Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

navigate,” Caleb said.
     
    Maggie shook out her hair, lifting her face to the wind. “As long as you do not expect me to drive.”
     
    “Not a chance.”
     
    She narrowed her eyes.
     
    Caleb smiled blandly, rewarded an instant later when she chuckled and relaxed against her cushioned seat.
     
    “Perhaps you are right,” she conceded. “I would rather learn to sail anyway.”
     
    “I could teach you,” he offered steadily. “If you stay.” Their gazes met and held, the unspoken plea trembling between them. Stay .
     
    She looked away, a flush climbing her cheeks. In the distance, a single kayaker struck out for open water, paddles glistening in the sunlight. “Who taught you?”
     
    Caleb recognized and accepted the change of subject. “To pilot a boat? My father. I started going out with him— working stern—the summer I turned ten.”
     
    The year his mother left them.
     
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    He steered to avoid the strings of buoys, orange and white, red and yellow, that bobbed above a likely ledge. Fifteen years since Caleb worked the lines, and he still recognized the individual markings of each lobsterman’s traps, still heard his father’s voice name them, Tibbetts, Dalton, Spratt . . .
     
    He didn’t want to think about Bart. Not now. He didn’t want to remember his father taking Lucy to the sitter’s so they could go out on the boat together, just the two of them, and watch the sun rise over the sea and feel, in the quiet before dawn, that maybe the day held promise after all.
     
    Caleb’s hands tightened on the wheel. He didn’t like the doubts that stirred inside him like something ugly crawling on the ocean bottom.
     
    And he hated the question he had to ask, the question that had burned a hole in his gut since he’d stumbled on his father lurking in the restaurant alley.
     
    He asked anyway.
     
    It was his job.
     
    “My father—he resented my mother for leaving. Is it possible the demon knew that? Used it. Used my father?”
     
    “Possessed him, you mean?”
     
    Caleb didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
     
    “No,” Maggie said certainly.
     
    Caleb held himself very still, not daring yet to believe. “How can you be sure?”
     
    “Because I would know. Living in the same house, breathing the same air . . . I would smell it. Sense it. Caleb . . .” She put her hand on his arm until he met those great, brown, perceptive eyes. “I would know,”
    she repeated quietly.
     
    Some of the tension leached from his muscles. His hands eased their death grip on the wheel. “Right. All right. Thanks.”
     
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    They rounded the rocky point, plowing the deep blue water, leaving white-capped furrows in their wake. The Atlantic sparkled as far as the horizon. The breeze snatched at the dark streamers of Maggie’s hair and molded her clothes to her body. She looked like some exotic figurehead sprung to life, full-breasted, bold, and gorgeous. The embodiment of every sailor’s fantasy, every dream of home.
     
    Caleb’s chest constricted. Would she stay? Or would she go, taking his dreams and his heart with her?
     
    He cleared his throat. “That’s Whittaker’s place.”
     
    She turned her head, studying the expanse of glass and shingle squatting on the headland. Turned back to smile at him, memory glinting in her eyes. “I recognize the cliff.”
     
    Oh, yeah. That cliff.
     
    Where Caleb had found her swimming with the dolphins.
     
    Where he’d backed her against the rocks and put his tongue in her mouth, his hands up her skirt.
     
    He licked salt from his lips. “I went there today. To his house.”
     
    He watched, both glad and sorry, as the awareness in her eyes shifted. Sharpened. “Why?”
     
    “His place overlooks the beach where you were attacked, ” Caleb said evenly. “He wasn’t at the school assembly that night. He doesn’t have an alibi for last night either.”
     
    She scowled at him. “And you went to his house? Alone?”
     
    “I never got past the front door. He claimed he didn’t feel well enough for company. Or questions either.”
     
    Her frown turned thoughtful. “If a demon has him . . . he may not be eating much. Or sleeping. The children of the fire are rarely considerate of their hosts.”
     
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    “That would explain why he looks like shit,” Caleb said grimly.
    “Unfortunately, it’s not enough to convince a judge that Whittaker could be a murderer.”
     
    “But it convinced you.”
     
    Caleb hesitated. “Not . . .