She bit into the apple. Crisp, tart flavor exploded on her tongue. “So, how old are you?”
He hesitated. “I was blood born to my father, Llyr, three thousand years ago.”
Lucy inhaled. Choked.
Conn handed her a napkin and waited politely while she coughed into it.
“What . . .” She wheezed. “What about your mother?”
“I do not know her.”
She lowered the napkin to stare. “You don’t know who your mother was?”
“I mean I barely met her. I do not remember her.” He handed her a glass of water. “If you are born in the sea, you live in the sea until your first Change, the first time you take human form at seven or eight years old. If you are born on land, you live on land—again, until you mature and Change at eleven or thirteen. I was born in the sea and weaned when I was two years old. By the time I came here, to Sanctuary, I had not seen my mother in years.”
She gripped the glass 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 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 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.”
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 hands behind his back. “Your brother knew what he risked and what he rejected. You do not.”
“I heard you talking on the stairs.” She sorted through the jumble of memories and emotions, picking her words. “You said I carried the bloodline. My mother’s bloodline. You said I had the right to choose.”
“They should have told you.”
“Well, they didn’t.” Her lips trembled and then firmed. Her family’s failure to include her, to trust her, still hurt. “And neither did you.”
And that hurt even more. It scared her, that he had the power to hurt her emotionally.
“I’m telling you now,” he said evenly.
“Telling me.” She stood on shaky legs. “Not asking me. What happened to my right to choose? I’m entitled to say no.”
“You said yes.” His voice was clipped and precise. “In the garden.”
His hand gripping her jaw, his face dark and intent above her, haloed by the blue, blue sky. “Come with me,” he commanded. “Come.”
She shuddered a little in longing and reaction. “I don’t remember saying anything.”
“Your actions were assent enough.”
Her cheeks burned. “I agreed to have sex with you. Not have your babies.”
His jaw bunched. “Humans do conceive after sex. Or did that not occur to you when you were under me?”
He might as well have punched her in the stomach. All her breath went. Her knees wobbled. She hadn’t even considered the possibility she might be pregnant.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“I got carried away,” she mumbled. “I won’t again.”
He flowed across the room to her in two quick strides. “You will.”
She threw up her hands, panicked. If he touched her, she was lost. “I can’t. You can’t make me.”
He stopped dead. Their eyes locked.
Her heart hammered under her breastbone. He could, she realized. Who would stop him? Who would even blame him?
“My people are dying,” he had said with a look. With such a look. He wrenched her heart.
Oh, God. She could feel herself slipping, feel her resolve eroding like sand. What should she do?
They faced each other across a foot of bare floor. Tension hummed between them. He was so close, so big and male. If he reached for her, would she scream? Fight him?
Or would she let him do anything he wanted?
Everything she wanted.
“I will not force you,” he said coldly.
Relief rushed through her. Of course it was relief. That crash of feeling couldn’t possibly be anything else. Let-down. Disappointment.
She sucked in her breath, aware of the rise and fall of her breasts under the padded silk. “Okay,” she said cautiously, waiting for the “but.” She was pretty sure there was a “but.”
“Neither can I let you go. You belong here. In time you will come to accept that.”
The tension spilled as anger. “I’m not some homesick kid at summer camp. I won’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide to get with the program.”
“Nevertheless, you will stay.” His austere face looked hard and worn, like a stone carving of a medieval king or a saint. “You will sleep here tonight.”
She twisted her sash, holding on to her self-control. She felt restless, itchy, disagreeable.
Dissatisfied.
“This is your room,” she said.
“Yes. You are safe here.”
“Really.” She hardly recognized that hard, provoking voice as her own. An itch built in her blood and crackled under her skin. “Who’s going to protect me from you?”
His gaze moved over her face. “Is it me you must defend against?” he murmured. “Or yourself?”
Her hand flew to strike him. He gripped her wrist, letting her feel his strength. Held her, while her pulse beat a frantic tattoo in her throat and the air throbbed thick between them. His eyes darkened. His grip shifted.
She felt the beat of his blood through his fingers on her wrist, pounding through her, overtaking the rhythm of her heart. Her pulse slowed to match his. His heart drove hers, one pulse, one beat. He pulled her close, closer, until his face was an inch from hers. She was surrounded by him, his scent, his heat. Her lungs clogged. His breath skated over her lips. She parted them in anticipation, almost tasting the wine of his kiss.
And still he didn’t close the gap between them. His mouth hovered over hers, daring her participation, taunting her control.
Frustration vibrated in her throat. She lurched on tiptoe to meet his mouth. Her teeth scraped his lower lip. Her body registered the jolt of his before he plunged into the kiss with her, taking her, tasting her, in soft, hungry bites. Her muscles tensed at the shock of heat and then the surge of delight like slipping into the bath before everything went fluid and warm. Response seeped through her blood and rose in a flood to her brain. More, yes, now, again . . .
She suckled his tongue. She wanted to eat him alive. All her life she’d been starving for him, for this. He slid his hand under her hair, holding her head still while his mouth plundered hers and her heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest. Swamped by need—to touch, to take—she tugged against the grip on her wrist. His fingers tightened and then released as he swept her up, as she wrapped both arms around his neck. His knee pushed between her thighs. His broad hand molded to her bottom, pulling her roughly against him. He was fully, hotly aroused, thick and long against her. He dragged her toward the bed.
Panic reared out of the fog of emotion, the wave of need. Panic and reason.
She surfaced, gasping. “No.”
“Too late.” His mouth claimed hers. His touch was hard and branding. “Let me have you. Give yourself to me.”
Oh, she was tempted, horribly tempted and afraid. He was too strong for her. If she let him take her, if she once gave herself up to him and her need, he would consume her, bod
y, mind, and heart. Her pulse raced. The back of her knees hit the bed.
“You said you wouldn’t force me,” she reminded him breathlessly.
“Not force.” His lips were warm on her cheek, her ear, the side of her neck. “Persuade.”
His skill weakened her knees. Her will. But inside, a small, hard kernel of her Lucy self remained, stubborn as a seed in winter. She shook her head. “It’s the same thing. It’s the same if I can’t walk away.”
His hands stilled. He raised his head. “Bollocks. You want this. You want me.”
She fought not to squirm. “Maybe.” Yes. “But I won’t have sex with you as long as I’m your prisoner.”
His eyes narrowed. He was angry, she realized. Anger—strong emotion of any kind—had always terrified her. But losing herself, losing control, scared her even more.
“You would use your body to bargain for your freedom?” he asked.
Heat whipped into her face. “It’s my body. We can’t have any kind of equal relationship, we can’t have sex, if I’m not free to choose.”
“Equal.” A snarl of fury and frustration tore from his throat. “I am more your prisoner than you are mine.”
If the bed hadn’t been behind her, she would have wobbled. Retreated. She took refuge in confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I am selkie.” He ripped the sealskin from the foot of the bed and thrust it between them. The fur spilled between them, heavy, enveloping. “I gave my pelt into your keeping. I gave myself, my freedom up to you. You hold my life in your hands as surely as you hold the fate of my people.”
She felt battered, bewildered, assaulted. Trapped against the bed, she faced him, bristling like a small, cornered animal. “I didn’t ask for your life. Or your pelt. I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t want it.”
His silver eyes blazed. “You do not have the courage to take it,” he said coldly.
He dropped the fur at her feet and walked out.
Conn sat in the dark in the antechamber that had once served as the selkies’ schoolroom, away from the wardens still gathered in the hall. Most had gone to bed, their own or others’, in pursuit of sleep or fruitless coupling. The last conversations—of politics and pair bonding—sank to murmurs like the fire.
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