Page 5 of The Cornish Mermaid

Within a few short minutes Kit was supporting the girl up the cart track between drystone walls, his heart a heavy, foreboding weight in his chest. Jago was not going to be happy about their unwelcome visitor.

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