Betina Krahn

A sharp crack occurred underfoot as he shifted to face her. He felt himself sinking, dropped the metal, and scrambled for purchase on the ledge. “I’ve got you,” she called. Steadied, he was able to slide one foot onto a sounder board and pull the other free of the broken wood. With a lunge, he reached the main dock and safety.

His heart hammered, he could barely catch his breath, and a burning throb was developing in his foot. But what filled his awareness as his senses cleared, was the feel of Celeste Ashton pressed tight against him … so close that he could feel her heart was beating fast, too.

That wave of adrenaline drained, leaving in its place a confusing flush of heat. He looked down into her upraised face—luminous skin, delicate features, generously curved lips … Soft, she was so
soft
against him … everywhere … his chest, his loins, his thighs, his arms. And everywhere she was touching him, something seemed to be melting … his resistance to her, his clothes, his very skin.

It should have raised an alarm in him. But as he looked into her large, dark-centered eyes and felt the warmth of her body seeping into his chest, he couldn’t think of a single reason to let her go …

AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF
DOUBLEDAY BOOK CLUB

“
NOTHING MORE STIMULATING
than a juicy new heresy, eh, Thorny my boy?”

Titus Thorne stopped short in the doorway to the faculty meeting room, causing a chain reaction of collisions among the black-robed dons filing in behind him. Grunts and exclamations of surprise trailed down the long black line, a testament to the ambulatory peculiarity of the professors of Cardinal College … who habitually walked with their heads bent, studying their shoes as they pondered the great questions of the age.

“
New
heresy?” Titus stared at Sir Parthenay Fenwick’s twinkling eyes. “What heresy is that?”

“This aquatic personage.” Sir Parthenay, the college head, pulled him out of the doorway so that the rest of the dons could shuffle in and take their places at the large rectangular meeting table. “Creating quite a stir, I understand. Has all London awag. Been in all the papers.”

“Haven’t seen any London papers of late. I came straight from Newcastle—that Viking-artifact debacle,” Titus said, his interest piqued by the prospect of yet another scientific boondoggle in progress. “What ‘aquatic personage’?”

“This ‘mermaid’ creature. Saved a copy of the
Gazette
for you.” Sir Parthenay hurried across the Gothic oak-paneled
room and snatched a newspaper from under another aged don’s bespectacled nose. He handed it to Titus and waited eagerly for the younger man’s reaction.

Titus’s jaw tightened as he read the account of a young woman on the southern coast of England who claimed to have been befriended by dolphins and taken into their watery world. The article dubbed her “the lady mermaid,” called her recently published book “absorbing,” and made tittery allusions to the “romantic” nature of her revelations.

“Pure nonsense,” he said, tossing the paper onto the nearby meeting table.

“
Popular
nonsense,” Sir Parthenay corrected, rescuing the article.

Titus frowned and continued toward his seat at the end of the long oak table. “They will do anything to sell books to a gullible public. Dolphins and mermaids. Ridiculous. It won’t last.” As he passed Sir Isaac Ellis, he stooped out of habit to lift the venerable old don’s foot onto his gout stool. Sir Isaac responded by thrusting a stack of news clippings into his hand.

“That first article came out more than a fortnight ago,” the old fellow wheezed, pointing a gnarled finger at the newsprint Titus held. “These followed.”

“Since then, it’s been an endless stream of mermaid-this and mermaid-that in the news,” hoary old Sir Mercer Gill declared from across the table.

“A number of faculty from other colleges and even the chancellor himself have inquired as to
your
response to the matter,” Sir Parthenay added.

“My response?” Titus scowled at the expectation in their faces.

A mermaid craze
. Stranger things had happened in recent years. Two-headed farm animals promoted as oracles … people claiming to contact spirits of the dead … reports
of sea monsters in lakes … faked antiquities from bogus archaeological digs … spurious miracle cures … cults bent on saving the human race by making people into living lightning rods … he had been there to unmask and expose the lot of them. In the last five years he had become Britain’s resident skeptic … the leading investigator of hucksterism and “quack science.”

Now it was a mermaid. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d battled a mythological creature, but he had learned from experience that such things were seldom a matter of science. No matter what evidence he uncovered to expose such preposterous claims, some would refuse to be convinced. They simply wanted to believe. And he had no time to waste on lost causes; not when there were so many more worthy battles to fight in the name of truth and reason. He tossed the stack of articles onto the table, unexamined, and sat down.

