For the Taking

Pictures weren’t enough. She wanted to hear their voices, catch up on twenty-five years of lost time, hold them against her and hug them just as she used to when they were tiny.

How would she get through the day?

Looking up, she realized that Loucan wasn’t doing what she’d asked him to. Despite what he’d said a few minutes ago about bussing tables and tending bar, and despite his obvious intelligence and strength, she honestly wasn’t expecting him to be of much help. He seemed too powerful and too driven to have the necessary practical skills.

Susie had left the chairs stacked upside down on the tabletops after she’d cleaned last night, and Lass had simply asked Loucan to put them back in place. But he’d already done that, and now he was setting the tables, with the deft, experienced movements of someone who’d done this before.

His big hands flicked back and forth, unloading floral centerpieces, place mats, pepper and salt and sugar. The sight was incongruous, but apparently bothered him not at all. Evidently, he didn’t set much store by his image when he had a higher goal in view. Unwillingly, she was intrigued by what this said about the man who now ruled her ancestral home.

As he leaned over the tables, the fabric of his faded jeans tightened over his backside, emphasizing its compact, muscular shape. The sleeves of his T-shirt stretched taut around the hard bulk of his upper arms. Something softened and grew heavy inside her, making her deeply uncomfortable.

She quickly refocused on the photos.

He didn’t pause or look up, but he must have seen that she had been watching him, and that she wasn’t anymore.

“They’ve both married good men,” he said. “Men who deserve them. Because they’re great women, Lass. You’ll think so when you meet them again. Both of them are bright and loving and happy.”

“Oh, of course they are….”

“Saegar had a tough time, growing up. His guardian, Bali, kept him pretty isolated. He never spent any time on land until he met Beth—her father captured him and was planning to go public. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. And when Saegar fell in love with Beth, he made the decision to lose his tail.”

“He’ll never get it back.”

Saegar was one of the cursed among the mer people, able to grow his tail just once. His decision to shed it for the sake of his new love was irreversible. After living as a merman all his life, he must love his new bride very much to have made such a choice.

Lass’s chest tightened, as if an unseen hand was squeezing her heart. The idea of taking a step like that frightened her. There was no room for such a dramatic change in her own life. No room for love. Cyria had convinced her of that. Lass was happy here. She was safe, and she wanted to stay. She had promised Cyria that she wouldn’t go back. Pacifica held too many memories.

“Have they decided…” She stopped. Her voice was so scratchy it was barely intelligible. She cleared her throat. “Have they each decided where they’ll live now? If they’ve married land-dwellers, they won’t be returning to Pacifica, will they? Even if peace is fully restored there?”

“No. They’re all hoping to visit together very soon, but it’s not the same.”

She expected him to make more of an issue of it, but he didn’t. He had his back to her, setting the last of the tables, and she couldn’t read him. She knew he hadn’t come here just to tell her about her siblings. He wanted something from her. He’d told her that, and instinct told her to dread what it could be.

He obviously didn’t want to talk about it yet. Instead, he said in a matter-of-fact way, “I’m finished here. Tell me what you want done in the kitchen, and the gallery.”

“The gallery’s fine. Everything’s set up.”

“I liked some of the things I saw, coming through,” he said, following her into the adjoining kitchen. “Particularly those semiabstract paintings of the sea.”

Yes, those are my favorites, too.

She didn’t say it out loud.

“I have a rotating group of local artists and craftspeople who exhibit and sell through the gallery,” she explained instead, grabbing on to the subject like a lifeline. “And a stockroom out the back for people to browse through. The tearoom takes more work, but I need both things, to pull in the business. People will stop to browse and stay to eat, or the other way around. I’m not on a main road, so I don’t tend to get big tour groups, or anything like that. I’m not making a fortune, but I’m very happy.”

And I’m staying.

Her meaning was clear, although she didn’t say it.

“Not lonely?”

“With people coming through all day?”

