Sea Lord (30 page)

Conn swore and hauled her out of the surf. She stumbled. He held her tight, his body her shelter. She

clung to him, trembling. He pressed his lips to her hair.

“I’m . . . okay,” she managed. “Just let me get my”—
nerve
—“breath, and we can try again.”

Maybe. If she didn’t throw up or pass out first.

He frowned. “Something holds you back.”

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“Yeah,” she joked through chattering teeth. “Incredible pain.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Something else.”

“You mean it’s not supposed to feel like that?”

“Not without Changing.”

She winced. At least he wasn’t still suggesting she was suppressed or repressed or whatever.

“I did try,” she said defensively.

“Yes.”

That single syllable—“yes”—sounded good and solid. The sick feeling in her stomach eased slightly.

But Conn was still frowning, staring out to sea.

She bit her lip. “Maybe I’m not selkie, after all,” she suggested.

He did not answer.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked.

He glanced down in apparent surprise. “No,” he said simply. “You have accepted me as I am. I can do

no less.”

His near echo of her words made her breath hitch:
All my life I have waited to be wanted for who I

am . . .

“Come.” He swept her cloak from the sand and wrapped it around her. “We must get you warm.”

Her gaze dropped to the sealskin lying just beyond the reach of the waves. “What about you?”

His face set in familiar, formidable lines. He stooped for her skirt and blouse. “I will not put my pleasure

before my duty to you.”

That, she thought, was his strength. And her problem. She appreciated his care of her. But who took

care of him?

“You can’t always put off what you want, what you need, because you feel responsible for everything

and everybody else.”

Speaking the words, she even believed them. Who knew?

Conn’s mouth compressed with annoyance. That was okay, Lucy told herself. Annoyance was an

emotion. She could deal with his emotions.

“I
am
responsible,” he said, very coolly and precisely.

“Which is one of the reasons I love you,” she told him honestly. “But sometimes—now, for

instance—those responsibilities can wait. I can wait.”

“You should not have to.”

She dug her heels in the sand. “Neither should you.”

She could see the turmoil swirling in his eyes, gray as storm clouds.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked gently.

“The selkie flow as the sea flows. The water is our blood, our home, our life, our delight. Yet if we are to

survive, someone must remain on shore to reason and to rule.”

“Someone has to be the grown-up,” she murmured.

“I beg your pardon?”

She shook her head. She admired Conn’s decision to step up, to step into his father’s role. Hadn’t she

and Caleb, in their different ways, tried to do the same? But doing so had cost them a part of their

childhood.

It had cost Conn a piece of himself.

“You think if you Change, you’ll forget who you are? That you’ll stay out at sea like your father?”

Conn’s face was bleak as February. “That I will want to. Yes.”

“I don’t believe it.” She stooped, as he had done, and raised his sealskin from the sand. “You’ll come

back.”

“You cannot know that.” His voice was strangled.

“ ‘
Trust me,
’ you said, remember?” she quoted back at him softly. “ ‘
Trust yourself
.’ And the crazy

thing is, I did. I do.”

Contrary to all her expectations and experience, she trusted him not to leave her.

She held the heavy pelt out to him. “I know because I know you. We’re connected. Forever, just like

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you said.”

The wet leather of Lucy’s boots chafed her ankles as she climbed the track to the tower. Madadh loped

ahead.

Conn had insisted she return with the dog to the castle. As she reached the ridge, however, she turned

for one final sight of the beach.

Her lover stood at the water’s edge, a statue of male beauty cast in gleaming bronze. The setting sun

burnished the hard curve of his shoulders, the long muscles of his legs, and set the gold medallion at his

neck aflame. A burst of foam ran over his feet.

Lucy’s breath caught. She hugged his shirt to her chest.

With a matador’s grace, he swung the sealskin into the air, aided by a gust of wind that lifted the heavy

pelt and blew Lucy’s hair into her eyes. She pushed hastily at the blowing strands.

Conn was gone.

An enormous black bull seal reared on the beach in his place.

She bit her lip to keep from crying out in shock, loss, wonder, protest.

It was so big. He—
Conn
—was so big, at least twice the size he had been as a man.

It—
he
—hunched over the rocks, ungainly, awkward, and powerful. The water rushed to meet him.

The first wave rippled along his sides. The next broke over his head. The surf exploded in a burst of

force and movement, and then he was beyond the breakers, one with the water, suddenly graceful,

suddenly free.

His beauty closed her throat. Yearning filled her chest.

