Sea Lord (22 page)

turned, tall, stern, and forbidding as ever. “And a human who takes a selkie pelt holds that power over its

owner. As your father held your mother.”

Lucy stared at him, a terrible suspicion rooting in her brain. “You mean, against her will.”

He did not answer.

Her heart pounded as the foundations of her world rocked again. “My father
loved
my mother.”

Conn’s face was without expression. “He would say so.”

She didn’t know how to respond. What would it mean if all these years, all her father’s choices, hadn’t

been governed by grief at all, but by guilt?

“And she . . .” Lucy’s voice shook shamefully.

“Cared for him, I believe. For a time.”

“Then Caleb . . . And Dylan . . .”

“Margred made the choice to live as human for your brother’s sake. As Dylan chooses to stay with

Regina.”

But Maggie loved Caleb. No one who saw them together could doubt it. And Dylan was devoted to

Regina.

Lucy’s heart beat faster. “What does that have to do with you and me?”

Conn’s face became, if possible, even colder and more remote. “I took your freedom. I gave you mine.

What more do you want of me?”

Her throat ached.

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Your love.

But of course she couldn’t say that. He had given her what he had. All he could. Could it be enough? She

didn’t want to be like the little girl in the fairy tale, crying for the moon.

What did she want?

“I want to be part of a normal couple,” she said. “I want a regular relationship. Somebody to talk to and

laugh with and care about. Somebody who is with me because he cares about me. Not because of a

prophecy or a sealskin or anything else.”

He gazed back at her steadily with those cool-as-rain eyes. “I cannot change what I am or what I have

done. I would not if I could. There is no going back for us.”

“I’m not asking to go back. I just want to slow down.”

“To what end?”

Doubt lodged like a splinter in her chest, pricking old insecurities. She couldn’t entice her live-in

boyfriend to go out for pizza. Did she seriously think she was going to sell the three-thousand-year-old

lord of the sea on the concept of dinner-and-a-movie?

“To get to know each other.”

“I know you.”

Sexually.

Yes.

The red marks of her teeth scored his arm.

She flushed and looked away. “You only know part of me. You don’t know my favorite color or my

favorite flower or if I leave the cap off the toothpaste or whether I like Chinese food. You don’t know if I

go to church or what side of the bed I sleep on or the name of my first boyfriend.”

“And you think these things are important.”

She stuck out her chin. “What they demonstrate—the trust, the closeness—is important. Yes.”

“Very well. Tell me.”

She was surprised into a laugh. “You want a list?”

“Yes.”

He was serious. The realization was at once completely ridiculous and oddly reassuring. “Getting to

know someone doesn’t work that way. It takes time.”

He clasped his hands behind his back. “How much time?”

He was pushing at her, always pushing. Tentatively, she pushed back. “Worried about how many

childbearing years I have left?”

His eyes glinted. “Not as long as I can spend them in your bed.”

Her pulse jumped. Desire was a whisper against her skin, a throb in her blood. How could she slow her

rapid slide into dangerous dependence when he could arouse her with a look, a word?

“We need to compromise. I’m willing to give you—us—a chance. You need to give me space.”

He raised his brows. “This room is not enough for you?”

Haha. “I meant emotional space.”

“Agreed. During the day, you may take all the time and talk and emotional space you require. But at

night, we share the bed.”

Her pulse beat in her throat and between her legs. “That’s your compromise?”

His lips curved. “Yes.”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip to contain her answering smile. She wanted to sleep with him,

yearned for a body beside her in the dark to provide an illusion of intimacy and keep her dreams at bay.

She wanted more than that. Even now, with her body slick and tender from his assault, she craved him in

ways and places that shocked her. That would probably shock him, if he knew.

Her gaze flickered to the bite on his arm and away, sliding over him like a hand, greedily gathering up

impressions: the column of his throat, his long, strong, broad body, the pillars of his thighs. She

recognized the slow uncurling of desire in her stomach with delight and despair. His rough possession had

released her sexual appetite like a genie from a bottle. How would she ever wrestle it back under

control?

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I wish . . . I wish . . .

“Tell me his name.”

She jerked her attention back to his face. “What?”

“The name of your first boyfriend. The one you think of when you look at me.”

“Oh.” Hot blood flooded her face. “It’s not important.”

Conn regarded her steadily, immovable as his tower, inexorable as the sea. “The trust is important,” he

quoted softly back at her.

Her heart raced.
Trapped.

“His name was Brian.”

Conn waited.

Crap.

“He, um . . . We met my sophomore year. At a party?” She snuck a look at him to see if he understood.

Just a typical Saturday night, open doors and open bottles at a friend of a friend’s apartment. Watching

other people get wasted usually didn’t appeal to Lucy. She’d had too much of that growing up. But

Caleb had recently deployed to Iraq, and she had felt anxious and itchy, cut off and almost unbearably

lonely. So she’d let her roommate nag her into going.

“You had sex with him,” Conn said.

“That night?” Lucy winced. “Yeah.”

Hookup sex. Her first time. Brian was drunk and she was nervous. She recalled fumbling and hunger and

pheromones trickling like a cocktail through her veins, heady and addictive. She’d stumbled home giddy

with hormones, almost believing in love at first sight.

“And after?”

“Sometimes.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, we, um, lived together for a while.”

