Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

closeness, sucking away her will.
    “I want you,” he said between his teeth. His hard face loomed over her, mesmerizing in its intensity.
    “Never doubt it. I want to put myself in you as deep, as hard, as often as I can. I think about taking you on the boat, on the beach, on the bed, against the wall. I want to feel you come apart around me as I fill you with my seed.”
    His images made her weak. Hot. She swallowed hard and lifted her chin. “You want sex.”
    “Not just sex.” His tone was dark with threat or promise.
    “Right. You want to knock me up.”
    He drew back, his light, penetrating eyes searching her face. She forced herself to hold his gaze as the fire ate all the oxygen between them. She could not breathe.
    “I want to give you children,” he said. “Children who would love you. Need you, as I need you.”

Page 55
    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    Her heart constricted. She squeezed her hands together in her lap to contain her desperate longing. He could not give her what she wanted. She could not be what he needed. “Because of some story about my mother.”
    “Because my people are dying.” His tone was harsh. The stark look in his eyes pierced her heart. “You promise life.”
    He pushed up on the arms of her chair and strode to the window. The shape of his head and the lonely set of his shoulders were framed in stone and outlined by the night. The uncompromising line of his back made her want to weep.
    She swallowed hard. “I thought you were immortal.”
    “Yes. But the cumulative years away from Sanctuary weaken our human bodies. Fear of aging drives us to the sea until we lose the will and finally the ability to Change. The oldest can no longer speak, act, think as rational beings. My own father . . .” He broke off, staring out the darkened glass.
    Her mind struggled to comprehend. “Your father?” she prompted softly.
    Conn’s shoulders were rigid against the dark glass. “My father, Llyr, abdicated rather than rule any longer from Sanctuary. He went beneath the wave, never to return. That’s what we call it, that’s what we say, when one of our own is seduced by the sea. And every time it happens, our numbers diminish by one more.”
    His bleak tone opened a chasm in her chest. So they’d both been disappointed and abandoned by their parents. That didn’t mean that she could help him. Or even that she should try.
    “Then you’re, like, the king now.”
    His back appeared to stiffen even more. “ ‘Like’ the king?” he repeated. “Yes.”
    “So there must be something you can do. Something else.” Besides get me pregnant , she thought.
    “We could do more once,” he said, still without turning. “In the time before my father’s time, when our blood was thicker and our gifts were stronger, before the sea sickened and our people declined. This is the fading of our season. We do not have such power anymore.” His voice was bitter. “I do not have such power.”
    Which didn’t stop him, apparently, from taking responsibility. She wanted to resent him for what he was prepared to put her through. But she admired him, too.
    “Can’t you . . . You could have other children,” she said.
    “Few, too few, conceive. Our numbers dwindle as our magic ebbs. No children have been born of selkie parents in a hundred years.” He turned, his face hard-edged as winter ice. “I gathered the human fosterlings, the children born of human mothers or raised by human fathers, and brought them here. There are not enough to ensure our survival. Not nearly enough. Your brother was the last.”
    Dylan, the brother she barely knew, the selkie brother who had only recently returned to World’s End.
    He had moved back into the room he once shared with Caleb. Although now that he was engaged to Regina, he spent most of his time with his new family.
    His family .
    Lucy blinked. “Dylan is having a child.”
    “Indeed.”
    “So why don’t you talk to him? Why don’t you ask him to . . .”
    Oh.
    Her brain stumbled. Her gut churned. She stared at Conn, remembering. “You did,” she said slowly.
    “That night at the house. You came to talk to Dylan.”
    His eyes were wary now and cool. “I offered them a chance to raise their child on Sanctuary.”
    She pressed her hands to her stomach. “You offered them more than a chance. You gave them a choice.”
    “Lucy—”
    “Which is more than you gave me.”
    Conn clasped his