Burning Up

am?”

He shook his head. Winced as the movement jarred his wound. “You don’t want to know.”

His rejection jabbed like a sea urchin’s barb. He was hurt, she reminded herself, the gash on his forehead still bleeding. Hurt and confused. “Let me help you,” she said again gently.

“You helped me . . .” His eyes focused as he struggled to remember. “That was you in the water, carrying me.”

She sighed. “Yes. Come now.” She slid an arm around him, urged him to his feet. “We need to get you home.”

He weighed on her, his arm heavy and damp around her shoulders, his body shaking as if with fever. “You’re a mermaid.”

She arched her eyebrows, injecting what she hoped was the right amount of amusement in her voice. “Half woman, half fish? There is no such thing.”

She coaxed him a few steps toward the cart, water squelching from his boots.

He staggered and recovered. “But I saw . . . And your toes . . .”

He stopped.

She could not put him off forever, she realized with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She would not apologize for who she was or for what she had done. She had saved him.

Besides, he clearly wasn’t budging until he had an answer.

“I am finfolk,” she said clearly. “An elemental of the water.”

He swayed. “I need to sit down.”

Wonderful. Her eyes burned. Her throat ached. First she made him throw up and now he had to sit down. “We are almost at the cart,” she said. “Lean on me.”

They shambled toward the cart and the patient pony. Jack managed somehow to pull himself into the rig before collapsing onto the seat. Beneath his tan, his face was lined and bloodless.

“What is . . . An elemental, you said?”

She swallowed past the constriction of her throat. She did not want to quarrel with him. Not when he was injured, half drowned, and in shock. “We are the children of the sea, formed when God brought the waters of the world into being, the first fruits of His creation.”

“Not . . . human?”

“We can take human form. The finfolk can take any form under the sea.”

He was silent, staring at the horse’s ears.

Her heart hammered. “Do you believe me?”

Jack stirred and looked at her, his eyes dull. “I don’t know what to believe. You lied to me.”

She untied the hitch with jerky motions. Of course he would see it that way. He was a man of rigid honor. He saw the whole world in black and white.

But she was not of his world. “I did not lie. Not really.”

He frowned. “Misled me, then.”

She raised her chin, driven on the defensive by hurt and guilt. She was responsible for her evasions. But he bore some responsibility, too. “You were eager enough to be misled. You did not want to see anything that did not accord with your notions of who I should be. The clues were there. You did not want to know.”

His face was closed. Stubborn. “A man doesn’t imagine the woman he’s in love with is a mermaid.”

“Finfolk.”

He ignored her distinction, focused on his own human logic. “You should have trusted me.”

“You said you accepted me. You said you loved me. Would my telling you have made any difference?”

“Of course it makes a difference. I wanted to marry you.”

Ah. Pain pierced her heart. Wanted, not want.

She was a fool.

I am a plain man, he had told her when he proposed. With ordinary needs.

And now he did not need her. Did not want her. Could not accept her.

It was as simple, as devastating, as that.

She drew her ragged dress, her shredded pride around her, a shield to protect her broken heart. She was an elemental, one of the First Creation. She would not stoop to beg for his love.

“How fortunate for us both, then,” she said, “that you never proposed properly.”

She slapped the pony’s reins across its broad back. The cart jolted as she turned swiftly away.

“Morwenna!”

Her vision blurred. She did not stop to hear. There was a roaring in her head like the sound of the waves and the bitter taste of salt on her lips.

Her brother was right. Love did not last. Nothing lasted forever but the sea.

She crossed the beach, shedding her clothes, and plunged into the ocean.

SEVEN

“The cottage was empty,” Jack said flatly.

He stared out the library window, his mood as bleak as the sky, his back to the room. Against the glass, Edwin Sloat’s image appeared, a darker shadow against the shadow of the trees. Jack’s own reflection swam in the glass like a ghost, gray and hollow eyed, the illusion heightened by the bandage on his forehead.

He’d looked worse stumbling off the troop ship in London. But however terrible his injuries, however dubious his prospects, then he’d had hope.

Now . . .

“She has not returned,” Sloat said behind him, his voice an unctuous blend of sympathy and satisfaction.

Jack’s hands fisted at his sides. His eyes felt gritty and dry. “No.”

He had been back to the cottage three times with increasing desperation and diminished hopes. Morwenna was gone as if she had never been. The air smelled like a deserted campsite, of ash and abandonment. Only the rumpled covers of the bed and scattered gifts from the villagers proved she had been there at all.

He felt her absence like an amputated limb, a phantom pain in his chest where his heart had been.

What had she said after she sang the young fisherman from the sea? Go back to your sweetheart . . . hold her tight for the time that has been given to you both.

Good advice.

So why the hell hadn’t he followed it? He should have relished every day, every hour, every second he had with her.

Now it was too late even to apologize.

She had saved him from death. More, she had made him feel alive.

And instead of thanking her, he had accused her of not trusting him. Of not being what he imagined, when she was so clearly everything he needed.

No wonder she left him.

A cough recalled his attention to the steward standing behind him.

“Apparently no one has seen the girl since your, er, outing the other day,” Sloat said. “It’s caused some talk in the village.”

Jack felt a prickle like a soldier’s warning awareness of danger. He turned from the window. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing. Good heavens, nothing at all. Actually, I defended you.”

Cold comprehension pierced Jack’s fog of misery. “What do they think I did? Push her overboard?”

Sloat’s tongue flickered over his lips. “Of course not. Even if, in a moment of passion, you were driven to . . .