For the Taking (8 page)

She nodded. “And maybe later on, as soon as it’s fully dark, we can…” Her voice went husky and she cleared her throat. “We can go for that swim.”

“Yes, I’d like to swim with you tonight, Thalassa.”

She flushed, hearing a connotation to the words that she was sure he didn’t intend. It wasn’t his fault that the sea and her own sensuality were so closely linked in her mind. He didn’t know that after she’d immersed her body in seawater, she always longed more strongly for the unknown mystery of a man’s intimate touch.

Oh, Lord, and she didn’t
want
him to know, either!

She took care not to touch him as they left the restaurant.

Barefoot a few minutes later, with their shoes left in the car, they scrambled down the steep cliff path to the beach and walked north toward the next headland. The sibilant sigh of the waves on the sand kept their silence from feeling awkward. When the ocean
was speaking, there was little need for other conversation.

The beach was dotted with people tonight. Surfers and fishermen, children playing ball, couples walking hand in hand. It was too crowded to swim yet. If anyone saw them disappear out to sea, and raised an alarm, thinking they were in danger, the consequences could be frightening.

Lass had been “saved” once in the past by an overeager lifeguard, just before her tail began to form. She’d been petrified of discovery. Cyria would have yelled about it for weeks, had she known, and Lass herself had no desire to repeat the experience.

And yet she longed for the sea.

“Do you want to turn back?” Loucan asked when they reached the end of the beach.

“No, how about we go across the picnic area to the tidal inlet,” she suggested. “The tide has just started going out, which means the current at the mouth of it will be strong. Almost no one swims across the inlet then, and there’s no way through to the next beach by road. We won’t need swimsuits, and we won’t need to wait. That beach will be…” She stopped, realizing that she was speaking too fast and much too eagerly.

“Empty.” He finished for her, smiling. “Don’t be ashamed of your impatience. It reminds me of when you were a child, always so brave and eager. I’m glad you haven’t lost that spirit, Lass.”

“Mmm.” She turned away, not wanting him to see her face.

There were families cooking barbecue at the public gas grills in the park, and children splashing in the inlet. The sun had just set behind the mountains to
the west, and the light was draining out of the sky, turning into a dozen different pastel shades as it went.

“Watch out for broken oyster shells on the rocks and mangrove trunks,” Lass warned Loucan. “They’re sharp. Stick to the sand, or you can get cut.”

“Should those kids be playing on the rocks, then?”

She gazed in the direction he was pointing, and saw several children messing around on the rocks. They ranged in age from preteen down to toddler, and looked like siblings. She couldn’t see their parents.

“Those rocks are probably free from oyster shells. They’re just above the high tide line. But the current starts to get strong around this point,” she said. “If I was a parent—”

Loucan didn’t wait for the end of her sentence. With an exclamation under his breath, he took off ahead of her through the shallow water, and she saw that the youngest child had just lost his balance and slipped off the rock he was standing on. Lass lost sight of him beneath the water for several seconds, then he sat up in water that reached to his chest, spluttering and crying, just as Loucan reached him.

He snatched the little boy up, thumped him hard on the back several times with the heel of his hand and brought forth more spluttering and a belch of seawater. The older children stood back, a little startled by the sudden arrival of a strange man in their midst.

Then their father emerged from between the mangrove trees that lined the edge of the water. He had a red, sunburned face and a belligerent attitude.

“What’re you doing with my kid? Put him down!”

The child was still crying. Lass had almost reached the scene now, and she could see that the father had
a point. Loucan’s dramatic swoop and scoop had frightened the little boy more than the seawater closing over his head.

Apparently Loucan didn’t agree.

“He could have drowned.” His voice was hard with anger and emotion. “The older ones were playing. No one was watching him. A young child can panic or hit his head and drown in an inch of water in less than three minutes, quite silently.”

“He’s fine,” the father insisted.

“Yes, because I reached him in time.”

“It wasn’t your problem. I was watching him. He sat up on his own. You’re scaring him.” He took the boy in his arms and attempted to stare Loucan down.

