Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  Not him. Dylan scowled. His experience with his own family, with his father and his brother, made him despair of Regina ever accepting him.

  But she had to accept his protection, the necessity of it. For the sake of the child she carried. Whether she liked it or not.

  His hands closed into fists. When he had led her to the Jeep, she had leaned on him. Just for a moment. He could still feel her slight weight against his side, the pressure of her arm.

  He glanced at her, her clasped hands nestled between her thighs as if she sought to warm them, and fought a completely uncharacteristic urge to cover them with one of his own.

  The merfolk did not touch. Yet as the road wound down and around toward the harbor, he was conscious of her upright and fragile beside him, every shift of her body, every rasping intake of her breath.

  The Cherokee rumbled to a stop in front of the restaurant. The yellow crime scene tape was gone from the sidewalk. The lights of the dining room glowed through the wide plate glass windows.

  Caleb half turned in his seat; cleared his throat. “I’ve got to write up some kind of report that will satisfy the state guys. I’ll leave you two to . . .”

  His eyes met Dylan’s. Talk.

  “Get settled,” he said.

  Dylan nodded.

  Regina fumbled with her door handle as if she couldn’t wait to escape them both. Uneasiness tightened Dylan’s stomach. How much explaining would he have to do? What did she remember?

  His own door was locked. Before he could get out to assist her, Caleb had opened her door and helped her to the curb.

  Dylan’s jaw set. He pulled his duffel from the back of the Jeep and joined them.

  Regina’s gaze fell on the packed bag and narrowed.

  Dylan felt a lick of panic disguised as irritation. Did she think she could send him away? He leaned very close, close enough to see the pale parting of her hair, to inhale the private fragrance of her skin. “I’m staying,” he said softly, for her ears alone. “Deal with it.”

  Her eyes flashed. But whatever reply she might have made was lost as Antonia bustled through the maze of tables to unlock the front door.

  She reached to grab her daughter and then crossed her arms instead. Regina stood stiffly under the restaurant lights, all angles and shadows like a black-and-white drawing.

  Antonia regarded her daughter and scowled. “The doctor said warm fluids. I made soup.” The smell followed her from the kitchen, rich with chicken, vegetables, and garlic. “Sit down, I’ll get you some.”

  Regina smiled wanly. “Thanks. Is Nick—”

  “Already in bed. You can see him after you eat.”

  Dylan saw the indecision flicker on Regina’s face. “We’ll go up now,” he said.

  Antonia looked at him. Looked at his bag. Her eyebrows rose. “Will you.” Her tone made it not quite a question. “Planning on staying?”

  “Just for tonight,” Regina said in that rasping voice that sounded so incongruously, so ridiculously sexy coming from her thin, sharp face.

  His heart leaped. She wanted him. Or at least she was prepared to tolerate his presence. “Just for tonight.”

  Antonia snorted. “Well, you’re too old to need my permission for a sleepover, but I’d like to know what you’re going to say to Nick in the morning.”

  A red flush swept Regina’s face.

  “I’m helping take care of his mother,” Dylan said. “I’ll come down later for the soup.”

  “Hm. Well, go on,” Antonia said. “I’ve got to lock back up.”

  Dylan followed Regina through the disarranged tables. She still walked with difficulty, he noted with a frown. At the swinging door, she stopped, and the color that had come back to her cheeks faded away.

  He thought he knew why. The kitchen was her territory. Her little kingdom. And she had been brutally attacked in there less than twenty-four hours ago.

  His chest constricted. He eased the plastic bag from her grip with one hand, and reached around her with the other to nudge the door open. “I suppose you expect me to thank you because you didn’t let your mother throw me out.”

  Regina glanced at him, startled, her lashes dark smudges against her white face. And then her eyes lit with laughter. “Maybe I wanted the pleasure of doing it myself.”

  He grinned down at her.

  Her slim shoulders straightened, and she marched— hobbled, rather— under his outstretched arm. She went down the kitchen work aisle like a gauntlet and out the back door.

  She needed his assistance up the metal stairs. Or he told himself she did. Perhaps it was simply pleasant to touch her.

  When she fumbled with the plastic bag digging for her apartment key, he took it from her and fished the key from her wet jeans pocket. He was in control of the situation and himself.

  Until he stepped over the threshold of her apartment and the walls closed around him like a trap.

  She lived in a . . . home. The kind of home he had not known in nearly twenty-five years. Comfortable. Messy. The litter of human life was everywhere: pillows on the floor, a child’s artwork on the fridge, photos on the tables, a red blanket on the couch. Regina in a cap and gown smiled beside a dark-haired Antonia. Nick’s much smaller handprints were preserved in a frame on the wall.

