He raised his eyebrows. “I believe I can bear the burden.”
As she must tolerate his touch.
He strode with her up the slope. Despite her pale face and cold hands, she felt warm in his arms, warm and damp. Beneath the tangle of sealskin and slicker, he discerned the rapid rise and fall of her chest. His hand was very close to her breast. Her hair tickled his throat. She smelled like woman and faintly of wet dog.
She was not selkie.
But her humanity—messy, genuine, artless—had its own natural appeal.
The track was narrow, worn by his feet and by the dogs. The long grass whispered of home. A bird soared over the battlements, crying in warning or welcome.
Lucy looked up at the bird and down at the path and at Madadh, ranging before and behind them. She looked everywhere, in fact, but at him.
She was pressed against him, angles and curves, long, strong legs and small, firm breasts. Her breath was warm on the side of his face. Her hands were cold.
His blood stirred. He shifted his hold. If he could get her to his room, if he could get her in his bed, he could warm her, comfort her, persuade her, bind her . . .
He frowned. Because that had worked so well the first time.
She slid him a sidelong glance. “Are you all right?”
His shaft was hard as stone. “Fine.”
“I told you I was heavy.”
Long and lean, rather, with a strength to meet his own. “It is not your weight that disturbs me.”
“Oh?” She met his hot gaze and flushed. “Oh.”
The tower door was ajar. He elbowed it open. The air of Sanctuary rushed to envelope them, cool with mist and magic, smelling of time, stone, and the sea.
She cleared her throat. “You can put me down now.”
He did not want to let her go. The longer she submitted to his touch, he felt, the more chance she would accept him. “The stairway is dark. You cannot see.”
“Oh, and you can?”
“Yes,” he said simply and silenced her.
He carried her up the spiral stairs, his shoulder brushing the rough stone wall, her bare feet suspended over the drop. Tall, narrow chinks of light pierced the gloom. In the stillness, he could hear her breathing and the dog’s nails clicking behind them.
The stairs divided, circling to his rooms on the one side, broadening to wide, flat steps and an arch on the other. She adjusted her arm about his neck, pressing her soft breast into his chest. Anticipation pulsed through him. Almost there. He resisted the impulse simply to throw her over his shoulders and take the steps two at a time.
“My lord!” The call rang from the hall.
Madadh growled in soft warning.
Lucy stiffened and turned her head.
Conn tightened his hold.
A broad bulk loomed in the stone archway. Frustration jabbed Conn. But the man who had hailed him was his most trusted warden. No purpose was served by snarling at him. Or by ignoring him either.
“Griffith ap Powell, the castle warden,” he said shortly. “Lucy Hunter.”
The warden frowned. “Dylan’s sister?”
Lucy blinked. “You know my brother?”
Griff spoke over her head to Conn. “What is she doing here?”
“Don’t ask,” she muttered.
Something in her voice, some subtle alteration of her posture, broke through Conn’s lust and impatience. He glanced down. Her shoulders were hunched, her eyes lowered. She seemed almost to have shrunk in his arms.
“My lord, I must speak with you,” Griff said, as if the warden had forgotten his own question. Forgotten the girl’s very presence.
Conn’s skin prickled.
“Don’t ask,” she had said. Was it possible the words were not simply a comment, but a command?
Unease trickled through him like melted ice. What did it mean, if she could command the castle warden?
“She is the daughter of Atargatis,” Conn said, answering Griff’s question. “And my guest.”
Griff rubbed his grizzled jaw, his dark eyes momentarily confused. “Then she is welcome. My lord, a delegation from—”
“Later,” Conn said. “She needs fire, food, and clothes. In the upper tower room. See to it.”
And he would see to her.
“My lord.” The warden was respectful but firm. “This cannot wait.”
“I have been gone two weeks.” Conn bit out the words. A blink of an eye in a selkie’s long existence. His father had been absent for damn near a millennium and no one was after him to attend to his duties. “Whatever it is can wait another hour.”
“Gau knows that you were gone,” Griff said.
