Moontide
Read Along Chapter 23
The Keys
“I need to eat,” Cindy stated. She felt completely wrung out.
They’d walked along the beach until they’d come to an area with some shops and restaurants. She stood there trying to decide between fish tacos from a stand or the Cuban restaurant across the street until Ronan finally steered her towards the taco stand.
“I have no wish to try whatever this ‘Cuban’ is that the old man mentioned.”
“Good call,” Cindy agreed. “Tacos it is.”
They carried the food and sat at a table, their arms stretched across to hold each other’s hands. Anyone looking would have thought they were a couple.
“So, are you from here? Originally, I mean,” Cindy asked, deciding there was nothing weird about engaging in small talk after the day they’d had. Nothing at all. She was losing her mind.
“No, I was born in England,” he said then glanced up at her, “some time ago.”
“Right,” she left that thought. “I only wondered because you speak Spanish so well and, when I first saw you, I uh, kind of thought you looked like a pirate.”
His head came up and he gave her a slanted smile. Her initial impression of him amused him and that lightened the mood.
“Not a pirate, cara, a sailor. I captained a merchant ship from my father’s fleet. The only pillaging and plundering I ever did was among willing parties.”
He winked at her, then, and his smile grew even more dazzling. Cindy rolled her eyes, but couldn’t stop a blush from stealing into her cheeks.
“My father was an Englishman, my mother was from Spain,” he explained.
“That makes sense. She’s the one who taught you Spanish?
He nodded.
“Did you have a wife?”
The words were out of her mouth before she could bite them back. His eyes flashed up to hers. He paused.
“No, no wife,” he shook his head in the negative.
She felt an unexplainable wave of relief wash over her.
“I was betrothed, however.”
Why did that knowledge feel like a knife piercing through her middle? You couldn’t be jealous of someone who’d been dead for centuries, could you? And why would she care? She didn’t… not a bit.
“My father wanted heirs to carry on his trade empire. Anna Maria’s family sold goods to ours.”
“Did you love her a lot?”
She just couldn’t quit!
***
That word got Ronan’s attention. Love? He’d had lovers aplenty, but he’d never experienced the state of being in love in all the many years that he’d lived. He’d never sought it out either.
When he’d landed on Poseidon’s island, it was as a slave to Thema, and though some of his men suffered fascinations with the nymphs, Ronan felt only disgust for their kind.
The tactics the Nereid queen had used to keep him in servitude flashed through his mind—threat’s to his men and even his family on Earth, when they’d been alive. Not to mention the visions, the blood fury, she’d used to condition and torture him with. She was insane. Sometimes it had been as though she thought he was someone else—someone who had wronged her in another time—and she’d focused all her hate and rage on him until Poseidon had made her leave the island.
Those had been the only times he’d ever felt weak. Through it all, he’d been alone in his struggles. Now, after all these centuries, he found himself in the unfamiliar territory of needing someone else. Cindy’s question pushed at some unused part of him.
He looked into her eyes.
“No,” he shook his head, “I didn’t love her. Our marriage was meant to build the power of our families’ businesses. She was just a girl, fragile like a flower,” when he said it, he remembered the weight he’d felt at the thought of taking the raven haired beauty to wife, like a drag on his spirit. “We’d have married out of duty not love.”
Cindy nodded thoughtfully.
“Of course, back then people rarely married for love,” she mused. Ronan detected a note of sadness in her voice.
She shrugged as she crunched another bite of taco. He watched her mouth work as she chewed. Reaching across the table, he brushed a crumb from her lips then let his hand linger. Her lower lip was just a little fuller than the top, and so very soft. He’d learned that when he’d kissed her, something he wanted very much to do again. Her eyes were darker right now, storm clouds over a restless sea, due to all that had transpired this afternoon. It had been torture to be brought so low by Thema’s curse in that shed when Cindy’d been under Melinoe’s spell. He’d fought through it to get to her, but it was her own strength of spirit that had led her out of the veil.
She might be soft but she wasn’t fragile. That realization made him want her all the more. He wrestled the idea back down into submission just as a little tune rang out. He watched as she grabbed a slim little box like Adam’s out of her bag. She glanced his way, then spoke into it.
“Hi Marley, how is your… uh… meeting going? That’s good. The lighthouse? It was really... interesting.”
She listened for a moment.
“Okay, well, I’ll see you back at the hotel.” She ended the conversation.
“That was your friend?” Ronan asked. “The one with the knee?”
“Yeah, that’s Marley,” she confirmed. “Sorry about your rib cage. We thought you were a mass murderer or something.” He frowned before she added, “I mean, you were chasing us in and out of the elevator at the time.”
He had no argument for that.
*Author’s Note: If you could ask someone from the past about their customs, way of life etc., what would you ask them first?
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