It didn’t work. The merman simply stood his ground and said quietly, “I’m sorry if you think that I saw danger where none existed. I was thinking of the child’s safety, that’s all. Let’s go, Lass.”

She nodded. “Sure.”

She thought Loucan was fully in control until she looked sideways, as they walked away, and discovered that his fisted hands were shaking. Then she looked closer. His mouth was a tight line and he was frowning heavily. The rolled legs of his dark pants were drenched to the thigh and his shirt was plastered to his body by the seawater that had streamed from the crying toddler. Loucan barely seemed to notice, let alone care. He was striding through the water, now just ankle deep and—oh Lord!

“Loucan, you’ve cut your foot,” Lass said on a hiss of breath. She felt dizzy and sick at once.

He stopped to look down at his foot, and the spreading cloud of blood darkened in the shallow water. “I don’t feel it yet.”

“It must be deep. It’s right on your heel. You will feel it when the sand gets into it. There’s so much blood….”

So much blood.

Lass felt sick and panic-stricken as her mind filled with the stark, familiar image of pristine, translucent turquoise seawater stained and polluted with dark red blood, thinning as it spread, and turning the water pinkish-brown.

Her mother, Queen Wailele’s, death.

Ironically, it had been the first day in months that Lass had spent with her frail mother. They’d gone out together, just the two of them, to swim among the coral and the bright tropical fish on the nearby undersea reefs. They’d had no goal, other than to enjoy the beauty and each other’s company.

Lass, always a bold explorer, had swum ahead, out of her mother’s sight. She hadn’t even known about the attack until she’d swum back in search of her mother, and found Galen’s hired henchman holding his knife to Wailele’s throat.

Lass had hidden behind a rock, too frozen with shock to move. Galen’s thug had pulled her mother’s body out of sight along the submerged reef, holding its lifeless shape the way lifeguards on Australian beaches held the swimmers they rescued from drowning. He’d disappeared, never knowing about Lass. She’d stayed, still unable to move until that pinkish cloud drifted toward her in the water like a ghost. Only then had she fled.

To Cyria.

She fled again now, blindly, away from the stain that was moving toward her feet.

“Lass! Thalassa!”

Loucan followed her, but she ignored him. The direction she took wasn’t logical. She should have run to the sand and up into the safety of the barbecue area beneath the trees, with its grass and people and the smells of cooking food.

Instead, she went instinctively toward the open sea. It was only about twenty yards to the place where the current pouring out to sea transformed the sandy floor of the tidal lake into a narrow channel more than ten feet deep. Loucan was slowed by the cut on his foot, which had to be hurting by now. She was well ahead of him.

She ran until the water reached her thighs, then launched herself full length and began to swim, letting herself get carried by the current until she met the clean, churning foam of the breaking waves. She felt her tail begin to form, wriggled out of her panties, left them behind and kept swimming, needing the movement and the distance.

The power of the memory was beginning to ebb, but she knew Loucan would have questions. He would want her to tell him what was wrong, and she didn’t know if she could. Didn’t even know if she wanted to try.

When the membrane thickened fully, she dived beneath the waves without waiting for the slightly slower opening of the feathery gills in her neck. She’d trained herself to hold her breath for a long time. The sudden trebling of her speed through the water came as a huge relief. It was kin, she had always assumed, to what land people felt when they put on flippers or a fiberglass fin, but much more powerful.

The cold, clear water streaked past her skin, and the black dress she still wore seemed like a madden
ing impediment. Wriggling and stretching her body in the water, she pulled it over her head and left it behind to float slowly down to the sea floor or wash ashore in the next high tide.

Clothing always seemed so foolish and unimportant to her when she was in mer form. Even her black lace bra was a tight, uncomfortable impediment, so she shed that, too.

But she’d forgotten how much faster Loucan would be, and shedding her clothing had slowed her down. Loucan had been faster in freeing himself of his. Surging to the surface to breathe, she felt his hand close around her wrist.

“What happened?” he said. He sounded breathless from his impatience to reach her. “The blood made you panic. Why?”

“I can’t talk about this.”

Nausea rose in her gut once more, and she tore herself away from his grip, even though she knew he would follow her.

