Chapter Eight
It took Finn almost an hour to sort out the story for Zoe—an hour in which he resolutely ignored Aiata’s attempts to hide a smile that seemed to be a carbon copy of Joe’s.
When the snorkelers started returning to the boat he was in the cabin pretending to look at messages on his phone but with a clear view of the deck.
Zoe was the last out of the water, hauling herself onto the platform where Cristina was waiting for her, then positioning her legs. Everyone else—with the exception of Matilda—had made their way up to the flydeck for prelunch drinks. Even the eager Daniel had disappeared, spurred on by Cristina’s glare when he’d offered to boost Zoe onto the platform.
“Hey, Zo, how about I wait with you while Cris sorts out the platform?” Matilda asked.
Cris? Zo?
“Sure, Tilly,” was Zoe’s easy reply—nicknames all around then. Almost as interesting as the knowledge that an offer of assistance wasn’t always scorned.
A sound. Hydraulics. The swim platform rising.
Mermaid rising. His mermaid.
Finn looked down at his phone again, because in his head he heard her calling him Finlay as they talked about mermaids and myths and legends. His heart was aching and he didn’t want it to. She was not his mermaid. That was just his own personal myth. She’d never been his anything.
He was going to get himself under the strictest control before he went out there or he wasn’t going to go out there at all.
As Zoe settled herself on the bench, Matilda handed her a towel and asked: “Are you going in at the next spot?”
Zoe blotted her dripping plait with the towel. “The only thing that could keep me out is a great white.”
Matilda made a silent-scream face. “Please! I’m freaked out enough out there without imagining lurking great whites.”
“The water’s so clear I don’t think ‘lurking’ applies,” Zoe said with a laugh as Matilda sat beside her. “You’ll see them coming a mile away.”
“Thank you for that!”
“You Americans. Scared off by a little old shark!”
“You Australians. Dealing with great whites on a daily basis!”
“I’m not Australian, I just live there. And I’d sacrifice my pride and let you tow me back to the boat in a heartbeat if I saw a great white.” She peeled off her rash vest. “But Gaz said there aren’t any great whites in French Polynesia.”
“He also said we’ll be seeing black-tipped sharks at the next spot.”
“There’s never been a fatality related to a black-tip attack.”
“There have been attacks, though!”
“Occasional attacks.”
“I’m quaking with fear! Can you see me quaking?”
“I’d bet good money you don’t know how to quake.”
“I quaked when you almost took my head off when I offered to tow you in.”
“I warned you what she was like,” Cristina said, coming back out onto the deck and taking a seat on the bench on Zoe’s other side.
Matilda huffed out a laugh. “Luckily I handle rejection well. I still like her. Despite the way she glared at me when I was trying it on with the scrumptious Mr. Doherty.”
“I wasn’t glaring at you,” Zoe insisted, a little too emphatically she had to admit.
“Oh, you most definitely were,” Matilda said, “but so you know, in my book girl power trumps boy trouble.”
“Wh-what?” Zoe sputtered.
“I said—”
“No! I heard... That was a ‘what’ of disbelief because... I mean, it’s not like... Me and Finn, I mean, we’re not—gah!” She covered her face with her hands, laughed into them, then let her hands drop. “Let me start that again: I don’t have boy trouble, and it’s not like that between me and Finn. And anyway, you can say what you like about girl power but I have two friends who’ve just found true love and I know who they’d be saving first in a great white attack. Hint: not me!”
“Oh, I’m not interested in true love,” Matilda airily dismissed. “True lust is more my style, and under that scenario I’d be towing you back to the boat and leaving him to Jaws.” She turned to Cristina. “What say you, Cris?”
“I’m all for girl power,” Cristina said, “but I can’t tell you how many times Zoe’s mentioned needing some ‘boy trouble’ since she got back from Hawaii, so I think we know where her head’s at!”
“Traitor,” Zoe said, blushing but laughing.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s her head!” Matilda said, expertly dodging an admonitory flick of Zoe’s towel. “That man is one crazy-hot hunk so if you need boy T.R.O.U.B.L.E. he’d be choice number one. Choice number two is mighty fine too, though. And don’t look all oh-I-am-mystified! I heard you and Daniel talking on the pontoon.”
“That was Daniel talking and me trying to shut him up so I could hear what Gaz was saying about giant clams and—Oh.” Because out of the corner of one eye she saw Finn emerging from the cabin.
