Chapter Three

Morvoren

Hooray. Civilization. Morvoren's heartbeat quickened at the thought that this farmhouse would surely have a phone she could use, or maybe this kind young man who'd rescued her could drive her back to Penzance. She fixed her gaze on the squat bulk of the house and quickened her halting steps. With its grey slate roof, it could almost have grown there, out of a wound in the landscape, the way the bark of a tree grows over a severed limb to hide the scar.

She peeked sideways at the young man who'd rescued her from the watery grave for which she'd surely been destined. The memory of the cold water burning her lungs in the dark green depths pressed in, and she shivered. When she'd opened her eyes to find herself lying on hot sand with his dark shape silhouetted against the bright sunlight, for a moment, she'd thought she'd died and gone to heaven. Then the cold and need to vomit had overcome her. She'd had no chance since then, and no inclination, to look him over.

Now, after struggling all the way up the path with his strong arm supporting her but his face virtually unseen, instinct took over, and she stole a furtive glance at him.

For "brave rescuer," he seemed to fit the bill. Taller than Josh by several inches, the long lean body pressed enticingly close to hers felt hard and muscular. Dark hair clung in wet curls to a high forehead, touching skin more tanned from the sun than her own. His profile, which was all she could see, showed a long, slightly aquiline nose, a strong chin and firm mouth, and the shadow of dark stubble on his jawline.

Now she was out of the water and had got rid of most of what she'd inhaled or swallowed, to her surprise, she found she could see the humor in her situation. Either that or it was a hysterical reaction. The thing she'd always dreaded had almost happened. Josh had abandoned her to her fate, and here she was, leaning on a man whose profile promised to reveal handsome, if stern, good looks when she got a better view of him.

"This way, miss. Watch your footing on the stones. They're a bit uneven here." With gentle hands, her rescuer guided her up a path edged with hawthorns and brambles toward a wooden gate set between low farm buildings. With a tanned hand, he unhooked a frayed rope from around the gate post and pulled the gate open a foot or so to let them through. The bottom of the gate scraped on the uneven paving slabs.

"Welcome to Nanpean," her rescuer said. "This way."

A proper old-fashioned farm. How quaint. Had she stumbled into a historical recreation of a bygone age, or maybe one of those religious cults that spurned all things modern? She glanced at her escort in his knee-high boots and loose white shirt. He certainly looked as though he might have stepped out of a romance novel, never mind a cult's HQ. Very Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy, only considerably younger and better looking.

She'd think about that later. Right now, getting to a phone was top of her agenda. That, and getting warm and dry.

A few scrawny hens scuttled out of their way as her rescuer escorted her with gentle firmness across the yard toward the ramshackle front porch of the house. A narrow gate set into a low stone wall separated the porch from the yard.

"You'll be safe and warm here," her rescuer said, pushing open the gate.

He seized the large, cast-iron knob and, turning it, gave the door a hefty shove with his booted foot. It swung open and, his hand in the small of her back, he ushered her inside.

What a gloomy house. Just for a moment, Morvoren's wits returned. Was it wise to be going into a strange man's house in the middle of nowhere, even if he had made promises of safety? But then, a serial killer would say just the same. Then common sense took over. What option did she have? And if he tried it on, she had a few moves. She'd taken self-defense classes at university.

Heavy, ancient beams stretched across the low ceiling of a long, stone-flagged room. Halfway down the right-hand wall stood what could only be described as a kitchen range—the sort you saw in National Trust restoration projects. In fact, the whole room, with its enormous oak table and long low benches, its oak sideboard and two high-backed chairs sitting on a rag rug in front of the range, looked like something out of a museum set piece. Very quaint. Just like the old-fashioned farmyard.

Odder and odder. The feeling of being isolated with a strange man, even if he was very handsome, swarmed in around Morvoren again, and she shivered.

He must have mistaken her shiver of misgiving for a shiver of cold, because the firm hand in the small of her back propelled her gently toward the range. "Come and get warm. Please." A glow of heat exuded from it, so she didn't protest.

"Won't you sit down?"

She perched on one of the high-backed chairs, extending her hands to the warmth of the fire before remembering her manners. "Thank you."

He stood back, and she looked up at him, seeing him properly for the first time by the flickering flames in the firebox. What was it about his dark hair and somber face that looked so familiar?

His loose white shirt gaped to reveal the topmost dark hairs of an admirably muscled chest, and he was wearing trousers something akin to jodhpurs above the long boots she'd closely inspected on the way up from the beach. If she hadn't seen his little boat pulled up on the sand, she'd have guessed he'd just been out riding.