  The children of the sea were magpies. Their sea caves and the court at Caer Subai were furnished with rich and shiny things— whatever fell beneath the waves that pleased their humor or caught their eyes. But their selections were not personal. They did not bear the weight of memory, the patina of sentiment. They did not cause this tightness in his throat, this howling in his chest.

  Nothing at Caer Subai ever changed. Gold and iron, sea and stone, would outlast these human keepsakes. But now, here, surrounded by the mementos of Regina’s life and her son’s childhood, Dylan was achingly aware of all that would change.

  And all that had been lost.

  He stood rooted on Regina’s shabby carpet, frozen with desire and despair.

  Regina saw him standing like a pillar of salt in the center of her living room and raised her chin a notch. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  She had bits of sea glass strung on fishing line dangling in her windows, green and gold against the darkness outside. Why should that jab at his heart?

  “Nick and I will be fine. You don’t have to stay.”

  Her tone drew his attention. Her jaw was at a belligerent angle, her eyes defensive. She was embarrassed, he realized. She thought he was critical of her home. Her housekeeping. He could hardly tell her that the sight of Nick’s crayon drawings, the fat white candles on the table, the popcorn kernels in the bowl by the TV, made something inside him crack and flow like glacier ice.

  He shrugged. “It’s all right.”

  “Right.” She waited a moment for some reaction he did not know how to give. “You can have the couch, then. I’m going to say good night to Nick.”

  A crack of light showed beneath the boy’s bedroom door. She opened it and disappeared inside, and Dylan could breathe again.

  * * *

  “Hey, kiddo.”

  Nick’s head jerked up. His comic book slithered to the floor. “Mom!”

  He was glad, so glad to see her. Even if she did look like crap. Her face was white and tired. Okay, he’d seen her tired before. But her neck . . . Oh, man. Her neck made him sick to his stomach.

  She caught him looking and tugged casually on her collar. “How you feeling?” she asked. She sounded like Nonna when she smoked.

  Nick jerked his shoulder. “Okay. You?”

  She smiled and sat on the end of his bed, like she used to when he was little. “I’m fine. Everything’s going to be fine now.”

  He wanted desperately to believe her. She wanted it, too, he could tell. But last night’s terror was still too real. Too raw. He could see the bruises poking over the neckline of her shirt. That asshole had hurt her, and Nick hadn’t done anything to stop him, didn�
��t even know she was in trouble until it was too late.

  “What if he comes back?” His voice broke, embarrassing him.

  His mom didn’t pretend not to know who he was talking about. “He won’t,” she said firmly. “He’s in jail.”

  Normally Nick knew better than to argue with that tone of voice. But his anxiety pushed him to ask, “But what if he does?”

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  Nick’s stomach lurched.

  The Dylan dude stuck his head in the room and nodded to Nick. “How’s it going.”

  “What are you doing here?” Nick asked.

  “We’re fine,” his mom said. “Do you mind?”

  Dylan ignored her. “I’m keeping an eye on your mother,” he said over her head to Nick. “Until she feels better. Okay?”

  Nick swallowed, some of the burden of worry and guilt lifted from his shoulders. Dylan was cool. He’d said he would find Nick’s mom, and then he did. If he wanted to keep an eye on her, that was fine. That was good. Somebody had to.

  Nick shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

  Dylan nodded again, like they’d come to an agreement. It made Nick feel better than he had since he first saw the bruises on his mom’s neck. “Good. I’m getting that soup,” he said to Nick’s mom.

  The door closed quietly behind him.

  His mother sat on the edge of the bed, biting her lip.

  Something quivered in Nick. “Mom?”

  She focused on him then, her eyes and smile quick, warm, familiar. The quiver went away. “You think you could get some sleep now?” she suggested.

  He could, because she was here. Maybe because that guy Dylan was here, too, keeping an eye on her.

  Nick snuggled under the covers, and when she leaned over to kiss him good night, he put both arms around her like a little kid. And was able to let her go.

  * * *

  Regina closed the bedroom door behind her and leaned against it, throat tight, pulse jumping. She closed her eyes, flattening her battered hands against the smooth, cool wood. She never brought men to the apartment. Never. Nick came first, always.

  She sighed. Which was why she couldn’t ignore his very real fear or miss the hero worship in his eyes. If Dylan’s presence made Nick feel better, if it eased her son’s mind or helped him to sleep, then she was grateful Dylan was here . . . and never mind why.

  He was here.

  He knew about the baby.

  Her mind kept struggling with those two things, worrying at them, trying to make them add up, like she was in seventh grade again and wrestling with an uneven equation. Maybe if she’d been better at algebra, she would have gone to college instead of to work as a dishwasher, a prep cook, a line cook at Perfetto’s.