Matilda, with the benefit of being able to direct both of her eyes—unabashed and admiring—toward Finn, thrust out her impressive chest. Zoe thought in that moment that girl power might well trump boy trouble—but nobody could call Matilda a girl; she was definitely a woman. And Finn Doherty wasn’t a boy. In fact, he’d never been a boy. Aaaand she had no idea where she’d been heading with that train of thought because Finn had come to a stop beside where Matilda was sitting.
“Giant clams?” Finn said, and Zoe prayed he hadn’t heard their entire conversation. “Did you see any?”
A general question, addressed to nobody in particular.
Zoe could have said an enthusiastic yes, she could have launched into a fabulous description of the colors she’d seen, the frilled rainbow of blues and greens and aquas and turquoises, she could have asked questions based on what Gaz had told them about the need to monitor numbers and protect the clam population for future generations.
Instead, what she said was: “Tridacna Maxima.”
Ugh!
“Well, look at you, Miss Marine Biologist!” Matilda said. “Getting all scientific while all I was thinking about as Gaz was talking was that one of the damn things better not try to eat me.”
Finn laughed. “Zoe could probably come up with a romantic story about that, of the Jules Verne variety. She always had a story half written in her head.”
“Hey!” Matilda again. “You two know each other?”
“We grew up in the same village,” Zoe said, keeping her voice as nonchalant as she could.
Matilda patted the space on the bench beside her. “Well, I hope one of you is going to tell us the story!”
“It isn’t a story as such,” Zoe said, as Finn sat beside Matilda. “We worked together one summer at a beachside café when we were...well, kids, really. But we didn’t hang in the same circles or...or anything like that.”
A heartbeat. Two. Zoe waited for Finn to say something, but he simply kept those too-blue eyes unwaveringly on her.
There was the shiver, on cue. “B-but I’ll tell you a more interesting story,” Zoe said, uncomfortable with the silence. “One Finn and I used to talk about, called ‘The Mermaid of Zennor.’”
“Lay it on me,” Matilda said, hanging her towel around her neck as though settling in for the long haul.
“It starts—of course—with a beautiful young woman—they’re always beautiful, aren’t they?—who occasionally visited the local church at Zennor. Which, incidentally, is a real place, not make-believe. Nobody knew who she was. They knew only that when she sang the hymns it was the most magical sound in the world.
“One fateful day a local man, Mathey Trewella, beguiled by her voice, followed her after the service, all the way to the cliff overlooking a notoriously treacherous cove. He was never seen again and neither was the mysterious woman. Everyone in the village presumed Mathey had fallen off the cliff and drowned, and that the woman had moved away. And in the absence of any news or any sightings, as time moved on and life in the village continued, both of them were forgotten.
“But one day, during a fierce storm, a ship cast anchor in the sea off that very cove below the cliff where Mathey was last seen. The captain heard a voice calling to him from the tempestuous waves. A siren’s voice. Lyrical and luring, mesmerizing, bewitching. It coiled around the captain’s heart like a rope and tugged him, helpless, to the side of his boat, unable to resist the pull despite the fear that clawed at him because he didn’t know what he’d find. When he looked into the water he saw a beautiful face surrounded by white-gold hair floating and twisting in the turbulent swell.
“She rose from the waves, to her waist. Beneath the green of the sea he could see a tail of iridescent scales in blues and greens and purples and pinks—and yet her face, her arms, her bare breasts were undeniably, exquisitely human. She was, of course, a mermaid.
“But not just any mermaid. Her name was Morveren, and she was a daughter of Llyr, the king of the sea. She was also the beautiful stranger from the church.
“Morveren begged the sailor to raise his anchor, which was blocking the doorway of her house where her husband—the human who’d jumped off that cliff into the tumultuous sea to be with her—waited for her.
“The wildness in her eyes scared the captain and he quickly raised his anchor and sailed away as fast as he could, fearing Morveren would wreck his ship. But Morveren was interested only in getting back to Mathey. The wildness the captain had seen in her face was nothing to do with destruction; it was the agony of being parted from her love for even a moment.”
Silence. A hear-a-pin-drop moment.
Into which Finn, at last, spoke: “We found a silver chain once, Zoe and I, with a single white pearl dangling from it. We told ourselves it was a gift from Mathey to Morveren. Remember that, Zoe?”
