Betina Krahn (24 page)

He turned crimson, caught red-handed crediting human motivations to a creature that only two days ago he would have dismissed as an air-breathing fish. He ran his hands over his face. In a mere forty-eight hours he had been cured of seasickness, shaken “flippers” with a dolphin, set foot in the ocean for the first time in decades, had two memorable swimming lessons, and seen Celeste Ashton do things that he hadn’t imagined anyone could do.

Celeste. Just now, she stood in knee-deep water with her
arms crossed and her thin garment drawn taut across her hard-tipped breasts, looking infinitely more alluring than Botticelli’s
The Birth of Venus
. She was warm and bright and determined and clever and earnest and insightful. And she kissed like a white-hot dream.

Suddenly, he was thrown forward into the water and scrambled to regain his footing. An instant later, Celeste was there, helping him up and glaring at the force that had knocked him over.

“All right, that does it,” she declared. She dived into the water and returned a short while later, steering Prospero straight toward Titus.

“It’s time you two made peace. Pet him,” she ordered Titus. “Stroke him. Tell him how beautiful and strong and handsome he is.”

Titus’s horror gave place to annoyance, then determination. “I’ll do no such thing.” He glared at the wary gray dolphin eye staring at him, wondering what the beast was planning next.

A moment later he was stewing in confusion, scarcely able to believe he had just credited the beast with cognitive ability.

“May I remind you, Titus Thorne,” Celeste said calmly, “that your task is to repeat my methods in an effort to repeat my results.”

His huffing reminiscent of one of Prospero’s “blows,” Titus gave in and approached. After some coaxing, he stroked the animal just as he had from the boat. Standing in the water on equal footing with the dolphin, that contact seemed infinitely more risky … and more personal and profound.

As he relaxed, he used more gentle strokes, heeding Celeste’s advice to avoid Prospero’s sensitive eye region and powerful tail flukes. With a delicate but thorough touch, he investigated the rake marks on the dolphin’s head and sides and the deep scar on the animal’s lower jaw. After a while, Prospero turned onto his side and Titus took this as a sign
that the dolphin was warming to him. He began to rub the dolphin’s belly and Celeste, who had backed away to allow them to get acquainted, came to attention.

“Titus, I don’t think you want to rub him there,” she called.

“Don’t be silly. He seems to like it,” Titus called back, thinking of the way puppies roll to offer their stomachs for a good scratching and assuming it meant the same in dolphins. “In fact, we’re getting along rather well here. Aren’t we, old man. Just us fellows … having a good old-fashioned belly rub. You know, I believe he has a bit of pink on the underside, here. Interesting, actually … the difference in coloration from upper to lower. I wonder what the infamous Mr. Darwin would make of such a thing, what purpose he would say it—” He froze, his hands on Prospero’s belly, his eyes fixed on a slit at the beginning of the dolphin’s tail and what was suddenly protruding from it. “What the hell is—”

His eyes widened. “Aghhh!” He lurched back with a grimace and his hands spread in horror on either side of him. Prospero rolled onto his side and tried to rub against Titus as he lurched back toward the beach. Celeste rushed to intervene, withstanding a bit of the dolphin’s misdirected enthusiasm herself. At her adamant rejection, Prospero sped off toward the center of the cove and executed several jumps and acrobatic turns before disappearing.

Pausing a moment to compose herself, she headed for the beach, where Titus stood like a colossus, dripping seawater and indignation.

“Did you see that ‘thing’? I mean, it was what I thought it was … wasn’t it? Well, what else could it be?” he said, embarrassed at having to ask her for confirmation in such a matter. When he glanced up and saw her knowing smile, he realized that she had been trying to warn him. “Do you, have you—”

“I thought you said you had read my book,” she said as she proceeded to the blanket and wrapped herself in a large towel. She then handed him one.

He stiffened, feeling awkward and naïve and more than a little foolish. “Of course I read it.”

“Then you must have skipped parts, because I described in detail that very behavior.”

He looked nettled. “You most certainly did not. Being accosted and savaged by a rut-maddened dolphin—you never said that.”

“I believe I used somewhat more ‘romantic’ language,” she said with laughter in her eyes. “A peculiarity of style you have denounced on a number of occasions. Perhaps I should rephrase it. Something on the order of: ‘Beware of randy dolphins. If you pet or stroke one on the belly, he’s likely to try to make you his next amorous conquest.”

He turned away, rubbed his face with the toweling, and then turned back with fresh horror blooming. “It’s happened to you, too, hasn’t it? Why, that is monstrous—a young woman subjected to such indecencies—”

“Titus, he’s a dolphin.” She came to stand near him. “It’s what dolphins do. It’s not rude or disgusting or an outrage.” She saw in his eyes the objection he was about to raise. “And it’s not immoral of me to have seen it and reported it. It’s just a dolphin’s way of making certain there will always be dolphins.”

She freed the grin she had been holding back. “Look at it this way: you’ve just verified my assertion that it is not difficult to distinguish males from females.”

Giving up a lifelong prejudice was a rather disorienting process. Titus suddenly felt a little weak in the knees. He stalked over to the blanket and sat down hard. Distracted by troubling new thoughts, he dried his hair and then wrapped the toweling around his neck.

Young women weren’t supposed to see such things or even know such things existed. Conventional wisdom had it that women who knew about such things were crude, immoral, and dissolute … the mere knowledge of such things tainted their weaker minds and made them susceptible
to all manner of vices. They couldn’t help it. It was just in women’s delicate natures to be easily ruined.

