He was sitting on the shabby sofa, looking as relaxed and as at home as he might have looked seated on one of the rich leather couches in his own den. Amber was on his knee, and together they were looking at one of her favorite books. In the kitchen Shirley was working on the cinnamon rolls, transferring some of them from the cooling rack to a plate. Mark’s eyes were cast downward, gut as if he sensed Jillian’s presence, he lifted them and looked at her, smiling. Sitting Amber on the couch beside him, he stood up and came to Jillian.
“You’re just a little bit of a thing without that long tail, aren’t you?”
“Five three is just a tad below average,” she said, feeling breathless with him standing so close. She supposed to someone over six feet, she would look like a little bit of a thing.
“I don’t think there’s a lot about you that’s below average, Mermaid,” he said quietly, his gaze sweeping from the top of her turbaned head down over her pink jumpsuit to the tips of her pink sneakers. Jillian’s insides did flips and dives as she met his admiring gaze, but she knew she had Io break this spell he was casting over her. Quickly she turned to speak to her daughter to explain how she had been caught on the wrong line. But Amber, with the attention span of most six-year-olds, hopped off the couch, dropping her picture book to the floor, and ran to the back door in response to another child’s call. “Billy and I are building a fort,” she said just as the screen door slammed.
“Your robe. And thanks,” said Jillian, handing it to him. He dropped it onto the couch.
“Coffee’s ready,” Shirley said, setting a cream pitcher in the middle of the table beside the sugar bowl and turning to busy herself pouring out three cups of coffee. She carried two of the hot rolls outside, and Jillian heard her call the children.
As Mark took a seat at the kitchen table, Jillian couldn’t help remembering how he’d simply rung for coffee and had Edward bring it to where he was. He didn’t seem to mind the way things were done here, though, and she felt a small warmth begin to grow inside her. As if he were feeling it, too, he smiled at her.
“I’d really like you to come back to my place and share that steak with me tonight,” he said quietly, “or we could go out for dinner somewhere.”
She met his gaze. Thinking of dressing up in something pretty, of sitting across a table from him, of the way he’d look dressed formally, made her stomach flutter madly and her heart leap wildly. How long had it been since she’d gone out to dinner with a man like Mark Forsythe?
The fact of the matter was that she had never gone out for dinner with a man like him, because he was one of a kind.
The trouble was he was not her kind. And if she did go out for dinner with him, she wouldn’t know what to wear. She didn’t think she had anything that would be suitable for the places he’d want to go. And as for going to his place ...
She liked him too well, and she didn’t think she could handle what would ultimately happen between them if they started dating. It had been more than two years, and there still was one hurdle she had yet to cross. Sometimes she had wondered if she would ever be able to cross it. But it hadn’t become an issue. Not until now. And now it would only become one if she let it. Yet looking at him, she felt cold, icy fear creep through her, and she shivered. With Mark Forsythe, it could very easily become a terribly important issue.
“I’m sorry. That’s not possible. I have to work tonight.” In truth her first show didn’t start until nine o’clock. She would have had plenty of time for an early dinner before work, but ...
“Then lunch,” he insisted, just as quietly.
Again she shook her head and sipped her coffee.
Her mother returned to the table and set down a plate of steaming rolls and pushed it close to Mark, who helped himself to one and then broke off a morsel, blowing on it to cool it before he put it into his mouth. It was delicious, but nowhere near as delicious as Jillian Lockstead’s lips had been.
“Please?” he said softly, and then went very still inside, wondering why he was pleading with her. He had never done such a thing before. He frowned and looked down at the cinnamon-covered raisins that had fallen to the plate before him. Then he glanced warily at Jillian, wishing he knew where the mermaid-magic ended and the man-woman attraction began. Dammit, he didn’t believe in magic any more than he believed in mermaids! But the attraction just wouldn’t quit.
“I have three math students coming in”—she glanced at the clock on the control panel of the stove—“forty-five minutes.”
