Page 2 of The Naiad's Lover

After another long minute of lying there, he slid off to the side. His heat pressed the length of my body and he slung a long leg over mine.

I suspected that he was up on an elbow, watching me.

I blinked my eyes open and caught him in the process of tracing the shape of my lips, his fingers a scant hairsbreadth from making contact. He froze. I leaned up and nipped a fingertip, and he collapsed onto me, kissing me fiercely.

“Are you awake now?” he demanded.

“I am.”

To my astonishment, he leapt off the bed and thrust out a hand. I’d expected him to at least insist on lovemaking first.

Hereallywanted me to go down to the lake.

I tossed the bedclothes back and stretched out long, the bones at the base of my spine cracking. “Is there something special about today?” I asked, shuffling over to sit on the edge of the mattress.

“Yes.” He all but vibrated with eagerness. “Today is the day that I will teach you to swim.”

I looked up at him with dismay.

His answering smile was bright.

The truth of it was, I didn’t want to learn how to swim.

I was forty-four years old, and I’d managed to go my whole life without learning.

Until last year, when I’d moved to my cabin close to Sayan’s lake, I’d lived in the great city of Hallevalt. I had been born there, in the Merchants’ Quarter.

Hallevalt was a port city and, as the son of a merchant and then a merchant myself, I’d spent countless days on the wharves and in the waterfront warehouses and offices I owned. There, the River Valt poured out the city’s filth along with its wealth into the crowded and polluted harbour. I could safely say thatthe idea of voluntarily splashing about in its waters hadn’t ever crossed my mind.

As a child, I’d often traveled with my father on business trips, and had explored country ponds and streams as any curious city child would. Once, when we were in Lindis, I’d waded waist-deep in the warm blue sea alongside white shores.

But I’d never learned how to swim.

I hadn’t needed to. Until today.

I’d known this was coming. Months ago, I’d drawn Sayan a hot bath. It was one of many human comforts that he hadn’t experienced before, wild naiad that he was, and I’d meant it as a treat for him. I’d hoped it would remind him of his southern birthplace, which he missed to this day.

The bath had been a great success. Too great a success. He’d been entranced by it, and had insisted that he would ‘return the favour’ by teaching me to swim so I could join him in his lake.

I’d tried to put it off. I’d tried my very best. It had been easy enough to do when autumn cooled into winter and the land was buried beneath great drifts of snow.

I’d coaxed him into more hot baths. I’d even allowed him to coax me in with him. It was a ridiculously tight fit with the pair of us in there; Sayan had been born in a time when men were closer to gods in stature than to the greatly weakened and diminished form—as he’d earnestly explained—that we now took.

Diminished I may be in comparison to my godlike naiad, but I was still taller than the average man, and squeezing into the tub once he’d crammed himself in there was no easy task.

I’d already ordered us a new, much larger, one.

I’d been fooling myself, though. A bath, no matter how large, would never satisfy him. Today, I had to accept it.

My luck had run out.

Sayan chivvied me through my morning ablutions and hovered close by as I dressed, telling me that neither a wash nor my clothes were necessary, as if I would justhurry, then I would be naked and fully submerged before I knew it.

He lost patience when I attempted to brew a third cup of coffee and, despite my laughing protests, he whisked me out of the house, into the forest, and off to his lake.

We walked hand in hand along the grassy track that wound through the trees. The morning breeze was crisp enough to raise goosebumps over my exposed skin, but it was significantly milder than it had been for some time.

Snowdrops had come and gone months ago, followed by dainty blue squill and thick banks of yellow daffodils. Blackthorn blossom had turned the bare brown hedgerows into delightful billows of creamy white before fading to make way for fresh new leaves. The hawthorn had taken up its mantle and now glowed under the lemony, late spring sun, even as the bluebells that had turned the ground beneath the ash and oak trees to a hazy purple carpet were turning, their seed pods swelling.

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