For the Taking (9 page)

“Don’t fight, Lass,” he said. “Let me hold you for a little longer. Let me. We both want this.”

She shook her head, pressed her lips tightly together, then said, “That’s not enough.”

“It is for now. I can’t think beyond it. I can’t think of anything else at all.”

L
oucan’s mouth touched Lass’s again before he had finished speaking.

His lips were cold and wet and salty, like hers, but it took only a moment for their kiss to grow warm and sweet. Lass closed her eyes. At first, she hardly dared to do so, afraid that the memory of her mother’s death would ambush her once again.

But it didn’t, and maybe the touch of Loucan’s mouth and the feel of his body against hers was the only thing in the world that could have kept the nightmare vision at bay.

“Loucan…” His name made the most delicious pouting, kissable shape in her mouth, so she said it again, and he sighed something back to her that she didn’t catch.

She parted her lips to taste him more deeply, and felt the slow dance of his tongue against hers. Thrills of sensation ran through her like showers of sparks, and she began to follow the slow, graceful ripples of
his tail with her own movements so that they became a dance, too.

Not a chaste dance, either. He could touch her intimately. She could feel his arousal. In calmer, warmer waters, they could have joined together fully as merman and mermaid.

And, oh, she wanted that!

Or her body did. Every inch of her skin was on fire, and deeper inside she was aching. When he touched her breasts, gently at first and then with increasing possession and pleasure, she arched back and gripped his hips with her hands convulsively, unconsciously pulling him closer. He went still, then shuddered and began to kiss her even more deeply.

“Yes, oh, yes,” he said.

No longer able to stay above water, they sank together into depths that were now darkened by the fall of night. Somewhere not too far away, they heard the muffled, chugging sound of a boat’s engine. Most likely it was a local fishing boat heading out from the harbor in hope of a nighttime catch. They had sunk out of sight just in time, and the close brush with discovery should have frightened Lass, only there wasn’t room inside her for thoughts like that right now.

Her sense of taste was sharper in the sea, almost as acute as a dog’s sense of smell. She’d always known that, but it had never meant much to her before. Now it did. Exploring Loucan with her mouth, she discovered the unique taste of his skin, a blend of exotic flavors that made her think of cinnamon and coconut.

Although his tail held no particular appeal to her senses, it was a part of him and therefore important.
The scales that would have glinted golden-brown in the sunlight felt smooth, and the muscle beneath was firm and supple, a more powerful version of her own mer form.

Breathing through gills now, neither of them needed air. She could kiss him forever. Nothing else seemed to matter but touch and taste…until suddenly she tasted blood. On land her mouth would never have been this sensitive, but underwater it was. The gash in his heel was now transformed into a wound near the soft, finned tip of his tail, and it was still bleeding into the water.

The memory of her mother flooded her mind again, more vivid than ever. It brought with it the rising panic she dreaded. When she fought Loucan off and began swimming again, she took him by surprise, but he soon caught up to her. This time, though, he didn’t try to hold her or stop her, just took her hand in his and swam toward the water’s surface. Breaking through into the air, they both began to breathe.

“Can you see the boat?” she asked him.

“I don’t care. We’ll dive again if it’s anywhere close.” Loucan kept moving through the water, swimming on his side. The light of the moon showed Lass the determination and certainty in his face. “We haven’t finished with any of this,” he said. “Not your memories, and not what we felt for each other just now.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To my boat, moored in the harbor, where we can be alone and safe, and can talk.”

At the speed they moved, it didn’t take long to turn into the quiet harbor and reach his boat. It was a sleek, sizable vessel, with a polished wooden deck, a pow
erful motor, a tall mast for sails, and comfortable cabins below.

On deck, Loucan poured cold, fresh water over their bodies. Not expecting it, Lass shivered and screamed.

“Didn’t you know?” he asked. “This will speed up the transformation by several minutes.”

“I’d never discovered that.”

“But Cyria didn’t tell you?” He leaned to his side and pulled two thick, dry towels out of a storage hatch built into the deck, and spread them in front of them.

