Riptide [Kismet Cove] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  “Now that was the oddest welcome I’ve ever had.” Jess laughed to herself as she dragged her bags inside. The moment she crossed the threshold, she felt like she was coming home. It didn’t matter that the harvest gold appliances were replaced with gleaming chrome, or that the fireplace had been converted to gas, this was still the place she remembered from her childhood. Jess dropped her things and ran to the living room’s bay windows that overlooked the ocean. The view was exactly the same, and in her mind’s eye she could see her parents and the girl she had been wading through the waves, all three of them holding hands and laughing.

  There were tears in her eyes as she turned away from the view, but for the first time, the sadness didn’t feel like it would crush her beneath its weight. “You were right, Mom,” she whispered into the air as she hugged her arms to her chest and then went to unpack. Before anything else, she needed a hot shower and some quality time with her hair dryer.

  She grabbed her suitcase and went to what had once been her room, then stopped and put it in the master bedroom instead. With her bag of toiletries and a towel in hand, she headed down the short hall to the bathroom. Jess still wasn’t sure how she felt about taking her parent’s old room, but all thoughts along that line stopped dead at the sight that greeted her. Instead of the faded, powder-blue vinyl bathtub surround and matching toilet she remembered, the entire room was done in soft creams and glass. The tub had been replaced with a walk-in shower, the entire bottom paved with dark gray river rock that matched the marble tiling.

  “Holy hell, that’s some remodeling job.” She shed her travel-creased clothes and turned on the shower, nearly cheering in delight as she realized the showerhead was one of the new rainfall types, positioned so that it hovered overhead. A second, more standard shower head with a detachable handle was set in the wall as well. She turned on the water and let it run as hot as she could stand before stepping under the gentle cascade.

  She groaned and rolled her shoulders, easing the tension that had built up in them over the last frantic days of packing and getting herself ready to leave. The cold that had seeped into her bones since her arrival was banished by the hot water, and she felt some of the fatigue and worry being washed away between the stones that curved beneath her feet.

  “I could get used to this,” she sighed. “And once Vivian sees it, she’s going to want to move in with me.”

  After her shower Jess felt more like herself, and as she put the kettle on she made a mental note to find out where in town she could find a decent espresso machine. If she was serious about getting back to her writing, then she was going to need the proper fuel. On her way back to the fireplace Jess grabbed her phone and hit speed dial, only to be surprised when the call didn’t go through.

  “Right, she’s long distance now.” Jess had switched her phone plan to reflect her change in location, one of the hundred details she would have never remembered if Vivian hadn’t been there every step of the way.

  She dialed in the number manually and smiled the instant she heard Vivian’s voice on the other end.

  “Hey stranger! How’s the new place? Met any cute guys yet?”

  “Hey yourself. Things are good here, but I miss you already.”

  “I miss you too. So, are you settling in all right? Is it like you remembered it?”

  “I’m settling in just fine. The realtor actually made me a casserole and left it in the fridge, and she baked me brownies, too. It’s not quite the same as I remember it, they have had some serious renovations done in the last few years, but yeah, it feels familiar.” Jess curled up in one of the overstuffed chairs near the fireplace and looked around her. “It feels good here. You were right to encourage me to get out of Toronto.”

  “You timed it well, too. We’re supposed to get the first blizzard of the winter hitting sometime tomorrow.”

  “No snow here, but it hasn’t stopped raining since I landed.”

  “There’s a reason they call it the wet coast, you know.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” Jess laughed. “And yet you let me leave without reminding me to take an umbrella, or a proper rain jacket.”

  “You’re right, I have completely failed you as a friend. When I get out there in a few weeks feel free to punish me by making me sit in the hot tub for hours on end while consuming copious numbers of Irish coffees.”

  “You got yourself a deal.”

  “Hey, Jess?” Vivian’s voice got softer.

  “What is it?”

  “I really do miss you.”

  “I really miss you, too, Viv, but you’ll be here soon. And I promise to have scouted out all the best places to meet the local men by the time you get here.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “Right back at you.” Jess hugged her knees to her chest and swallowed past the lump that seemed to materialize in her throat. “I’ll Skype with you tomorrow, once I’ve got the laptop set up.”

  “It’s a date. Toodles, Gator.”

  “Later, Poodle.”

  Jess pressed the disconnect button on her phone, but she didn’t put it down. She knew she should call her dad and let him know she had arrived safely, but things had been strained between them since he’d left her mother for another woman. It wasn’t an easy thing to forgive, but she was trying. It didn’t help that Jess suspected that her mother’s illness was brought on at least in part by the stress of the divorce. The day her dad had moved out, some of the light had gone from her mother’s eyes, and every day after she seemed to fade a little bit more. Jess wanted to hate him for that, but it wasn’t in her heart to hate anyone, especially not her dad. Even if he did go and marry his secretary. His much younger, silicone-enhanced, secretary.

  Jess still couldn’t believe he’d embraced the stereotype so completely. The only thing her father hadn’t done was bought a sports car or a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

  “Thank you for small mercies,” she muttered to herself and set down the phone as the kettle started to whistle. She’d make herself a cup of hot chocolate and then decide if she was going to call or not. Even with the time difference, he’d still be up for another hour or so.

