Forbidden Game: Seducing the Bride at the Altar novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Mother's Court

Jasper took the lock of hair off the table and put it in the stove.

It went up with a stink.

"She can't do anything with it now," he said.

"She doesn't need it. She wanted me to know she could have."

I sat with my hand over my wrist all afternoon.

The foam had crept a finger's width up my arm by supper.

Twenty-one days to the gala.

Twenty-one days for a woman who couldn't call a storm or a lost ring or anything at all.

I wasn't going to win that with a legal pad.

At dark I went down to the end of the dock in the pelican swimsuit.

Jasper was coiling hose on the Patience.

He saw what I had on and dropped the coil.

"Where are you going?"

"Home."

He came over the barge rail and down the dock fast.

"Not without me."

"You can't breathe where I'm going."

"I've got a tank."

"It's forty miles out, past the edge of the shelf. Six hundred feet down. Your tank's a joke there."

He stopped in front of me.

"My mother had a court," I said. "Elders. Cousins. The oldest sea folk on this coast. If anyone knows a way to take a pearl off a man who won't take it off, they do."

"And if they don't help?"

"Then I've lost a night."

"And if they keep you?"

I hadn't thought of that.

I looked at his face in the dock light.

"They won't want me," I said. "Wait up anyway."

He took my face in both hands and kissed me hard.

Then he let go and stepped back, and I went off the end of the dock.

Shem Creek. The harbor. The black road of the channel with the Lady Margaret lying in it.

Then out past the jetties, where the water turns cold and clear and goes on forever.

I swam the way I hadn't swum in five years.

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