“No.” Lass stretched herself out on her stomach, with her torso raised on her elbows. “For the first few years we were in Australia, we never went near the sea, and by the time we did, I’d forgotten all but the basic fact of the transformation. Everything I know about it, I’ve found out for myself, by trial and error.”

She paused, then added, “Mostly error.”

He laughed, then looked at her more closely. “I keep forgetting how alone you’ve been. Worse, in a way, than Kai and Phoebe, who were raised to fear the sea and didn’t even know they were mer.”

“No, that would be worse,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine not having the sea in my life.”

He kept watching her, and her self-consciousness grew once more. They were both still naked, and her skin was sensitized by the ocean’s caress as well as by his touch. She’d made her need for him so apparent. He seemed to feel the same, but that couldn’t mean nearly as much to an experienced man like him as it did to her.

“When you fought me off just now, it seemed like you were fighting off the sea itself,” he said.

“No. Never that.”

“Then what happened?”

“I could taste your blood. It’s just panic, Loucan.” She could feel that her voice was shaking, but couldn’t do anything about it. “I hate it. I don’t know how to get over it. Talking helped. It did, the way you said it would. But it wasn’t enough.”

She shivered as the cool breath of the night air blew across her skin.

“You’re cold.”

He pulled out another thick towel from the storage hatch and laid it over her. She rested her head on her arms and closed her eyes, swept by a familiar lassitude. Soon, when her tail membrane split and left just a few flaking scales, she knew from experience that she would be ravenous.

“I want to tell you something,” Loucan said.

His voice was a low rumble in his strong chest. Lass opened her eyes sleepily and found that he’d moved closer. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. His waist was covered but his back was bare and still glistening with a few last drops of moisture. She couldn’t take her eyes off the rippling muscles, the smooth brown skin, the hard, flat spot in the small of his back and the rising curve of his backside.

Her sleepiness and lassitude fled, but she made herself remain still.

“Anything you want to tell me, Loucan. It’s so good to be able to talk.”

“What happened at the inlet with that little boy…” he began. “I probably shouldn’t have gotten so angry.”

She blinked, having almost forgotten the incident that had caused him to cut his foot. “It wasn’t wrong
of you to be concerned for that child’s safety,” she said.

“There’s a reason for it, Lass.” His voice broke a little. “You see, I had a son once.”

“Had?”

Dear God, I don’t want to have to tell her about this,
Loucan thought.

But he knew he had to. Her eyes, which had been sleepy and half-closed a few moments ago, were now wide and huge. She knew from his tone, and that sudden crack in his voice, that this was important.

He took his time over it, knowing she needed to hear every detail. She didn’t interrupt his tortured narrative at all, for a long time. That made it fractionally easier to put the story into words. All the same, the words were clumsy ones. How could they be anything but?

“I told you the other day about my marriage, and that I never told Tara I was mer.”

The truth about who he was had dammed itself in the back of his throat a hundred times from when he first began to get serious about the Arizona rancher’s daughter. There were so many times when he could have told her. Riding together, hanging out over a late night snack in the kitchen of her family’s ranch.

But he’d been so young, then—not that that was an excuse he allowed himself. Just twenty when they were going out together. Twenty-one when they’d gotten married.

He was crazy in love with her. Impatient and selfish and foolish about it. With no patience for waiting. No wisdom, and nowhere near enough trust. He was so afraid that she’d laugh in disbelief, or that the reality of who he was would repel her. He had thought about
taking her on a vacation to the sea and just letting the transformation happen right there in front of her.

But the possibility of losing her was too hard to contemplate. He’d sacrificed the truth for the sake of making her his.

Only, of course, with such a lie between them, she had never truly been his at all.

“She knew I was hiding something,” he told Lass. “And that it was something important. It started to come between us like another person. This big, secret lie. This thing that I wouldn’t tell her. She made all sorts of accusations. She started watching me, and she went through my things when she thought I wouldn’t know. She read my mail and I accused her of violating my privacy. I tried to put the blame on her, but in reality it all came from me. I was the one who didn’t trust her enough.”