She had seen seals before.

In Maine.

At a distance.

She had glimpsed the sleek, dark heads appearing in the shining sea, rarely enough to
seem
like magic.

Their eyes were wide, wise, and round, human enough to spark legends or stir the longings of lonely

sailors.

Or so Lucy had thought.

She had never imagined anything or anyone like Conn.

He crested and dived with liquid power and fluid joy, moving away from her, heading toward the open

ocean.
We flow as the sea flows.

Her face was wet. She tasted salt. Spray or tears?

He would come back, she told herself fiercely. They were connected. Forever.

She stayed on the path a long time, her heart swollen with longing, watching the sea.

17

CONN’S SIDE OF THE BED WAS EMPTY, HIS PILLOW cold and undented, when Lucy woke.

She flipped onto her stomach, wrestling the covers and her concern. What did she expect? He wasn’t

some harried executive out for an after-work jog. He wasn’t her father, stumbling home when the bars

closed.

Conn was selkie. He was . . .

A scrape. A thump. A rustle from the wardrobe.

Her heart leaped with love and relief.
He was here.

She lifted herself on one elbow, shoving her hair back from her face. Conn stood before the wardrobe.

She glimpsed a slice of his naked back before his shirt dropped over his head. His sealskin lay like a rug

before the hearth, the rich, dark fur gleaming in the last embers of the fire. Her breath caught.

Conn turned. “I woke you. Good.”

“You’re home.” Her voice was husky with sleep and welcome.

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“Yes.” He strode briskly to the bed, his austere face relaxed and open, his eyes dancing silver. “I brought

you a present.”

She blinked. She barely recognized him in this mood, warm and playful. His early morning energy made

her want to burrow right back under the covers.

And drag him with her.

“I can’t wait,” she said. “Give it to me.”

Conn grinned like . . . okay, not like a little boy. No little boy had that wicked, knowing curve to his

mouth. But he looked amazingly pleased with himself and with her. He flipped back the covers. “In the

courtyard.”

“Hey!” Laughing and shivering, she made a grab for the blankets. “I’m naked here.”

“I noticed.” The glint in his eyes became even more pronounced. She shivered again in pleasure. “Very

nice. Come on.”

Lucy gawked. She had received presents before. Cal had seen to that. On Christmas Eve, after the bar

closed, their family would gather in front of the TV and unwrap their gifts to each other: a ball, a board

game, a pair of gloves. But she had never had the experience of waking early Christmas morning and

scrambling downstairs.

Heart fluttering with unfamiliar excitement, she dragged on her clothes and followed Conn down the

tower’s spiraling stairs.

“It’s not a pony, is it?” she joked.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps so that she almost ran into his broad shoulders.

He turned. “You want a pony.”

She stood on the step above him, their faces almost on a level. She smiled into his eyes. “Not since I was

about eight.”

“I am relieved to hear it,” he said dryly.

Love for him tightened her chest. Her throat.

“Conn.”

He waited, eyebrows raised.

He was selkie. How could she make him understand what it meant to her to have her desires considered,

her needs met? By him. More than by any other man, any other human, she had ever known.

“I . . . Thank you,” she said softly. “You’ve already given me everything I ever wanted.”

His eyes deepened with emotion. His mouth curved, tender and amused. “You might have said so

earlier,” he complained, his voice wry. “I could have been back hours ago.”

She laughed and jumped off the last step into his arms.

“A rosebush,” Lucy said.

Her voice was flat. Stunned.

Conn shifted his gaze from her downturned head to the wet burlap sack on the courtyard stones. Four

thorny canes protruded from the mouth of the bag. The damned bush had been the very devil to

transport.

Despite his own disappointment with her reaction, he could not blame her for her lack of enthusiasm.

“Not much of one, I am afraid.” It was almost winter, after all. “I brought it from Scotland. For your

garden.”

“You . . . dug it up?”

He remembered—too late—that she had problems with him taking things. He clasped his hands behind

his back. “Yes.”

“How did you get it here?”

Dragging it with him through the sea. “There was some little magic involved,” he admitted.

Lucy regarded the pathetic bundle of sticks with their sharp, wicked thorns. Anything looking less like a

rosebush would be hard to imagine.

“There are seeds, too,” he offered, feeling like a fool.

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Never surrender to impulse.

He should have brought her pearls or gold, precious treasures to show her she was precious to him. But

Griff had advised him to pay attention to her character and habits, to find something she wanted but could