“What are you doing?” she said, struggling in his embrace. “It isn’t going to attack me, Quinn!”
“No, but that is.” He pointed a few hundred feet offshore, where a great dorsal fin at least as tall as a man had broken the surface of the choppy dark water. The creature—whatever it was—was zeroing in on the baby’s distress.
“Oh dear God,” Sasha said as she struggled to slip past Quinn. “We’ve got to get the baby out of the water!”
“Out of the water?” he cried, trying to hold her back. “Are you insane, woman?”
But she’d already shoved past him—she was small and quick, and he had trouble holding onto her—and then she was sprinting into the knee-high water where the baby was making pitiful noises and flapping its flippers with wild abandon. She didn’t think. She just raced up to the baby, took its slick long neck in an embrace, and tried to drag it over the rocks and onto the safety of beach.
It was like the baby was made of stone. Slippery stone. She couldn’t budge it more than an inch.
“Sasha!” Quinn was furious, not that that was anything unusual. “Sasha, you’re mad!”
“Help me get her to shore!” she said, trying to angle herself so she had a better hold on the baby’s neck but was still able to keep an eye on the dorsal fin growing larger by the second. Her hands kept sliding off the slick surface of the baby’s skin and she felt her frustration mount moment by moment. The baby mewled pitifully. “Quinn!” she cried. “Please! You’ve got to help me!”
“Mother of Mercy,” Quinn said, but he raced dutifully into the foamy grey water to help her rescue a prehistoric reptile from another prehistoric reptile. He grabbed the baby around the bulk of its body and started shifting it along the slick rocks, straining with every inch.
“Quinn, please hurry!” Sasha said as she continued to tug on the baby’s neck.
The baby began screaming, its whole body electric with fear.
Quinn huffed and puffed. “Sasha, my dear, I’m rather fond of you, but if you don’t be quiet and let me work, I’m going to leave this baby of yours to the shark!”
“Do you think it’s a shark?” Every time she glanced out to shore, the dorsal fin seemed to grow bigger, the shark that much closer. The fin alone was as tall as a sailboat’s sail. She shuddered to think of the size of the creature it belonged to.
“Sasha, get out of the way!”
“I won’t leave you!”
“Sasha, get out of the way now or this ‘baby’ of yours is going to crush you.”
Nearly whimpering with fear, she shifted out of the way.
Quinn was much stronger than he looked. With a great cry, he flipped the baby up off the rocks and onto the soft beach with a puff of sand, where it started floundering. “Help me,” he said. Together, the two of them started rolling the baby through the sand like a beer barrel while it mewled in alarm. Quinn said, sweating and sand-covered, “How does this thing survive on its own?”
“It’s an apex predator.”
“Really? It looks rather foolish to me.”
“Maybe it gets smarter with age.” Panting, she stopped rolling the baby through the piles of sand to check on the shark, which was practically right on their heels. It was as monstrously big as a whale, the shallows barely reaching its gills. The moment Sasha saw it she screamed. She screamed at the size of it. She screamed at the size of its teeth. She couldn’t help herself. The only thing keeping the shark from coming right up on the beach were the rocks that had moored the baby plesiosaur. The creature was a nightmare of huge black mechanical eyes and a mouth so large it could have swallowed a man whole.
Quinn snagged her wrist and pulled her to him. They were on an incline now, the baby floundering in the sand at their feet. They tripped, and then all three of them started rolling down the beach Jack and Jill style. The world turned round and round. It was a bumpy, painful ride that didn’t end until they were halfway to the sea cave. Quinn did his best to cushion her fall. Unfortunately, the baby rolled right over him, leaving him dazed in the sand with Sasha landing atop him in a very unladylike sort of way. He let out his breath in a grunt and stared up at her.
They were less than an inch apart, her legs straddling his hips, her hands flat to the hard muscles of his chest. He had a small cut at his temple where the baby had cuffed him. She found her handkerchief, soaked from the sea, and used it to wipe away the bit of blood there. Quinn flinched when the salt entered the wound. She expected him to be furious. She expected him to berate her. Instead, the most peculiar expression overcame his face. Instead of angry, he looked positively elated.
“Quinn…” she said, feeling his hands move to clutch her shoulders and draw her closer. She had absolutely no idea how to finish that statement. Luckily, she was saved when the baby started crying and rolling helplessly in the sand next to them. She slid off Quinn, who sighed with regret by the sudden turn of events as she stood up to attend to the baby.
And just in time, as Toby had appeared at the mouth of the cave, looking tousled and confused. “What in hell is going on?” he asked. Then his eyes widened when he spotted the baby plesiosaur floundering in the sand. “And what in hell is that?”
CHAPTER 7
First they got the baby plesiosaur centered on Quinn’s frock coat, then he and Toby started pulling her down the beach toward an isolated shallows with Sasha following after. She toted a waterskin and she poured water over the baby’s back to keep her skin moist under the scorching sun as they pulled her along.