It wasn’t an answer, and they both knew it. “People” weren’t friends. But she didn’t want him to challenge her on any of the choices she’d made in her life. They were necessary, considering who and what she was.

Mer.

Like Loucan himself.

Somehow, though, he was far more at ease inside his own skin than she was. At ease on land, too, from what she’d seen so far. He didn’t seem to have built up the same defenses, the same complex web of fear and longing for the mer world, the same deeply in-grained instinct to set herself slightly apart from the land-dwellers among whom she’d lived for so long.

He didn’t see his mother die.

“Okay, now salads.” Loucan opened her commercial-size refrigerator and began to take out ingredients. “You probably make the quiche fillings and the pastry crusts in advance, right? Just add filling to the base when they’re about to hit the oven, a little later on? And are you doing a pasta special?”

“How did you—”

“I read your blackboard menu while I was unstacking the chairs. What about the cakes?”

“Those are delivered. There’s a local woman who makes them for me. But I do the scones. I need to get those in the oven soon.”

“The same as American biscuits, right, only not with gravy?”

“Here we serve them with jam and whipped cream and a pot of tea or coffee, and it’s called a Devonshire Tea. They’re very popular, all through the day. Even things like sandwiches and pasta people want as late as three or four o’clock.”

“Tricky. Hot dogs or chicken nuggets would be easier.”

“Hot dogs and chicken nuggets would be a disaster. My gallery clientele doesn’t have that sort of taste. They want something a little more up market and fancy. I tried a more substantial hot meal for a while. A curry or a casserole. But I found…”

Lass stopped. His face was wooden.

“I’m boring you stupid with this,” she said.

Lord, what was happening to her, confiding the petty details of her business to him like this? She was rattling on like a runaway train! She, solitary Lass Morgan, who rationed small talk as if words were an endangered species, and never had deeper conversations at all. She was babbling.

Loucan laughed. “Wait until I tell you about my past life as a bond trader. That’ll bore you stupid. This is nice. It reminds me of…well, of some good times I had once, in America, hanging out with someone I liked.”

She went still. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” He kept on deftly cutting green pepper and slicing mushrooms with his big hands, while Lass set up the mixer to put together the day’s batch of scone dough. Her own hands were clumsy today, and she couldn’t seem to get the dough hook to click into its slot.

“Don’t try and act as if we’re friends,” she said. “Don’t try to get through to me that way.”

She dropped the metal mixing bowl and crossed the kitchen to the CD player. One press of a button brought music into the room—Susie’s favorite classic rock radio. Lass didn’t care what it was, as long as it was loud and fast and broke the illusion of intimacy.

“Is that what you thought I was doing?” Loucan said. “Trying to get through to you?”

“Yes. Weren’t you?”

“I’m not a manipulative man, Thalassa. I don’t sneak my way into people’s good graces through flattery and insincerity.”

His head was held at a proud angle, emphasizing the straight strength of his nose. His brown skin was incredibly smooth, considering he had to be forty years old by now. He was an able man in the prime of life, and Lass felt foolish at having accused him of behaving like a two-faced schoolgirl.

She flushed and said weakly, “Don’t you?”

“I go after what I want,” he continued. “But I do it openly. I’ve told you, we’ll talk at the end of the day, and then I’m sure things will get rocky and tense again.”

“You got that right!”

“I know you don’t want this to be happening. For now, if we can enjoy each other’s company, is that a sin?”

“I’ll…I’ll get back to you on that,” she told him awkwardly. Lifting the lid of the big flour bin, she would gladly have crawled inside.

A moment later, the driving, upbeat rhythm and lyrics of a song on the radio threw her back into gear at last. This was familiar. It was what she did every day, and if she didn’t get through the routine by ten or close after…

Loucan needed her to tell him what to do from time to time, but apart from that she ignored him. She and Susie and Megan usually chatted a bit. Light stuff about local events and the doings of the women’s extended family.

