Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

nervous. She recalled fumbling and hunger and pheromones trickling like a cocktail through her veins, heady and addictive. She’d stumbled home giddy with hormones, almost believing in love at first sight.
    “And after?”
    “Sometimes.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, we, um, lived together for a while.”
    She’d never told Caleb. She never told anybody, except her roommate. She had visions of her brother coming home from Iraq and field dressing her boyfriend. So there had been no one to confide in, no one to advise her. Fermented by time, the words spilled out like acid, thick and corrosive.
    “Sometimes he couldn’t . . . He didn’t want to . . . Well, look at me.” She hunched her shoulders in irritation and embarrassment. “I’m hardly a supermodel. And he was taking some really hard courses, he was too tired to . . .”
    “What are you, some kind of freak?” Brian had protested sleepily, irritably, when she reached for him the fourth—or was it the fifth?—time. “Get away from me.”
    Lucy winced at the memory. “He didn’t like it when I made demands.”
    “ Made demands ”?
    Sodding angels. Blood flooded Conn’s brain and his cock. He’d like her to make demands of him. He wanted to throttle the young fool who had taught her to devalue herself, who had cheapened her sensual selkie nature.
    “ Look at me, ” she had said.
    He did. He saw her thick, springy hair, her lean, strong face, the thick sweep of her pale lashes. She was not an exotic beauty, not an obvious one, but subtle, clean-limbed, and lovely. Her clear eyes reflected the moods of the sea. Right now they were the color of storm, gray washed with moisture.
    Lust transmuted to tenderness, flooding his chest and tightening his throat.
    “I see you,” he said.
    She braced.
    “I want you.” He held her gaze, held his arms away from his body, palms upward. “I am at your service.
    Command me.”
    Her lips parted. He saw the possibilities work into her imagination and bloom in her eyes, deep, disturbing, exciting. But she did not have the confidence to command or even to ask. Not yet.
    So he crossed to the bed and bracketed her face in his hands. Her skin was warm and faintly flushed.
    With his thumb, he smoothed the thick, stubborn line of her brows, the subtle indentation of her chin. She closed her eyes, and he kissed her quivering lids and the slope of her cheekbone and the corner of her Page 76
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    mouth.
    Her breath escaped on a sigh. Carefully, watching her, he moved his hands to the fastenings of her cloak, undoing the long row of buttons one by one. His knuckles brushed her breasts. She trembled.
    “Beautiful.” His whisper vibrated between them.
    She opened her eyes, the gray depths swirling with yearning and denial.
    “Like the sea at dawn,” he said.
    She snorted in disbelief.
    Anger stabbed Conn’s gut. Anger at her human lover, who had taken her and left her in such doubt.
    Anger at himself, for doing the same.
    Yet for all that he had taken, he could give her this. He continued to undress her, taking time, taking care, pausing to admire each part. His sex words made her blush and squirm, so he told her without words how exquisite she was, how firm, how fine, how delicately made. He set his lips to her shoulder, inhaling the perfume of her skin, tasting her salt. He traced the velvet tips of her breasts and bent to suckle them.
    She made a sound of impatience low in her throat and reached for him.
    He stepped back from her urgent touch. “Lady, I am yours. At your service.”
    Her drowning eyes were lost. Confused. They tore his heart. “So?”
    “You wanted to slow down,” he reminded her wickedly.
    A smile trembled on her lips. Her hands dropped to her sides.
    Tension shivered through him. Not only to have her, but to return to her a measure of her feminine power. He shucked his own clothes hastily, tunic, leggings, and shirt. His cock jutted, rock hard and rampant, but he ignored his own arousal to focus on hers, brushing his hands up and down her arms, letting his touch drift from the angle of her hip to the curve of her belly. The tiny jewel, caught in gold, glittered against her skin.
    He touched it with one finger. “What is this?”
    She looked down. “Um . . . aquamarine, I think.”
    “I mean, why do you wear it?”
    “You don’t like it.” Her voice was flat.
    What could he tell her? That it excited him?