Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  She turned and gaped at Dylan standing in the doorway with a steaming mug in his hands.

  “I thought you could use this.”

  “What . . .”

  “Tea with honey.” He set it on the dresser, avoiding her eyes. “My mother used to make it when one of us had a sore throat.”

  Her heart slammed in her chest. Her head whirled. He’d made her tea, was all she could think. Like his mother used to make. She could smell it, lemon, honey, and a hint of spice.

  His gaze narrowed as she continued to gawk at him. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” She forced the word from her tightened throat.

  But she wasn’t. She was in danger, terrible danger.

  Regina was a practical woman. She might have resisted Dylan’s sulky good looks and sneering humor. She could have suppressed her sympathy for his wounded childhood, her helpless response to his stormy passion. Over time, she might even get over his talent for showing up in the right place at exactly the right time.

  But his awkward consideration destroyed her defenses.

  She pressed her trembling lips together. Shit. She was at very real risk of falling deeply, hopelessly in love with him.

  * * *

  “We’ll be fine,” Antonia told Regina brusquely, sounding for a moment so much like her daughter that Dylan’s brows twitched together. “Maggie’s here. Lucy’s here. We’ll be open for dinner.”

  Regina leaned her slight weight against the stainless steel counter, ignoring the knife that flashed like lightning not six inches from her hip, chopping, chopping. “Then you need me to do prep.”

  “You can do it when you get back. Caleb wants to see you now. To take your statement.”

  Dylan didn’t give a damn what his brother wanted. Caleb could not protect Regina.

  “Can’t.” Regina snatched a piece of red pepper from the cutting board and ate it. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh . . .” She wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans, avoiding her mother’s gaze. “Follow-up. I think she wants to make sure my toes haven’t fallen off.”

  Dylan lifted an eyebrow. So she hadn’t told Antonia about her pregnancy yet. Only him. And only because she hadn’t had a choice. He felt the prod of responsibility like a goad.

  “And what will you be doing while Regina is at the doctor’s?” Margred murmured.

  Dylan’s gaze slid past Lucy to find Margred beside a screen of shelves with an ease that was almost . . . troubling. Except that no man, especially a brother, would spare a glance for Lucy when Margred was in the room. Lucy was tall and inoffensive. Human. Insignificant. Margred was . . . herself. Although apparently Caleb wasn’t letting his beautiful wife get enough sleep these days. Faint shadows lay like bruises under her eyes.

  In the large commercial kitchen, there was enough space and enough noise for them to speak privately. He joined her by the shelves, lowering his voice so the others would not hear. “I’m going with her.”

  Margred tilted her head. “If what Caleb says is true, Conn will expect you to give him a report.”

  “I’m giving him more than that.”

  Dylan had it figured out now. He’d had time to think in the long quiet night with Regina sleeping beside him, holding him in place with the lightest pressure of her palm against his heart. He could feel that pressure now, squeezing his chest until he couldn’t breathe. Somehow she had made him feel responsible for her. Made him care. That didn’t mean he needed to stay with her forever, tangled in a net of human expectations and emotions, trapped on shore.

  “I’m taking her to Sanctuary,” he explained. “Where she will be safe.”

  Where he would be free.

  Margred’s dark eyes widened. “Have you told her so?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ah.” Margred regarded him steadily a moment. Her full lips curved. “Good luck with that.”

  * * *

  “You could have been nicer to your sister,” Regina said as they climbed the hill toward town hall.

  When Dylan left the island, over twenty years ago, the building had not existed. Most of the weathered gray houses and shops at the center of town were the same. But there were more cars than he remembered, more telephone wires, more flags and flower boxes, more signs and pedestrians crowding the narrow street, cutting him off, closing him in. He could barely see the sky or smell the sea.

  Slouching beside Regina, he felt like a ten-year-old boy being dragged clothes shopping or a wild animal being paraded on a leash. They could not walk more than a few yards without someone wanting to stop, talk, exclaim. He didn’t want to hear about his sister.

  “I was nice to her,” he growled.

  “Yeah? Considering she—”

  A pretty young woman blocked their way with a baby stroller. “Oh, my God, Reggie, your neck! You look terrible. Are you okay?”

  Regina sighed. “Thanks, Sarah, I’m—”

  The young woman’s gaze slid sideways. She smiled and fingered her shoulder-length hair. “You must be Dylan. I heard you carried her all the way to the Mitchells’ house.”

