Falling for the Rebel Heir

Six years old and running away the first night his parents had left him here and getting lost in the pine forest before Aunt Fay found him—she and her neck-to-ankle layers of lace, lolloping dog and hurricane lamp. The hundred-year-old oak tree in the centre of town that he knew had changed every summer he visited though he couldn’t see how. The piano in the downstairs parlour with its broken e-flat.

And then suddenly, before he even felt them coming, memories of another kind swarmed over him, making the water in his mouth taste like dust. Memories of no water. For days. So thirsty he couldn’t stop shaking. And the sound of a dripping tap in a room nearby. So close. Yet achingly out of reach.

His eyes flew open. He switched off the tap, his breath loud in the huge marble shower. He leant his hand against the wall, watching the droplets slide from his skin and drip to the floor. Just as they had when his high-spirited mermaid had sprung forth from the depths of the glimmering pool.

He concentrated on brandy-coloured hair. Long pale limbs. Stormy blue-grey eyes. His breathing settled. His memories calmed. And he only had her to thank for it.

Whoever she was.

CHAPTER TWO

HUD woke early the next morning. While still fuzzy with sleep, he tugged on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt from the minimal choices still stuffed into his rucksack and headed downstairs, through Claudel’s cold, silent rooms and outside into the post-dawn mist.

It wasn’t all that long before he found himself swinging by the pool house. He thought about poking his head inside, even though he knew that he’d find nothing there bar still water and lingering shadows. He hadn’t led a charitable enough life to deserve stumbling upon such an apparition two days running.

Instead he kept walking until he was swallowed up by the cool dauntingly tall moss-covered trees, flat beige ground covered in a layer of pine needles and shadows of the mighty forest separating Claudel’s grounds from the nearby town.

He let his fingers trail over the rough bark, the tactile discomfort grounding him while he headed he knew not where. Into blissful nothingness? Or with all too specific purpose—the knowledge that this was the last place he had seen her?

The sound of a cracking branch stilled his steps. He looked out into the tightly packed trunks and saw something shimmer and shift. Lucky for him this wasn’t bear country. Though he’d come to realise that humans could be far worse creatures to stumble upon down a dark alley.

The form stirred. Took shape. Human shape. Female shape. And there she was. As if he had conjured her out of the mist. His mermaid. The woman whose effortless allure had hovered at the edge of his dreams all night, miraculously keeping far darker dreams at bay for the first time in weeks.

As she slid into full view her dark red curls streamed over her shoulders like waves of silk. Her pale skin was luminous in the weak morning light. The fine features of her face hid nothing. Not her loveliness, or her wariness. Again he wished he had his camera, on him. His camera which he had not picked up once in two long months.

‘Well, hello there,’ he said when she was near enough for him to see the whites of her guarded eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said, offering a half smile, even though her clenched fists and ducked chin told him far more than the smile could hope to hide.

As did the black tank-top with a hot pink one beneath, the long hippy skirt and heavy black boots she’d run off in the day before. It would be close to thirty-five degrees later that day. Her feet must have felt like ovens. But he decided as soon as the thought occurred to him to keep that little titbit to himself. A wild bear she may not be, but there was an air of the intractable about her all the same.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t coming to use your pool, if that’s what you mean.’

Hud laughed before he even felt it rising up his chest. It felt good. No, it felt great. Natural. Unforced. Curative. He held up both hands in surrender. ‘Ah, no. I was just making conversation. Badly, it seems.’

She flicked her hair off her face. Not out of any kind of flirtation but more like she was shooing away a bothersome fly. Either way, the shift and tumble of her hair mesmerised him. The woman wasn’t a mermaid, she was a siren. An unwilling siren, if that clenched jaw was anything to go by, but a siren all the same.

‘You come here often?’ he asked, wondering where these conversational gems were coming from.

‘More often than I should probably admit,’ she said with a shrug.

Hud didn’t realise he had a thing for shoulders until that moment. Pale, delicate, eloquent shoulders were his new favourite thing.

‘But I came out this morning in the hope I might bump into you,’ she said as she finally made prolonged eye contact with him.

Well, that was one for the books. Hud stopped his daydreaming and came to attention. ‘You could have come knocking on my front door,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established you know where I live.’

Her eyes blazed and he bit his inner lip and told himself to cool it. The more he pushed, the more she seemed determined to pull away. But maybe it was worth it for the flare of energy in those blue-grey eyes.

‘Not my style,’ she said, the tight half smile shifting into something far more natural as it tugged at the corners of her lips. ‘I tend to make things far more difficult than all that.’

‘I’ve been there,’ he said. And he smiled back, feeling it from the inside out.

Then her smile slid away and she shook her head and, with a big deep breath, said, ‘Look, I wanted to apologise for yesterday. And all the days before that. The trespassing. The tidying. The water usage.’ She closed one eye and squinted up at him through the other, obviously mortified at having to say so.

And it was just as obvious to him that he found this woman utterly adorable. Whoever she was. Whatever she was really here to say to him. Because he knew as well as he knew his own name that she sure wasn’t here, hat in hand, just to say, I’m sorry.

‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘The pool house never looked so good. Ever. I should have come looking for you at the other end of this forest of ours to say thank you.’

She opened the other eye and her eyebrows disappeared under wavy wisps of dark red hair. Her voice dropped when she said, ‘It never looked that good ever? Maybe you should demand a refund from your previous pool guy.’

Hud laughed again. And his smile lingered. Grew, even. ‘You needn’t have worked nearly so hard at it.’

‘How could I not? It’s the most amazing structure I’ve ever seen. Like something out of a fairy tale.’ She let go of a sigh. A long romantic sigh that seemed to curl about them both until Hud realised the sounds of the forest had slipped completely away until all he could hear was the sound of her voice, her breathing, the swish of her voluminous skirt.

Her eyebrows settled back to a normal position, perhaps even a little furrowed as she shifted her stance as though her toes were turning numb in her shoes, and said, ‘But, even so, you were no doubt surprised to find…what you found. And I feel utterly embarrassed. About the whole thing with the pool. Tidy though it is. And for thinking you were going to rob me. And for the running away without explaining myself.’