Читать книгу Fire: The Mermaid Legacy Book Two - Natasha Hardy - Страница 10

Gazing out of the cracked rock that encased me, I watched, disinterested, as the snow fell in soft silence, covering everything it touched in icy whiteness.

I turned from the brightness of the morning back to the gloom, wincing as a dormant memory sparkled to life as the smell of the fresh clean winter air drifted into my cave.

She had spun around in circles, laughing and dancing, arms raised at her first experience of falling snow. I still remembered how my heart had raced at her beauty –her dark hair swirling around her, flecked with a confetti of snow, her eyes sparkling and her body weaving an unpretentiously sensual dance as she called me to join her.

As much as I fought it, that one innocent memory unleashed an avalanche of others, all of them peppered with the intensity of the emotions that had surrounded her.

The memories stuttered to a close with two final images – the beginning and the end.

The first was the moment I’d first seen her: huddled with the other bedraggled travellers, her eyes betraying the exhaustion her body refused to give in to as she’d scanned the blackness of the cave for the lurking evil she’d felt so close at hand.

In all of my long, long years, I’d never experienced anything as intense as the stab of longing and protectiveness I’d felt for her in that moment. I’d determined she’d be mine in the few seconds it had taken before she’d returned to fretting over the dying child in her friend’s arms.

I shook my head a little in the unnatural and perpetual dusk of the cave, shying away from the second memory. Try as I might, though, it always caught up with me, because as much as I’d determined to have her, it was me, in the end, who’d been trapped. Happily at first, because my love for her was an all-consuming emotion, one I’d rather die than be without. But now, I was paying for it…

My final memory of her spooled in aching slow motion, as I watched from behind closed lids, while the light faded softly from her eyes and her chest collapsed at the end of her last breath.

I drew in a ragged breath, curling in on myself as each agonising squeeze of my heart reminded me of the cruelty of my life. I now lived in the shadow of the happiness and love that had once been mine, the afterglow of the most spectacular time of my life.

I would have ended it all years and years ago had I not promised her that I would remain, that I would fight.

The pain subsided ever so slightly as my foot brushed the still, inky, icy surface of the pool that dominated the cave I was hiding in.

All of the whispers of the water were instantly within my grasp with that light brush. I didn’t like what I heard.