“Sasha, I really must protest your habit of collecting pets. This environment isn’t appropriate for such sport,” said Quinn, his teeth clenched as he tugged the enormously heavy creature a few more inches down the beach. The softness of the sand didn’t help much. It had been soft and deep enough to trap the Ceratosaurus knee-deep, and it wasn’t conducive to pulling a half-ton creature through it. They were leaving quite a rut.
“Dotty isn’t a pet. I don’t mean to keep her. She’s just an animal in trouble,” Sasha explained simply.
“You named the damned dinosaur?” Quinn cried in horror.
She frowned at Quinn and offered Dotty another berry. “She’s not a dinosaur. She’s a marine reptile.” Dotty took the berry gracefully, swallowed it down, then flapped her flippers in the hopes that more would follow. More did.
“How do we know this thing isn’t going to turn on us, come up the beach one night while we’re all asleep, and eat all of us?” Toby asked. He’d stripped off his dirty white work shirt and sweat gleamed against the sun-bronzed muscles of his arms and chest as he yanked Dotty a few more painful inches down the beach.
“Dotty doesn’t eat humans. She eats fish and crustaceans,” Sasha explained.
“Are you certain of that?”
Sasha hesitated. “I’m fairly certain.”
“Fairly?” Quinn said. “You don’t know?”
“The periodicals allude to an all-fish diet.”
“Well, as long as the periodicals allude to the beast not eating human flesh, it must be true!”
“Quinn,” she said, getting exasperated now. “Your sarcasm is not welcomed.”
Toby elbowed Quinn. “Don’t talk to Sasha like that.”
Quinn gave the boy his now familiar disgruntled look. “I should have left you to the Sen…”
“Please,” said Sasha with a long, weary sigh. “Stop.”
Quinn almost started saying something, then thought better of it. Instead, he concentrated on the work at hand, though his eyes periodically shifted to Toby, taking in the boy’s physique as he worked as if he were assessing him. When Toby pulled, Quinn pulled harder as if it was a contest between them. Although Quinn wasn’t built like Toby, who’d worked his entire life with horses, he was strong and wiry, without even an inch of fat on his body like so many men his age. At times it was difficult to believe that he was twice her age; he strained the seams of his shirt very nicely.
That wasn’t a proper Christian though
t, she realized, and dutifully turned her back. Closing her eyes briefly, she said a little prayer that God would lead her out of the path of temptation. She’d already given in too many times where Quinn was concerned.
They were coming upon an incline, which she knew would help some. If they could get Dotty over the ridge, they’d be able to roll her down to the water’s edge. “Give her a push, old boy,” said Toby, and Quinn pushed, though his expression remained as sour as ever. Between the two of them they managed to roll Dotty down the incline and into the lagoon. A natural row of rocky outcroppings a few hundred feet offshore made the lagoon impenetrable to large predators—there was no way they could get their enormous bulk around the rocks—but it would allow a small predator like Dotty to maneuver easily. She seemed very keen on getting back into the ocean, and within seconds was slicing through the water.
The two men waded out into the water to stand beside Sasha. “I hope she’ll be all right now,” Sasha said, watching Dotty dive for fish.
“Bloody hell,” said Quinn under his breath. “I can’t believe she named the bloody thing.” With a huff, he walked away.
CHAPTER 8
After a supper of roasted prehistoric crustacean—she thought it might have been a sea scorpion of some kind—Sasha excused herself and went down to the water’s edge to check for signs of Dotty. She wasn’t very hopeful. Surely the plesiosaur would have swum out to the open sea, lured by the prospects of more kinds of fish. But after standing on the shore for a few minutes she spotted a small head on a long snakelike neck breaking the surface and gliding through the water of the secluded little shallow.
The water was a clear blue-green, and glittered in the setting sun like it was full of diamonds.
She turned to glance behind her. Both of the men were still occupied with after-dinner duties. Quinn was gathering and itemizing their supplies for the trek ahead of them tomorrow, and Toby had taken one of their homemade javelins for protection and had gone down the beach to hunt for crustaceans. She was alone.
She glared up at the boiling reddish sun, suddenly realizing how long it had been since she’d felt clean and not covered in sweat and brambles from walks through jungles, or had sand in her shoes. With no one watching, and the secluded little lagoon stretching out in welcome, she stripped off her once-white debutante dress—it wasn’t much more than brown rags now—then her chemise, stockings and shoes, and quickly dived into the water before she had any second thoughts. It was much colder than she’d anticipated; she came up gasping and shivering, her skin pebbling all over. But oh, it felt so good to be wet and cool and clean!
She swam a few laps, circling close to shore and keeping an eye out at all times for potential dangers. The larger marine reptiles might not be able to draw inland, but that didn’t mean there weren’t smaller dangers lurking about. Primitive jellyfish, sea scorpions, even prehistoric eels could present problems if she tangled with them.
Dotty skimmed by her at high speeds, then made an arc around her before swimming further out on her neverending quest for fish. Sasha wasn’t afraid of Dotty. Much. Dotty wasn’t much larger than she was. She wouldn’t actually think of making a dinner of Sasha Strange, would she?
