He raised his eyebrows. “You humans have a saying: If you save a life, it belongs to you. You saved more than my life today.”
“You saved mine yesterday.”
“After bringing you here against your will,” he pointed out. “I merely restored the balance between us.”
She swallowed. She was no good at putting feelings into words. Her family didn’t. And selkies supposedly had no feelings to speak of. But a combination of hurt and fairness drove her to blurt out, “The hell with the balance. I’m not fucking keeping score, okay? I’m here because I want to be here. I choose to be here. Now. With you.”
His silver eyes gleamed. “And you think to offer me the same choice.”
“I . . .” She drew a sharp, bitter breath. “Yes.”
He crossed the room in two strides. He took her hands. The sealskin fell between them. He raised her hands to his lips, one after the other, kissing the backs and then the palms. His lips were warm. So were his eyes.
“Then I choose you,” he said. “Only you. Now and forever.”
Later, much later, they climbed down the narrow rutted path to the beach. The sea had the texture of beaten silver; the sky was molten gold.
Lucy felt weak-kneed, warm, and satisfied. Every time Conn made love to her, she felt closer to him. More free to be herself.
Yet after only two weeks, how well did they really know each other? He had never said he loved her. She had never seen him Change.
She eyed the black sealskin slung over his shoulder and fought a little shiver. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll watch.”
He tugged his loose shirt over his head. He had a beautiful body. “Come with me.”
She jolted, the impositions and restrictions of a lifetime clenching her stomach. “Oh, I . . .”
Couldn’t.
Can’t.
Won’t.
“You have been in the water before,” he reminded her.
Her heart tripped in panic. “Not when it was this cold.”
He stooped to unbuckle the knife from around his knee; divested himself of his pants. His long, arched feet were already bare. His toes . . . For the first time, she noticed his toes were webbed.
She jerked her gaze back to his face.
“You braved Hell for me,” he said softly, holding her gaze. “Will you not come with me into the ocean?”
Put that way, how could she refuse?
She gritted her teeth and stood while he unfastened the buttons of her cloak, untied the skirt at her waist, and slid her blouse over her head. The clothes she wore on Sanctuary offered more coverage and fewer challenges to a man than her jeans back home. All the while he undressed her, his hands were busy, touching, brushing, stroking, cupping. By the time he had her naked, she was shivering with cold and fear and desire.
Her nipples peaked. She crossed her arms over her breasts, pressing her thighs together.
“You know, on World’s End, when the ice breaks, we have this thing called the Polar Bear Plunge,” she babbled nervously as he herded her toward the line of foam, his muscled arm around her waist. “But nobody actually goes into the water naked.”
Conn smiled at her, his eyes very bright. “Trust me,” he murmured. “Trust yourself.”
“Easy for you to . . . Shit, that’s cold.” She hopped from foot to foot.
Conn steadied her against his broad, naked side as the water ran over her knees. “It will be all right. Hold on to me now.”
She clutched him, grateful for his warmth. His support. “What about your, um.” With her free hand, she gestured toward the shore, where his sealskin lay in a lump.
“Not this first time. Not your first time. You will need me with you.” His face was serious, intent, like the first time they’d made love.
With another internal quiver, Lucy realized he didn’t expect this to be easy. What had Iestyn said? “The first time, you must generate your own skin from the inside. It hurts. Like your guts being torn out.”
Crap.
She sucked in her breath and waded into the icy water. Cold speared her feet, gripped her legs, swirled toward the juncture of her thighs. She clenched; inched into the ripple of the surf.
“Brave girl,” Conn said.
She nodded weakly and slid another foot forward.
Pain shot through her belly, white-hot, nauseating. Her body locked. Spasmed. She felt like a poker was being driven into her stomach. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t yell.
Conn’s arm was an iron band around her waist. He held her upright in the freezing water as the agony battered her in waves. Like the worst kind of cramps, like what she vaguely imagined childbirth might be, like death . . .
Sweat broke out on her face. Panting, she leaned her head against his shoulder and prayed for the pain to end.
Surely it must end.
Conn swore and hauled her out of the surf. She stumbled. He held her tight, his body her shelter. She clung to him, trembling. He pressed his lips to her hair.
“I’m . . . okay,” she managed. “Just let me get my”—nerve—“breath, and we can try again.”
Maybe. If she didn’t throw up or pass out first.
He frowned. “Something holds you back.”
“Yeah,” she joked through chattering teeth. “Incredible pain.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Something else.”
“You mean it’s not supposed to feel like that?”
“Not without Changing.”
She winced. At least he wasn’t still suggesting she was suppressed or repressed or whatever.
“I did try,” she said defensively.
“Yes.”
That single syllable—“yes”—sounded good and solid. The sick feeling in her stomach eased slightly.
But Conn was still frowning, staring out to sea.
She bit her lip. “Maybe I’m not selkie, after all,” she suggested.
He did not answer.
“Are you disappointed?” she asked.
He glanced down in apparent surprise. “No,” he said simply. “You have accepted me as I am. I can do no less.”