Loucan didn’t let her get far, and this time he held her more strongly. His arms wrapped around her waist, then slid higher to her shoulder blades. She tried to keep swimming, but he matched her pace, his body undulating against hers in the same rhythm.

“You can talk about it,” he urged her. “You have to. It haunts you, Lass.”

Yes, that was how it felt—a ghost that appeared whenever she was most vulnerable. She slowed in the water and stopped fighting him, because she was too busy facing and fighting the demon of her memory.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” he said. “This is the thing that haunts you. More than loneliness. More than the fear that someone will find out you’re mer. This is
why you’re afraid, on a deep, subconscious level that you can’t control, to go back to Pacifica.”

The moment Loucan saw Lass’s eyes, he knew he was right. In the light of the newly risen and nearly full moon, her pupils were dark, and whatever she saw in her vision, it wasn’t him, even though she was only inches from him and staring in the direction of his face.

He held her and waited, feeling how she shivered in his arms, but even more aware of her lushly female body enclosed there. He had abandoned his clothing just as she had, both of them responding to the same instinctive need to feel the water on their bare skin. Their nakedness removed what little protection he’d had against his growing desire for her. He ached to dip his head lower and taste her full mouth, to explore the shape of her back and the weight of her breasts, despite his vow not to kiss her again.

He knew that Lass was unaware of his body’s response, and too tightly wound right now to feel the sensuality that was so strong and newly discovered inside her. Loucan held his own needs in check and urged her once more, “Tell me, Thalassa.”

“I saw my mother die,” she whispered. “I
saw
it, Loucan! I was hiding. He—the assassin, the murderer—never knew I was there. And her blood came toward me in the water. She was so frail and defenseless. The last person in the whole of Pacifica who would ever have fought back. What a despicable, cowardly act to choose my mother! It would have been more courageous to choose me, an eight-year-old child! If only I’d understood what was happening! But I didn’t.”

“How could you have understood? And what could you have done?”

“I told Cyria, and she made me promise never to say what I’d seen. She knew that it would endanger my own life. It was only a few days after that when we left Pacifica. My whole memory of Pacifica is clouded by what I saw, the same way that her blood clouded the water. I’ve never been able to—” She broke off, then continued, “Once before, I saw a little girl get an oyster shell cut in the inlet. I fainted on the sand.”

Lass shook more violently than ever, so Loucan held her closer, stroked her bare back and kissed the top of her head, as if she were still the child she’d once been. “Oh, Lass,” he said, “and you’ve kept this shut away.”

“I didn’t think I could say the words. There’s been no one to say them to, Loucan.” Her voice cracked. “No one. Cyria would never let me talk about it.”

Lass began to cry wildly, and Loucan held her quite still in the water, flicking his tail every few seconds to keep them afloat. He knew she needed this, and that he shouldn’t hurry it. She could cry for hours if that would help her to release the pent-up grief and fear.

But it was disturbing to discover how much he needed it, too—the touch of her skin against his, the chance to give her something instead of being constantly on the lookout for opportunities to take.

The giving wasn’t much, just a little human warmth and comfort, a listening ear. As she’d said, there had been no one, until now. The taking, on the other hand, was enormous. He knew that his arrival in her life had taken away her whole safe, carefully created little
world. Although it had to happen, he wished he had more to offer her in return.

Maybe he did, he finally decided, when her long storm of tears at last began to quiet. Maybe the best and most obvious thing was right here and already happening.

If he kept her in his arms and kissed her again.

“Lass,” he whispered. “Lass…”

He began to stroke the wet hair back from her face. Her breathing was still jerky against his chest, and her shoulders were shaking. He caressed them until she relaxed, then used his fingers to smooth the stress lines from her forehead and from around her brilliant green eyes.

Only when she was completely calm did he narrow the gap between his mouth and hers. At the first brush of his lips, she gasped, pushed her hands against his chest and tried to swim away, but he wrapped his arms more tightly around her and held her back. Their moving tails collided, and Loucan felt the hard shape of the gold bangle on her wrist, as well. He hoped it was waterproof. She’d obviously forgotten all about it.