For the Taking

Damn! It was his own fault, Loucan realized. He’d declared himself way too soon. “I’m not looking for any kind of decision right away, Lass,” he said calmly.

“Well, you’re getting one!” Her green eyes blazed and her full lower lip jutted angrily. “My decision is made. I’m not going back to Pacifica. I want you to leave.”

“This isn’t over, Lass.”

“Is that a threat? Are you planning to kidnap me?”

Loucan’s jaw tightened in frustration. Kidnap her? What a good idea. “Yes, Lass,” he said through clenched teeth, “if I have to.”

A Tale of the Sea

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE by Carla Cassidy

IN DEEP WATERS by Melissa McClone

CAUGHT BY SURPRISE by Sandra Paul

FOR THE TAKING by Lilian Darcy

For the Taking

Lilian Darcy

LILIAN DARCY

has written nearly fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia, but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack, NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Epilogue

Prologue

This time they met in a bar.

Loucan was at home in places like this. He’d worked in one, a long time ago, for about six months. The yeasty tang of beer in the air was familiar, and the other drinkers didn’t think there was anything strange about two men sitting hunched over their filled glasses in the darkest corner of the establishment, locked in conversation.

“So, how is married life?” he asked Kevin Cartwright. It sounded like a casual question, but it wasn’t.

“Uh, you know, it’s okay,” the big man answered. “It’s not bad.”

Yeah, right! The guy was actually wrestling with his uncontrollable grin, and the grin was winning. It just wouldn’t stay off his face, no matter how hard he tried. Marriage to Phoebe Jones was clearly a lot better than “not bad.”

“I’ve brought some wedding pictures, if you want to see them,” Kevin added.

Loucan didn’t waste any time. Ignoring the mention of such a trivial thing as wedding pictures, he pounced at once. “Because I get the impression it’s too much of a distraction,” he said. “What progress have you made in locating Thalassa since your marriage?”

Kevin sat up straight, gulped some beer and swore. “Where is this coming from, Loucan?” he demanded. “I thought we were here to celebrate three successes, not fling accusations about one failure.”

Loucan ignored him. “Have you narrowed down the search?” he asked. “You’ve been working on this for four years, on and off. Phoebe, Kai and Saegar have all been found. Yes, that’s success, but it doesn’t mean anything without Lass. She’s your sole focus now. I need results, and I have to wonder, is wedded bliss with Phoebe taking the edge off your hunger to close this case?”

“Easy, Loucan…!” Kevin slumped back in his chair. He shook his head slowly several times as he swirled the beer in his glass.

Loucan wasn’t fooled by the apparently relaxed posture. They were both strong men. Direct. Sure of themselves. He’d gone on the attack with the deliberate aim of getting the straightest possible answers from the man he’d hired to track down the four far-flung Pacifican royal siblings.

Kevin didn’t disappoint him. Leaning forward again with new energy, he took another long gulp of beer, fixed his deep blue eyes on Loucan and said, “Okay. You want the truth? The only thing that finding the other three has done is made me face facts.”

“What facts?” Loucan said. “I’m interested in facts. I like them.”

“Loucan, we have nothing left to go on. There weren’t many avenues to pursue to begin with, and those turned into dead ends real fast. Thalassa and Cyria are both unusual names, but I ran searches through every database and archive I could think of in two hemispheres, and the handful of hits I turned up didn’t pan out. Australia and New Zealand, where you think they’re located, both have small populations compared to the United States, but that didn’t seem to help. I’ve told you all this.”

“Tell me again. Tell me what point you’re at now.”

“I’m guessing Cyria changed her name, and maybe Lass’s as well. I’m guessing she got them each forged identity documents—birth certificates—through some South Pacific nation where bribes get results. We found the other three mainly through luck. Now it seems like our luck has run out.”

“You’re throwing in the towel?” Loucan felt his scalp tighten with anger. “Giving up the search? This is because of Phoebe!”

