“It was in a bear’s mouth before that,” he pointed out.
“Hmm, true.” She noticed his eyes once more drift southward a bit. The smile on his face let her know that he wasn’t minding a single bit of this—and neither was she. In fact, she needed to get out of here right now before she did something she might not regret. “Why don’t you clean the fish while I go ... rinse off?”
Once she was back in the water, as a bear, she paddled around until she felt like she’d had the equivalent of a cold shower. When she looked to shore, Luke and the dog were no longer visible, and smoke curled up from the chimney of the cabin above her.
Inga scrambled on shore, shook vigorously to get the bulk of the water off her coat, shifted and slipped back into her clothes. As she stamped into her boots, she wondered why, if she was the naked one, she was also the one in need of a cold shower. Being around Luke did things to her.
If thiswasn’thaving a mate, what could a mate possibly feel like?
She found the Spice Griffins shrieking and squabbling over fish guts, and entered the cabin to delicious frying smells. Rogue lay on the floor by the door, happily crunching on a few leftovers of his own.
“Luke! Did you give him bones? Rogue! Leave it!”
“He’ll be fine,” Luke said from the stove, where he was tending the fish in a frying pan. “He’s been living on whole fish for the better part of a year.”
“Yes, but—” However, she couldn’t think of a reasonable objection. Luke was right; if Rogue was going to choke on a bone and die, he would have done it months ago. And when she looked at the way he was eating, Rogue was being careful, nipping at the more questionable parts of the fish and crunching on the spine. “I guess he’s an unusual dog.”
“He definitely is.”
She joined Luke at the stove. “What sort of experiments were they doing on Rogue, do you know? I know they were trying to create shifters out of the—the human test subjects.” It felt very weird to refer to Luke like that. “But what about the animals? What were they for?”
“I’m not sure.” Luke expertly jiggled the fish with the tip of a spatula, checking for doneness. “They used them to test the drugs, make sure they weren’t going to make their expensive test subjects drop dead ... not right away, at least.” His gaze darkened for a moment. Then he glanced at Rogue, and his face cleared a little. “I don’t know if they were doing anything else. Say, not to change the subject, but is there anything around here that might make a good side for this? This smells great, but fish with no side dishes has been on the menu for a long time, and I wouldn’t mind a salad or something.”
“It’s early in the year for any greens we could make a salad out of, but I bet I can whip up some stovetop cornbread. I’m sure I saw a dry mix for it when I was cleaning up earlier.”
The fish was done first, but they made themselves wait, and soon were sitting down to a meal of ocean-fresh fish and crumbly cornbread. Inga wished she’d had some butter; the cornbread was a little dry. But it was a perfect complement to the oily fish. She put some of the cornbread leftovers down for Rogue. Like all dogs, in spite of just having eaten, he was still a bottomless pit.
It was early afternoon, with the sun still high, and nothing much to do. Luke went to feed some cornbread crumbs to the baby griffins, who had now decided he was the greatest thing since fish guts. Inga took a walk to the top of the hill above the cabin to stretch her legs and work off a little of her lunch.
From here, she could see astonishingly far across the ruffled blue ocean, all the way out to where the edge of the sea became indistinguishable from the sky. A bank of distant fog hung like a long blue-gray curtain, and scattered clouds trailed across the sky.
She was also in a position to notice something else. There was a boat just coming around the headland. Inga waited to see if it would go on, but it nosed its way into the bay.
Inga bounded into motion, running down to find Luke, who looked up in alarmed surprise.
“Luke! There’s someone coming!”
INGA
By the timeshe got to the water’s edge, Inga recognized the boat. It was a green skiff with red trim that belonged to the Westerly family, who had playfully named it theChristmas Seal.And she also recognized the person standing at the skiff’s upright steering console, her childhood friend Juanita Westerly, who they all called Nita.
Luke had vanished. Inga turned to call up the hill to him and let him know it was safe, then decided to see what her friend wanted first. She couldn’t imagine Nita would turn Luke in, but there was no telling why she was here or what she’d already heard.
Inga scrambled out to the intact part of the dock and caught the mooring rope that Nita threw to her. No words needed to be said; the two women had both been on boats since they were tiny. Inga smoothly snubbed the rope around one of the sturdier posts.
“Hiya!” Nita called. “Give me a hand with this?” She braced one foot on the dock and handed Inga a baby carrier, which Inga took carefully and then discovered it was much lighter than expected, containing not a baby, but a crumpled pink dress and an assortment of baby supplies.
“She’s a seal?” Inga asked, peering into the bottom of the boat.
“Yeah, she’s under that.” Nita pointed at a crumpled tarp behind the bench seat. “Let’s unload before we wake her up. I hope you don’t mind company on your finding-yourself retreat. Your brothers were starting to get a little antsy about not hearing from you, even though they know perfectly well that you’ll be fine out here. I figured you’d rather me than them, and I wouldn’t mind a day or two of solitude myself.” She looked around as she dragged a cooler to the front of the boat. “Where’s the Dingboat? Do you have it pulled out somewhere?”
“No, I lost it,” Inga admitted as she stepped a foot into the boat’s bow to grip the cooler by the handle on the other end. “I feel stupid as heck about it, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain to Dad. I’m actually really glad to see you. I figured someone would come looking at some point, and I can always catch fish if I need to, but it’s nice to not be stuck anymore.”
Nita stared at her. “Inga, what happened? Are you okay? It’s not like you to just not tie off.”
“But that is exactly what I did.” Inga heaved a sigh as she dragged the cooler onto the dock. “It wasn’t at the cabin. I got caught in that storm and had to pull in along the shore in a place I don’t know well. And my tie-off tore out. Like I said, I feel so stupid.”
“Don’t.” Nita jumped out of the boat and gave her a hug. “You remember when Wy and I decided to check out that passing iceberg and got ourselves stranded and thought we were going to float all the way to the Caribbean, right? And I don’t think any of us will forget that time Tor thought it would be a great idea to moor theCodfatherto a floating log and went to sleep and woke up way the heck out in the middle of the ocean with barely enough fuel to get back. Not to mention all the stuff your dad’sdone over the years, which I’m guessing I don’t even know half of.”