His near echo of her words made her breath hitch: All my life I have waited to be wanted for who I am . . .
“Come.” He swept her cloak from the sand and wrapped it around her. “We must get you warm.”
Her gaze dropped to the sealskin lying just beyond the reach of the waves. “What about you?”
His face set in familiar, formidable lines. He stooped for her skirt and blouse. “I will not put my pleasure before my duty to you.”
That, she thought, was his strength. And her problem. She appreciated his care of her. But who took care of him?
“You can’t always put off what you want, what you need, because you feel responsible for everything and everybody else.”
Speaking the words, she even believed them. Who knew?
Conn’s mouth compressed with annoyance. That was okay, Lucy told herself. Annoyance was an emotion. She could deal with his emotions.
“I am responsible,” he said, very coolly and precisely.
“Which is one of the reasons I love you,” she told him honestly. “But sometimes—now, for instance—those responsibilities can wait. I can wait.”
“You should not have to.”
She dug her heels in the sand. “Neither should you.”
She could see the turmoil swirling in his eyes, gray as storm clouds.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked gently.
“The selkie flow as the sea flows. The water is our blood, our home, our life, our delight. Yet if we are to survive, someone must remain on shore to reason and to rule.”
“Someone has to be the grown-up,” she murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
She shook her head. She admired Conn’s decision to step up, to step into his father’s role. Hadn’t she and Caleb, in their different ways, tried to do the same? But doing so had cost them a part of their
childhood.
It had cost Conn a piece of himself.
“You think if you Change, you’ll forget who you are? That you’ll stay out at sea like your father?”
Conn’s face was bleak as February. “That I will want to. Yes.”
“I don’t believe it.” She stooped, as he had done, and raised his sealskin from the sand. “You’ll come back.”
“You cannot know that.” His voice was strangled.
“ ‘Trust me,’ you said, remember?” she quoted back at him softly. “ ‘Trust yourself.’ And the crazy thing is, I did. I do.”
Contrary to all her expectations and experience, she trusted him not to leave her.
She held the heavy pelt out to him. “I know because I know you. We’re connected. Forever, just like you said.”
The wet leather of Lucy’s boots chafed her ankles as she climbed the track to the tower. Madadh loped ahead.
Conn had insisted she return with the dog to the castle. As she reached the ridge, however, she turned for one final sight of the beach.
Her lover stood at the water’s edge, a statue of male beauty cast in gleaming bronze. The setting sun burnished the hard curve of his shoulders, the long muscles of his legs, and set the gold medallion at his neck aflame. A burst of foam ran over his feet.
Lucy’s breath caught. She hugged his shirt to her chest.
With a matador’s grace, he swung the sealskin into the air, aided by a gust of wind that lifted the heavy pelt and blew Lucy’s hair into her eyes. She pushed hastily at the blowing strands.
Conn was gone.
An enormous black bull seal reared on the beach in his place.
She bit her lip to keep from crying out in shock, loss, wonder, protest.
It was so big. He—Conn—was so big, at least twice the size he had been as a man.
It—he—hunched over the rocks, ungainly, awkward, and powerful. The water rushed to meet him.
The first wave rippled along his sides. The next broke over his head. The surf exploded in a burst of force and movement, and then he was beyond the breakers, one with the water, suddenly graceful, suddenly free.
His beauty closed her throat. Yearning filled her chest.
She had seen seals before.
In Maine.
At a distance.
She had glimpsed the sleek, dark heads appearing in the shining sea, rarely enough to seem like magic. Their eyes were wide, wise, and round, human enough to spark legends or stir the longings of lonely sailors.
Or so Lucy had thought.
She had never imagined anything or anyone like Conn.
He crested and dived with liquid power and fluid joy, moving away from her, heading toward the open ocean. We flow as the sea flows.
Her face was wet. She tasted salt. Spray or tears?
He would come back, she told herself fiercely. They were connected. Forever.
She stayed on the path a long time, her heart swollen with longing, watching the sea.
17
CONN’S SIDE OF THE BED WAS EMPTY, HIS PILLOW cold and undented, when Lucy woke.
She flipped onto her stomach, wrestling the covers and her concern. What did she expect? He wasn’t some harried executive out for an after-work jog. He wasn’t her father, stumbling home when the bars closed.
Conn was selkie. He was . . .
A scrape. A thump. A rustle from the wardrobe.
Her heart leaped with love and relief. He was here.
She lifted herself on one elbow, shoving her hair back from her face. Conn stood before the wardrobe. She glimpsed a slice of his naked back before his shirt dropped over his head. His sealskin lay like a rug before the hearth, the rich, dark fur gleaming in the last embers of the fire. Her breath caught.
Conn turned. “I woke you. Good.”
“You’re home.” Her voice was husky with sleep and welcome.
“Yes.” He strode briskly to the bed, his austere face relaxed and open, his eyes dancing silver. “I brought you a present.”
She blinked. She barely recognized him in this mood, warm and playful. His early morning energy made her want to burrow right back under the covers.
And drag him with her.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “Give it to me.”