“It’s not,” Kevin insisted. “And I’m not throwing it in. I’ve got one thing left to suggest, the only thing I believe can get a result.”

“Yeah? Then I want to hear it. Straight.”

“You knew Thalassa,” Kevin said. “How old was she when you left Pacifica that first time?

Loucan shrugged impatiently. “That was twenty-five years ago. She was eight and I was fourteen. What does that have to do with anything?”

“You knew her then,” Kevin repeated. “And you knew Cyria, who was her guardian. And whatever has happened to both of them since, there are ways in which people don’t change. Think, Loucan!” It wasn’t quite a command, yet much more than a plea. “You’re the one with something to go on. Memories. Impressions. Things you couldn’t communicate to me even if you tried, because you’re not going to realize what’s significant until you’re actually living the search.”

“Me? Living the search? You want me to find her?”

“Yes. If anyone can find Thalassa after all this time, it’s you.”

Kevin’s eyes blazed intently, and he’d balled one hand into a fist. Given the kind of man Kevin Cartwright was, that meant the idea deserved at least Loucan’s consideration.

He nodded slowly and narrowed his eyes, thinking, struggling….

Memories? Impressions? Lord, it was hard! He’d last seen Thalassa twenty-five years ago, back in Pacifica, when he was just a boy. Since then, he’d had adventures enough for three lifetimes.

He’d spent ten years, and more, roaming the world. He’d swum with pods of whales on their great migrations around the Pacific rim, until he knew every current in that vast ocean. Living on land, he’d worked as a commercial fisherman, an Arizona ranch hand and a Wall Street bond trader. He’d swapped identities easily, and he had hungrily absorbed knowledge and understanding from every experience.

He’d never done anything seriously illegal, but he had been in prison once for several days, arrested by mistake. He’d even been married. That wasn’t a memory he liked to dwell on, since it carried with it so much guilt and grief.

For the past fifteen years, he’d spent most of his time in Pacifica, relearning its ways, working to bring together the two warring factions that had divided the mer people for a generation.

But before all of that…

Yes, he realized. He still had memories. One in particular flooded into his mind as he sat and thought, his beer untouched on the table in front of him.

His parents and Thalassa’s had been friends once, before Lass’s father, King Okeana, had come under the malign influence of an evil, manipulative merman named Joran, and his dangerous ideas. The friendship had already begun to fracture by the time Loucan reached his teens, but the two women, Okeana’s wife, Wailele, and Loucan’s own mother, Ondina, were still managing to hold it together, the way women sometimes did. There had been no open rift, and no violence, as yet.

The two families had left the safe confines of Pacifica’s underwater world and gone on a picnic together, at a secret coral island beach. Around a closed fire made from phosphorus distilled out of the ocean itself, they’d feasted on freshly cooked marine delicacies as well as the exotic and expensive treats of earth-grown foods—bananas, coconuts and baked yams.

Loucan remembered Wailele’s frailty. She’d never fully recovered from the difficult birth of the twins, Phoebe and Kai, and could take little part in the day-to-day rearing of her children, particularly lively Lass. Cyria, he remembered, was the dominant influence in Lass’s life even then. He remembered her doting strictness. He wouldn’t have put up with it, he’d thought at fourteen. He remembered Cyria’s unwillingness to share Thalassa with others, and her pride in the bright, pretty child.

Take Lass’s long, rippling, red-gold hair, for example. It had never been cut.

“And never will, while I have breath in my body!” Cyria had declared in his hearing. “It’s far too beautiful, and it sets her apart, as a princess should be.”

Lass had seemed unconcerned by Cyria’s attitude back then. She had delighted in playing with her toddling sisters, entertaining them by building sand castles and digging holes for the sea to fill.

