Mermaid (6 page)

“Mom, Mark just came in so I could change and give him back his robe,” she said firmly. “His son is waiting for him at home.”

“Thanks,” said Mark, stepping out of her bedroom. “I’d love some coffee, Mrs. Elliot. It smells great.”

“Those are cinnamon rolls you smell,” said Shirley. “They’re just about cool enough to touch, so please stay and share them with us. You should have brought your son. I’ve never known a little boy who didn’t like cinnamon rolls.”

As Jillian leaned over to close her bedroom door, she heard Mark laugh. “Or a big one. You couldn’t beat me off with a baseball bat. Mrs. Elliot. Thank you. I’ll stay.”

“O
H, HEAVENS, CALL ME
Shirley. And sit down. You’re too tall to be hovering in the doorway like that,” her mother said.

Jillian heard the weak springs of the couch squeak as Mark sat down. She cringed, hoping he hadn’t sat on the one that poked up uncomfortably into the tender anatomy of anyone unlucky enough to get that end of the sofa. She could hear the low rumble of his voice, her mother’s higher tones, and then a delighted giggle from her daughter. So she wasn’t the only woman charmed by Mark Forsythe.

Of course she wasn’t. A man like him wouldn’t lack for female companionship, and he said he’d been divorced for years. She wondered why he had never remarried. Because he never wanted to, of course, dummy, she told herself quickly. And most likely he’d never needed to. What was that about his not needing a good cook because he ate out a lot? She was quite sure that when he did dine out, he wasn’t alone.

Sighing, she shucked his robe, holding it for a moment to her cheek, convinced she could smell the faint scent of his body on it. But of course she couldn’t. It had been pristinely clean when he’d wrapped her in it. It hadn’t been the one he’d worn when he got out of bed that morning. For an instant she toyed with the image of his large frame arising from his bed. Did he have hair on his chest? She glanced at the pure white of the robe in her hands.

Was his body hair sprinkled with white as the hair on his head was? Or was it all dark like his eyebrows and lashes? she wondered. What in the world was she doing, sitting there speculating about the body hair of a perfect stranger? Even one who had kissed her absolutely dizzy?

With a sigh, she draped the robe over the end of her bed and stripped out of her costume and the black bathing suit she wore under it. Her shower took only five minutes, and she wrapped her hair in a towel before drying herself off and dressing.

She put on a hot-pink jumpsuit with a broad white belt, then shoes and socks, and, still turbaned with the towel, she carried his robe out to him.

He was sitting on the shabby sofa, looking as relaxed and as at home as he might have looked seated on one of the rich leather couches in his own den. Amber was on his knee, and together they were looking at one of her favorite books. In the kitchen Shirley was working on the cinnamon rolls, transferring some of them from the cooling rack to a plate. Mark’s eyes were cast downward, gut as if he sensed Jillian’s presence, he lifted them and looked at her, smiling. Sitting Amber on the couch beside him, he stood up and came to Jillian.

“You’re just a little bit of a thing without that long tail, aren’t you?”

“Five three is just a tad below average,” she said, feeling breathless with him standing so close. She supposed to someone over six feet, she would look like a little bit of a thing.

“I don’t think there’s a lot about you that’s below average, Mermaid,” he said quietly, his gaze sweeping from the top of her turbaned head down over her pink jumpsuit to the tips of her pink sneakers. Jillian’s insides did flips and dives as she met his admiring gaze, but she knew she had Io break this spell he was casting over her. Quickly she turned to speak to her daughter to explain how she had been caught on the wrong line. But Amber, with the attention span of most six-year-olds, hopped off the couch, dropping her picture book to the floor, and ran to the back door in response to another child’s call. “Billy and I are building a fort,” she said just as the screen door slammed.

“Your robe. And thanks,” said Jillian, handing it to him. He dropped it onto the couch.

“Coffee’s ready,” Shirley said, setting a cream pitcher in the middle of the table beside the sugar bowl and turning to busy herself pouring out three cups of coffee. She carried two of the hot rolls outside, and Jillian heard her call the children.