So they had separated. Painfully. After a huge fight.

He had left her family ranch. In fact, he’d left the whole state and gone to New York, taking on a whole new identity. He’d spent those two years as a bond trader, working in lower Manhattan. He hadn’t tried to contact her, and he found out later that she hadn’t tried to trace him.

They’d both been too angry, and too hurt.

“What I didn’t know was that Tara was pregnant. She had a baby boy seven months after I last saw her.”

“Seven months. Then she must have known about the baby, or at least suspected, before you left.”

“Yes. She knew. Things were already so bad between us that she didn’t want to tell me.”

“What happened, Loucan?”

Lass knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy
ending. Loucan could see it in her face. So he just said it. “Cody drowned. When he was twenty months old.”

She gave a tiny moan, which almost brought him to tears.

Mastering himself, Loucan went on with the story. “He and Tara had gone for a visit to her sister, who had a swimming pool. It was the first time he’d seen such a big piece of beautiful blue water.”

The pool had been fenced, but Cody had found a place where the boards had been loosened by the family’s dog. He had managed to squeeze through.

Loucan coughed to try and clear the tight, painful constriction in his throat.

“I didn’t find out until six months later, when I finally came back,” he said. “If I’d told Tara who I was, if I hadn’t tried to hide the truth from her and from myself—I mean, hell, what was I doing, marrying a woman who lived so far from the sea?—she would have known how strong his need for water could be.”

“She didn’t tell you she was pregnant. If she had—”

“No, Lass. I’m not going to put the blame on her. I should have told her. I should have had the courage to accept the risk that I might lose her. That’s why I know that my father was right to believe that the mer must open ourselves up to the rest of the world, and that’s why I know it has to be done carefully. It isn’t going to be easy. It never could be. But it has to be done. When I realized that, I went straight back to Pacifica.”

“A good while ago.”

“Fifteen years. I was so afraid of losing Tara, but
because I didn’t tell her, I lost her anyway, and we lost our son. She’s okay now. As okay as it’s possible to be. She has a good second marriage, with a couple of school-age kids, a boy and a girl.”

“You’re the one who isn’t over it.”

She was right, of course, but not quite in the way she thought.

“I never want to get over it,” he told her. “It’s a lesson I never want to forget. You
have
to do the hard things in life, Lass. The fact that it’s hard is the reason you have to do it.” He took a deep, careful breath. “I think if you ever want to be able to deal with the memory of seeing your mother die, you have to go back to Pacifica, the way I did.”

He waited, half expecting her to be angry and to accuse him of steering the whole point of his painful story in this single-minded direction, but she didn’t. She seemed to recognize that he wasn’t trying to manipulate her, and he was glad of that.

“I want you to think about it,” he said quickly. “I’m not asking you to make any kind of a decision now. But if you decide that you’re ready, I’ll take you there. You’ll have my protection, if you want it.”

She nodded. “I’ll…uh, keep that in mind.”

He reached out to curl his fingers around hers, and then they both lay silent and half dozing on the deck for more than half an hour.

“I’m hungry, Loucan,” Lass said a little shyly.

She stretched her legs beneath the towel and felt the last of her scales slip away. Her toes wriggled like newborn kittens, and the movement felt delicious.

“Thought you might be,” he said. “I always get that way, too. I’ve got food in the cabin.”

“But no women’s clothing, I don’t suppose?”

“For just such frequent occasions as this one? When I have a naked mer woman stretched out on my deck? No, I’m afraid not.”

“Well, you might have,” she said. “You keep this boat somewhere near Pacifica, right?”

“Not near, exactly. Hawaii, mostly. Not far if you know the right current at the right depth.”

“And there are mermaids in Pacifica, as I remember.”

“If you’re asking whether I’m involved with a woman there, the answer is no.” There was a forbidding look on his face and Lass flushed a little. “With the political situation, it hasn’t been a priority. As for clothes, I can lend you a clean pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt.”

“That’ll do fine.” Too fine, possibly. Even the idea of feeling his clothes against her skin made something coil and ripple inside her.