Her gaze fixed on his face. Those dark curls, drying now, clustered around a sun-tanned face out of which a pair of brown eyes, so dark as to be almost black, regarded her in open curiosity. The lack of even the smallest of smiles gave his face a look of austere severity that didn't suit him.

But oh, how familiar his face was. Could she have noticed him on the street in Penzance during her holiday?

In encouragement, she let her own mouth curve into a smile.

For a moment he studied her face back, as though intent on committing it to memory, and she thought he was going to allow his sensuous mouth to soften into a smile, but he didn't. With a huff of exhaled breath, he turned away and strode over to the table in the center, an air of frustrated resignation about him that she didn't understand, his boots clacking on the flagstones.

But my goodness, wasn't he handsome with his darkly brooding good looks, his Mr. Darcy outfit, and his wildly curling hair. Quite the romantic hero.

*

Kit

Kit stared atthe girl sitting in his chair. The fact that her long blonde hair had dried in salty rats' tails did nothing to detract from the beauty of her bone structure as she smiled at him. He experienced an urge to smile back at her but withstood the temptation. Her being here was not a matter for smiling about.

He looked her up and down. Since he'd inherited Ormonde from his late father five years ago, he'd met numerous eligible girls. But none quite like this girl he'd seen come back from the dead. But there was no time for idle speculation, he had to make sure she was away from the farm before nightfall and preferably before Jago returned from wherever he'd gone.

He met her candid blue eyes and almost took a step back, which was most unlike him. How, when she was just sitting there shivering in front of the fire, was she making him feel like a green boy meeting a pretty girl for the very first time?

What was there about this girl? He gave himself a mental shake. What he needed to do was to pull himself together and get to the bottom of how she'd come to be in the sea. She probably had distraught relatives searching for her if she'd fallen overboard from some passing ship. Yes, that was certain. He needed to find out who they were then set about locating them.

Straightening his spine, he clicked his booted heels together and made a small bow. "Christopher Carlyon, at your service, Miss…?"

She gazed up at him as though taken aback by his formal greeting, the smile slipping from her face to be replaced by a puzzled frown. Those eyes really were the deepest blue he'd ever seen. He could drown in them if he wasn't careful. "Lucas," she said, almost a question in her voice. "Morvoren Lucas."

What? Morvoren? Was she truly a mermaid as he'd first thought? No, that was just fancy and all wrong. She couldn't be, or she wouldn't have been drowning. However, at the very least, he wanted to know why someone had named her "mermaid." As a Cornishman, Kit knew all the stories told by fishermen and sailors of the many mermaids around the Cornish coast—like the Mermaid of Zennor and the one from Padstow who'd cursed the harbor. But he'd never before met a girl whose parents had named her for one of them.

Her smile tiptoed back onto her face, as though she'd read his mind. "Yes. Mermaid. My parents named me for a mermaid, and I can't swim and am terrified of water. Ironic, isn't it?" Her voice sounded stronger and more confident, with a clear hint of refinement. This was a young lady of good breeding.

Kit gave her a small nod. "So, Miss Lucas, how did a young lady, who can't swim but is named after a mermaid, end up in the sea?"

A bit blunt, but he was curious.

She shivered again, whether at the memory of nearly drowning or from cold, he had no idea, but it reminded him of his duties as a host. He pushed the black kettle onto the hottest part of the range. "I'm sorry. Don't answer. I've been most remiss. You're still cold. I'll fetch you a blanket."

She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could say anything, he stepped to the corner where the door to the spiral staircase opened and ran up the steep stairs two at a time, feet thumping on the creaking boards. Grabbing two blankets from the chest in the box room, he galloped back down the stairs.

He'd half expected her to have vanished away like the mermaids in the stories, but she was still sitting there, the chair drawn closer to the heat and her hands held out to the firebox.

She looked up when he came in, her face breaking into a smile again. Beautiful enough to have been a real mermaid, although some of the old fishermen swore a genuine mermaid had a wickedly ugly face and scaly skin like a fish. Not this mermaid—her face, especially now that it was no longer blue-tinged, took his breath away, her drying sandy hair only giving credence to her possible otherworldly origin.

"Here, Miss Lucas." He handed her the blanket and retreated a step, puzzled by his own reaction. As she draped it around herself and pulled it close, he slung the other one around his own shoulders and took a seat in the empty chair—Jago's—waiting for the kettle to boil. "Are you feeling warmer now?" Bit of a stupid question.

