Stolen by the Sea Lord (Lords of Atlantis Book 4) Page 5

  But Dragao Azul had little choice. The All-Council enforced the ancient covenant.

  Someday, the All-Council representatives would realize their folly.

  The children urged Zain to change his fins into feet. They wiggled their bare toes. “See? Make feet!”

  Zain simply stared at them with his wide, curious eyes.

  Vaw Vaw laughed heartily. “That is the way, my babies. Show him how much fun it is to have human feet and he will be encouraged to try his hardest.”

  Under Vaw Vaw’s expert eye, the children frolicked around Zain, treating him like their youngest siblings, offering him toys and making him welcome. Elan had not seen such effortless direction of young fry in all his years beneath the ocean. Fewer than one young fry was born every year in Dragao Azul, so there was little opportunity. Perhaps someday, when the mer race recovered their numbers, specialized young fry-rearing elders would be needed once more.

  Zara brought in the plate of the cut kiwis. The children treated her as a familiar adult and she had no unusual emotions around them. Only near Zain did her soul light brighten and darken.

  And near Elan.

  She paused in the doorway, offering him a slice of the green fruit. “It sure is different from your home, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louder.”

  He took the slice and licked the sweet-tart juice that slipped down his hand. “I have never seen so many young fry.”

  “Not in any of the undersea cities?”

  “I have only been to a few. And in those cities, like in Dragao Azul, only one warrior was honored to travel to the surface and take a sacred bride.”

  It was different in the past. Only a few generations ago, their sacred islands had teemed with willing brides. Secret traditions passed from mother to daughter. Brides from ten, twenty sacred islands had gathered each year to join with Dragao Azul warriors.

  Then, the islands had emptied. The brides had modernized. Across the sea, constrained by the ancient covenant, the city populations declined. Zara was perhaps one of the last sacred brides to join with a warrior in the old way. And that was only because she had been at the sacred island by mistake.

  Meanwhile, from Dragao Azul itself, a new voice had risen. Kadir called out to the mer to throw off their old ways, embrace the new, and reveal themselves to the world at large. Break the covenant. Woo and marry modern women according to modern ways.

  Kadir’s voice had been compelling — and doomed.

  No. Elan would not think of it. Not at this happy house during this peaceful time.

  Zara frowned in concern. “Are you okay?”

  He twitched. “Yes.”

  She didn’t seem convinced.

  He refocused on their conversation. It was safer. “Underwater it is different, but seeing the mer flourish is my deepest wish.”

  Her expression turned inward. She sipped her wine. “You were so excited for Zain.”

  He pivoted and drew her hip against his belly. “I am excited for any young fry with you.”

  With her hands full of the tray and wine, she allowed the contact, but did not melt into him as before. She glanced at him out of the sides of her eyes. “You still want a big family?”

  “Yes.” And he wanted this warmth. Her bright light. He wanted steadiness and calm for her. “You will be a grandmother like Vaw Vaw someday.”

  Her brows rose. Her light burned brighter, proving she was touched, and she gazed on Vaw Vaw surrounded by children. “I could never be her kind of hero.”

  He tugged her closer. “You will be your own kind.”

  She rested her weight against him, giving in. Only for a moment. He could tell. “We may never know.”

  But he did know. Family was what he’d held in his mind, his vision, the sole image keeping him alive and striving when he’d been forced to do the things that turned his stomach and made him question all he’d been taught about goodness, rightness, and honor.

  Zara must become such a hero. She must allow the protective love she hid inside to flow out and inspire all. She must share her love freely and shine her beautiful light.

  And then perhaps her goodness would atone for all he had done.

  “Come to the water with me,” he murmured pushing those nightmares from his mind and concentrating on the softness of her skin at her delicate neck. “I want to swim with you again.”

  She took a shuddering breath. “I don’t have my bathing suit.”

  “We swim nude as mer.”

  “I’m not mer.”

  “Zara.”

  She took a deep breath and pulled away. “Dinner is almost ready.”

  Their talk would come after. He released her slowly. Every time he held her, the craving to keep holding her grew. He was losing his discipline.

  Dinner was a volcanic stew of wine-braised beef, searing potatoes, and vegetables in scorching sauces. Peasant food, the relatives called their dishes with self-deprecating charm, but once they were sufficiently cooled, he found the honest flavors to be filling. Zara slathered fluffy bread with melting butter and showed him how to sop up the last tasty bites.

  The dinner ended and, after promising Vaw Vaw to return the following day, they departed for home. Zain fell asleep on Elan’s shoulder. Once at the white house, Milly parked and walked in with them to the living room. She seemed to have things she wanted to say, but after one look at Zara’s face, Milly departed for her bedroom with the words left unsaid.

  Zara’s nervous gaze flicked over Elan’s body. Her awareness sensitized him. Desire swirled in her soul light. The mood crackled with anticipation. He tasted her hunger on the back of his tongue. They were alone, and she wanted him.

  He wanted her.

  It was right.

  Elan followed Zara toward her bedroom. “Now, we talk.”

  She stopped in the doorway. “We’ll wake Zain.”

  He evaluated his options.

  Zain needed his rest.