Something slippery brushed past her leg and she nearly jumped before noticing that the water teemed with fish. All kinds of fish, of so many varieties and colors that they looked like little living jewels glowing in the water. For all the danger and fear this place generated, it still managed to serve up an amazing variety of beautiful things, like the glittering fish and clear, tropical green water. She could almost love this place…
A splash made her jump and swing around, bobbing in the water like a top. At first, she thought it might be Dotty playing with her, but then she spotted a second set of clothes crumpled on the beach beside her own. Like her, someone had decided that an evening swim was in order. The problem was, the clothes were too far away to see whose they belonged to. “Quinn?” she called. And then, “Toby?”
No answer. And no one broke the surface. She was alone.
Sasha felt her heart trip in her chest. Suddenly she was cold, and this little swim didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. She had just started stroking back to shore when someone touched her leg. She jerked away with a cry, splashing water compulsively. If it was Quinn, she was going to kill him for frightening her! But when a head finally broke the surface, she saw it was tanned and smiling and had longish brown hair plastered down over boyish dark eyes.
“Toby!” she said, getting angry now and splashing him. “You frightened me.” She kicked at the water, putting space between them, suddenly acutely aware that she was very much naked. Toby smiled cheekily and swam a few paces closer, which only made Sasha splash back a few more paces. “What are you doing?”
Toby treaded water, smiling his charming smile. It occurred to her that he was probably as naked as she was, though the water came up to both their chins. “Swimming.”
“I’d prefer to swim alone,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t. But don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous to swim alone? There could be anything in these waters.” He offered her his beautiful, lopsided grin. It made her remember him as a little boy, climbing trees with him, catching fireflies. All those nights she’d snuck books out to him in the stables where he’d smiled like this in welcome. He looked like a boy and a man all at once. Her charming Toby. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t angry with him.
“Dotty’s looking out for me,” she said, hoping to chase him out of the water. “I’m in no danger.”
“I think Dotty’s off fishing.” He swam that much closer.
Now she had a decision to make. She could swim farther out and take her chances with whatever might be skulking in the deeper parts of the lagoon, or stay where she was. It seemed ridiculous that she was even thinking about running away. Toby couldn’t be any more frightening than anything that might be out there.
Toby swam right up to her, which put them in an awkward, intimate space as they both dogpaddled to stay afloat in the water. She couldn’t find the sandy bottom of the shallow lagoon at all anymore. They were most certainly in depths that were becoming treacherous. Toby gave her his lopsided smile, leaned in close, and flicked some wet hair off the side of her face.
“Toby…” she began.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding concerned suddenly. “We used to swim at your aunt’s farm, remember? Remember when you invited me to see her horses?”
They’d climbed the trees, and fallen, and ridden the horses, and fallen off those too. They’d swum in the beautiful lake that bordered her aunt’s pastures, and had managed to conquer all of that in just one summer. She gave him a sidelong look. “We were children then.”
He splashed closer and Sasha kicked away, turned and started swimming back toward shore. Toby followed, staying abreast with her. Like her, he was a strong swimmer. He looked amused, playful. As they drew closer to the shore, and the water became shallower, he grabbed her around her wet, bare middle to stop her. She snapped around and he pulled her closer like they were children in her aunt’s lake again, though she had a feeling that the games of the past, the dunking and laughter, were not on his agenda today. He smiled cheekily at her as he drew her against his cool wet body and she felt things that made her blush all over. “Did you think about what I said about how different this place is?” Toby asked, sounding almost breathless. “About how there are no rules here?”
She knew what he meant. She was naïve, perhaps, but she wasn’t stupid. “I thought about it,” she said quietly. “But I haven’t made any decisions about it yet.”
His face darkened. Over the years, much had changed about Toby. He was a man now, and she’d heard stories that he could drink and fight with the best of them down in the East End pubs. She felt a pulse of anger from him. “Sasha…”
“Toby, please, don’t. We have to keep our heads straight at the moment.” She didn’t want to go on. S
he didn’t want to have to explain Quinn to Toby. But maybe he suspected something, because he gave her a dubious look. “You know how I feel about you, Sasha. Do I have to spell it out?”
“Please, Toby,” she said, raising her hands between them to break his hold.
“Why are you pushing me away?” He glanced at shore, then back at her. His eyes clouded over. “Is there something between you and Quinn?”
“Toby, don’t. Please. Not now.”
“Is there?” he demanded to know, his voice growing hoarser by the moment.
She didn’t know what to say to that. She couldn’t sort out her feelings for Quinn at all. She was drawn to him, body and soul, that was all she knew. The Chinese believed that an invisible red string of destiny bound one soul to another. Yet it seemed ridiculous; Quinn was everything in a man she disliked. She had never so hated and wanted a man in her life. She had vowed to keep her distance, yet the more she tried not to think of Quinn, the more she did.
Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons) Page 12
