Page 6 of The Cornish Mermaid

Kit stared at the 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.