Conn went still.
Gau was a lord of Hell, an emissary for the children of fire. Ruthless, humorless, self-important, and dangerous, the demon lord was quick to scent an opportunity or a weakness. He would have seen Conn’s absence from Sanctuary as both.
Something dark and fierce rose in Conn. “I do not owe Hell an accounting of my whereabouts.”
“No, lord.” Griff met his gaze, his expression somber. “But Gau requests an audience.”
“Gau can go to Hell.”
“He has been to Hell, my lord,” Griff said with grim humor. “Now he is coming here. With a delegation.”
Madadh’s shoulders quivered as the dog responded to the tension in the air. Lucy’s gaze darted from face to face.
“He dares much in my absence,” Conn said through his teeth.
“Perhaps he knew you were returning,” Griff suggested.
“Or hoped I would be gone,” Conn said. “Summon the other wardens. Let Gau see our strength.”
Such as it was, he thought bleakly.
“Done, lord. Morgan and Enya have arrived already,” Griff said. “The others . . . there may not be time.”
Strain dug into Conn’s shoulders at the combined weight of responsibility and the woman in his arms. “How long?”
“Until Gau arrives?” Griff shrugged. “I cannot map the demonkind as you can. But soon, I think.”
Conn’s gut clenched. His grip on Lucy tightened.
Gau must not find her was all he could think. The demons had tried to kill Dylan’s woman Regina simply because she carried the selkie’s child. The children of fire were determined to prevent the birth of a selkie female who might fulfill the prophecy. So far, they had dismissed Atargatis’s only daughter as human, unworthy of their notice. But if they knew she had caught Conn’s eye, they would swarm like wasps around fruit.
A chill rose from the stairwell and settled in his bones.
Better to keep her hidden.
Even on Sanctuary.
Conn lowered Lucy’s feet to the floor. Her toes winced from contact with the cold stone. She clung to him a moment, the only warm and familiar thing in the room, while she got her balance and her bearings.
The hound pressed in beside them and circled the room, its staccato nails loud in the quiet chamber.
The high, curved walls were finished stone. The windows overlooked the sea. If she concentrated, she could hear the hiss of the retreating water and the gulls crying as they dipped over the waves. But unlike the other chambers they’d passed through, this room had actual glass in the windows, veined with lead and filled with tiny bubbles. The carved and gilded furniture looked built for a giant or a king: a vast, empty fireplace, two high-backed chairs like thrones, an enormous wardrobe, a massive carved and canopied bed. Deep blue hangings shivered in the draft.
Lucy shivered, too, cold and overwhelmed.
Madadh yawned and settled in front of the empty hearth.
“Someone will be up soon to build the fire,” Conn said. “If there is anything you need, you have only to ask.”
How about you take me home?
She swallowed the words before they escaped. He would only say no. And each time she begged and he refused, she felt more helpless, more frustrated than before.
She was sick of feeling helpless, tired
of being silent and careful and afraid.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. “This guy that’s coming, this Gau—”
Conn’s mouth formed a hard line. His eyes assumed the cold, flat sheen of tempered metal. “All will be well,” he said. “You are safe here.”
Which didn’t answer her question at all.
Lucy’s heart hammered. Her spine straightened. All her life, she had avoided confrontation. She was the good child, the one who smoothed things over, who made things work. She was used to covering for her father’s failures, to denying her own anger and her needs.
But Conn had prized her from her comfortable shell. And however exposed she felt, however naked or afraid, she couldn’t crawl away and hide. What was he going to do if she offended him? Throw her back like an undersized lobster?
“Safe from what?”
He released her and crossed to the vast wardrobe, tossing the sealskin carelessly on the bed. “I will answer all your questions . . .”
She blinked. “Really?”
“Later,” he finished smoothly. He laid a hand on a carved panel of the wardrobe, swinging it open to reveal a flash of red, a gleam of gold, a fall of black as rich as midnight. Shrugging out of his shirt, he dropped it on the floor.
