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She blinked back the stars in her gaze. “That is so crazily romantic and—”
“Stupid,” Dylan muttered.
“Dylan!” Margot whacked him with her notebook. “It’s not stupid. It’s fate. It’s love at first sight—”
“Forgive me,” Dylan said, catching my eyes with a wince. “But...I’m not one for destiny. Surely, you look back now and admit that what you felt back then was just an...infatuation? A strong one but nothing more than that.”
I laughed under my breath, not offended by his lack of belief. After all, until it happened to you, it seemed as far-fetched as a fairy-tale. “It was the biggest infatuation of my life.” I stroked my wedding ring. “My only infatuation.”
“No one else?” Margot asked, her eyes crinkling with eagerness. “You mean, he was your first and your last? Oh God, could this tale get any sweeter?”
I didn’t catch her misty gaze.
I couldn’t answer that question without reliving the two worst moments of my life.
So I didn’t.
“I’m never going to live this down.” Dylan groaned under his breath. “Not only did I brag to everyone I know that I was chosen to interview the Nerida Avci, but now I’m going to have to sign my name to an article full of taboo romance and pubescent angst.”
I chuckled softly and shook my head, dispelling the future and what I’d have to share. “I promise our tale has more than just longing, Mr. Collins.” My laughter drifted away as my thoughts nudged at the wound that would never truly heal. “There is darkness. A lot of darkness. There are bad guys and murderous plots. There’s torture and—”
“Hold up. Torture?” Dylan sat dead straight. “Whose? Yours, his—?”
I swallowed hard.
That part of the story would also not be easy.
In fact, looking back, our love had endured so much.
So, so much heartache and pain and suffering.
God, the suffering.
But I would live it all over again to be with him.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Collins, I’d like to unfold the events as they did in the past.” I gave him a smile, softening my tone. “If I’m going to do this, I’d like to bask in the freshness of new love a little longer, if that’s okay with you.”
I wanted to relive the falling, the wanting, the first touch and stolen kiss and everything else between.
Margot glanced at Dylan before reaching across the short distance between us and patting my knee. Her eyes caught mine, wide and eager. “Tell us everything. I don’t know about Dylan, but I’m not going anywhere. Give me every juicy, delicious detail.”
Settling back against the lacy cushions, I said, “Okay then. Well, I was an impressionable young girl. I was raised a little wild and given freedoms not granted to many. My days were full of sea life and sunshine. My nights were full of watching my parents laugh and love. I wanted so very much to be loved in that way, so I suppose, when Aslan told me that his every breath, from then until his last, was mine, I fell so hard I became his in return.”
I plucked at my floaty dress. “I believed the sea had chosen him to be mine, you see. A shipwrecked boy delivered to me by a pod of dolphins that I’d grown up swimming with. I was just lucky I had kind parents who believed it was their duty as humans to help anyone and anything who needed it. If they’d been anyone else, our story would’ve ended before it’d even begun.”
Dylan wiped his mouth and angled the microphone closer to me. His lips were pursed but he couldn’t hide the light in his hazel eyes. The curiosity to see where this story would go. “You said your parents took him to receive care? That you went back to check on him—with takeout no less—and then you left because of an early start?”
“The hours of a marine biologist are all over the place. Some nights, we’d work until two a.m. studying phosphorus luminescent plankton. Others, we’d get up at dawn to chase the dwarf minke whales or dive on the reef to see hundreds of baby turtles fresh out of their nest.”
“But you were twelve.” Dylan scowled. “You weren’t working with them, surely? What about school and things?”
“I was home-schooled until I finished primary. They tried sending me to school on land, but it never stuck. I’d run from class, stowaway on some fishing trawler, and appear from behind their nets when we were far out to sea, demanding the poor fishermen radio my parents on The Fluke to come get me.”
“The Fluke?”
“Our research boat.” I grinned. “My mother often said she’d doomed them the moment she delivered me in a home water birth. That my affinity with the ocean could never be undone.”
“She was right.” Margot laughed. “I mean, you figured out a way to live underwater. Just like you said that fortune teller prophesized.”
