Betina Krahn (20 page)

Cherrybottom rubbed his eyes. Bentley squinted and stepped back, training his vision on the foamy circles left in the dolphin’s wake.

Titus was already in motion, running back down and across the beach toward Celeste. His heart was pounding and something in his chest was swelling, making it hard for him to breathe.

“Did you see?” she shouted, running with her skirts raised and her feet barely touching the wet sand. “Did you see him? It’s Prospero! He’s come!”

“I saw
something”
he declared, catching her shoulders to steady her.

“Something?” She laughed at his stubborn skepticism. “It’s
them
—I told you they would be here!”

She looked past his shoulder, toward Bentley and Cherrybottom, who were scrambling back down the cliff as fast as they could. Grinning at the sight they made, she whirled and scanned the waves for a familiar shape.

“There!” she called, pointing to the triangular shape of a dorsal fin, then looked back at him with her face glowing excitement. “A dolphin, Professor.”

With an exultant laugh, she darted to the water’s edge, jerked off her shoes, and threw them back up onto the beach. Then, fixing her gaze on the center of the cove, she fumbled with the buttons of her skirt.

“What are you—” Titus’s eyes widened as she pulled her skirt down over her hips and tossed it in the same direction as her shoes. In horror he glanced over his shoulder at the approaching Cherrybottom and Bentley. “Good Lord, woman—you can’t just strip your clothes—”

But she
was
doing it. Now. Here. His jaw dropped then worked soundlessly as she jerked her blouse up and over her head and tossed it onto the pile. No decent petticoat or proper stockings—she was left in only that thin, short-legged “combination” she was given to wearing. His protest died a
conflicted groan in his throat as he watched her shapely legs plunge over and over into the surf, until she stood waist-deep in water.

“Good God.” Bentley’s winded voice came from nearby.

“Come out of there, Miss Ashton! Are you mad? There’s a beast of some sort—” Cherrybottom bustled down to the water’s edge and tiptoed frantically back and forth, dodging incoming waves as tried to decide how to retrieve her.

“No, she’s not mad,” Titus declared, to himself as much as Cherrybottom. He watched with rising emotion as she waved, turned, and dove into the water. “Nor, it would seem, is she devious … distressed … or seriously deluded.”

Bentley hurried over and stood beside them, staring at the place she disappeared and speaking for them all when he said with stark wonder: “By God, it’s true—she does have a dolphin!”

Again the dolphin breached the water and dove back in, making screeching sounds and noises that in human parlance would have been termed laughter. Then as they watched, transfixed, they saw Celeste crash through the surface, clinging to the dolphin’s fin, joining it in its upward arc, separating, and diving back into the water nearby.

The men looked at each other, each verifying what he had just seen by the startlement in the others’ faces.

“By Jove, she’s done it! Called the blessed creature right to her very doorstep!”

Cherrybottom was so full of excitement that he looked as if he would burst if he didn’t release it. He grasped Bentley by the shoulders and they began to laugh and hop around like delirious children.

Titus stalked to the very edge of the water, anticipating her next appearance and feeling his world beginning to tilt crazily underfoot. He could barely make sense of what was happening before his eyes. She not only sailed and dove, she actually
swam
with a dolphin … touching the blasted thing, hanging on to it and letting it drag her about just as
she had reported. She had told the truth. And, unless he’d gone delusional himself, that meant that something he had considered ridiculous, absurd, and scientifically impossible …
wasn’t
.

That conclusion was nothing short of staggering. He had been so certain, so adamant that it was all a fraud, that now it was difficult to admit the evidence of his own senses. A part of him clung desperately to the security and superiority of intellectual doubt. It could be a fluke—a passing dolphin investigating those rhythmic sounds she produced. Before he truly would be convinced, he had to see the beast at close range, touch it himself—

She popped up in the water, some thirty yards out, waving and calling for them to watch. Then she dove beneath the surface and he found himself holding his breath until her head reappeared fifty yards out, and she rose straight up out of the water, with the dolphin underneath her, propelling her upward. In a twinkling, she extended and arched her body and dove into the water, and the dolphin disappeared. Titus, Cherrybottom, and Bentley were left with the searing image of her nearly naked form—extended and moving with effortless grace—burned into their vision. They were snapped back to reality, moments later, when the dolphin itself jumped out of the water, turned, and landed on its back with a tremendous splash.