Conn grinned like . . . okay, not like a little boy. No little boy had that wicked, knowing curve to his mouth. But he looked amazingly pleased with himself and with her. He flipped back the covers. “In the courtyard.”
“Hey!” Laughing and shivering, she made a grab for the blankets. “I’m naked here.”
“I noticed.” The glint in his eyes became even more pronounced. She shivered again in pleasure. “Very nice. Come on.”
Lucy gawked. She had received presents before. Cal had seen to that. On Christmas Eve, after the bar closed, their family would gather in front of the TV and unwrap their gifts to each other: a ball, a board game, a pair of gloves. But she had never had the experience of waking early Christmas morning and scrambling downstairs.
Heart fluttering with unfamiliar excitement, she dragged on her clothes and followed Conn down the tower’s spiraling stairs.
“It’s not a pony, is it?” she joked.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps so that she almost ran into his broad shoulders.
He turned. “You want a pony.”
She stood on the step above him, their faces almost on a level. She smiled into his eyes. “Not since I was about eight.”
“I am relieved to hear it,” he said dryly.
Love for him tightened her chest. Her throat.
“Conn.”
He waited, eyebrows raised.
He was selkie. How could she make him understand what it meant to her to have her desires considered, her needs met? By him. More than by any other man, any other human, she had ever known.
“I . . . Thank you,” she said softly. “You’ve already given me everything I ever wanted.”
His eyes deepened with emotion. His mouth curved, tender and amused. “You might have said so earlier,” he complained, his voice wry. “I could have been back hours ago.”
She laughed and jumped off the last step into his arms.
“A rosebush,” Lucy said.
Her voice was flat. Stunned.
Conn shifted his gaze from her downturned head to the wet burlap sack on the courtyard stones. Four thorny canes protruded from the mouth of the bag. The damned bush had been the very devil to transport.
Despite his own disappointment with her reaction, he could not blame her for her lack of enthusiasm.
“Not much of one, I am afraid.” It was almost winter, after all. “I brought it from Scotland. For your garden.”
“You . . . dug it up?”
He remembered—too late—that she had problems with him taking things. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Yes.”
“How did you get it here?”
Dragging it with him through the sea. “There was some little magic involved,” he admitted.
Lucy regarded the pathetic bundle of sticks with their sharp, wicked thorns. Anything looking less like a rosebush would be hard to imagine.
“There are seeds, too,” he offered, feeling like a fool.
Never surrender to impulse.
He should have brought her pearls or gold, precious treasures to show her she was precious to him. But Griff had advised him to pay attention to her character and habits, to find something she wanted but could not ask for.
He ought to strangle Griff.
She raised her head. Her eyes were huge and translucent with tears. Her expression struck him like a quick blow to his gut.
“You brought me a garden,” she whispered.
He shrugged uncomfortably. Never admit emotion. Never reveal weakness. Yet with her, his defenses crumbled like the mortar of the tower. “Only the beginnings of one. To remind you of home.”
“Oh, Conn.” To his horror, the tears welled and began to roll.
Sh
e scrambled from the ground and launched herself at his chest.
He had just enough presence of mind to catch her. Soft hair, soft breasts, soft, foolish, female sounds beyond his understanding like the gurgle of the fountain. He deciphered enough, however, to comprehend that she was pleased, that he had pleased her, and the slippery knot in his gut eased.
He stroked her back, pressed a kiss to her hair. An unfamiliar tenderness swelled his chest until he could scarcely breathe. All this fuss for sticks and seeds. She had not cried like this—noisy, abandoned tears—when he kidnapped her or when she faced the demon wolves or when she dragged him back from the gate of Hell.
“You . . . So thoughtful . . . Love it,” she wept.
He was baffled. “Then why are you crying?”
She shook her head, mumbling something into his chest.
He put a finger under her chin and lifted her head. “Tell me.”
“I know I can’t . . . And I don’t want to.” More tears spilled. “Not to stay.”
His heart froze in his chest.
“You do not wish to stay here.” It was possible, he discovered, to form words, to speak calmly and precisely, even as his whole world turned to ice.
She raised those soft, drowned eyes to his. “Of course I want to stay,” she said. “I miss them, that’s all.”
His heart began beating again. “Miss . . .”
“My family.”
Ah. He released her.
Her teeth dented her lower lip. “It’s all right. I totally get you can’t leave Sanctuary for a two-week jaunt across the ocean. I’m sure they’re all fine. It’s just . . .” Her voice trailed away.
Conn clasped his hands behind his back. What had she said to him last night? “You can’t always put off what you want because you feel responsible for everything and everybody else.” Yet she was willing to sacrifice her desire for his sake.
“Would it ease your mind to see them?” he asked.
She blinked. “You said that wasn’t possible.”
“Not possible to visit,” he conceded. “That does not mean you cannot observe them.”
“Can you do that?” Lucy asked.
“I saw you,” he reminded her simply.
Taking her hands, he led her to sit on the edge of the fountain, bubbling with magic, sparkling with memories.
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