For the Taking by Lilian Darcy

of her speed through the water came as a huge relief. It was kin, she had always assumed, to what land people felt when they put on flippers or a fiberglass fin, but much more powerful.
    The cold, clear water streaked past her skin, and the black dress she still wore seemed like a maddening impediment. Wriggling and stretching her body in the water, she pulled it over her head and left it behind to float slowly down to the sea floor or wash ashore in the next high tide.
    Clothing always seemed so foolish and unimportant to her when she was in mer form. Even her black lace bra was a tight, uncomfortable impediment, so she shed that, too.
    But she’d forgotten how much faster Loucan would be, and shedding her clothing had slowed her down. Loucan had been faster in freeing himself of his. Surging to the surface to breathe, she felt his hand close around her wrist.
    “What happened?” he said. He sounded breathless from his impatience to reach her. “The blood made you panic. Why?”
    “I can’t talk about this.”
    Nausea rose in her gut once more, and she tore herself away from his grip, even though she knew he would follow her.
    Loucan didn’t let her get far, and this time he held her more strongly. His arms wrapped around her waist, then slid higher to her shoulder blades. She tried to keep swimming, but he matched her pace, his body undulating against hers in the same rhythm.
    “You can talk about it,” he urged her. “You have to. It haunts you, Lass.”
    Yes, that was how it felt—a ghost that appeared whenever she was most vulnerable. She slowed in the water and stopped fighting him, because she was too busy facing and fighting the demon of her memory.
    “I’m right, aren’t I?” he said. “This is the thing that haunts you. More than loneliness. More than the fear that someone will find out you’re mer. This iswhy you’re afraid, on a deep, subconscious level that you can’t control, to go back to Pacifica.”
    The moment Loucan saw Lass’s eyes, he knew he was right. In the light of the newly risen and nearly full moon, her pupils were dark, and whatever she saw in her vision, it wasn’t him, even though she was only inches from him and staring in the direction of his face.
    He held her and waited, feeling how she shivered in his arms, but even more aware of her lushly female body enclosed there. He had abandoned his clothing just as she had, both of them responding to the same instinctive need to feel the water on their bare skin. Their nakedness removed what little protection he’d had against his growing desire for her. He ached to dip his head lower and taste her full mouth, to explore the shape of her back and the weight of her breasts, despite his vow not to kiss her again.
    He knew that Lass was unaware of his body’s response, and too tightly wound right now to feel the sensuality that was so strong and newly discovered inside her. Loucan held his own needs in check and urged her once more, “Tell me, Thalassa.”
    “I saw my mother die,” she whispered. “I saw it, Loucan! I was hiding. He—the assassin, the murderer—never knew I was there. And her blood came toward me in the water. She was so frail and defenseless. The last person in the whole of Pacifica who would ever have fought back. What a despicable, cowardly act to choose my mother! It would have been more courageous to choose me, an eight-year-old child! If only I’d understood what was happening! But I didn’t.”
    “How could you have understood? And what could you have done?”
    “I told Cyria, and she made me promise never to say what I’d seen. She knew that it would endanger my own life. It was only a few days after that when we left Pacifica. My whole memory of Pacifica is clouded by what I saw, the same way that her blood clouded the water. I’ve never been able to—” She broke off, then continued, “Once before, I saw a little girl get an oyster shell cut in the inlet. I fainted on the sand.”
    Lass