  “Yeah, I was pretty out of it,” Regina said. “Look, we—”

  “It was just so awful. I mean, you don’t expect anything like that to happen here.” Sarah smiled again at Dylan. “Do you?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “Okay.” Regina grabbed his arm. “Great seeing you, Sarah. Come by the shop sometime.”

  Dylan regarded the small, strong hand on his arm as she hauled him away. He liked having her hold on to him. And he resented that he liked it.

  “So, about your sister . . .” she said.

  “What about her?”

  “It was nice of her to help us out.”

  “Why nice? You’re paying her.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Hey, Regina.” A ruddy, round-faced man carrying a hard hat and a repair bucket hailed her from the street. “That was some excitement at your place yesterday. Everybody all right?”

  More cars crawled by. More people stopped to stare. Dylan was overcome by the smells and press of bodies.

  “Just fine, thanks, Doug.”

  His gaze switched to Dylan. “You the guy that found her?”

  Dylan stared down his nose. “Yes. And you are . . . ?”

  “Doug does cable repair on the island,” Regina explained. “Eats at Antonia’s two, three times a week.”

  “That’s right.” Doug shifted his weight and the bucket. “Hoping to eat lunch there today, as a matter of fact.”

  “We won’t open until dinner,” Regina said. “But if you stop by tomorrow, I can—”

  Dylan had had enough.

  “Excuse us,” he said and walked away.

  Since his hand was clamped over Regina’s on his arm, she had no choice but to go with him.

  He wanted air. He wanted the sea. He wanted to get Regina away from the people who pressed around them and the circumstances that hedged them in. He wanted her. Still. Again.

  Since he could not have what he wanted, he found the nearest escape, a turn off the main road that led to the island church and a cemetery dreaming on the side of a hill.

  Dylan stopped among the crooked stones and rough grass, breathing in the silence and the scent of juniper.

  “Well.” Regina exhaled. “That was rude.”

  He wanted her naked. She didn’t have a clue.

  “Not as rude as they were. Not half as rude as I wanted to be. How do you stand it?” he demanded. “How do you stand them? All those people. All they cared about was gossip and their own convenience. Not one of them cared about you.”

  Her chin cocked. “Oh, and you do.”

  “I . . .” His mouth opened. His brows drew together. Was he like her shallow friend, her hungry customer, focused only on his own concerns and appetites?

  Wasn’t he?

  And why should that bother him? It hadn’t bothered her last night. Or
the night of his brother’s wedding. He snapped his mouth shut.

  Regina smiled, an odd little twist of lips that knotted his insides. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  She sighed again and leaned against the low stone wall that bordered the graveyard. “Tell me about your relationship with your sister.”

  What was she after now? “Lucy? I barely know her.”

  “So you keep saying.” Regina tilted her head. “You just haven’t told me why.”

  “I . . .” He kicked at the grass. “She was a year old when I left.”

  “Yeah, well, she grew up. You should, too. Just because you were taken from your family at the age of thirteen is no excuse for spending the rest of your life in a state of arrested emotional development.”

  Arrested emotional . . . He ground his teeth together. But the wry understanding in Regina’s eyes eroded his anger and his defenses.

  “I hardly see the point of forming a relationship now,” he said stiffly.

  “Because you don’t need her.”

  He did not allow himself to need anyone. “Yes.”

  Regina met his gaze, her dark, expressive eyes surprisingly compassionate. “Did you ever think maybe she needs you?”

  His head throbbed. “She has Caleb. And our father.”

  “And that’s enough,” Regina prodded him.

  It was more than he had. But he could not, would not, let himself say so. He was selkie, he thought, half desperately.He had made his choice more than twenty years ago.

  “She doesn’t appear to be suffering,” he said.

  “How would you know? You didn’t even look at her in the kitchen.”

  Dylan frowned. He hadn’t. All his attention had been on Margred. When he looked at his sister, when he even tried to look at her, his gaze slipped away. She was like an ice sculpture, colorless, opaque.

  “She is not interesting to me.”

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

  “Only by human standards.” Yet he could look at his brother. “When I see her— sometimes when I even think about her— I get a headache,” he confessed. He felt it now, again, an odd pressure building like a headache in his skull, tempting him to avert his gaze, his focus, to something, anything else. “It’s almost like a glamour.”

  “A what?”

  “A spell, you would call it.” His mouth felt dry. “To make you look away. But this— this is different.”

  Regina’s brow pleated. “Could your sister be selkie?”

  His stomach revolted. His temples pounded. Everything in him rejected the very idea.

  “No,” he said positively.

  “Why not?”