He took another bite of the cinnamon roll, looking as if he had been transported to heaven, then swallowed. He’d thought he was going to compliment Shirley on her cooking, when he heard himself say, “Then what about a late dinner? When you get off work?”
She smiled. “On weekends, I don’t finish my last show until one-fifteen. By the time I’ve showered and changed and driven home, it’s usually after two and much too late for dinner. But thanks anyway. It was nice of you to ask me.”
This time, to his relief, he managed to get himself under control. He shrugged and said easily, “Another time, then,” and stood to leave.
Jillian realized that of course he didn’t really care if she went to dinner with him or not. There must be hundreds of women who could and would and wanted to. And when it came to the last—those wanting to—she was certainly right up there among the most eager. She wished she hadn’t had to turn him down.
Jillian found that Mark was constantly on her mind as the afternoon progressed, and she had to force herself to concentrate on her students as well as the needs of her daughter. He seemed to accompany her as she drove to work that night with Robin. But as she prepared to slip into the top of the huge tank in the Pearldiver’s Club, ready to make her entrance from within the concealing fronds of kelp, she finally managed to clear her mind of anything and everything that a mermaid wouldn’t think about.
Taking a deep breath, she lowered herself into the tepid water, entering another world.
Mark had never been to the club before. He sat at a table on the second tier that surrounded the massive tank, the focal point of the Pearldiver’s club, and took in the lush aquatic growth planted in the big saltwater aquarium. Huge, waving fronds of seaweed, green, red, brown, and gold, grew from coral-encrusted rocks and what might have been the hull of a sunken pirate ship.
Vibrantly colored schools of tropical fish darted in the concert between fans of pink, white, black, and orange coral, as if moved by a single mind, swing-through the beams of waving spotlights. Shells lay here and there—large, spiked ones with opalescent, peachy insides; small, delicate ones shaped like long spirals in white and gray and coal black, and even a couple of brilliant yellow ones.
An ornate jeweled tiara of blue and white stones hung from a coral branch, and a pewter loving cup stood half-buried in white sand near the center of the bottom of the tank beside a tilted brass chest, which had strings of pearls spilling forth, along with rings and bracelets and necklaces of rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. The gleam of gold and the glow of emeralds glittered within its depths, and glinting silver coins were scattered all around.
A moving spotlight followed one school of fish, then switched to another. Slowly, the houselights began to dim. From somewhere in the recesses of the darkening club, a slow drumroll began then built, as the lights in the tank slowly brightened until it was a vast, green glow within the darkness of the packed club.
All eyes were on it, all sound had stopped. She slowly came from behind a huge sheet of shiny brown seaweed with her hair floating behind her like a backlighted halo of gold. Wrapped around her head was a broad, sequined band that glittered with the same blue, green, and silver colors as her shapely body and tail, hiding from the world the fact that even a mermaid could bang her head on the rocks.
A collective sigh went up from the audience. The women all seemed to want to change places with her if even for only an hour, to have a chance to be the magic, ethereal creature she was, the stu
ff of fantasies, the stuff of dreams, the stuff of a thousand legends, cynosure of every eye. And the men seemed to yearn to be in that very authentic looking seascape with her, swimming effortlessly through the water as a bird would fly through the air. Each one seemed lost in a secret dream of capturing her, holding her in his arms while they rolled and twisted and cavorted together in the unreal realm where she seemed so at home.
But one, only one, sighed and smiled as he remembered exactly what it felt like to hold that mermaid in his arms.
Enchanted, he watched her, caught up in the beauty she created as she went from a rolling dive into a graceful soar, chasing the fine stream of bubbles that rose away from her, then abandoning them, letting them rise unheeded as she made for the bottom of her man-made ocean environment. She twisted sideways, and reached out a hand to the glass, touching the same spot where a red-faced, middle-aged man had placed his palm. She smiled, and her sea-green eyes shone as if he could see the admiration and longing in the man’s face, but then she was gone, chasing a bright blue and gold fish as it darted for the cover of a mass of green fronds.