She’d casually obeyed Cyria’s order, “Braid your hair! Keep it out of the sand!” then had gone back to her sisters, with a laugh and a kiss for each of them. She’d made herself a frivolous pair of “shoes” out of shells and strips of seaweed, and all three sisters had giggled as she pranced around in them on the beach. She’d been so full of life and happiness.

But what might have changed since? Cyria and Lass had left Pacifica together, just the two of them, and Cyria’s influence could only have grown stronger.

Still, Lass’s spirit would have been hard to break. Loucan remembered how she’d left the beach and swum far out into the ocean, lazing there during the minutes it took for her tail membrane to form. He had followed her at a distance, unwillingly impressed by her boldness. She was only a little kid!

Then some dolphins had swum past and she’d joined them, surfing and frolicking in the waves….

Yes, Kevin was right. There were memories.

Kevin was watching him. And watching his untouched beer. Loucan blinked and quirked his lips in a reluctant and self-conscious smile. His voice came out slightly husky as he told the younger man, “I see what you mean. You’re right. Maybe I am the only one who has a chance of finding her.”

And with Kevin’s thoughtful and curious gaze still fixed on him, Loucan was struck by a sudden intuition that, after all, finding Thalassa was going to be the easy part.

Chapter One

Thalassa came toward Loucan across a lush field of green grass, where several sleek and well-fed horses grazed.

Her red-gold hair, which still shocked him with its almost boyish length, glinted like polished copper. A clingy, cream knit tank top showed off smooth pale skin and a figure that was just as shapely above the waist as it was below. Her legs were neat and athletic in a pair of khaki stretch pants, and she had brown leather boots on her feet, making her walk easy and confident. She was as graceful and sure in her body as one of the horses she’d just been tending.

Something stirred inside Loucan, and he recognized the feeling with ease. He’d felt it the other night, too—the night they’d first met. He could be attracted to this woman. Very easily. There was something so lush and physical about her. The rich color of her hair. The fullness of her breasts.

There was something very contained and self-sufficient in her emotional makeup, as well. He suspected she wouldn’t open up to him easily. She had reasons for that—reasons to do with the past. She’d probably trained herself to be mistrustful.

But it wasn’t just a matter of history, of discordant beliefs and opposing factions. It went deeper than that, to the very heart of her. The powerful sensuality he detected in her seemed dormant, as if she hadn’t yet discovered it.

Or as if she feared it, and kept it hidden.

As soon as Lass registered his presence on her land, the whole aura of her body changed. She tensed and lifted a hand to shield her eyes against the Australian summer sunlight, which was strong even at nine in the morning.

Yes, she’d recognized him, and she wasn’t surprised. Loucan had told her on the beach the other night that he would give her two days—time in which to think, to get used to this, to understand that he wasn’t a part of the violence of the past—and then he would come looking for her. In the end, he’d given her three days, but now, as promised, he was here.

She wouldn’t even acknowledge him at first. They were still some distance apart. He leaned against the side of his dark blue rental car and took in the details of her place, while she swung two feed buckets in her hands and scowled up at the leafy tops of the eucalyptus trees, moving in a light breeze.

Lass had found a pretty incredible home for herself, Loucan decided. At the end of a gravel path lined with nasturtiums and lavender stood a quaint old building with a veneer of pale yellow stucco and a mantle of leafy green wisteria.

According to an elegantly carved and painted sign, this was The Old Dairy—Tearoom and Gallery. The sign listed its opening hours, as well as the fact that “light meals and Devonshire teas” were served. Lass owned the place, and the land it was situated on. Several acres, if he was judging it right.

Beyond the tearoom building, and connected to it by another path, was a low, gracious house built in the Australian colonial style, with a galvanized metal roof that curved down to form what Loucan now knew was called a bull-nosed veranda.

At the moment, the veranda was filled with morning sunshine. It made the terra-cotta pots of bright flowers stand out like beacons. Later, though, as the day grew hot, the long sweep of stone flagging would be darkened by cool shade.

