Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

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, Page 40
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