Immortal Sea (9 page)

“Until I saw the boy yesterday, I was unaware of his existence.”

She would have told him. If she’d ever had the chance. But he never came, he never called, he never contacted her.

He never tried to find them. Her.

The realization was like peeling adhesive back from an old wound. “So you’re telling me your being here is, what? Coincidence? An accident.”

“Or destiny,” he said. “Fate has brought us together. Twice.”

As if their one-night stand was more than lust on his part, stupidity on hers.

“I don’t believe in fate. Bad luck, maybe.”

Those pale gold eyes assessed her. “You consider the boy a misfortune.”

“Of course not.” She pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples. “When I found out I was pregnant . . . My parents didn’t want me to have the baby. They said if I went through with the pregnancy, I’d have to take full responsibility for my choices and my child. So I did. I put myself through med school. I kept my baby.” She raised her head, the old resolve burning in her breast. “And you can’t just show up sixteen years later and take any of that away from me.”

“No female among my people would choose as you did,” he said quietly. “I honor your choice.”

The sincerity in his voice, the admiration in his eyes, caught her off guard. Since Ben’s death, she was used to getting through the days and the nights and the years on her own. There were rewards, sure. But precious few compliments.

She blinked back sudden tears. “Thank you.”

“But the choice is not yours any longer,” he continued inexorably.

She stiffened, on the alert again. “Zack is my son.”

Morgan regarded her steadily beneath hooded lids. “He is almost a man. He must make his own choices.”

“You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. He’s fifteen years old and going through a very difficult time.” So difficult she had given up her practice and moved her family nine hundred miles to provide them with a fresh start. “You have no right to tell me how to raise my son.”

“What about his rights?” Morgan asked.

She stared at him blankly, attracted. Unsettled. Afraid. “What are you talking about?”

“He has the right to know his father.”

She didn’t want to consider the truth of his words. Without moving a muscle, he had managed to threaten everything she valued, her life, her family, her control. “Bernardo Rodriguez was his father.”

“Your dead husband.”

Anger shook her. Anger at Ben, for leaving. Fury at Morgan, for making her feel, for making her face that loss again.

She curled her fingers around the wineglass. “Ben loved Zack. He was there for him all of his life.”

Morgan’s gaze collided with hers. “But not at the beginning of it.”

The air whooshed from her lungs, sucked away by heat and memory.
Only this, only him, his hot gaze, his overwhelming size, the violent grace of his body in hers as he pinned her down and pounded inside her, as the sky wheeled and the world changed around them . . .

She sucked in her breath, gripping the stem of her wineglass. “Ben was there when it mattered. Zack is still adjusting to his loss. He doesn’t need another disruption or another disappointment in his life. He doesn’t need you.”

“What of your needs?” Morgan asked. “This cannot be the life you envisioned for yourself.”

She gulped her wine to dispel the faint bitterness in her mouth. “My life is none of your business.”

“Look around you. You cannot be satisfied with this place.” His gaze flickered over the bar’s clientele, his lip curling. “By these people.”

She set her glass down with a snap. “I have work I love and children who need me. What do you have?”

He looked back at her, his eyes dark. Menacing. Sexual. “I can have whatever I want whenever I want it. Can you say the same?”

His face was so cold, his body throwing off heat. Despite herself, she was shaken and attracted, her own body warming and softening in response.

She must be out of her mind.

“You mean the waitress,” she said in a thin attempt at scorn.

“I mean sex.” His deep voice taunted her, plucking at her nerve endings. She trembled like a violin to the pull of the bow, raw and roused, angry and achingly alive.

And that was absolutely unacceptable. She was not his instrument or his tool. He would not get to her child through her. Or the lure of . . .

“Sex,” she repeated slowly, drawing the word out, testing it, tasting it in her mouth.

She felt the force of his attention, full-blown and intense. She smiled and slipped her foot from its shoe. “I can have sex with whomever I want.”

With her bare foot, she touched his ankle, traced a line up his calf to his knee. His chest rose with one rapid breath, but he did not move, did not shake his gaze from hers. Her heart pattered wildly.

In control, she reminded herself.

She pressed her arch to his thigh. His leg was hard as iron, his thigh heavy with muscle. She meant to turn him on. To turn on him. But she was caught up in her sensual exploration, swept away by a quick surge of need, as riveted by this journey into new territory as he.

She moistened her lips, her toes casting higher. His eyes blazed. He was . . . Oh, God, he was
there,
hot and hard under her foot. Her toes curled.

“Whenever I want,” she said huskily.

His face was harsh. Focused. “My room is upstairs.”

His invitation jolted her. Temptation—to go with the flow, to follow the current of desire—tugged deep in her belly. Oh, she wanted to. She wanted him.

Dropping her foot from his lap, she forced it into her shoe. She slid from the booth and stood looking down on him.

“But that’s the difference between us.” She was amazed her voice could sound so cool, so steady, when she was boiling and shaking inside. “I don’t take something just because I want it,” she said and walked out.

PERHAPS THE SEA LORD WAS RIGHT, MORGAN mused as he strolled down the inn steps late the next morning. Perhaps there was some magic on World’s End.

Trees framed the view, the long green lawn falling away to a crescent of beach bordered by sea and stone.