  He reared his head like a harpooned animal. “I would know. My people would know.”

  “But you said yourself you don’t know her very well,” Regina said reasonably. “Maybe while you’re here you could spend some time—”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she asked again. Stubborn. Irresistible. Hopeful. Human. The sight of her caused a fissure in Dylan’s chest as deep and painful as the dissonance in his head.

  “Because we won’t be here long enough.” He faced her, his mouth a tight, grim line. “I am taking you to Sanctuary.”

  13

  REGINA REGARDED THE BROODING EYES AND set mouth of the man she was falling in love with and felt a surge of exasperation. Never mind the choices his mother had made when he was thirteen.

  “Running away is not a solution,” she told him.

  “I am not running away.” His voice was flat. His eyes were stormy. “I am taking you where you will be safe.”

  “To Sanctuary,” she said.

  He nodded once, as if he didn’t trust himself to speak or her to hear. Regina’s stomach gave a warning flip. He wasn’t going to give her anything she didn’t ask for. Not information or anything else. Even last night, she’d practically had to beg him to make love to her.

  Well, that had to change. Maybe he didn’t love her, but he wanted her. And she had some pride, after all.

  But right now she had more important things to worry about than her pride.

  She set her jaw. “Where’s that?”

  “It is an island off the Hebrides. The coast of Scotland,” he explained. “You will be safe there. You and the child.”

  “His name is Nick.”

  She was fascinated to see a flush spread across his hard cheekbones. “I meant the child you carry.”

  Right. Potential Super Selkie Baby. Regina suppressed a sudden pang. She couldn’t let her own growing feelings for Dylan blind her to his true priorities.

  “I can’t just leave,” she protested. “I have . . .” A jumble of images and concerns pressed on her: Nick, her mother, the restaurant. “A life.”

  “I’d like you to keep it.”

  Fear feathered her nerves; shortened her breath. She shook it from her head. “I have responsibilities.”

  “Your first responsibility is to the child.”

  Her heart beat faster. “I have two children,” she reminded him.

  “You would not have to leave Nick.”

  At least he remembered to use her son’s name this time.

  “Damn straight,” she said.

  “He can come with you,” Dylan said.

  “You.” Not “us.”

  “To Scotland,” Regina said.

  “To Sanctuary.”

  “No. No way. I can’t just uproot him. His home is here, his friends, his school . . . Everything he’s ever known.”

  “He is young. He will adjust.”

  “Like you did?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  She didn’t buy it. “You were thirteen. And selkie, as you’re so fond of pointing out. Are there other humans on this Sanctuary of yours? Other children?”

  Dylan shifted his shoulders, staring out at the tilting headstones and blowing grass. “Not many.”

  Uh-huh. “Any?” she pressed.

  His eyes were black with suppressed emotion. “He would be safe there,” he said, which was no answer at all.

  “There’s no reason to believe he won’t be safe here, is there?”

  Dylan was silent.

  Her heartbeat drummed. “Is there?”

  His face set. “It’s my responsibility to protect you. You and your child. Children,” he amended before she could correct him.

  Regret welled in her heart like blood. His acknowledgment of Nick was not enough. He’d said “protect,” not love. He did not love her. She could not expect him to. If he did . . .

  It wouldn’t make any difference. She had her priorities, too.

  At least he was stepping up. It was more than Alain ever offered to do.

  Regina stuck out her chin. “Then figure out how to protect us here. Because we’re staying.”

  * * *

  The woman was impossible.

  What she asked was . . . impossible.

  Dylan glared at her stumping up the hill, her usual grace hobbled by her gauze-wrapped toes. The collar of bruises showed plainly above the scooped neck of her tank top. Her eyes were shadowed and strained. But nothing seemed to slow her down for long.

  Brave girl. She had more courage than most men, as much appetite for life as any selkie, more strength of mind and stubborn spirit than . . . well, than anyone he’d ever known.

  But she was still only human. She could die.

  Fear and admiration coalesced in a hot, tight ball in Dylan’s gut. “You have a touching— if misplaced— faith in my ability to save you.”

  She turned to look at him. The sun gleamed in her cap of dark hair and warmed her ivory skin to gold. “You rescued me before.”

  “I did not face a demon for you before.”

  “Scared?” Her tone was teasing, her eyes deadly serious.

  He was terrified. Terrified of failing her, terrified of losing her. His hands clenched into fists at his sides.

  “I am not . . . trained for this,” he said
with difficulty. “You need someone . . .” Better. Stronger. “Someone else.”