  She was softened from her time with her family. If he waited until the morning, she might close up again tightly and not let him in.

  Elan placed Zain in the damp seaweed in the bathroom tub. Zain snuggled into the familiar weave and cuddled it with a sigh. Good. He would rest well in this familiar ocean texture. Elan straightened.

  Zara bit her lip. “This is dangerous.”

  Defensiveness rose in him. “Zain cannot easily escape.”

  “Exactly. He could turn on the water.”

  “This water is not harmful to mer.”

  “No, but he could…” She trailed off as a new thought seemed to occur to her. She snorted and rubbed her forehead. “I must be tired. I was thinking something dumb.”

  Her soul light plunged to dark.

  Curse his defensiveness. Elan moved to her and stroked her arms, striving to bring back her happy confidence. “No concern for our child is dumb.”

  “I was afraid he might drown.”

  “In the water?”

  “Yes. I told you I’m tired.” She turned away, pulling free. “We should talk another time.”

  No. That was the last thing that should happen.

  He eased in front of her, rested his hand on the door head, and blocked her exit. “The longer you delay, the longer I will remain here, in your house, where you do not wish to have me.”

  She seemed conflicted.

  He leaned forward. Now was the time to push. Push her to acknowledge how much she did still want him, how much they belonged together, and how she needed to keep him close by forever.

  “We talk now.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Fine,” Zara told the domineering male who demanded they talk now. “Let me by. I have to tell my sister I’ll be to bed late.”

  He released the doorframe.

  She squeezed past. His hard body brushed hers like a promise. She shivered.

  Not because of Elan’s hard, irresistible body. Oh, no. The temperature had dropped with the pressure, and the air see
med to hold its breath with anticipation for rain.

  But she didn’t feel cold. She felt hot. On fire.

  He crossed his arms and leaned against the frame. Even in a faded dive shop T-shirt and athletic shorts, he was the picture of male virility. “I will wait.”

  Those words, and the rough promise that filled them, heated every feminine thread in her body.

  She could not fall into their old life as though nothing had changed. Everything had changed. He had to admit it.

  So did she.

  Zara detoured to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and drank half. The chilling liquid did not quench her body’s sudden fire.

  She climbed up the stairs. Her heart thumped fast in her chest.

  In the bathroom, when Elan had looked at her with a seductive glow and murmured the longer she delayed the longer he would be here, she’d almost said, “That’s okay.”

  And it wasn’t okay. It very much wasn’t okay, and the fact that she even considered it to be okay for an instant was the proof she needed to have this conversation another time.

  He’d only emerged from the ocean a few hours ago. He looked gorgeous, but also like he’d been through hell. She’d just met her son. The world was fragile, and she was shaky.

  Milly would talk her out of this.

  Her sister’s room was a confetti of fluffy purple pillows, a peach and lavender bed set, textured hangings on the walls, and teen posters of hot guys encouraging her to read because smart chicks were hot. Even though she was twenty and finishing her junior year at college, she’d surrounded herself with the comforts of a simpler, younger time.

  She’d exchanged her contact lenses for serious, purple-rimmed glasses and reviewed homework on the bed, her back against the pillows and unicorn notebooks balanced on her drawn-up knees.

  Milly glanced up with a suppressed yawn and removed her earbuds. “Bedtime?”

  “Almost.” Zara shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Elan wants to talk.”

  She smiled with a knowing look. “I’m sleeping with my music in tonight, so don’t mind me.”

  After her kidnapping, Milly had suffered severe nightmares. Only classical music or Zara in the bed next to her had let sleep return to normal again.

  “It won’t be long,” Zara insisted. “I have nothing to talk to him about.”

  “Okay, take your time.”

  Her sister was misunderstanding again.

  “I’m not starting anything with him,” Zara said, making a cutting off gesture with the flat of her right hand. “That’s not what’s happening here. We’re not one happy family. Don’t get any ideas.”

  Milly lifted one eyebrow as though to say, Ideas? But she hunched over her homework and, in a tone that was far too casual, mentioned, “You brought him here.”

  “He had nowhere else to go.”

  “You never bring anyone here.”

  “And there’s Zain.” Zara shook her head. “Elan’s not staying.”

  Milly chewed on her pen eraser. “Why not?”

  “Because!” Zara gripped the water glass so hard it sloshed. “How could I even consider it?”

  “He’s the father of your child?”

  “Yes, and he practically destroyed me! I lost everything. I barely remembered who I was.”

  Milly finally looked up. “I know.”

  “So—”

  “That’s why, when he first appeared, I was ready to dump you at the airport and storm the beach with a shotgun.”

  Zara blinked. “A shotgun?”

  “You were hurt badly, and I was going to hold him responsible with both barrels. But, Zara, the moment you saw him on that TV, you came alive.”

  She shook her head.

  Milly insisted. “You’re more alive right now, arguing with me, than you have been for the last year.”

  Well, there hadn’t been anything worth arguing before. Zara hadn’t cared. Nothing had shaken her out of the numbness…

  Which meant Milly was right.

  She crossed her arms, the glass resting against her elbow. “And that’s his fault?”

  Milly shrugged a shoulder. “You tell me.”

