Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

closer, making her heart race. “You still find me charming.”
     
    Her breath went. “Ha.”
     
    “You can’t help yourself.” His breath skated over her lips. His lips skimmed her jaw. Desire drizzled like honey under her skin. “My power over women is irresistible.”
     
    She heard the laughter throbbing in his voice and under the laughter something else, something deeper, something almost like . . . yearning.
     
    She felt herself leaning, melting into him, and closed her eyes. “Your ego is unbelievable.”
     
    “Let me prove it to you,” he murmured, his hands circling her ribs, his voice warm and seductive at her ear. “Let me charm you, Regina. Let me love you.”
     
    Oh. Her heart contracted sharply.
     
    “Oh.” Lucy’s voice, high and mortified. “Antonia sent us to . . . I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
     
    Regina disentangled herself from Dylan. Lucy stood in the kitchen door, with Margred behind her.
     
    “You’re not interrupting,” Regina lied, heat creeping up her face. “I was just giving Dylan an errand to do for me in town.”
     
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    Margred arched her brows. “Is that what you were giving him?”
     
    “I don’t pay you to stand and talk,” Antonia bawled from the line.
    “Let’s clean those tables. We open in an hour.”
     
    Margred strolled forward, as elegant carrying a rag and a bottle of sanitizer as a sommelier with a folded napkin around a bottle of Grand-Cru.
     
    “Is that wise?” Margred murmured to Dylan. “To leave her . . .
    now?”
     
    “It’s safe.” Dylan looked over her head to Regina, directing his assurance to her. There was a new confidence in his voice, she realized, an energy she hadn’t heard before.
     
    “I warded the building,” he said.
     
    Margred inhaled. “I’m impressed. That was you?”
     
    “Not only me. I thought . . . I felt . . . You?”
     
    She shook her head, eyes wide.
     
    Regina watched their byplay, lost.
     
    Dylan frowned. “Then . . .”
     
    Nick barged through the kitchen door, his sneakers squeaking on the old wood floors, and fixed Dylan with wide, hopeful eyes. “Nonna said you were going to the store. Can I come?”
     
    Dylan glanced down. “Not this time.”
     
    Regina winced. Ouch.
     
    Nick hunched a shoulder in a boy’s gesture. “Okay. Whatever.”
     
    Regina read his body language as easily as his heart: I didn’t want to anyway. Better to pretend that you didn’t want something, than to hope and have it denied . . .
     
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    This was what she was afraid of, she realized. That her son would fall in love as quickly as she had done.
     
    “Maybe you could hold on to something for me until I get back,”
    Dylan suggested.
     
    Nick’s chin came up. He was interested, but wary. No fool, her boy.
    “Like what?”
     
    Dylan reached into his pocket and withdrew a silver coin. A Morgan Liberty Head silver dollar. Regina had looked it up online. The thing was worth a couple hundred dollars, easy. She sucked in her breath.
     
    Dylan’s gaze clashed with hers.
     
    She exhaled slowly, without speaking.
     
    Nick examined the coin in his grubby palm and then looked up at Dylan. “What’s this, like, a bribe?”
     
    “If it was a bribe, I would have to give it to you,” Dylan explained.
    “Which I can’t, because your mother would skin us both.”
     
    Nick snickered.
     
    “It’s a marker. Like a promise,” Dylan said. “You keep it safe until I ask for it, and then I take you out in my boat.”
     
    Nick’s gaze flickered to his mom. “Is that okay?”
     
    She hugged her arms across her chest to hold in her expanding heart.
    “It’s your deal, kiddo.”
     
    “Okay. Cool.” His fingers closed on the coin. A smile cracked his thin face as he stuck out his other hand. “Deal.”
     
    Dylan nodded once, his large, dark hand encompassing Nick’s small, dirty one.
     
    This was her son, Regina thought, almost dizzy with emotion. Her family, her life. She had never had a man in her life, never felt the need for one.
     
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    But now, watching Dylan shake hands with her son, she realized how easily he could make a place with them.
     
    And how much it would hurt when he was gone.
     
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Fifteen
     
    THE TEENAGER BEHIND THE REGISTER AT THE grocery store blinked purple-lined eyes at the coins on the counter. “You can’t pay with those.”
     
    Impatience whipped through Dylan like wind through a sail. He quivered, desperate to be gone. Browsing the pharmacy