As Mark took a seat at the kitchen table, Jillian couldn’t help remembering how he’d simply rung for coffee and had Edward bring it to where he was. He didn’t seem to mind the way things were done here, though, and she felt a small warmth begin to grow inside her. As if he were feeling it, too, he smiled at her.

“I’d really like you to come back to my place and share that steak with me tonight,” he said quietly, “or we could go out for dinner somewhere.”

She met his gaze. Thinking of dressing up in something pretty, of sitting across a table from him, of the way he’d look dressed formally, made her stomach flutter madly and her heart leap wildly. How long had it been since she’d gone out to dinner with a man like Mark Forsythe?

The fact of the matter was that she had never gone out for dinner with a man like him, because he was one of a kind.

The trouble was he was not her kind. And if she did go out for dinner with him, she wouldn’t know what to wear. She didn’t think she had anything that would be suitable for the places he’d want to go. And as for going to his place ...

She liked him too well, and she didn’t think she could handle what would ultimately happen between them if they started dating. It had been more than two years, and there still was one hurdle she had yet to cross. Sometimes she had wondered if she would ever be able to cross it. But it hadn’t become an issue. Not until now. And now it would only become one if she let it. Yet looking at him, she felt cold, icy fear creep through her, and she shivered. With Mark Forsythe, it could very easily become a terribly important issue.

“I’m sorry. That’s not possible. I have to work tonight.” In truth her first show didn’t start until nine o’clock. She would have had plenty of time for an early dinner before work, but ...

“Then lunch,” he insisted, just as quietly.

Again she shook her head and sipped her coffee.

Her mother returned to the table and set down a plate of steaming rolls and pushed it close to Mark, who helped himself to one and then broke off a morsel, blowing on it to cool it before he put it into his mouth. It was delicious, but nowhere near as delicious as Jillian Lockstead’s lips had been.

“Please?” he said softly, and then went very still inside, wondering why he was pleading with her. He had never done such a thing before. He frowned and looked down at the cinnamon-covered raisins that had fallen to the plate before him. Then he glanced warily at Jillian, wishing he knew where the mermaid-magic ended and the man-woman attraction began. Dammit, he didn’t believe in magic any more than he believed in mermaids! But the attraction just wouldn’t quit.

“I have three math students coming in”—she glanced at the clock on the control panel of the stove—“forty-five minutes.”

He took another bite of the cinnamon roll, looking as if he had been transported to heaven, then swallowed. He’d thought he was going to compliment Shirley on her cooking, when he heard himself say, “Then what about a late dinner? When you get off work?”

She smiled. “On weekends, I don’t finish my last show until one-fifteen. By the time I’ve showered and changed and driven home, it’s usually after two and much too late for dinner. But thanks anyway. It was nice of you to ask me.”

This time, to his relief, he managed to get himself under control. He shrugged and said easily, “Another time, then,” and stood to leave.

Jillian realized that of course he didn’t really care if she went to dinner with him or not. There must be hundreds of women who could and would and wanted to. And when it came to the last—those wanting to—she was certainly right up there among the most eager. She wished she hadn’t had to turn him down.

Jillian found that Mark was constantly on her mind as the afternoon progressed, and she had to force herself to concentrate on her students as well as the needs of her daughter. He seemed to accompany her as she drove to work that night with Robin. But as she prepared to slip into the top of the huge tank in the Pearldiver’s Club, ready to make her entrance from within the concealing fronds of kelp, she finally managed to clear her mind of anything and everything that a mermaid wouldn’t think about.

Taking a deep breath, she lowered herself into the tepid water, entering another world.

Mark had never been to the club before. He sat at a table on the second tier that surrounded the massive tank, the focal point of the Pearldiver’s club, and took in the lush aquatic growth planted in the big saltwater aquarium. Huge, waving fronds of seaweed, green, red, brown, and gold, grew from coral-encrusted rocks and what might have been the hull of a sunken pirate ship.

Vibrantly colored schools of tropical fish darted in the concert between fans of pink, white, black, and orange coral, as if moved by a single mind, swing-through the beams of waving spotlights. Shells lay here and there—large, spiked ones with opalescent, peachy insides; small, delicate ones shaped like long spirals in white and gray and coal black, and even a couple of brilliant yellow ones.