Miss Lucas sighed. "Much better, thank you. Do you have a phone I could use, do you think?"

A what? He frowned, wanting to be able to give her what she'd asked for but not certain what she actually meant. A phone? What was that? Best to be honest. "I'm sorry. I don't have one."

Her turn to frown. "I must have lost mine in the sea." She patted her hip. "It must have fallen out of my pocket, but even so, it wouldn't have worked after a dunking."

The kettle began to sing.

Best to humor her. Whatever she'd lost from her pocket must be important and she thought he might have one himself. Maybe he did, and she'd used a foreign word for something he knew by another name. She'd patted her hip which was where he usually kept his hipflask. Maybe that was it. A phone must be a hipflask. Of course, she'd need a tot of something to warm her up. A hot toddy would be far better than the cup of tea he'd been intending to provide her with.

Relief that he could help flooded over him. "Of course. I must apologize for being remiss in my duties as your host." Now he was sounding more of an idiot than ever. Whatever had come over him? He'd be dropping things next.

Conscious of his burning cheeks, he rose with as much dignity as he could muster and went to the cupboard in the far corner where Jago kept his best contraband brandy. With nervous fingers, he poured two generous tots into a couple of pewter mugs, then came back to the range. Picking up the kettle's hot handle with a rag, he added boiling water to the mugs and handed one to Miss Lucas.

"This should warm you through."

She sniffed the contents of the mug with a wrinkled nose. "What is it?"

"A hot toddy. That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

She opened her mouth, and for a moment he thought she was about to say no. Then she furrowed her brow, sniffed it again, and took a tentative sip. "I don't normally drink brandy, but maybe just this once."

He knocked back his own drink in one go, the fiery trail it left down his throat giving him confidence. He felt both warmer and wiser at the same time. "You haven't yet told me how you came to be in the sea."

Her eyebrows shot up. They were particularly lovely eyebrows, arching in a gentle and slender curve, almost as though they'd been drawn on, above those blue eyes. He had to stop being distracted by her looks.

"Not much to tell, I'm afraid. I was on one of those sea fishing trips they offer to tourists in Penzance and fell out of the boat when a big wave tossed us up in the air. I thought I was going to drown. The next thing I knew, I was with you on the beach."

Now Kit was really flummoxed. Tourists? Some of his old school friends had gone on the Grand Tour of Europe after Oxford and liked to call themselves tourists, but he'd never heard of any of them deciding part of their tour needed to encompass a trip in a Cornish fishing boat.

Surely, she hadn't been out on an actual fishing boat?

Kit narrowed his eyes, puzzled that she could have fallen off some passing boat he hadn't seen while he was out fishing. He needed to get to the bottom of this. "What was the name of your vessel?"

She gave an eloquent shrug of her shoulders, the blanket slipping to reveal her thin undergarment. "I can't remember its name, but it was one of those trip boats from Penzance. My boyfriend persuaded me to go with him." She snorted in a very unladylike way. "Against my better judgement. Today's the last day of our holiday, and he loves fishing. Like an idiot, I agreed to go. He's not going to be my boyfriend for much longer, I can tell you."

What? Kit's frown deepened. What was she talking about now? Holidays? Trip boats? Tourists? He fancied himself something of a man of the world, despite his mere twenty-seven years, but these were terms he'd almost never come across in daily speech. What on earth did she mean? Well, he knew what a holiday was, but a trip boat? And a boyfriend? He'd never heard that word before, although it was reasonably easy to infer its meaning. Could she mean she had a suitor who'd taken her out on a ship and then lost her overboard? Perhaps someone she was engaged to, who liked fishing?

The thought that anyone would take their gently bred, possibly affianced, lady friend out on a rough fishing boat from Penzance and then not leap in to save her when she fell in, shocked him to the core. The blanket slipped a little more as she shifted her position and her odd, breeches-clad legs protruded. A lady friend so inadequately dressed as well.

The thought that he might have rescued not a mermaid, but a young lady whose lot in life had forced her into a career as a woman of ill repute, surfaced. Kit swallowed. However, one look at her convinced him she couldn't be either. She was far too sweet faced—not that being sweet faced meant anything, really. He just refused to believe a girl as beautiful as this one could be anything other than what he wanted her to be—a highborn lady who'd been unlucky enough to fall off her ship unnoticed.

At that moment, the front door swung open with a bang, and a burly figure strode into the room. Damn it.

"Uncle Jago," said Kit.