“Did you see that?” Bentley cried, pointing wildly. “She was standing on its head! The thing lifted her up out of the water!”

“Have you ever seen anything like it, Professor?” Cherrybottom rushed over to grab Titus by the arm and give him an ecstatic throttling.

“Never,” Titus answered, unable to take his eyes from the place she had gone into the water.

There were more leaps and splashes and she was launched by the dolphin into a dive three or four more times. Titus’s desperate theory of “the passing dolphin” was utterly demolished by their spectacularly intentional cooperation.
They swam and dived together. The dolphin towed her around the cove, and for one brief pass along the surface, she mounted it and rode sitting up, as if it were a horse. They were behaving like boisterous playmates. There was only one possible explanation: the creature knew her, and knew her
well
.

As the reality of it sank in, Titus, Cherrybottom, and Bentley sobered and watched intently every flash of a fluke, every bob of her head, every bit of contact between the woman and the dolphin. After several stunning displays of partnership in motion, her head popped up beside the dolphin’s in the middle of the cove, and they saw her direct a hand toward the shore. In an instant, the pair was headed for the beach, the dolphin towing her as she gripped its dorsal fin. In the shallows they slowed and stopped, and Celeste crouched on her knees so that only her shoulders were above the water.

“Come and meet Prospero!” she called, beckoning broadly.

Bentley began ripping off his shoes and stockings, but rotund Cherrybottom tried in vain—stretching and puffing—to reach his expensively clad feet. In the end, he plunged determinedly into the water with Bentley, natty footgear and all.

Only Titus held back. He watched from a distance of thirty or so feet while they approached the dolphin and jumped like startled rabbits when it screeched unexpectedly and splashed them.

“Come in, Professor!” She beckoned to Titus. “He won’t bite.”

“I can see very well from here, thank you,” he called hoarsely.

Cherrybottom and Bentley moved still closer and, after some coaxing, Bentley put out a hand to touch the dolphin. He drew back giggling, then did it again. Cherrybottom followed suit and was soon laughing as well. Celeste said something to “Prospero,” clapped her hands twice, and the
beast rolled onto his side and began to slap the water with a flipper. Bentley and Cherrybottom lunged back to keep from getting wetter than they already were, but continued to laugh and exclaim how remarkable it was to “meet” such a creature. After a few moments, they retreated to the beach and stood dripping and grinning with schoolboy delight at their adventure.

As the three watched, she gave the dolphin a hug, rose, and started for the beach wearing nothing but her all-but-transparent combination and a glowing smile. She was glorious; her curvaceous hips swaying, her light eyes sparkling, her breasts with their cold-hardened tips—Titus choked out a groan, ripped his coat from his shoulders and thrust it up to shield her from the others’ eyes.

“Miss Ashton, really!” He met her halfway, in ankle-deep surf, and flung his coat around her.

“You didn’t come to meet Prospero,” she said, looking up as he enveloped her with both his garment and his arms.

“There will be plenty of time for that, Miss Ashton,” he said gruffly, unable to resist the temptation of sliding into the shimmering pools of her eyes.

“But you’re lea—” Understanding lighted her face. “You’re staying?”

“Of course I’m staying,” he said in a tone she had never heard from him before. “I have a good bit of scientific work to verify.” It was a softness, she realized, a tone of intimacy that sent a chill through her. “Potentially groundbreaking work … like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“Like nothing
anybody’s
ever seen before!” Cherrybottom crowed as he and Bentley rushed over to join them.

Titus released her long enough for her to slip her arms into his coat, then pulled her toward her discarded clothing. While he gathered her garments, thrust them into her arms, she shivered and huddled in his coat.

Feeling light-headed and having her teeth chatter with cold were minor inconveniences in view of what had just happened. In the space of half an hour, her reputation, her
academic possibilities, her entire future had changed. She had just proved that her work and her word were based on genuine experience, not girlish daydreams or clever manipulations. But, as important as all that was to her, the thing that sent a delirious wave of warmth through her was the fact that she was once again wrapped in Titus Thorne’s generous coat.