Behind the house was a stable and a shed or two, neatly kept, then more green fields and forest, and finally, in the distance, the mountains. Wild mountains, Loucan observed, clothed in forests of sage-green eucalyptus.

This view to the west was impressive enough, but behind Loucan, in the opposite direction, it was even better. More significant, too. It told him much more about Lass than she probably wanted him to know. About three miles away, beyond lush dairy country, beyond a scattering of small towns, beyond tidal lakes, rocky headlands and miles of pristine sandy beaches, was the beckoning sea.

Technically, it was the Tasman Sea, this two-thousand-mile stretch between the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, but in reality it was an integral part of the Pacific Ocean. It stretched, blue and sparkling, in a long, wide ribbon from north to south, and in the summer haze its horizon blurred indistinctly with the almost garishly blue sky. The whole scene was breathtaking.

“You came,” Lass said.

He turned to find her watching him from a distance of twenty feet or so. “I said I would.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t. I didn’t want to see you again.”

“I know.”

He had a sudden flashback to the other night’s most shocking moment. After he had told her who he was and how he had found her, she had fled from him across the sand in the darkness to hide among the jagged piles of rocks on the nearby headland. He had followed her, and found her sobbing wildly, in anger and fear, while hacking at her gorgeous fall of hair—it reached to her thighs—with a jagged piece of oyster shell.

“I like your hair that way,” he said to her now. He wasn’t going to let her avoid the difficult issues between them. He couldn’t pretend. They both needed to confront this.

“I’m getting used to it,” she answered guardedly. Self-conscious, she ran her fingers through its short, bright strands, making it seem more alive than ever. The gesture momentarily deepened the cleft between her breasts and drew his gaze. “I went to my hairdresser on Wednesday morning to get it properly shaped,” she added.

“What did you tell her?”

She shrugged. “That I’d grown sick of it, suddenly. That it was too much work, so I’d chopped it off.”

She was so prickly and distant and defensive! Loucan knew how emotional she had been the other night when he’d found her on the beach and told her who he was, but she was trying to pretend her outburst had never happened.

“Why did you hack it off like that?” he persisted.

“You know why.”

Yes, but I want to hear it from your own mouth.

She had a passionate mouth, he observed. It was full-lipped, sensuous and strong. With a surge of understanding, he gave in and said it for her. “Because your hair was the thing that led me to you.”

Her nod was just a brief jerk of her jutting chin, and her green eyes were narrowed.

“Does this mean you’re going to hurt the dolphins, too?” He asked, then ignored her shocked hiss of breath. “Hearing that you’d been seen surfing with them at sunset was what clinched it for me. I knew you were the woman I’d been looking for, and I knew where to find you.”

“Hurt the—!” She shook her head and swallowed, outraged.

Maybe he’d gone too far. He wanted to push her into talking about what she believed and why she was so scared, but this wasn’t the way. She wasn’t like Kevin Cartwright, who rose to the bait of a direct attack. She was a woman—a mer woman, if she could accept that—and therefore very different.

He was about to apologize, but she hadn’t stopped speaking. “Why are you doing this? I won’t tolerate it. Leave my property, please!”

She turned in the direction of the house, ignoring him as he followed her. When she reached the veranda, she clumsily levered off her elastic-sided riding boots and socks, and tossed them into a basket beside the door. Retrieving a pair of flimsy, high-heeled cream sandals from the same basket, she slipped them onto her feet and tottered inside.

Still he followed her. Still she ignored him. It would get to be a habit between them, soon. Almost immediately, as if hardly noticing what she’d done, she kicked the sandals off again and frowned down at her pink manicured toes.

Did she have a love-hate relationship with her footwear? Or with her feet?

She tipped her head to one side thoughtfully and said, “Is it enough to tell you that I’m busy this morning? Or should I phone the police?”

“Thalassa—”

“My name is Lass. Or Letitia Susan Morgan, if you want the full, legal version.”