“It’s a pile of bunkum. It has nothing whatsoever to do with science.”

“Well, I’m afraid the Oceanographic Society is of a different opinion,” Sir Parthenay declared in a challenging tone. “They’ve set aside this month’s scheduled speaker in favor of an address by this ‘mermaid’ personage.
And
they’ve invited the Zoological Society to sit in for a joint session.”

Titus’s eyebrows shot up.

“The hell you say.”

An invitation to address the royal societies was tantamount to an offer of membership … the academic equivalent of a royal patronage … reserved for scientists, naturalists, and explorers of major accomplishment.

“See for yourself.” Sir Parthenay passed a printed meeting announcement down the table to him. “Seems all a bit reminiscent of that Atlantis business, back in ’82. What was that American fellow’s name again?”

“Donnelly … Ignoramus Donnelly,” Titus muttered, taking the paper.

“Ignatius,” Sir Mercer corrected.

“Whatever. And look how that turned out. Every Tom, Dick, and Herbert climbing into a toga and claiming to be the lost royalty of the long-lost continent …” As Titus stared at the written confirmation of Sir Parthenay’s news, his stomach began to heat. After all his work with shark and large-fish feeding habits, he himself had been invited to join the Oceanographic Society only a year ago. And now, to have this absurd scientific pretender—this flimflam artist in a phony fish tail—invited in to address a meeting of not one but
two
major scientific societies…

Small wonder the chancellor was disturbed and his fellow faculty members were up in arms, demanding to know what he intended to do about it.

“It’s an outrage,” he said, retrieving the spurned news articles and glancing from headline to headline. “Elusive,” “romantic,” and “mysterious” … characterized the early opinions, but farther down in the stack, the words “perceptive,” “painstaking observation,” and “revolutionary thinking” crept in. He shot to his feet.

“Who is this absurd female? What credentials could she possibly have?”

“No academic training, of course. But her grandfather was Sir Martin Ashton, an archaeologist of some reputation,” Sir Mercer declared. “Cambridge man. Solid fellow. Did work in the Azores and the Canaries, I believe.”

“She’s apparently something of a sailor,” Sir Harold Beetle added. “Claims to have been researching aquatic populations in a bay near her home when a dolphin sought her out and tried to talk to her.”

“Lunacy,” Titus declared.

“No, clicks and squeaks,” gravel-voiced Sir Milton Ruckers put in. “Says it’s their language. Got up the nerve to climb right in the water with the thing, and it hauled her around for a ride.”

“Bullfeathers.”

“Not necessarily.” Sir Parthenay raised an excepting finger. “There are documented cases of sailors being saved by
dolphins … towed to shore and safety. She experienced several such ‘rides’ and seems to think such behavior is intentional. That dolphins are curious about us. That dolphins … think.”

“
Think?
Horse manure!”

“No,” came a reedy objection, “don’t believe there were any horses in the book …” Old Sir Isaac was puffing for breath, struggling over the arm of his chair to reach something that had slid from his lap onto the floor. Titus rounded the table, picked it up, and found himself holding a sea-blue book with a dolphin embossed in gold leaf on the cover. His eyes widened as he read the title on the spine.
The Secret Ufe of Dolphins
, by Miss Celeste Ashton.

“You’ve read this?”

Sir Isaac looked unrepentant.

“Had to see what all the fuss was about,” the old don insisted, huddling back in his chair.

Titus stalked back to his seat, observing that the cover of the book looked rather worn. As he flipped through the well-thumbed pages, they fell open to an oft-read passage on pages ninety-three and ninety-four. Scanning the print, his gaze fell to a line containing the words “frequency of romantic behavior.” A bit farther down, the phrase “astonishing variety of mating techniques” caught his attention. At the top of the second page, “continuous and fascinating sexual play” positively leaped out at him. Stiffening, he dived into the flowery prose, and before he realized it, he was reading aloud.

“ ‘The lotharios of the deep, dolphins spend most of their nonfeeding time engaged in courtship and romantic displays. Not unlike males in some human societies, dolphin males must compete for dolphin females’ attention and favors. Since the traditional land-based methods of attracting a mate—preening and self-decoration—are impossible in their watery world, behavior is their only recourse for courtship. They use every method of persuasion possible … sound, acrobatics, and a surprising variety of physical contact. First,
they serenade their chosen ladies with a series of clicks and coos not unlike the songs of human minstrels. “
Click, click, click, click
…
screee, screee”
is a common refrain in courting songs …’” He glanced farther down the page.