Her prickly professor wasn’t going anywhere.

L
UNCHEON THAT DAY
was a festive occasion. Maria opened some of her brandied peaches and made a special cold prawn salad. Old Stephan managed to find a bottle of French champagne in the cellar, and Lady Sophia insisted on serving the entire thing on a folding table in the middle of the garden. Instead of having a centerpiece of flowers among her guests, she said, she would make her guests the centerpiece among a bounty of fragrant flowers.

When Celeste had bathed and dressed again in a simple gathered skirt and long-sleeved blouse, she joined them for a toast and a delicious meal in the drowsy peace of the warm summer afternoon. Throughout the luncheon, Mr. Cherrybottom and Mr. Bentley recounted over and over their experience with Celeste’s dolphin and plied her with eager questions.

What did the creature eat? How much could she see under the water? Hadn’t it frightened her at first? Was she ever worried that the beast might hurt her? Did the dolphins ever get overexcited, and how would she calm them down if they did? How did she communicate with this one? What sorts of signals did she use? Did she understand what it meant by its clicks and screeches? What new tricks was she teaching it?

It was late afternoon and the sun was starting to sink when they made their way down to the water for another demonstration. Celeste had Titus and the others sit on the edge of the dock while she maneuvered the boat out into the middle of the cove by herself. With whistles and hand claps
for signals and a small bucket of fish for rewards, she and Prospero demonstrated that he had learned how to jump through a hoop, retrieve a painted cork float, and skitter across the surface of the water on his tail flukes. The dolphin returned to the boat each time for a treat and a rub around his head or back. Once or twice he rolled on his back, offering her his belly, and she pushed him away and refused to give him a treat.

Each “trick” drew applause or gasps of appreciation from her audience. When she ran out of fish, she clapped her hands and Prospero stuck his head up out of the water. She sang several notes of a musical scale, and by the third tone, the dolphin sang with her. The tones were flat and lasted only a short while, but no one hearing them could doubt the dolphin’s vocalizations were an attempt to imitate her singing.

A standing ovation welcomed her back to the dock, where Bentley appropriated her hands and attention, and gushed over her achievement. Cherrybottom predicted a sellout for her second edition and an ever-greater swell of public interest in her dolphins. And Titus Thorne acknowledged that she had a unique rapport with the creature. Every comment was like a salve for her battered faith in herself and her work.

As they started for the beach, Cherrybottom declared genially, “I envy you, Professor.”

“Me?” Titus gave him a puzzled look.

“Of course. You get to swim with those magnificent creatures, yourself” He made Celeste blush with the teasing grin he aimed her way. “And with the loveliest
mermaid
in all of the seven seas.”

Titus’s smile faded.

Celeste caught that change in his expression and watched him as they made their way up the cliff to the house. Since those first few delirious moments on the beach, he had grown increasingly distant, and Mr. Cherrybottom’s comment seemed to have sunk him into a foul mood. She
couldn’t believe he would really be so stubborn or mean-spirited as to doubt the proof of his own eyes. Could he still disbelieve her work? Or was it—she made herself admit the possibility—that he was so rigid and unbending that he couldn’t bear to admit he had been wrong?

She chewed the corner of her lip, thinking about the fact that he had refused to greet and touch Prospero and remembering his adamant views about science. Now that he knew her observations were genuine, was he determined to label them as irrelevant and unscientific? Would he still insist that his precious laboratory work was the only real kind of research? More importantly, would his intellectual pride keep him from experiencing the joy of the discoveries that awaited him?

That evening, over coffee and brandy in the parlor, Peter Bentley settled an acquisitive gaze on Celeste, watching her glowing countenance and graceful, womanly movements. She was a delicious bonus, he thought. A living mermaid. So lovely, so unspoiled, and so artlessly susceptible to flattery. It was a pity he didn’t have more time to explore her charms fully. He consoled himself with the thought that he would have plenty of time for that after his plan and his financial backers were in place. Business, he smirked silently, had to come before pleasure.