Susie and Megan always did most of the talking, while Lass asked just enough questions to keep the flow going. It was one of the things she liked about the two sisters—the easy flow of their chatter. Since she didn’t have to give away much of herself, it kept her feeling safe. Loucan wasn’t nearly such a restful presence.

“What time do you usually get your first arrivals?” he asked at around quarter after ten. The clock above the old stone fireplace was ticking loudly, and the scones had just come out of the oven.

“About now.”

“I’ll wait tables while you take care of things in here. Is that okay?”

“Yes.”

If anybody ever showed up. She had been counting on a steady summer crowd today. Like the music, it would add a distance between the two of them that she increasingly needed. It would be ironic if this turned out to be one of their rare days when, for no reason that they could ever predict or discern, almost nobody came.

She hated her awareness of Loucan. Tried to tell herself that it was purely self-defense, but deep down, she knew it was much more.

Loucan was mer.

Lass hadn’t seen a merman in twenty-five years, and she’d been just a child then. Over the past fifteen years of her adult life, she had never allowed herself to fall for a land-dwelling man. That one clumsy attempt at a relationship during her college years had quickly convinced her that Cyria was right on this issue. Physically, she and Gordon had never gotten beyond a few unsatisfying kisses.

But Loucan was mer.

That had to be the reason she was feeling like this.

She was so conscious of exactly where he was in the big kitchen. So conscious of her own body—of its lush curves, of its weight and shape and the way it moved, of the sensitivity of her skin.

In the days following one of her guilty trips to the ocean, she was always more sensitized, always yearned for…for something. For years this something had been quite nameless and out of reach. Painfully, frustratingly so. But suddenly now she understood.

She wanted a man’s touch.

She wanted the sensations of lovemaking that she’d only imagined and read about, never experienced. Cyria had told her it must not happen, not with a land-dwelling man. She’d always implied that one day, in the future, when King Okeana came for them and everything was safe, there would then be someone for Lass to give her heart to—someone in Pacifica. Unconsciously, she’d believed that, waited for that.

And Loucan was mer.

Mer, and the son of her father’s enemy. It was because of Galen and the escalating violence that her father had secretly sent all four of his children away, each with a different guardian, and each to a different part of the world. It was because of Galen that her mother had died.

The hair on Lass’s arms and on the back of her neck stood on end, and her stomach began to churn.

What am I thinking? she wondered. What kind of a trick is my body playing on me? I can’t start wanting him. I still don’t know why he’s really here. This instinct to trust him could all be coming from…from this physical frustration. Because he’s mer, and I want—I want… Oh lord, Cyria was wrong to tell me to live my life like this!

Chapter Three

“So is it often like that?” Loucan asked.

“No, thank goodness.” Lass combed her hand through her hair several times. The gesture was jerky, as if she still expected her fingers to get tangled in the long, living strands that had recently reached to her thighs. As if she couldn’t get used to the change.

She looked tired, and Loucan wasn’t surprised. It was nearly six-thirty. The kitchen was squeaky clean and the chairs were stacked on the tables. He’d just vacuumed the gallery floor, while Lass was still mopping the tearoom.

They hadn’t had a single customer until noon, when three cars had pulled in within two minutes of each other. After that, it hadn’t stopped all day. Lass had shuttled back and forth between cash desk, kitchen and gallery, while Loucan had waited tables and washed dishes. He’d also sold two of the seascapes and a big and very ugly vase. He hadn’t told her about that yet, actually.

He remedied the oversight, and Lass’s opalescent green eyes widened.

“You sold that? The big—? The green—? With the knobbly things?”

“Yep. That’s the one.”

“Good grief, I thought I’d never get rid of that.” Her relief broke a little of the simmering tension between them—a tension they’d managed to put on hold since noon.

She leaned on the mop handle. Her hands shook a little and she seemed giddy and light-headed all of a sudden, as if she’d gone beyond exhaustion and was running purely on nerves. Loucan guessed she hadn’t been sleeping well since the other night, and felt bad about that.

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