Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

stayed. She should have stayed with us. With me.”
    “She was selkie.”
    “She was selfish.” The accusation burst from her aching throat with the force of pent-up grief.
    “And you do not want to be like her.”
    “No.”
    “In any way.”
    “I . . .” Lucy closed her mouth. Opened it. “No.”
    “She would have come back for you,” Conn said, and his voice was so gentle she almost didn’t care if he lied. “If she had lived. She would have come back for you and Caleb both at the appropriate time.”
    “When you’re a kid, you don’t get the concept of ‘the appropriate time,’ ” Lucy said bleakly. “You just want your Mommy.”
    “It is different for us.”
    “Not that different. You miss your father.”
    Conn flinched as if she’d stuck him with a harpoon. “My father did not die. He went beneath the wave.”
    “And mine went out on his boat and got drunk. Gone is gone. There’s more than one way to be abandoned.”
    “Lucy . . .” Regret weighted his voice.
    She shook her head. Her eyes were dry. Gritty. “It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m all grown up now.”
    “It may be that your power focused on suppressing your Change,” Conn offered carefully. “And the exercise of that power, the discipline of your gift, day after day, year after year, has made you strong.”
    She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” she managed with only a trace of bitterness. “For me to be strong. For me to be the targair inghean .” She stumbled over the unfamiliar phrase: targuhr een-yen .
    His eyes darkened. “I want you to be yourself.”
    “Then you should have left me alone!”
    Her words reverberated between them. She would have snatched them back if she could.
    She stood there miserably. This was not her fault.
    Or his either, she admitted fairly. Sometimes being able to see both sides sucked.
    “I cannot,” he said grimly.
    She nodded, resigned. “Because of the prophecy.”
    His eyes blazed. “Because that was not you ,” he snapped. “Cautious, fearful, unfulfilled, eking out some dutiful half-life. You are more than that. You deserve more than that.”
    “It wasn’t that bad,” she muttered.
    Conn flowed out of his chair with a ferocious grace that made her pulse jump. “It is intolerable . To deny your nature . . . To give up your freedom . . .” He broke off.
    She gaped at him, and she knew. She knew, and her heart cracked.
    “ There is no choice, ” he had told her. “ For either of us. ”
    She had not understood then. He was as isolated in his world as she was in hers. As bound by his duty.
    As trapped by his destiny.
    If she had been his broodmare, then he was, what? The king’s stud?
    She set her teeth. He had made her role as easy on her as he could.
    Now she could return the favor. She could release him from at least one of his responsibilities.
    “Intolerable for me?” she asked softly. “Or for you?”

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    His face was hard as arctic ice. “I beg your pardon?”
    “You’re as stuck as I am. You said so yourself.” “ I am more your prisoner than you are mine, ” she remembered. “But at least you don’t have to have sex with me anymore.”
    She waited for him to protest, prayed for him to object.
    He did neither. Only watched her with narrowed eyes.
    She hugged her elbows, heartsick and determined in the face of his silence. “I’m the promised daughter, right? The one in the prophecy. So you don’t need to get me pregnant.”
    “Are you barring me from your bed?”
    His tone was still measured and even, but there was a turbulence in his storm gray eyes that raised the tiny hairs along her arms and made her hope.
    “Not if you want to be there,” she answered.
    “You called my name,” he said unexpectedly.
    She blinked.
    “Before,” he explained. “When you stood with Iestyn. You called, and I sensed you needed me.”
    “I did,” she whispered.
    I do.
    “There is a connection between us. I do not know what to call it. I have never experienced such a bond before.” He prowled across the room, stopping in front of her, close enough to touch. “I only know when the demons attacked and the connection snapped, when I believed that you were taken or dead, the sun was blotted from my sky and the oceans ran dry.”
    She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, not even air.
    “And then I saw you, fair