She laughed. “On Sir Gaden L. Baxter’s private beach! We were returning the dinghy you...you’d borrowed, and we went to the police station to hand in the pearl but you wouldn’t go in with me because...” Oops. Not finishing that sentence.
“Because a) I was ‘known to the police’—I think that’s the phrase you’re looking for,” Finn said, unabashed. “And b) I wanted you to keep the pearl.” He grinned. “I was the real criminal, you were just an apprentice. And don’t try and pretend you didn’t get a kick out of being in that motorized dinghy, which I didn’t ‘borrow,’ I regularly stole whenever Sir GLB didn’t come down from London for the weekend. I know it was much more your style than the rowboat old Mr. Michaels used for rock fishing, which you and your friends thought you were so daring for stealing when everyone knew he let you get away with it. And you were bona fide trespassing with me, unlike your secret fishing barbecues with the girls on the Hawkesbury Estate because Mr. Hawkesbury knew very well what you lot were up to and let you do it.”
“Hmm,” Matilda said. “Stealing boats, trespassing, finding treasure, private beaches, visiting police stations. All that just because you worked at the same place for one summer? Did you really not hang in the same circles? Because you seem to know all the same people.”
Finn shot Zoe an inscrutable look. “We really did not,” he said. And then he gave the almost dismissive shrug of one shoulder he’d given her last night. “That’s life in a small English village, everyone knows everyone and what everyone else is doing.” Another of those shrugs. “Anyway, that was a long time ago. I’m respectable now.”
“Well, that’s a shame!” Matilda said, winking at him.
“I’m respectable most of the time,” he corrected. “So, Matilda, Cristina, why don’t you two go on up for lunch? No giant clams on the menu, mind. Even though they’re considered a delicacy and are eaten by locals, we don’t serve them at Poerava for reasons of sustainability—and there’s definitely a story in that if you want to grab Gaz, Matilda.”
“I’d be delighted to grab Gaz!” Matilda said cheekily.
Finn laughed before turning to Zoe and asking, “Can you spare me a few minutes?”
No! was what Zoe wanted to say, because his laughter had faded, and the look on his face was unreadable, and he was so not her old friend Finn, yet those memories he was dredging up were so painfully good to hear they made her wish he could be the old Finn.
Cristina was hesitating, and Zoe experienced another of those moments of detestable cowardice: she could ask Cristina to stay with her, help her transfer to her chair once she’d dried off, even though she didn’t need assistance. Flickering at the edge of her consciousness was the insight that what she wanted from Finn was more complicated than a moment or two of nostalgia. More complicated, more...physical. T.R.O.U.B.L.E.
Matilda clapped her hands together as she stood. “Let’s go, Cris, and leave these two to reminisce while we snaffle all the shrimp.”
And what could Zoe do but give Cristina the royal wave and wait until the girls had disappeared. She forced herself to smile as she asked Finn, “Are we still on for tonight?”
Finn edged into Matilda’s vacated spot, which brought him closer to Zoe, and the scent of him—she recognized that just-showered smell even without taking a deep breath, which was beyond her at the moment—made her pulse thrum. Soap. He’d always smelled like soap. Some people had thought he looked dirty, but she knew that he’d always been scrupulously clean. His mother would have made sure of that even if his own pride hadn’t demanded it. In a twisted way he’d loved it when people were surprised that he smelled like soap instead of sweat and grime.
She wished he smelled of expensive cologne, something that would make him completely new to her, because this melding of past and present was confusing, disturbing. He smelled the same as he used to but he was not the same. He was edgier, darker. As though he’d grown out of the gang and into his very own dangerous reputation, embodying it completely at last. And her reaction to him was not innocent as it had been once upon a time. Not because of the trauma of that night, which had changed everything between them, but because of something else, something that made her intensely conscious of his legs so close to hers. If he moved a mere inch his knees would touch hers, and even though she wouldn’t feel it she thought she would feel it. In her blood and bone and soul.
“Yes,” he said, the deep timbre of his voice imbuing the simple word with a sense of just-us-two intimacy that had the shiver whispering through her, making her skin prickle.
“Then what?” She licked her lips nervously, feeling an undercurrent, like a rip that would drag her out of range, out of her depth, forcing her to fight her way back to the shore, to safety. “I mean, is there a problem?”
“No problem. I just wondered if you’d heard the news about Blake Hawkesbury.”