Because holding a conversation wasn’t hard enough. No, she had to push for answers while he was stripping.
She jerked her gaze from his hard-planed, hairy chest to his face. “When?”
His hard mouth softened. “Tonight. Over dinner. Right now, more urgent matters require my attention.”
He thrust his hands into his waistband and shucked his pants.
No underwear. He was naked except for a long black knife strapped to the inside of his left calf.
She sucked in her breath. Okay.
He was broad and hard. Her gaze skimmed the ridges of his stomach to the dark hair between his thighs, down to the knife, and up again. All of him stood broad and hard.
Her mouth dried. His gaze locked with hers.
Arrogant asshole. As if she would take one look at his magnificent manhood and beg him to take her.
Oh, wait. She had.
In fact, she admitted wretchedly, if she weren’t so worried that she was committing more than her body, she would be tempted to again.
She moistened her lips. “How urgent?”
His eyes had darkened to gray smoke. But instead of reaching for her, he pulled a long, loose shirt from the wardrobe. “The wardens wait. I cannot stay. Not even to satisfy your . . . curiosity,” he added softly.
Hot color whipped into her face.
She stood there while he dressed with swift, easy movements, apparently undeterred either by his impressive hard-on or her presence. Soft black pants—ha, that took a moment—loose white shirt, a tunic the same deep purple as the inside of an oyster shell. And instead of looking ridiculous, which might have soothed her confused feelings at least a little bit, he looked comfortable. Masculine. Assured. As though he wore velvet every day of his very long life. As if . . .
Lucy frowned. “He called you ‘lord.’ ”
Conn shot her a quick look. His hands were busy fastening a heavy gold belt low on his hips. Something in the gesture, something in his eyes, reminded her of Caleb strapping on his gun, preparing to go on patrol.
“Dylan did, too,” she said slowly, remembering. “When you came into the restaurant. ‘My lord.’ I thought he was just saying it because he was surprised. Like, ‘My God’ or something. But he wasn’t, was he? I mean, he was surprised, but . . .”
Conn gave a final tug to his belt. “I must go.”
She stood there with her frozen feet and yellow slicker, realization seeping into her tired brain. “Who are you?” she whispered.
His eyes were cool as burnished silver. “You know who I am.”
“No, I don’t,” she said, amazed by her own audacity. “Or I wouldn’t have to ask.”
Did he hesitate, for just a moment? His face was hard as marble. “I am Conn, the son of Llyr, prince of the merfolk and lord of the sea. And Gau must learn that I protect what is mine.”
The hound rose from the hearth, its gaze fixed on his face, its small round ears erect.
“Madadh, stay. Guard,” Conn commanded.
And before the girl or the dog had opportunity to react, he was gone.
8
STAY. GUARD.
Standing in the middle of the cold stone floor, Lucy eyed the big, hairy dog blocking the door. “Are you supposed to keep me safe? Or keep me in?”
The hound gave her a long, level look and turned its head away.
“That’s what I thought,” she muttered. “Who does he think he is anyway?”
“I am Conn, the son of Llyr, prince of the merfolk and lord of the sea.”
Prince. The word crashed on her like a wave, robbing her of balance and breath. And she was what, Cinderella? She paced. Alice in Wonderland. Beauty in the castle of the Beast.
She wanted to go home. Longing swept her for her brother’s smile, her father’s querulous voice, her students with their quick hugs and straggling garden plots. She squeezed her eyes tight as if she could shut out the castle, as if she could make everything go away, go back to what it had been. Like Dorothy after the tornado, waking to find her journey had all been a terrible dream. A nightmare.
Her nightmare.
She had always dreamed of the sea. The sea and drowning. In her dreams, the oceans came for her, a hungry wall of water that swept everything, destroyed everything, killed everyone she loved.
Her mother had drowned. “Trapped in a fisherman’s net within the year after she left you.”
The sea took everything.
Pressure crushed her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. Roaring filled her head, louder than the ocean. The sound of loss. Of fear.
She trembled. She remembered . . .