  She remembered telling Alain she was pregnant, late at night when the dinner service was over and the rest of the staff had finished drinking and gone home. Alain had teased her because she had stuck stubbornly with club soda all night, and she’d let herself hope because he’d noticed, because he’d been watching her. She’d offered to take him home with her. He wasn’t completely wasted, but he’d had enough to make driving dangerous. Enough to make him want her. And she . . . Well, she’d always wanted him.

  So she’d told him, standing in her living room, twisting her hands together at her waist, her voice rising and falling with apology and hope.

  He never came home with her again. Bastard, she thought wearily, out of habit.

  But Dylan was here.

  He was bringing her soup.

  And even though Regina knew better, even though she told herself she was just prolonging the inevitable disappointment, she set her tiny table for two.

  She heard him come up the stairs, and her stupid heart bumped into overtime. She opened the door.

  His gaze rested on her face. “We need to talk.”

  She did her best not to wince. “Which one? You hope we can still be friends? Or it’s not you, it’s me?”

  He gave her a flat, hard stare.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “It’s been a rough day.”

  His gaze fell to the mottled collar around her neck. Emotion flickered in those black, black eyes and was gone too quickly to be identified. “Yes,” he said.

  He followed her into the kitchen and saw the white bowls, the lit candles. One eyebrow arched.

  Embarrassment rose under her skin, a faint warm flush. She was annoyed with him for noticing and with herself for caring. “Old restaurant trick,” she said, ladling the soup— her mother’s minestrone, good for whatever ailed you— into bowls. “Candlelight improves the food.”

  He carried the bowls to the table. “And the company.” She joined him. “Are you saying I look better in low light?”

  “It suits you.” His gaze met hers across the table. “Your eyes shine.”

  Another arrow, straight to the heart. She clenched her spoon to hide her hand’s trembling.

  “Good soup,” Dylan remarked.

  “Two compliments in a row. Be careful, or I’ll start to take you seriously.”

  “Why shouldn’t you? Your mother is a good cook.”

  Regina let the soothing broth trickle down her throat. It brought back memories, of being sick, of being sad, of being fed. “More than that. Ma supported herself and me and Nicky on an island where a lot of businesses pack up or die in the winter.”

  “She is a stubborn woman.”

  “I’m proud of her.” How long since she had told her mother so?

  “Yet you left.”

  Regina sipped her water. This was so not the discussion she expected to be having with him. This was not a conversation she would have with anybody on World’s End. Everybody here knew everybody. Knew everything, or thought they did. “Antonia’s is . . . Antonia’s. It’s good. It could be great. It’s just not . . . mine.”

  “Your mother is afraid of change.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “And you are not.” His tone was faintly challenging.

  “I . . .” She stopped, struck. Was she afraid? When she’d crawled home eight years ago, exhausted, broke, and defeated, she’d seen few choices and little future for herself. But now . . . it was one thing to settle for her mother’s menus. At what point had she begun to settle for her mother’s life?

  “I try to keep an open mind,” she said.

  “That is fortunate,” Dylan murmured.

  She frowned, uncomprehending.

  He stood to clear their bowls, carrying them to the sink. She pushed back her chair to help him, but he kept her in place with a quick shake of his head. She’d spent years in the kitchen with men. Yet despite Dylan’s obvious grace— or maybe because of it— watching him perform the small domestic chore made her breathless and slightly uncomfortable. He ran water over the dishes before he retrieved his duffel from the floor by the front door and brought it to the table.

  Her vocal chords tightened. “What’s this?”

  In answer, he unzipped the bag, reached in, and pulled out a fur, a fur coat, a . . .

  Regina stared at the thick, black pelt gleaming in the candlelight. Her heart moved into her throat and choked her.

  A sealskin.

  11

  DYLAN’S HEART POUNDED.

  Regina raised her gaze to his, her brown eyes wide with shock. “It was you,” she whispered. “In the caves.”

  She must have known. She’d seen. She’d even thanked him for rescuing her. But now she knew how.

  He held himself stiffly, braced for her rejection, his messy human emotions tucked safely out of sight. “Yes.”

  “In . . . this.” Her fingers flexed in the pelt.

  He flinched. “Yes.”

  Her hands, her gaze, returned to her lap. He watched her fingers twist together. His insides knotted.

  Moments passed, measured in the mad drumming of his heart and the slow release of her breath.

  “I wondered why you weren’t wearing a wet suit.”

  Dylan scowled to
cover his surprise. He was a creature of legend. A fairy tale. A freak. His own father couldn’t stand the sight of him. He did not expect Regina— hard-headed, practical Regina— simply to accepthim or his explanation. “That’s it? You’re not going to . . .” Scream. Run away in horror. “Demand proof?”