“Oh.” It made sense that he’d want to talk to her alone about that. If only she could stop overreacting to his nearness. “Yes. I spoke to Lily yesterday. Do you remember Lily?”
“Of course. One of the awesome foursome.”
Zoe blinked at him. “Is that what we were called?”
“The Hawkesbury set called you that. Henry. His friends.”
“I...I like that. I think?”
“I’d definitely take it as a compliment. More poetic than the village riffraff.”
“I never called you that, Finn.”
“No, but you once called me a thug. And your parents had a few choice epithets for me.”
Thug! A brief flash of his face in her hospital room. Yes, shehad called him that because he’d said he was going to beat Brad to a pulp.
She attempted a laugh, wanting to deflect from the memory. “Not as choice as they had for Henry Hawkesbury.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment since he was all that and I...was all wrong.” Pause. He seemed to be choosing words. “I don’t know when the funeral is but if it’s this week and you want to go back for it Doherty Berne will give you a rain check.”
“Thank you but no. Not that I don’t want to be there for Lily but...well, just no.”
She saw that Finn was looking at her thighs, realized he was watching her rub them, and immediately shifted her hands to the bench either side of her.
The shrug again. “I’m flying to the UK myself tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow? Oh. So it was just one... I mean...you...here...not...not there... I mean...gah!” She covered her face with her hands, embarrassed. “Sorry, sorry.”
“Er...yes, one day, yes, I’m here not there, but I will be there, and there’s no need to apologize. Did I get all that right?” he said.
She laugh-groaned into her hands before dropping them, and found Finn smiling the way he’d always smiled when she did that stupid face-covering thing, and she remembered the way he’d always interpreted her babble perfectly, which made her unutterably sad because he wasn’t actually smiling at her, he was smiling at a memory. “Yes, you got all that right,” she said.
“So, you’re definitely staying on here.”
“Lily insisted.”
“And do you always do what Lily tells you?”
“She doesn’t usually tell me what to do. No one does. But this time... I mean, the Cove... It’s...difficult.”
“Because of the accident?” he asked softly.
She sucked in a sharp breath as a memory came at her like a hot dart. A sound, a screech. Then gone. She shook her head, as much to clear it as to deny. “It’s just that I didn’t know Mr. Hawkesbury the way Lily did. If I were to go back it would only be for her and she wanted me to stay here because she knows.” Stop. Enough. “It doesn’t matter. I’m staying but I’ll be writing her eulogy for the funeral.”
“A eulogy, travel stories, a blog.” He considered her, head tilted to one side. “But no novel?”
She sucked in a breath at the unexpectedness of that. It was a valid question; they’d talked many times about her becoming a novelist one day. Of course he’d be curious, there was no harm in it—but she nevertheless found it surprisingly difficult to confess: “Not yet.”
There was a drawn-out pause as Finn continued to regard her. And then he said: “You were going to reset ‘The Mermaid of Zennor’ in Hawke’s Cove on Sir Gaden’s beach.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten.”
“I went to that beach a time or two after you told me your version, imagining your mermaid rising from the waves at midnight, the moment of enchantment, when two worlds would become one.”
She stared at him, picturing him alone on that perilous beach at midnight, watching the waves, waiting for magic. One of her hands came up, hovered over his thigh. She wanted to touch him, to comfort him, console him, and she didn’t even know why.
He looked at her raised hand and swallowed, his throat working as though maneuvering around a rock. And then those blue, blue eyes went to her face, so fiercely intent she read a warning in them: keep your distance.
“Just kids, hey, Zoe?” he said. “Dreaming about traveling the world, telling stories that never got written.”
“Yes,” she said, bringing her hand back to her own thigh, smoothing up and down, unstoppable.
“You know, I’ve heard a version of ‘The Mermaid of Zennor’ that I like better than the version you told today. One where Morveren goes to the church to hear Mathey sing and she’s so enraptured by him she waits for him outside. She leads him away deliberately, unable to breathe without him, either in his world or her own.” Another of those shrugs. “Makes a nice change from the man chasing the poor mermaid off a cliff!”
“He might have chased her in my version but at least he jumped in after her.”
“It was a bold move, I’ll give him that, going after her with all guns blazing.” He stood. “Myths, huh? I guess we were always meant to outgrow the magic.” He smiled at her, no chipped tooth, no eye crinkles, unreadable. “See you at eight o’clock. Bring your notepad.”