to hide the movement by wrapping her bare arms across her body.

“And
I’ve
lost sleep,” he added. “I wish all of this wasn’t so hard for you, Lass. Please believe that.”

She tucked in one corner of her mouth and drawled, “I’ll try.”

“Are you busy tonight?”

“Uh…no.”

She was never busy at night.

There again, maybe Cyria had been wrong. If Lass had close friends to spend time with, maybe the sea and the dolphins wouldn’t call to her so often. If she didn’t go for all those guilty, lonely swims, she wouldn’t feel so set apart. She might have built a real life for herself here, with the husband and kids that Susie kept naively hinting about.

And if Lass had a life of her own, she wouldn’t be half so vulnerable to Loucan.

No, but Cyria wanted this, she realized.

Cyria had never wanted Lass to put her roots in too deep, in case the time came for them to go back. She wanted Lass always to be open to Pacifica’s call.

“Let’s go to dinner, somewhere by the water,” Loucan said. “Let’s forget the key for tonight.” He took it from her—she still had it dangling in her hand—and she let it go without protest, ignoring the touch of his fingers. “I’ll take you out in the boat somewhere safe, and we can swim. You’ve been lonely, Lass, away from your own kind, and taught to distrust the people around you. Whatever happens in the future, let me help you not to be lonely for a while.”

With the need that had been building inside her for so long, Lass couldn’t resist his appeal. She didn’t care that he knew just how vulnerable she was, didn’t care about his hidden and not-so-hidden motivations. Here was someone with whom, in a vital way, she
didn’t have to pretend, the way she pretended with everyone else.

She hadn’t known how deeply she craved this openness until she found it.

“I—I’d like that,” she said. “Just for tonight.”

“Dress up a little,” he suggested. “We’ll go somewhere nice. Celebrate the fact that you have siblings again. Have you spoken to Saegar and the twins since the other night?”

“Yes, Phoebe called me yesterday. She and the others are planning their visit to Pacifica, and wanted to know if they could meet up with me at the same time. I said… Well, that it was hard to get away from this place. They may make a detour here. I spoke to Saegar, too. He’s still busy getting adjusted to his new life, and isn’t sure yet if he’ll go with Phoebe and Kai. I think he may stick pretty close to home and Beth.”

“Your eyes light up when you talk about them, Lass. If ever you think you have reason not to trust me, I hope you’ll remember that I’m the one who brought them back into your life, and I’m the one they trusted with their portions of the key.”

“You don’t need to remind me of that, Loucan,” she told him with a flash of spirit that felt good. “If I didn’t trust you in that sense, you wouldn’t still be here on my property, and I wouldn’t be having dinner with you tonight.”

Without waiting for his reply, she went inside to change, thinking,
When it comes to the question of trust, the person I trust least, right now, is myself.

They drove to a seafood restaurant overlooking the ocean just north of Condy’s Bay. It was attached to
a solitary hotel on a high headland with magnificent sweeps of white beach to the north and south. The coastal towns south of Sydney were not noted for the formality of their dress code, and Loucan blended in perfectly in his casual dark gray pants and paler shirt.

Or rather, the clothing blended in. The man never could. He was taller and broader than most of the other male diners, and when women’s eyes discreetly followed the two of them across the room, Lass noticed at once, and didn’t think it was her own little black dress that held their interest, nor even Cyria’s heavy and distinctive gold bangle watch on her wrist.

Their meal was wonderful, and a treat for someone who spent so much of her time on the opposite side of a kitchen door. Wanting to keep the conversation to safe topics, she reminded Loucan of his threat to bore her with stories about bond trading in New York.

But he’d been kidding her, of course. His stories weren’t boring at all.

“Cyria used to try and get me interested in money,” Lass told him. “She wanted me to get an accounting degree, while I leaned toward something creative. We compromised on business management. But the way you tell it, there’s a lot more drama in dollars and cents than there is in scones and cream.”

“A lot more stress, too,” he answered. “Riding with you the other day, and tasting the water from the stream, I started to understand. There’s more to what you have than just a place to hide.”

She nodded, and said with spirit, “Of course there is. But you’re right. I—I have been hiding. For too long.”

She played a little self-consciously with Cyria’s gold bangle. Catching sight of the time indicated by
the long, ornate gold hands, she was surprised to find that it was still not even eight o’clock. They’d arrived here quite early. There was still plenty of evening ahead.

“Do you want coffee or dessert?” Loucan asked.

Their waiter was hovering. Outside, the sun was beginning to set, changing the colors of the water and turning the sand into silver and gold. Even in this magnificent setting, Lass began to feel confined and eager for some fresh air.

Either Loucan sensed this, or he felt it, too. As she framed her reply, he added, “It suits me if you don’t. We could go for a walk along the beach here, before we drive back to the boat.”