Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

tightly. “That’s terrible.”
    “Different, perhaps.”
    “Kids need their mothers.” She spoke from experience and deep, buried longing.
    “They need someone to teach them how to survive and occasionally how to behave.”
    She tried to remember what he’d told her about his childhood. “ I received instruction—what there was of it—from my father. ”
    “So you hired a teacher.”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Miss March.”
    “She was not only a teacher,” Conn said. “She was Griff’s wife.”
    Her head hurt. Lucy set down the glass, pressing her cold fingers to her temples. “They were married? A selkie and a . . .”
    “Human.” Conn shrugged his elegant shoulders. “It happens. Your mother married your father.”
    She pushed away from the table, her appetite gone. “My mother left my father.”
    “Because the choice was taken from her.” Conn topped off her glass. “Griff was devoted to his mate until the day she died.”
    “Uh-huh. How did she feel about living on Sanctuary?”
    “She was happy here. Fulfilled.”
    “So you got lucky,” Lucy said. “When they got married, I mean.”
    Conn sipped his wine and did not answer. His eyes were shadowed in the firelight.
    She stared at him, his words niggling at the back of her mind. “ They need someone to teach them how to survive and occasionally how to behave. ”
    And Roth’s voice. “ The prince said he was not having us grow up as little savages. ”
    A fissure opened in her chest. She opened her mouth to breathe. “Not lucky. You brought her here, didn’t you?”
    Conn’s face closed, cool and smooth as ice. “She was happy,” he repeated. “She chose to stay.”
    “But she didn’t choose to come.” She balled the napkin in her lap. “What did you do? Take her like you took the ship?”
    “The whelps needed a teacher. I do not apologize for doing my duty for my people.”
    Her mind whirled. Her mouth was dry. “Is that why you . . . Why I . . . But Iestyn told me there aren’t Page 54
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    any children anymore.”
    “That is why,” Conn said.
    Her heart slammed into her ribs. “I don’t understand.”
    But she did. Oh, she did.
    “I need children,” Conn confirmed. His gaze collided with hers. “I need you. Your children. Ours. Your blood and my seed to save my people.”

9
    “CHILDREN,” LUCY REPEATED. SHE STARED AT him, shocked. Angry. Dismayed. He couldn’t want . . . He couldn’t mean . . . “I haven’t even agreed to have sex with you.”
    “Again.”
    She flushed hotly. “ Ever. ”
    His brows arced upward. “You cannot deny there is passion between us.”
    Deny it? Even now, with her heart burning in a sheath of ice, she was aware of him. Attracted to him. Her weakness where he was concerned infuriated and scared her.
    “Passion’s not enough,” she said stubbornly. Desperately.
    Conn watched her from his chair, as still as a cat at a mouse hole, his silver eyes molten in the flames of the fire. “There is no shame in pleasure.”
    She remembered the feel of his warm, sleek hair under her fingers, his mouth suckling her breasts, the startling fullness of his invasion as he moved on her, as he plunged into her. Her body remembered and wept for his.
    No shame . . .
    “And no future,” she said.
    Look at her parents.
    “On the contrary,” he said. “I can give you a better life than the one you left. I would be faithful to you.
    There would be no other partners for either of us as long as you live. You would be honored here.”
    Emotions churned under the ice, threatening to break through her shell of composure. She could smell the clean burning wood and the scent of her own arousal.
    “Honored?” Her voice cracked.
    “Of course. You are the daughter of Atargatis,” he said and shattered her heart.
    “I don’t want to be honored.” She flung the words at him. “I want to be . . .”
    “What?” His eyes were as sharp and brilliant as glass.
    She took another deep breath, almost a sob. “All my life, I imagined being needed. Waited to be wanted.
    Dreamed of being loved for myself, for who I am.”
    She raised her gaze to his. “Not fucked because of who my mother was.”
    Her deliberate crudity hit him like a slap. He was out of his chair and over her before she could draw breath. Not touching. Never touching. But leaning close, caging her with his arms on the arms of her chair, overwhelming her with his