Sea Lord (11 page)

Dylan’s flat, black gaze met his. “Until it becomes ours.”

The boat flew before the wind, rising and falling with the waves, its sails nearly at right angles to the hull,

wing on wing. Conn’s hair whipped his face.

He bared his teeth, enjoying the rush and control, the speed as heady as freedom. His presence at the

helm was hardly necessary. Magic drove the wind that filled the sails. But he liked knowing he had not

lost his touch with the sheets, despite the centuries since he’d last left home.

The island burst from the surrounding sea between the deep kelp forests and swirling sky, solid as an

anchor. Shining like a dream.

Sanctuary.

A possessive ache tightened his chest. He squinted through the strands of his hair, trying to see his home

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through the eyes of a stranger. Through Lucy’s eyes.

The green hills had faded with the passing of summer, but today the sun had pierced the mists and magic

to glaze the ancient towers with light. Rock spray sparkled like flung fistfuls of fat diamonds. A cloud of

sea birds drifted around the southern cliff face, crying a faint and far-off welcome.

Would the girl sleeping belowdecks appreciate the cold, stark beauty of his island? How could she not?

Unbidden, her words blew back to him. “
I didn’t ask to be brought here. You need to take me home.

”

Conn’s hands tightened on the wheel, his light mood dropping like the wind. He was as bound by his

duty as she was by her destiny. Her fears and his own regret were equally irrelevant. There could be no

turning back, he thought bleakly.

For either of them.

He heard her before he saw her, the scrape of the hatch, a soft footfall. He
smelled
her, human, female,

sweet.

He turned his head.

Lucy clung to the rail, legs braced against the swell. He had an impulse to go to her, to steady her with a

hand beneath her elbow. But the selkie did not touch. Only to fight or to mate, acts of possession as

much as passion.

She would not welcome his assistance anyway. In the cabin, she had recoiled from him, from the touch of

his fur.

Yesterday she had found an enormous yellow rain slicker and navy overalls in one of the lockers to

replace the warmth of his pelt. With the jacket hanging below her knees and the sleeves rolled back from

her wrists, she looked ridiculous, appealing, and very, very young.

Old enough
, she had said.

For sex? No doubt.

For the rest? He was not sure. He had ruled for nine centuries. He had lived much longer than that. But

Lucy was young, even by human standards. To her, even Dylan was old. She could have no idea of real

age, no clue what was required of her.

His gaze dropped to her narrow feet, bare beneath her cuffed pants.

And suddenly she was in his head, the air ripe with sweat and sex and the scent of growing things.
Her

long body rising from the earth to meet him, mate him, take him. The tiny jewel glinting against

her smooth belly. The sun searing his shoulders as he plunged into her, male to female, sex to sex,

power to power . . .

Stunned, he stared, stirred to the heart and the root. His pulse drummed in his ears.

The wind slipped his distracted grasp. The boat veered. The boom swung.

“Look out!” she cried.

The heavy boom swept the cockpit as the wind, freed from the force of his magic, shifted direction. Conn

ducked, cursing the sails and his loss of control.

The deck pitched.

He grabbed for the wind and the main sail, pulled the jib sheet on the leeward side. The breeze surged.

The sails rattled together and swelled. The boat heeled, collecting itself like a skittish horse, and leaped

forward into the waves.

Lucy staggered toward the bench and sat down hard. Water shot over the side. She recoiled from the

spray like a cat.

Conn winched the main sail taut. “Thank you.”

She stared at him blankly.

“For your warning,” he said.

“Well, I could hardly let you get knocked overboard.”

He was gratified. “Indeed.”

“I mean it,” she said. “I can’t sail. Or swim.”

Ah. He remembered. She was afraid of the water. Unthinkable, for a daughter of a selkie.

“You must learn to live with the sea,” he said.

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She straightened inside her bulky clothes. “I’m fine with the sea. As long as it stays on its side and I stay

on mine. I only get nervous when the boundaries get crossed.”

He recognized her challenge. Very few dared to challenge him.

He should have been affronted. He found himself oddly pleased instead. She was not without spirit, this

daughter of Atargatis.

He looked down his nose. “It is only water.”

Her throat moved convulsively as she stared over the surging swells running beside the hull. The wind

drummed in the sheets. “Right. I guess I should be grateful you bothered with a boat.”

“I chose it for you. After . . .”
After he had taken her, among the vines and pumpkins.
“After we

met,” he amended smoothly.

“Chose it?”

“From your harbor.”

Her brows drew together, making her look like her brother Caleb. “You mean, stole it.”

Conn shrugged. “The selkie do not hold possessions as humans do. We flow as the sea flows. We

accept the gifts of the tide.”

“So you just take what you want.”

The judgment in her tone annoyed him. He was selkie, one of the First Creation. He did not require her

approval. “We take what is needed.” He met her gaze, letting the memory of their coupling burn between

them. “And what is offered.”

Color climbed in her face. But she did not look away. “Where are you taking me now?”

“Home.” He nodded to starboard, where the shore moved up and down with the rhythm of the boat. “To

Sanctuary.”

Her knuckles were white in her lap, but her eyes remained steady on his. “That’s not home. Not my

home.”

He did not wish to antagonize her. But the sooner she accepted her fate, the easier this would be for both

of them.

“In time, it will be,” he said.

He hoped.