  On her way to the kitchen her eyes fell on the strange wood and metal box her mother had asked her to bring with her. It was sitting by the front stairs where Jess had left it. The thing was heavy! Her laptop was still packed, and so were the few books she’d brought with her, but Jess recalled the book her mother used to read to her was tucked in with the odd fur. It would give her something to read while she relaxed before bed.

  She settled back into the chair a few minutes later with a hot chocolate in one hand and the book in her other and started reading the storybook her mother had left for her. She’d remembered it from her childhood, a collection of stories about a group of men and women called selkies, who were magical beings that could transform from human to seal and back again. It had been her favorite growing up, but now Jess realized that her mother had been lifting small sections out of a much larger story.

  “Well, that’s certainly not something that should be in a children’s book,” she muttered to herself after one particularly adult passage that told the story of lonely fishermen’s wives, their husbands off at sea, crying into the ocean to summon a virile selkie lover to keep them company.

  Jess looked at the cover again, and then at the inside flap and discovered that the book was much older than it looked. It had been old when her mother had read it to her, more than twenty years ago. Why would she read this to me? It’s not even written for kids.

  Jess had always just called it her “seal people” book, but now she realized it was a collection of legends and tales, and all of them were about selkies. She flipped through the book randomly, skimming bits and pieces as she tried to reconcile the stories she remembered her mother telling her with what she was reading. There were dog-eared pages that Jess realized marked the passages her mother would read aloud to her, and as she let her tired mind drift she could almo
st hear her mom’s voice, soft and comforting, reading along beside her. It made Jess’s heart ache with loneliness and loss.

  “I miss you, Mom,” she whispered and touched the page she was reading with a loving caress. “I’m not sure why you wanted me to have this book, but I’ll read it, I promise.”

  Jess smothered a yawn and closed the book, hugging it close to her chest. “Just not now. Right now I need to start figuring out how to turn this from a rental cabin into a place I can call home.”

  Chapter 3

  Over the next few days Jess reclaimed the cabin that had been featured in so many of her childhood memories. She set up a writing area near the bay window so she could stare out at the view when she needed a break, and there was now a gleaming espresso maker sitting on the kitchen counter. Brand new raingear hung by the door, and she’d stocked the fridge and cupboards with every single one of her favorite foods.

  As she had settled in, her eyes kept sliding to the carefully wrapped case she had placed near the living room window. Inside the case was the urn that held her mother’s ashes. Every time Jess passed the case she looked outside, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that her mother was waiting for her to fulfill her last request.

  Jess split her time between settling into the cabin, writing, and reading more of the book her mother had left for her. The more she read, the more she wondered why it had been so important to her mother that she have it. The stories were from Scotland and the Orknie Islands mostly, both places that Jess knew her mother, Mara, had never been. Mara had always wanted to go to Scotland, but there was never enough money, or the timing was wrong.

  “And now you’ll never get to go there,” Jess sighed. “Though I suppose when I scatter your ashes, some of them might make it there eventually. Not much a vacation, Mom, but I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  She sipped her coffee and went back to her reading. The story she was engrossed in was one that appeared more than once in the book. While the selkie men were off chasing lonely human females, the selkie women were often at risk of being captured and taken as wives by human men. When in human form a selkie left their fur pelt behind, usually well hidden. If a human man managed to find and take possession of a selkie’s pelt then the selkie was forced to stay on land in human form and obey the one who possessed their pelt. They could only return to the sea if they were freed or could steal their fur back from the ones who had taken it.

  And Vivian wonders why I have trouble trusting men, Jess thought. Wait until she sees this, I think we’ve found the answer. I was read some seriously dark stuff as a kid! What the hell was my mother thinking?

  Jess had been there nearly a week when the weather finally broke. Despite the winter temperatures, she grabbed her coffee and padded out onto the back porch in her slippers to take in the morning. The sun was fighting to burn through the layer of marine cloud that shrouded the sky, but the rain had stopped and the world was brighter than it had been since her arrival. The sea was choppy, and gray-green waves crested and crashed onto the rocks with enough force to throw up a curtain of spray every third or fourth wave. Her gaze swept along the small stretch of sand beach that curved in behind the headland. Tucked away from the worst of the ocean’s pounding, the waves here were milder, surging up the sand to break gently and then flow back into the ocean.

  Above the high water line stunted trees clung to the sandy soil, their trunks growing at odd angles and their branches twisted by the constant wind. It was a far cry from the concrete and steel of Toronto, but there was something about this place that called to Jess’s soul. Her mother had been right to send her out here.

  “I just wish you were here to share it with me, Mom,” Jess murmured. She stayed out on the deck until the chill bite of the wind finally drove her back indoors, and she laughed at herself for standing outside in her pajamas.

  Feeling restless, Jess dressed quickly and headed back outside. She hadn’t had a chance to explore yet, and she was dying to get out for a walk before the weather forced her indoors again. Her writing may be going well, thanks to the enforced solitude, but Jess was feeling the first twinges of cabin fever.

