I thought it best to save him as much anxiety as possible. If you can’t understand that—”
“I can,” she interrupted, biting her lip.
He nodded abruptly. “Good. Now go get the Delanos back in here—and perhaps you’d better stay outside a while. This won’t hurt the animal, but—”
Ralph broke off to stare down in stunned surprise at the strong, lean hand grasping his ankle. “What the hell is— Ack!”
The pistol flew into the air, skittering at Beth’s feet as Ralph fell backward. With a huge splash he hit the water.
Beth’s eyes widened and her hand flew up to cover her mouth. Good lord! The merman had jerked Ralph off his feet!
Hurrying to the end of the platform, she looked down over the edge. The merman was swimming away. Ralph was flailing just beneath the surface of the water.
He bobbed up, gasping for air. “Elizabeth! Get the Delanos, I—”
A muscular armed wrapped around his neck, choking the words off. The merman had circled, coming up behind him. With frightening ease, the merman pulled Ralph back against his broad chest, holding him there with one arm across his throat, the other around his ribs. The immense muscles of the merman’s shoulders and biceps leaped into corded knots beneath his gleaming brown skin as slowly, steadily, he tightened his grip.
Beth watched in horror as Ralph’s eyes widened. His round cheeks turned from pink to red as he tore fruitlessly at the muscular forearm locked against his wind-pipe. His eyes rolled then bulged as he fought to escape, his expression filled with panic. But it was the sheer lack of emotion on the merman’s face behind him that finally spurred Beth into action.
“Oh, no. Oh, please no,” she pleaded unconsciously, desperately looking around, trying to decide what to do.
Her frantic glance fell on the tranquilizer gun Ralph had dropped on the wood. Snatching it up, she pointed it with a trembling hand toward the two figures battling in the water.
Ralph’s struggles were growing feebler. His face, held just above the water line, turned from red to purple. On shaking legs, Beth moved to the other side of the platform, trying to get a clear shot at the merman’s back.
She had it—his uninjured shoulder was in her sights. She steadied her hand. But a split second before she pulled the trigger, he swung around again.
The dart hit Ralph, high in the chest.
Beth’s hand fell, the gun dropping from her numb fingers. She could see the dart sticking out from Ralph’s wet shirt, right below the tanned forearm locked around his neck. The blood drained from her face. Now—thanks to her—the merman would finish Ralph off with no problem at all.
“Oh, God, no,” she said, the words emerging huskily from her tight throat. “I’ve as good as killed him.”
The thrashing figures suddenly became ominously still as trapped in the merman’s hold, Ralph went limp. Over his shoulder, Beth’s despairing gaze locked with merciless blue eyes. For a long, endless moment the merman stared at her silently.
Then he slid underwater, carrying Ralph with him. Beth’s hand crept to her throat—then she gasped as a form suddenly burst out of the foamy water. Water flew everywhere as Ralph landed on the platform at her feet.
She quickly bent down over him. Water streamed from his hair, his clothes—dribbled out of his mouth and nose. He was soaked. He was weak. But when she pressed her fingers against the side of his neck, she could feel his pulse beating.
He was alive.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she breathed, looking toward the water.
But the merman had glided away.
Chapter Four
Ralph obviously wasn’t going to awaken anytime soon.
“The tranquilizer in that dart you showed me is pretty strong,” Anne, her father’s nurse, informed Beth about an hour later. The nurse straightened and stared down at the man in the bed, shaking her white head. “He’ll probably regain consciousness in about six hours, possibly a little longer.”
Bending over again, she lifted one of Ralph’s eyelids and pointed a tiny flashlight at his pupil. Ralph didn’t move at all. He continued to lie there with a silly grin on his face, as if he’d had a bit too much to drink.
Such a contrast to his usual demeanor, Beth thought, feeling oddly guilty. He was almost unrecognizable. The Delano brothers had stripped his wet clothes off after lugging him to his bedroom while she’d run to get Anne, but they hadn’t bothered to dry Ralph before covering him with a sheet. A wet patch haloed his head on the pillow, and half of his red hair stuck out in greasy spikes, while the other half was plastered to his pale freckled skull.
The Delanos had laid him at a crooked angle on the mattress, too, Beth noticed. She kept wanting to straighten him out, as if doing so would straighten out this whole entire mess.
She watched Anne examine the puncture wound in Ralph’s shoulder. The creases in the nurse’s forehead deepened as she frowned at the tiny red mark, then glanced at Beth.
“You say you accidentally shot him while he was teaching you to use the dart gun?” she asked—for at least the third time.
“Um-hmm.”
“And he acquired the bruises on his chest and neck when he fell?”
Beth nodded, still avoiding the older woman’s eyes. She hated to lie to Anne. Over the years, the nurse had become more of an adopted aunt rather than simply her father’s caretaker and, along with Captain McDugald, was one of the few people Beth considered a friend. Beth knew that Anne’s snowy white hair, plump figure, and absentminded expression hid a very keen mind and equally kind heart.
Yet for some reason, keeping the merman a secret seemed even more important now than before he’d attacked Ralph. Perhaps because a normal merman was bad enough. A savage one was worse.
“Those don’t look like bruises he’d get from a fall,” Anne commented.
“He hit the edge of the platform after I shot him,” Beth explained, trying to make her story a little more believable. Conscious that the other woman was watching her intently, she busied herself by pulling the sheet up higher over Ralph’s milk-white chest. “But you think he’s going to be all right?”
The nurse nodded. “He should be—barring any unforeseen complications,” she added with characteristic caution. “He might have cracked a rib or two—without X rays I can’t tell. He’ll certainly want to take it easy for a week or so. But he’s young, healthy. All he really needs to do right now is sleep it off.” She turned away to repack her equipment in a small, brown case.
Beth gave a sigh of relief. If Anne said that Ralph was going to be all right, then she had no doubts he would.
The merman, however, was another story. A small frown puckered Beth’s brow as she thought about the wound on his shoulder. “Anne…”
“Yes?”
“What