“In time?” There was an edge to her voice like panic. Or anger. “How long are you planning to keep me

there?”

He did not answer.

She captured the flying strands of her hair, holding it back from her face. Behind her, the white wake

dissolved against the deep blue sea. “How long?” she insisted.

Something stirred at his heart, a worm of scruple or pity. He trimmed the jib, reluctant to meet her gaze.

“You are the daughter of Atargatis. You serve the prophecy. As I must.”

“Serve it how? I can’t do anything.”

“Your own actions have proved otherwise.”

“What, because I trashed the cabin? That was an aberration. A mistake. Like our having sex.”

He narrowed his eyes. His own people would have trembled. This girl met his gaze, her eyes miserable

and her mouth resolute. Whatever else she was, she was no coward. And no fool.

“You gave me your body,” he explained. In little words, so she could understand. “According to your

kind, we are bound.”

“We had sex. That doesn’t make me your bitch.”

Almost, he smiled. “Does it not?”

Her mouth opened. Snapped shut.

“You cannot deny your mother’s blood,” he said.

“I don’t know why you expect me to feel some great loyalty to my mother. She wasn’t loyal to me. To

us.”

“Your mother returned to her rightful place in the sea. It was her nature. Her destiny. As it is yours to

follow her.”

“I am not my mother.”

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“Obviously not,” he said cuttingly. “Atargatis was a true child of the sea.” Restless, vibrant, subject to the

whims of the moment and the tempests of her moods, confident of her beauty and her power.

Yet he had never sought the selkie’s company, never taken her to his bed.

Never wanted her the way he craved her tall, pale, stubborn daughter. Like the breath in his lungs, like

the pulse of his blood . . .

Conn froze. Bloody, buggering hell.

He did not want her. She was merely a necessary means to a desirable end. Through her, he could

preserve her mother’s bloodline and his people. But she was not one of them. She was not selkie.

The wind splintered against the cliffs and shifted over the water.

He looped the jib sheet around the winch. “We need to come about. Hold this end and pull when I tell

you.”

Lucy stretched her hand to obey him and then sank back on the bench. “Don’t you think that’s a bit

much? Asking me to assist in my own kidnapping?”

“The jib,” he said. “Unless after all you prefer to swim.”

He watched her reach for her dignity, drawing it around her like the ill-fitting yellow coat she wore.

“Now,” he commanded as they came about.

The jib luffed and then filled. Grabbing the rope, she yanked it taut.

As if it were a noose around his neck.

She cranked the winch, trimming the sail. “So she returned to the sea. Then what? What happened?”

He thought she knew. Surely her brothers had told her? “She died.”

“You said the selkie were immortal.”

Conn eyed her bent head, pity mingling with his irritation. Had she thought to see her mother again?

Foolish, human hope. Even if Atargatis were reborn on the foam, in the manner of their kind, she would

retain little memory of her infant daughter.

He adjusted course. “We do not age and die as humans do. But we can be killed.”

Lucy removed the winch handle and stowed it carefully away in the cockpit. She claimed not to sail, but

growing up in a fisherman’s household had clearly taught her how easily items could be lost overboard.

“What killed my mother?”

“She drowned. Trapped in a fisherman’s net within the year after she left you.”

Lucy raised her head, her eyes like the sea on a cloudy day. “Then her destiny didn’t do her much good,

did it?”

He had no answer to that.

Lucy’s hands gripped the rope around the dinghy’s inflated sides. Her stomach rose and fell with the

gentle chop of the waves. Her feet curled under the seat, away from the seal pelt bundled on the floor.

Like a cat in the rain, she kept one eye on the water and the other on the approaching shore.

Dry land. Solid ground.

At last.

The past few days she’d felt trapped belowdecks, breathing stale air, heating canned soup, washing her

dishes in the tiny galley, sleeping in the claustrophobic cabin. Trying to ignore the sealskin she’d folded

and stuffed into a locker. She couldn’t lie under it knowing what it was.

What Conn was.

She didn’t know where he slept. Or if he slept at all. When she woke in the morning, she sometimes

thought his scent clung to the sheets. To her skin. But the pillow beside her was never dented.

The oars dipped, dripped, flashed. Conn reached and flexed, his knees thrusting into her space, his skin

gleaming with sweat and sunlight. The wind ruffled his hair like a lover’s hand. In Dylan’s tight dark suit

pants, with his white shirt open to the waist, he looked like a movie pirate.

Her gaze skimmed his broad chest; jerked away from his stomach.

She panned the quiet cove behind him, the tumbled shore of sand and shale, the faded hills climbing in a

jagged circle like the broken edge of a cup. Stark and proud on the cliffs above rose the round,

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crenellated towers of a castle.

A white bird with sharply angled wings rose like a kite on a draft. Sunlight sparkled on the quiet water. A

shadow broke the surface and subsided before she could identify it. A fish? A seal?

Her lips tasted of salt. She quivered with cold. Fear.

Excitement.

The dinghy rolled as it caught the lip of the surf and scraped into shore. Conn shipped oars and jumped

out, his bare feet and strong calves splashing in the foam.

She looked at the line of his muscled back as he bent to the boat and felt another inconvenient quiver in

the pit of her stomach.

She averted her gaze. She knew better. She did.

The last time she’d let down her guard, she’d wound up unconscious and kidnapped in the middle of the