The mermaid, too, disappeared behind the green-cry, only to reappear seconds later on a different tangent, bubbles still streaming in a fine silver trickle from her softly parted lips. Her tail flipped gracefully, and she did a complete loop, landing upside down against the wall where yet another lucky customer was treated to one of her glowing smiles and a fingertip pressed to the lips he pressed to the glass Then she rose up, up, up, until all that was visible was the pale shimmer of her arms and hair, and then even that was gone, leaving only the swirl of her tail as she half-emerged from the water to let herself be seen by the customers seated on the mezzanine surrounding the top of the tank. She stayed for some time, and then descended once more, swirling through the water with the ease of a porpoise. For half an hour she cavorted, her graceful sweeps and dives, her tantalizing disappearances into and reappearances from the swaying, living growth, holding her audience in thrall. Now and then, she would choose an article of jewelry from the treasure chest—a rope of pearls to adorn her graceful neck; a glittering ruby bracelet for one arm, a gleaming series of golden bangles for the other. A ruby hair clip arose with her, along with a silver-backed comb one of the times she left the water to sit at the top of the tank. When she returned to the depths, she was followed by a shower of coins and costume jewelry which she gathered in both hands and let fall into the treasure chest.
She teased the schools of tropical fish, chasing them with white, fluttering hands. Then, with tidbits she picked up from the bottom or plucked from coral fans growing out of encrusted rocks, he tempted them to come to her, as she tempted the club’s clients to come close, closer to the glass. Then, long before anyone had a chance to tire of her show, she was gone. The main lights in the lank were dimmed leaving only a few moving spots through which the exotic tropical fish swam to show off their vivid colors.
The music, of which Mark had been unaware, now changed from the floating, mesmerizing strains that had accompanied Jillian’s show to an upbeat, louder tune over which applause rose and rose and then finally faded, leaving voices to grow loud and glasses to tinkle with ice once more as drinks were ordered with renewed enthusiasm and the houselights came up again.
People around him ordered more drinks and Food, talked and laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. He was even invited to join another table, the people seeming concerned that he was alone and not having any fun. He declined. He knew that only the day before he, too, would have preferred to have been part of a laughing group. Yet now, somehow, it didn’t appeal to him. His gaze kept straying from his watch to the dimly lit tank, where the fish were now the main attraction, knowing that the next forty-five minutes were likely to be the longest he had ever spent.
When the drum roll came again and the houselights dimmed as the tank was illuminated, he held his breath, waiting. This time she didn’t (come seductively from behind a curtain of seaweed. Instead she burst forth in a cloud of bubbles from a cave in the rocks that he hadn’t noticed before, her tail swirling, her arms stroking strongly, and she rose directly to the top of the tank.
Looking up, he could see that she had come out of the water, and as many others tried to do, he made a dash for the stairs. Being tall, his long strides carried him quickly to the mezzanine floor, but he was too late to find a place near the rail.
Still, over the heads of others he could see her. Sitting on a rock that projected from the water near the center of the tank, she stretched out an arm and filled a peach-colored shell with the clear, fresh water, which came streaming down from a crag high above her small island. Filling it again and again, she rinsed her shoulders then her hair, trickling the water through its sleek pale gold. She drank deeply from the shell’s lip before letting it fall, tumbling through the depths toward the bottom while she combed her long hair, now and then lifting her tail from the water and splashing her delighted audience. When a customer stood and withdrew a glittering piece of jewelry from his pocket, tossing it toward the mermaid, she caught it expertly and blew the donor a kiss. The audience exploded with applause, then she dove beneath the surface once more, and the applause rose to nearly deafen Mark as he made his way back down the stairs.