Standing in her crib, crying in the dark, holding out her arms. And Caleb, kind and bleary with lack of sleep, trudging in to pick her up. A boy forced by circumstance to be a man. Patting her back, bringing her water, whispering that everything was going to be all right. She had allowed herself to be comforted then, only to learn as the years passed that her life would never be all right.
When she was nine, Caleb went away to college. “Be good,” he’d said. “Take care of yourself and Dad.” So she had, while the dreams came back, worse than before. She could pretend to control them, put them off with bedtime reading or hot milk or sex, but she’d never completely outgrown them.
Alone before the empty fire, she hugged her elbows. So what? Everybody had bad dreams. She wasn’t that little girl anymore, crying for her mother.
Conn called her the daughter of Atargatis. But she was more. She was Caleb Hunter’s sister, New England born and bred of hardy Yankee stock. Stubborn as the beach roses that bloomed along the cliffs, tenacious as the goldenrod that sprang among the rocks. She had endured island winters when the pipes froze and the harbor froze and the ice ran like a waterfall down the porch steps and had to be hacked with an axe. She had struggled to adulthood in a house haunted by her mother’s ghost and the specter of her father’s drinking.
“You are stronger than either of us imagined,” Conn had said.
Maybe.
Yes.
She released a shuddery sigh. Time to start acting like it, then. She could begin by getting dressed. Something in that wardrobe had to fit her.
She approached the tall wardrobe. Beauty at the castle of the Beast. Too bad there were no friendly spirits, no motherly teapots, to pick out something for her to wear.
Madadh raised his head; pricked his ears.
Something bumped and clattered below.
“Bollocks!” cried a voice on the stairs.
Lucy jumped, pressing a hand to her mouth.
“Watch it! You nearly took my fingers off.” A second voice, young, male, aggrieved.
“Well, if you weren’t so fucking clumsy—”
“Shh. She will hear us.”
The hound gave a soft woof and lurched to its feet, its big paws scrabbling on the stone floor.
“I can hear you now,” Lucy said.
Silence.
And then a scrape. A thump.
“Ma’am?” The voice cracked. A boy’s voice, she thought.
“I . . . Yes?” she called.
“We cannot pass the dog.”
Obviously not. Madadh guarded the doorway, shoulders hunched, head lowered, tail stirring from side to side. Good sign? Bad sign? She had never had a dog.
“Um. Madadh,” Lucy said, feeling foolish. “Here, boy.”
Would it obey?
She forced more authority into her voice. “Madadh, come.”
The hound’s narrow, bearded head swung in her direction. Slowly, slowly, the tall hips and long body followed. Padding to her side, Madadh sat with a thump. The dog’s head came to her elbow.
She clasped her hands tightly at her waist. “You can come in now.”
A grunt, another thump, and a man—a young man’s legs—appeared as he backed over the threshold, carrying one end of a large trunk. His companion followed, carrying the other. Setting their burden down, they turned to face her.
Boys. She released her breath. They were just boys—sixteen? seventeen?—in long white shirts and ragged shorts, one big and broad with a shock of dark hair and a belligerent expression.
Tough guy, Lucy thought with a teacher’s instincts and a smothered smile.
His companion was wiry and lean, not quite grown into the strength of his wrists or the size of his feet. Beneath a mop of blond-streaked hair, his eyes watched her, guarded and golden as the dog’s.
He nudged the trunk with one foot. “Warden said you needed clothes.”
She swallowed. “Yes. Thank you.”
The bigger boy shifted his weight awkwardly. “There’s more.”
“Other clothes. If these do not fit you.” The tawny one frowned in apparent concern. “You are taller than Miss March.”
“Miss March?” Lucy asked cautiously.
“She was our teacher.”
Was? “What happened to her?”
“She got old.” A girl spoke from behind the two boys.
Their age, Lucy thought, or maybe older. With girls, it was hard to tell. She had sleek, dark hair the color of mink and a wide-lipped, sulky mouth.
Sea Lord Page 9