It felt good to be away from the tensions on Sanctuary, from the sweaty labor of hauling rocks and the frustration of wrangling his work crew from the water. The children of the sea were hunters, not builders. They did not make or mine, plow or spin. Sanctuary had been furnished with the plunder of centuries, Viking gold and Spanish iron, French silks and Italian pottery. All gone now, all lost beneath the waves from which they had been recovered. Two days of hot meals and hot showers, soft linens and uninterrupted sleep had given Morgan a newfound appreciation for human comforts and surroundings. His mind was clear, his body alert, his spirits lighter than they had been in months. Years.

He squinted against the sun sparkling on the blue water below, free as the gulls soaring against the pale sky.

Of course, his current satisfaction might have had another source.

Elizabeth.

Anticipation hummed in his blood and low in his throat. He thought about her body braced in challenge, her cool control, that flash of heat. He’d thought about her quite a lot, in that quiet white room at the inn where he slept alone.

He enjoyed a test of wills almost as much as he enjoyed sex. With her, it would be a pleasure to indulge in both.

He wanted her again, more now than sixteen years ago. And unlike her, he had no hesitation taking what he wanted.

The road from the inn curved uphill and inland past weathered gray houses and small, bright gardens. Following the innkeeper’s directions, he found the police department housed in the town hall, a modest brick building overlooking the harbor.

He went inside. The air was acrid with dust and ink and burned coffee.

The steely-haired woman behind the counter wore her eyeglasses around her neck like a badge of office and looked older than the building itself. Morgan glanced at the name plate on her desk. EDITH PAINE, TOWN CLERK.

“Chief Caleb Hunter,” he said.

She continued to poke at her keyboard. “In his office,” she said without looking up. “Take a seat.”

Caleb had called Morgan with a request to drop by the police station. Possibly the policeman was following up on the report of the broken window. More likely, he wanted to keep tabs on the finfolk lord while he was on human turf. Morgan was willing to oblige in either case. He needed Elizabeth’s address.

“He is expecting me,” Morgan said.

“Maybe he is.”

“You will tell him I am here.”

The clerk raised her glasses to her nose and looked at him for a moment. As if, Morgan thought, he were a shark on her fishing line, unworthy of her bait or effort.

He bit back a grin.

“Maybe I will,” Edith Paine said. “When he’s free. Chairs are behind you if you want to wait.”

He supposed he could wait.

Turning, he surveyed the row of uncomfortable-looking chairs. The one in the middle was already occupied. A small girl with a halo of soft black curls huddled on the wooden seat clutching a large, pale doll. A candy bar sat on the chair beside her, unwrapped. Uneaten.

Someone’s attempt at comfort, Morgan deduced. It was none of his business. Clearly, the child was being cared for after a fashion. Children had survived on Sanctuary for centuries with less.

She looked up at him, her wide, dark eyes swimming with moisture, and stuck out her chin.

Something stirred in his gut. His memory.

“She seems rather young for a felon,” he said to the woman behind the counter.

She sniffed and tapped the keyboard on her desk.

Morgan glanced back at the child. Her lips trembled. Something about that face . . . That chin . . . He narrowed his gaze.

Pink sandals.

Hell and buggering angels.

He ground his teeth together. “Where,” he said very precisely, “is your mother?”

Edith Paine paused her tapping. “I called the clinic. She’s on the way.”

So that was all right, then, Morgan thought. He really had no responsibility here at all.

He frowned. “And your brother?” he asked the child.

Those wide brown eyes fixed on his face with a desperate, completely misplaced hope. “He had to go with the policeman.”

“Where?” Morgan asked sharply.

One grubby hand released the doll. The girl pointed one small, nail-bitten finger to a closed door.

“He said he wanted to talk to Zack.” She drew a shaky breath. Hiccupped. “We had to get in his car. I had to wait out here, he said.”

Morgan’s cold blood boiled. He strode across the lobby.

“You can’t go in there,” Edith objected.

He ignored her. The little girl scrambled off her chair and after him.

Morgan opened the door.

Police Chief Caleb Hunter leaned back behind his desk, big and imposing in a wrinkled blue uniform. The boy—Zachary—hunched in a chair before him, face sullen and eyes miserable.

The chief shot a look at the open door, mild annoyance drawing his brows together. “Morgan. I have to ask you to wait outside.”

Morgan felt a pressure against his leg and glanced down. The little girl had attached herself to him, one arm clinging to his knee, the other gripping the doll. Shaking her loose would be undignified and time-consuming, Morgan decided. He could tolerate her touch for the time it would take him to sort things out.

He locked eyes with the policeman. “What are you doing with him?”

“None of your business,” Caleb replied evenly. “Edith! I told you no interruptions.”

“You want a linebacker out here, call the Patriots.”

Morgan looked at Zachary. The boy slouched deeper in his chair, his mouth sulky, his gaze defiant. Beneath the kiss-my-ass attitude, he stank of fear and shame, his muscles coiled with animal tension.

“What happened?” he asked the boy.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Caleb said. “Now unless you’re his mother or his lawyer, get the hell out.”

“I’m his father.”

Silence crashed over the room like a wave.

The police chief rubbed his face with his hand. “Well, shit. That puts a different spin on things. Let’s see what his mother has to say.”