He looked at Celeste and found her sitting on her knees with her smock wrapped demurely around her, watching him with a hint of anxiety. He realized he was scowling fiercely. And with good reason. He was as confused as hell.

Celeste Ashton was about as “weak-minded” and “susceptible” as Admiral Horatio T. Nelson. She knew a great deal about sex and about mating and it didn’t seem to have corrupted her overly much. In fact, she was probably the most temperate, moral, and compassionate person he’d met in his entire life. She carried the responsibility of her household, supported and protected her grandmother, studied her dolphins and wrote about them, capably defended her work before two royal societies … and gave swimming lessons to an annoying, hidebound professor who had doubted and insulted her at every turn.

He studied her, surprised anew by the maturity she had shown in designing, conducting, and recording her work. He saw now that his prejudice against her work had been aroused, in large part, by her use of feminine terms, analogies, and allusions. Ironically, it was that very sort of language that had softened the shock of the startling content of her work and made it palatable for a moralistic and often hypocritical public.

Thinking of it now, in a more rational and objective light, he saw that her use of a feminine viewpoint had nothing to do with the validity of her observations. And how absurd of him to have ever believed that it did! He felt suddenly as if he’d been struck by a brickbat and rendered
conscious
for the first time in his life.

“I am a bit of a prig, aren’t I?” he said, his voice suddenly thick.

She nodded with a wistful smile.

He winced, embarrassed by the clash of his rigid moralism against his highly touted scientific objectivity, and shamed by her gift for accepting and understanding these
animals for what they were. She hadn’t tried to make them into “little humans” subject to human feelings and human morality …
he
had.

He groaned silently and focused on her. Those blue eyes … whole worlds of experience seemed to be revolving just beneath their surfaces. That golden hair … sunbeams probably vied for the chance to illuminate those tresses. And those lips … gentle and stubborn … desirable in both modes.

She was nothing short of extraordinary.

And she was here. With him.

“I want you to show me,” he said, his voice low and resonant. “I have to be able to see it for myself. I’ll learn to swim … hold my breath for hours … whatever it takes. I want to see what you see.” He nodded to the water. “Under there.”

She burst into a smile that left him feeling a bit dazzled.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

THE NEXT MORNING
, Celeste helped Titus add the arm movements to his floating technique, transforming it into true swimming. After some practice, he tried swimming to the dock and back and made it with no difficulty. When they paused to rest, Celeste noticed the way the salt water had reddened his eyes and produced two pairs of her goggles.

A new world opened to him. Peering through the round glass of the rubber-rimmed goggles, he could see with startling clarity under the water. He sat on the bottom in the shallows, staring at his hands and feet … then at her hands and … other interesting parts. Having his eyes open under the water made swimming a much more productive endeavor, and made the repeated transition between air and water much easier to bear. But the first time he looked up and saw Prospero bearing down on him, he scrambled up out of the water.

“What is it? What happened?” Celeste surfaced just behind him.

“Did you see that?” He pointed frantically.

“It was just Prospero,” she said, bewildered until she recalled her first experiences with goggles and understood the reason for his shock. “The water makes everything seem larger at first, including dolphins. Come with me. I want
you to see how Prospero swims under the water as well as on top.”

Together, they ventured out into water that was slightly over their heads. At first Titus had to fight his uneasiness at barely having a bottom beneath his feet. But with Celeste’s reassurance and reminders to breathe calmly and let the water buoy him, he gradually relaxed and was able to alternate treading water and touching bottom. She swam off and returned shortly with Prospero. Pointing under the water, she dove with the dolphin and Titus groaned, telling himself it was now or never.

Summoning every shred of self-control he possessed, he drew breath, held his nose, and sank below the surface. And he entered an environment that few humans in his part of the world had ever seen.

The water was relatively clear and an eerie blue-gray light illuminated everything, overlaying all colors with a wash of blue and silver hues. As the bottom sloped away, toward the center of the cove, there were boulders sticking up through a mixed bed of sand and rock. Brown seaweed and nondescript algae covered every available space. There were nooks and crevices in the rocks, around which occasionally something elusive would dart into view and be gone before it could be identified. After several brief glimpses, he realized they were small, quick shallows fish that used their speed for protection. He surfaced, took another breath, then submerged again, focused now on the riveting spectacle of a woman and a dolphin swimming in concert with one another.

It was nothing short of astounding … the sight of Prospero’s seemingly effortless motions propelling him through the water … the sight of Celeste hanging on to the dolphin’s dorsal fin and using her feet much like flukes. Her sleek body moved with graceful undulations beside the dolphin, following it into turns and rolls that seemed to have no aim except the pleasure of the movement.

Titus could scarcely get to the surface and back down
quickly enough. He watched her break off and head to the surface herself, her legs scissoring effortlessly, poising motionless near the surface as she filled her lungs, then snapping powerfully to send her shooting toward the bottom, where Prospero waited. The pair swam in a narrowing circle, gathering speed, and he sensed what was about to happen. He broke the surface even as they did and watched them leap into the air together and then dive separately back into the water.

His heart nearly stopped as he sucked in a breath and plunged back into the water to see where they were and what was happening. They were already swimming together again, preparing for another jump. This time he ducked back under in time to see them enter the water like living arrows, pulling white plumes of air and bubbles in after them.

If he lived to be a hundred, he would probably never see anything that was further from the realm of his experience than the sight of that small piece of ocean. It was a magical world, a place of serenity and beauty, a place that humans could glimpse only for the length of a breath. All humans except Celeste Ashton, that is. It was clear from her masterful movements that she was as at home here as she was walking down a village lane.