  In the short time she’d been inside, the weather had already started to shift, and Jess could see a fresh band of dark clouds hurtling toward shore, darkening the skies as it rolled in.

  Jess headed down to the gazebo, her booted footfalls echoing loudly on the wooden walkway that had been built from the deck all the way down to the hot tub and its enclosure. She’d only been down here once since her arrival. The hot tub was the height of luxury, but she’d quickly learned that any benefit of a heated soak was lost racing pell-mell back up to the cabin in the freezing rain.

  “Next spring I’m going to see about getting the walkway covered,” she mused to herself and then nearly tripped over her own feet as she realized what she’d said. Spring? She hadn’t really been here long enough to decide if she was going to stay, had she? Looking around her, the scent of the ocean in her nose and the wind tugging her hair free of its braid a few strands at a time, Jess realized that she might just have been here long enough to know that she wasn’t going to leave. This felt like home.

  Smiling to herself, she walked around the gazebo and headed out onto the headland, picking her way carefully over the rocks once she left the security of the walkway. The waves were coming in hard enough to throw spray, and she could feel the salty mist clinging to her face and hair as she made her way further down. When Jess got down close enough that the air was full of spray and the waves crashing around her were loud enough to drown out every other thought in her head, she stopped and found a relatively flat spot to stand and watch. The wind whipped around her and the breakers crashed against the rocks as heavy foam surged and swirled between the jagged gaps. A glance at the beach told her that the tide was on its way out, the high tide mark at least a foot further inland from where the waves currently ended.

  The wind threw up a wall of spray as another wave hit, and Jess laughed as she wiped the salt and water from her face. If the spray was reaching this high, it was clearly time to go. She had no interest in getting any wetter than she already was.

  As she turned to go the sun vanished behind the oncoming clouds, and Jess shivered as the last bit of warmth was drained out of the day. She made it a single step back up the rocks before the wave hit her.

  Jess’s world vanished in an instant, replaced with a roaring in her ears and an icy blackness that blotted out all of her senses. Cold pierced her down to the marrow of her bones and she opened her mouth to scream, only to have it fill with more of the terrible cold. Panic rapidly escalated to terror as she tumbled and thrashed in the alien darkness. She struck out blindly, half clawing, half swimming as she fought to move against the suddenly terrible weight of her own clothes. Her lungs were burning by the time she managed to get her head above water, and she had just enough time to cough once before a wave crashed over her head. Frantic, Jess kicked herself back up to the surface and gasped in a lungful of air, treading water as best she could. What the hell just happened?

  She couldn’t see over the waves that surged around her, and when she stretched out her legs she couldn’t find the bottom, either. She was in serious trouble.

  Fighting to keep her head above water, Jess managed to wriggle out of her boots one at a time and immediately her kicks grew stronger, lifting her a little higher in the water. Strange instincts kicked in and she had a sudden urge to dive beneath the water, away from the froth and chop to where the water was peaceful. Jess shook her head to rid herself of the odd thought. If she dove down into the water, she sure as hell wasn’t going to come back up again.

  Waves surged over her head time and again, and soon she was choking on sea water. The cold burned at her limbs, and as she struggled to get her jacket and sweater unzipped she couldn’t seem to make her fingers work. Every time she managed to grasp the tab of her zipper a wave would hit her and she’d be left flailing and fighting to br
eathe past the raw, rasping cough as her lungs rejected the water she’d inhaled.

  The waves around her were growing bigger, but they were no longer breaking over top of her head and she managed to ride to the top of some of them. That was when she realized how bad her situation really was. She was caught in a current of some kind and she was being drawn out to sea with no way to get back. The rocks she’d been standing on were already more than a hundred meters away, and the cold was making her weaker by the minute.

  So much for the majesty of the ocean, she thought to herself in a flash of bitter humor. Her teeth chattered so hard she could hear them clattering, and her hands were now so numb she gave up trying to shed her sodden clothing. As another wave closed over her head, she was filled with a sense of dread that was darker and colder than the sea around her. If someone didn’t find her soon, she was going to die.

  * * * *

  “Didn’t Nadine say something about that rental cabin having a new owner?” Evan nodded to the log cabin that was tucked into the woods beyond the headland that separated the colony’s land from their nearest neighbor.

  “Yeah, the guy who owned it gave it to his daughter, I think. Why?” Rory glanced up from the deck where he was kneeling beside the open hatch that covered the inboard motor.

  “Because I think that’s her standing out on the rocks.” Evan swiped his bangs out of his eyes and pointed. “At least I think that’s a she, it’s hard to tell with the bulky jacket.”

  Rory got to his feet and stood just as a large wave rolled the boat far to starboard and he had to brace his legs to stay upright as they dropped into the trough behind it. As he turned to look at shore he heard Evan swear and gun the motor.

  “Easy with the throttle, we’re still breaking that engine in!” Rory barked and then swore as he realized what had Evan worried. “Shit! She’s going to get nailed by that wave!”

  “And we’re too far out to stop it,” Evan was leaning into the wheel as if willing the boat to go faster, but they both knew that if he pushed the engine right now, they could damage it.