She’d never told Caleb. She never told anybody, except her roommate. She had visions of her brother

coming home from Iraq and field dressing her boyfriend. So there had been no one to confide in, no one

to advise her. Fermented by time, the words spilled out like acid, thick and corrosive.

“Sometimes he couldn’t . . . He didn’t want to . . . Well, look at me.” She hunched her shoulders in

irritation and embarrassment. “I’m hardly a supermodel. And he was taking some really hard courses, he

was too tired to . . .”

“What are you, some kind of freak?” Brian had protested sleepily, irritably, when she reached for

him the fourth—or was it the fifth?—time. “Get away from me.”

Lucy winced at the memory. “He didn’t like it when I made demands.”

“
Made demands
”?

Sodding angels.
Blood flooded Conn’s brain and his cock. He’d like her to make demands of him. He

wanted to throttle the young fool who had taught her to devalue herself, who had cheapened her sensual

selkie nature.

“
Look at me,
” she had said.

He did. He saw her thick, springy hair, her lean, strong face, the thick sweep of her pale lashes. She was

not an exotic beauty, not an obvious one, but subtle, clean-limbed, and lovely. Her clear eyes reflected

the moods of the sea. Right now they were the color of storm, gray washed with moisture.

Lust transmuted to tenderness, flooding his chest and tightening his throat.

“I see you,” he said.

She braced.

“I want you.” He held her gaze, held his arms away from his body, palms upward. “I am at your service.

Command me.”

Her lips parted. He saw the possibilities work into her imagination and bloom in her eyes, deep,

disturbing, exciting. But she did not have the confidence to command or even to ask. Not yet.

So he crossed to the bed and bracketed her face in his hands. Her skin was warm and faintly flushed.

With his thumb, he smoothed the thick, stubborn line of her brows, the subtle indentation of her chin. She

closed her eyes, and he kissed her quivering lids and the slope of her cheekbone and the corner of her

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mouth.

Her breath escaped on a sigh. Carefully, watching her, he moved his hands to the fastenings of her cloak,

undoing the long row of buttons one by one. His knuckles brushed her breasts. She trembled.

“Beautiful.” His whisper vibrated between them.

She opened her eyes, the gray depths swirling with yearning and denial.

“Like the sea at dawn,” he said.

She snorted in disbelief.

Anger stabbed Conn’s gut. Anger at her human lover, who had taken her and left her in such doubt.

Anger at himself, for doing the same.

Yet for all that he had taken, he could give her this. He continued to undress her, taking time, taking care,

pausing to admire each part. His sex words made her blush and squirm, so he told her without words

how exquisite she was, how firm, how fine, how delicately made. He set his lips to her shoulder, inhaling

the perfume of her skin, tasting her salt. He traced the velvet tips of her breasts and bent to suckle them.

She made a sound of impatience low in her throat and reached for him.

He stepped back from her urgent touch. “Lady, I am yours. At your service.”

Her drowning eyes were lost. Confused. They tore his heart. “So?”

“You wanted to slow down,” he reminded her wickedly.

A smile trembled on her lips. Her hands dropped to her sides.

Tension shivered through him. Not only to have her, but to return to her a measure of her feminine

power. He shucked his own clothes hastily, tunic, leggings, and shirt. His cock jutted, rock hard and

rampant, but he ignored his own arousal to focus on hers, brushing his hands up and down her arms,

letting his touch drift from the angle of her hip to the curve of her belly. The tiny jewel, caught in gold,

glittered against her skin.

He touched it with one finger. “What is this?”

She looked down. “Um . . . aquamarine, I think.”

“I mean, why do you wear it?”

“You don’t like it.” Her voice was flat.

What could he tell her? That it excited him? That it repelled him? Both were true.

“I have never seen anything like it,” he said honestly. “The selkie do not alter or adorn their skin. It is

pretty,” he added.

“Gee, thanks.”

He traced a line from the piercing at her navel to the soft thatch below. “This,” he said, “is beyond gold to

me.”

Her breath caught, a tiny betrayal. Her eyes were fathoms deep and dark. Outside the tower, the wind

murmured and moaned.

He moved in, gliding his lips along her throat, feeling the beat of panic and desire, down her beaded

breasts and the fragrant hollow between, down, down, following the line of his finger to the place where

she was wet and waiting for him. She made a choked exclamation in her throat and fisted her hands in his

hair, swaying closer, jerking away. Sweet. Hot. Her response maddened his blood.

The wind rattled the glass in the windows, sending shadows chasing across the floor. He was drunk on

her. Her need became his need, her pleasure his desire. He eased her back on the bed, coaxed her to lie

on his pelt. Her hair spilled over his sealskin, blond on black. Kneeling on the floor, his head between her

long, smooth thighs, he harrowed her with lips, teeth, and tongue, feeling her response, feeding on it, until

she undulated against his mouth and her breath came in sobs. Her beauty almost drowned him.

He dragged her up and held her hard against him as he reversed their positions, as he sat with her on his

lap. Rain lashed the glass. The storm drummed in his ears, raged in his blood. Seizing her hips, he pulled

her to straddle him there on the edge of the bed. Her knees pressed his flanks. Her breasts brushed his

chest. Her gaze locked with his.

Shock held them both still.

They were touching but not joined, his body poised and probing, hers open and wet.

“Take it,” he said, his voice thick, and the words meant something different now. A benediction. A plea.