“Cyria did change your name, then.”

“Who? Oh, you mean Aunt Catherine?”

“Do I?” His gaze held hers for a moment, and it was a toss-up whose was the most stubborn. He changed tack. “You have a fabulous view of the ocean, Lass.”

“I prefer the view in the other direction. To the mountains.”

“No, you don’t,” he told her softly. “It’s not the mountains you watch. It’s not the mountains that call you. You couldn’t stay away, could you? You couldn’t when you bought this place, and you still can’t.”

She lifted her chin, and he appreciated the stubborn yet delicate line of her jaw. “I go for weeks, sometimes, without setting foot on the beach.”

He laughed. “You sound like a gambler, talking about visits to the track. You do without it for weeks, but you think about it every day. Are you really going to call the police?”

“Yes! And I really don’t have time to talk! The tearoom opens at ten, and there’s a ton of stuff to do to prepare. My staff will be here any minute.”

“I have something for you from your sisters, Lass.”

Loucan didn’t wait for another defensive answer, another threat to throw him off the property. He just reached into the breast pocket of his conservative and anonymous navy T-shirt and pulled out a paper packet.

“Wedding pictures,” he said, and took the sheaf of prints out of the packet to show her. He knew exactly what effect it would have. It was his one asset in all this, and he was counting on it.

Watching her reaction, he saw that he wasn’t wrong.

Lass gasped and clamped a fist to her heart. Pictures? Of Phoebe and Kai? She had long ago shut off any hope of finding them, had often wondered if they were even still alive. She had thought of trying to trace them somehow, but it had seemed like such a hopeless quest. She didn’t even know to which part of the world or with whom her father had sent them. Didn’t know if they were together or apart.

She hadn’t seen them since they were two years old. They’d been the light of her life, back then—the beings she’d loved most in the world. She still remembered the soft, plump feel of their little cheeks pressed against hers for a “Tiss, Lassie. I want a tiss!” She remembered the exuberant embrace of their little arms, the innocent joyousness of their laughter and the equal intensity of their tears. And now they were grown women, old enough to be married.

She wanted to hear about her sisters.

Set against this longing, all her bravado toward Loucan was fake. For the sake of her sisters, she would make herself believe what he said—that he hadn’t been part of the violence. Because of her sisters, she wouldn’t turn him off her property.

And he knew it, too. Oh, he knew it.

He’d brought those pictures with him on purpose, and he’d mentioned them at exactly the right moment. Now he was cradling them closely in his hand. On the surface, it was a casual gesture, but she knew he was doing it with deliberate intent. She wasn’t going to get to touch those pictures until he chose to let her, and since they were so precious to her, she didn’t dare try and grab them from him by force.

Against a man like Loucan, she would have no hope of success. His strength had been apparent to her from the beginning. It wasn’t just about his powerful size or his almost intimidating good looks. There was an unusual force of will displayed in those incredible blue eyes. This man knew what he wanted.

His thick, dark hair was pulled into a short, tight braid that lay against the back of his neck, making him look like an English sailor from two hundred years ago. The style revealed the regal height and breadth of his forehead and emphasized his square jaw and very masculine bone structure.

He’d frightened her on the beach the other night, from the moment his strong, deep voice had uttered her name. Her full, real name. No one had used it since Cyria died.

Thalassa.

It meant “one who comes from the sea.”

She shivered a little, and wished she was wearing something more substantial than this snug top this morning. She felt vulnerable, physically and emotionally, but wasn’t going to let it show if she could possibly help it.

“Show me the photos!” she demanded.

In his hand she caught the tiniest glimpse of a gorgeous couple dressed in wedding finery, and her heart did a flip against her rib cage. Was that lovely woman with the honey-colored hair Phoebe? Or was it Kai? Oh lord, she should know! A woman should be able to recognize her own sisters!

The phone rang—so perfectly timed that she almost suspected Loucan of engineering the call somehow.