  She didn’t feel alive right now. She felt scared and fragile and she wanted everything to go away. But not. She was too conscious of Elan waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and her baby sleeping in a bathtub of seaweed, and all the days that had separated them. It should be an uncrossable abyss. If she tried to cross it and failed, she wouldn’t survive.

  “You crawled into hell to save me.” Milly pointed her erasable purple pen at Zara. “I’ll never forget that. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. But you brought him here, into your home, when in the past you wouldn’t even watch a friend’s cat overnight.”

  “Elan didn’t have anywhere else to—”

  “He could have gone with Border and Immigration. It’s not jail. You could have visited. We even could have still taken them over to Vaw Vaw’s for dinner. You don’t bring anyone into your home. I think it means something.”

  She couldn’t come up with a viable argument. “But he didn’t surface for a year.”

  “Why?”

  She was afraid to know the answer.

  “Looks like you have something to talk to him about after all.”

  Zara changed the subject. “Let me stay with you tonight.”

  “Of course.” Milly returned to her notebooks and put in one earbud. “But I’m listening to my music and I won’t wait up for you.”

  Zara left Milly’s bedroom with an unsettled feeling. She could have refused Elan. Within their first moments of meeting on the beach, he had slipped under her defenses. And she hadn’t even realized it.

  That wouldn’t happen tonight.

  She thumped down the stairs.

  His hard, lithe form came into view, still leaned against the doorframe. His clear aquamarine eyes pulled her in with hypnotic force. His hands, so big and comforting, rested on his thickly muscled thighs. She knew exactly how they felt between her legs as his hard cock thrust into her.

  Not only had she come alive today, she had stepped from being a numb, practically comatose, sexless creature into a fiery skin that screamed for sensation. For sex. Elan’s hot gaze awoke her hunger. She wanted to feel more than his gaze on her body.

  She slicked in readiness.

  But that could not be allowed.

  Zara strode past, deliberately avoiding him, and plopped on the living room couch. The glass of water sloshed. She rested it on one knee. “Okay. Talk. But it won’t change anything.”

  Elan uncoiled from the doorframe with powerful virility. He strode across the smooth living room tile, seeming to suck the oxygen from the room. That was why she couldn’t get her breath. He stopped right in front of her.

  Before she realized what he was doing, he pulled the glass out of her hand and set it on the table behind her. Then, he bent over, resting one powerful palm on either side of her thighs on the couch, bringing his kissable lips within inches of her face.

  Her heart threatened to beat out of her chest and attach itself to him, loving him even harder than before.

  “We belong together,” he growled. “You and I.”

  She shook her head.

  His gaze smoldered. “Do not fight what you know is right.”

  “What I know is right,” she pressed a hand to his immovable chest, “is that we’ve been separated for a year and you want to pick up like nothing happened. With no plan in place to stop another separation.”

  “There is a plan. You will transform into an unstoppable mermaid queen.”

  “That’s not a plan. That’s a fantasy.”

  “It is truth. You have great power within you. Queens can defeat an entire army. I saw this with my own eyes.”

  The mythical mermaid queens who had died out a thousand years ago. Now, only males were born to the mer, and the women who birthed them were quickly returned — or exiled — back to the surface.

 
Kadir had wanted to change that. Expose the mer existence, invite modern women to become brides, and ask them to stay forever — recreating the lost queens.

  Part way through Zara’s stay, Kadir had been arrested and imprisoned for blasphemy.

  It was a sign she should have heeded.

  “Kadir never said queens had magic powers,” she pointed out. “I think I would have remembered that part.”

  “He thought the ancient legends exaggerated the queen’s powers. Channeling a Life Tree’s energy to create protective spheres around loved ones, or push enemies, or heal fatal wounds sounded fantastical. Now we know they are true accounts.”

  If even mermen who worshiped magical “Life Trees” found something to stretch credulity, Zara could be forgiven for doubting its truth. It was too fantastical.

  And convenient.

  “If I have super powers, how come I don’t know?” she demanded.

  “You will know after making your fins. Come with me into the ocean. We will grow your power together.” His gaze glimmered.

  Her own desire rose to match. She fought against it. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  “Swim with Zain and I, and you will—”

  “No.” She pushed him back with full force. “The only way to keep Zain safe is to stay away from the water. Far, far away.”

  “You can protect him. You are the only one who will. Believe.” He kissed the back of her hand. “Have faith.”

  The kiss sizzled in her belly. Delicious, heroic, and unwelcome. She clamped down on the spreading desire, the need aching to wrap her arms around him and kiss him back. Believe, like he wanted. Close her eyes to reality and fall into the once beautiful fantasy of their life.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t believe in magic, and I can’t believe in you.”

  His eyes lost their glimmer and seemed to sink into dark shadow. His cheeks hollowed in the dim light. He looked defeated. And tired. So tired.

  Nothing like her Elan.

  She shook her head. “What happened to you?”

  He looked away. “Nothing.”

  “How can I have faith in you if you won’t be honest?” She tapped her flat palm against his chest. “You keep trying to pretend nothing has changed. But I’ve changed. You’ve changed a lot.”