Read Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord for Free Online Page B

your sister what she wants.”
    “Lucy?” asked Regina.
    “She’s not selkie,” Dylan said.
    “She carries the bloodline,” Conn said. “She has a right to choose.”
    “Lucy would never leave the island,” Caleb said. “She almost didn’t go away to college. She’s happy here.”
    Conn raised his brows. “Is she?”
    “Isn’t she?” Margred asked.
    “Ask her,” Conn said again.
    He gripped the door handle when something—a noise, a scent, a sense like a breath at the back of his neck—dragged his gaze upward.
    Lucy stood almost hidden in the crook of the narrow stairs, a hand pressed to her mouth. In the shadows, her eyes blazed.
    His heart leaped.
    Their gazes locked.
    She blinked, and it was as if the brightness had never been.
    Conn swallowed a snarl of disappointment. “A message at the inn will find me,” he said tightly to no one in particular. “When you are ready to talk.”
    Opening the door, he stalked into the night.
    Lucy stabbed her spade into the soil. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms
    . . .
    Which was stupid. She knew her family loved her. She loved them. But the silly jingle played over and over in her head like a bad song on the radio, complete with a slide show of scenes from last night.
    The Hunter family had never been big on Sharing Their Feelings. Every child growing up in an alcoholic household learned to protect its secrets. Lucy had spent most of her life avoiding questions from friends, teachers, and well-meaning neighbors. Where is your mother? How is your father? Why did you move back?
    But now the things her family would not say were threatening to split them apart. And the people with the answers, the people Lucy loved, weren’t talking.
    At least not to her.
    She ripped a potato from the garden. The fat root exploded from the ground in a shower of dirt that did nothing to relieve her hurt or frustration.
    Use words , she told her students when they were overwhelmed by the need to scream and kick and Page 22
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    bite. Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she? After Conn had left, she’d gone into the living room to talk to her family. But all her questions, all her overtures, had died a slow and miserable death in the face of their determined noncommunication, killed by Dylan’s stubborn silence and Caleb’s dismissive reassurances.
    She rubbed the potato against her jeans, leaving a long smear of dirt.
    Caleb’s reaction hurt the most. Her brother had raised her from the time she was in diapers until he left on a ROTC scholarship the year she turned nine. All through middle and high school, Cal had still been there for her, making trips home for holidays and school assemblies, sending checks on her birthday. She trusted him with . . . almost everything.
    He didn’t trust her. His lack of faith stung.
    Well, if Cal couldn’t treat her like a grown-up, she knew someone who would.
    She glanced toward the edge of the field. Assuming he came.
    She thought—she hoped—he would come. Otherwise, why bother making that cryptic announcement at the door? “ A message at the inn will find me when you are ready to talk. ”
    She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, smearing them even more. Ready to talk? Maybe. Ready to listen anyway. Anything was better than being cut off from her family by this awful not-knowing.
    She watched him emerge from the shadow of the woods like a surfer sliding from beneath a wave. He wasn’t a stranger anymore.
    That didn’t stop the drop in her stomach, the scrambling of her pulse.
    “You came,” she said foolishly as Conn approached over the sun-streaked furrows.
    No jacket today. No tie. The collar of his dress shirt—Dylan’s dress shirt—was unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up. Fine, dark hair dusted his arms. Otherwise, he looked the same, same slightly hooked nose, same unsmiling mouth, same cool eyes.
    The color of rain, Lucy thought