Once more at the lower level of her liquid stage, he saw her emerge from a group of coral fans and approach the glass to greet yet another grateful customer with an intangible touch of her fingertips to his lips. She reached out and caught another trinket dropped from somewhere above, smiled, and rose lazily to the surface, where he was certain she would blow a kiss to the bestower of the bejeweled bracelet she now wore around her right wrist.
Something inside him snapped, and he stood there, fighting fury as he watched her act come to an end. It was her last show of the evening, and he was certain he detected weariness in her wave just before she ducked into a crevice in the rocks and disappeared from view. At once, before the crowd had risen from their chairs, he turned on his heel to stride from the club.
He was sure he would never come back.
It was stupid. It was jealously. It was the most primitive emotion he had ever experienced, but lie hated having his mermaid accept baubles from other men. Oh, hell, he was out of his mind! She wasn’t his. He didn’t want her to be his!
He got into his car, slammed the door, and leaned on the wheel. He shouldn’t have come to the Pearldiver’s Club. It wasn’t his kind of place. He started the car and put it in gear, pulling out of the parking lot so fast, the tires squealed.
“Pearldiver’s Club,” he said scathingly to himself. “What a hokey name. What a stupid concept.”
All those fantasizing, panting men gawking at Jillian, pressing their hands and faces to the tank’s walls, pretending they could feel her touch through the glass. He had touched her skin with his own. He remembered its silk. He didn’t have to fantasize. It was there, imprinted on his brain, indelible and burning.
He hated the remembered sensation even while he yearned for it again. He slowed, stopped at the side of the road for several minutes to think. Then he made an illegal U-turn, heading back the way he had come.
Jillian had seen Mark. She was certain of it. In spite of being without her contact lenses, she was positive he had been there. As she showered the salt from her tired, aching body, she wondered why there was no note from him in her dressing room. Wasn’t that the way it was done? She knew it was. It had happened before, only all the other notes had been addressed simply to “The Mermaid,” as if it was too much trouble for the man to find out her name. She’d often thought that perhaps the men who asked her for dates didn’t want to spoil the fantasy by allowing her an identity other than Mermaid. Many of them had offered her money for personal appearances at stag parties or pool parties. A few even had offered her money for more than just that. It hurt her to feel that so many of her audience thought of her as nothing but a commodity. But maybe it went with the territory, and as long as she didn’t feel lik
e one herself, what other people thought hardly mattered.
Except for Ken Bristol, the congressional candidate, she had made it a point of refusing all and guy offers. For one thing, she was much too tired alter three shows on weeknights and four on Fridays and Saturdays to even consider going anywhere with anyone for any reason at all. She had agreed to the candidate’s request because it had not come in the form of a note in her dressing I room, but as a formal business proposition to her through her boss.
Yet in spite of her refusal to have a late dinner with Mark Forsythe, when she’d seen his distinctive, salt-and-pepper hair and tanned face in the crowd around the mezzanine, she had expected him to repeat his invitation. And she knew if he had, she would have accepted. No one ate dinner at two o’clock in the morning, however, a cup of coffee and some scrambled eggs would have been nice.
She sighed and hopped out of the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, and remembered that he hadn’t taken his robe with him when he’d left her mother’s house. It was now draped over the back of a chair in her bedroom. She blew her hair dry, dressed in jeans and a warm sweater, pulled on socks and sneakers, and grabbed up her purse.
Letting herself out the back door into the brightly lighted parking lot, keys already in her hand, she unlocked her car, locked the door behind her as she closed it, and then started the engine. As she pulled out onto the street, she yawned.
Because of the publicity stunt that morning, she’d been up for nearly twenty hours and hadn’t been able to sleep in as she usually did after her late stints at the club. She was thankful it was Sunday and no students would be coming. When she got up, if she wasn’t too tired, she could take Amber on a long-promised picnic and get to bed again by nine. Sleep, she thought. Blessed sleep. There never seemed to be enough time for it, and she found herself yawning too frequently. Maybe she was just bored. Nightclub work, as well as it paid, certainly wasn’t very mentally stimulating.
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