An ornate jeweled tiara of blue and white stones hung from a coral branch, and a pewter loving cup stood half-buried in white sand near the center of the bottom of the tank beside a tilted brass chest, which had strings of pearls spilling forth, along with rings and bracelets and necklaces of rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. The gleam of gold and the glow of emeralds glittered within its depths, and glinting silver coins were scattered all around.

A moving spotlight followed one school of fish, then switched to another. Slowly, the houselights began to dim. From somewhere in the recesses of the darkening club, a slow drumroll began then built, as the lights in the tank slowly brightened until it was a vast, green glow within the darkness of the packed club.

All eyes were on it, all sound had stopped. She slowly came from behind a huge sheet of shiny brown seaweed with her hair floating behind her like a backlighted halo of gold. Wrapped around her head was a broad, sequined band that glittered with the same blue, green, and silver colors as her shapely body and tail, hiding from the world the fact that even a mermaid could bang her head on the rocks.

A collective sigh went up from the audience. The women all seemed to want to change places with her if even for only an hour, to have a chance to be the magic, ethereal creature she was, the stuff of fantasies, the stuff of dreams, the stuff of a thousand legends, cynosure of every eye. And the men seemed to yearn to be in that very authentic looking seascape with her, swimming effortlessly through the water as a bird would fly through the air. Each one seemed lost in a secret dream of capturing her, holding her in his arms while they rolled and twisted and cavorted together in the unreal realm where she seemed so at home.

But one, only one, sighed and smiled as he remembered exactly what it felt like to hold that mermaid in his arms.

Enchanted, he watched her, caught up in the beauty she created as she went from a rolling dive into a graceful soar, chasing the fine stream of bubbles that rose away from her, then abandoning them, letting them rise unheeded as she made for the bottom of her man-made ocean environment. She twisted sideways, and reached out a hand to the glass, touching the same spot where a red-faced, middle-aged man had placed his palm. She smiled, and her sea-green eyes shone as if he could see the admiration and longing in the man’s face, but then she was gone, chasing a bright blue and gold fish as it darted for the cover of a mass of green fronds.

The mermaid, too, disappeared behind the green-cry, only to reappear seconds later on a different tangent, bubbles still streaming in a fine silver trickle from her softly parted lips. Her tail flipped gracefully, and she did a complete loop, landing upside down against the wall where yet another lucky customer was treated to one of her glowing smiles and a fingertip pressed to the lips he pressed to the glass Then she rose up, up, up, until all that was visible was the pale shimmer of her arms and hair, and then even that was gone, leaving only the swirl of her tail as she half-emerged from the water to let herself be seen by the customers seated on the mezzanine surrounding the top of the tank. She stayed for some time, and then descended once more, swirling through the water with the ease of a porpoise. For half an hour she cavorted, her graceful sweeps and dives, her tantalizing disappearances into and reappearances from the swaying, living growth, holding her audience in thrall. Now and then, she would choose an article of jewelry from the treasure chest—a rope of pearls to adorn her graceful neck; a glittering ruby bracelet for one arm, a gleaming series of golden bangles for the other. A ruby hair clip arose with her, along with a silver-backed comb one of the times she left the water to sit at the top of the tank. When she returned to the depths, she was followed by a shower of coins and costume jewelry which she gathered in both hands and let fall into the treasure chest.

She teased the schools of tropical fish, chasing them with white, fluttering hands. Then, with tidbits she picked up from the bottom or plucked from coral fans growing out of encrusted rocks, he tempted them to come to her, as she tempted the club’s clients to come close, closer to the glass. Then, long before anyone had a chance to tire of her show, she was gone. The main lights in the lank were dimmed leaving only a few moving spots through which the exotic tropical fish swam to show off their vivid colors.

The music, of which Mark had been unaware, now changed from the floating, mesmerizing strains that had accompanied Jillian’s show to an upbeat, louder tune over which applause rose and rose and then finally faded, leaving voices to grow loud and glasses to tinkle with ice once more as drinks were ordered with renewed enthusiasm and the houselights came up again.