Betina Krahn by The Mermaid Page A

could be heard.
    He scanned the surface of the cove for signs of a curved triangular fin, dimly aware that he was holding his breath. When the waters merely glistened and flowed on undisturbed, he turned to her. She was watching him. A moment later, she had returned to her drumming. Like waves piling on a shore, the seductive pattern of that primitive call accumulated in his consciousness, pushing his awareness of her steadily higher … to the point of true arousal.
    After a time, he found himself seated fully, gripping his upraised knees with whitened fingers, staring heatedly at the hazy blue ribbon of the night horizon. His jaw was clenched, his legs were beginning to ache, and his trousers felt suddenly tighter.
    “No dolphins,” he declared thickly, and cleared his throat.
    “They don’t just swim around the dock, or even the cove, Professor. They have a very wide range … miles, perhaps even scores of miles.”
    “Then what makes you think pounding on a piece of tin could possibly reach them?”
    “They have an exceptionally keen sense of hearing and sound carries under water for surprisingly long distances. And, of course, this is summer. They like to summer here, along this coast, with me.”
    “With you?” He raked a critical glance over her blatantly feminine form, wondering if dolphins could possibly be as susceptible to blond hair, big blue eyes, and generous curves as human males generally were. “And what makes
you
so irresistible to dolphins?”
    She watched him sitting there with his back ramrod straight and his chin raised well above his stiff collar so that he could look down his patrician nose at her, and she was seized by an overwhelming urge to shock him.
    “I’m a lot of fun,” she declared firmly.
    He made a choked sound, as if the word were a foreign concept. “
Fun?
”
    She smiled with defiant cheeriness. “Dolphins put a premium on fun, and I think of novel things to do and introduce them to games and objects they’ve never seen before. That … and … when I get into the water with them, they get to laugh at my flukes and flippers.”
    “Laugh at your …” He glanced involuntarily at her lower half.
    “Well, they are rather unusual.” She hauled her skirt up to her knees and plopped first one, then the other foot up onto the dock. Fitting her heels together, she waggled her feet as if they were flukes. “Much too small … from a dolphin’s perspective, anyway. And I expect they probably think my nose is pathetically short and my eyes are much tooclose together. Imagine”—she crossed her eyes—“what we must look like to them.”
    He produced a strangled sound that might have included a laugh.
    “We’re a strange sort of pale pink and white all over,” she continued. “We have only these long, unwieldy flippers”—she demonstrated, wiggling her hands—“and have to thrash and dig our way through the water to keep up with them. Not very promising creatures, we humans. Although”—her eyes widened in mocking interest—“they might find you more promising than most.”
    “Me?”
    “
Your
flukes”—she nodded to his feet—“are quite large.”
    He seemed to stiffen a bit more, but it was hard to tell for certain in the dim light. She rolled up to her knees and held out the mallets to him. “Your turn.”
    “My turn? Don’t be absurd.”
    “It’s not difficult. Five raps along the upper edge, a pause, then a single lower rap in the center.”
    He folded his arms. “I am merely an observer. There is objectivity to be maintained. My participation might muddle or taint the results.”
    She continued to hold the mallets out to him. “Oh, I doubt you would taint the results, Professor. Unless, of course, you have no sense of rhythm.”
    “That is beside the point, Miss Ashton—”
    “Dolphins can hardly know who is calling them across miles of ocean … as long as the signal is properly given. And if you are to repeat my results, surely you must repeat