Free A Secret Shared... by Marion Lennox Page A

moment was broken. But not the sensation. Not the desire to see more of that smile.
    Harry hesitated but Maisie had leaped to attention and her whole body quivered. She looked from Harry to Kate and back again, and her message couldn’t be clearer.
    There’s fun this way. Come with me and play.
    How did they train a dog to do this?
    No matter, the message was irresistible. Harry put a tentative hand on Maisie’s collar and it was like pressing a go button. Maisie headed off steadily along the beach with Kate, with Harry clinging behind.
    Bemused, Jack was left to follow.
    He walked slowly, watching Kate chat to his nephew. Down at the water two of the dolphins were playing with a ball, tossing it seemingly just for pleasure. The sun was glittering on the sea, the tiny waves were only knee high at most and sandpipers were once again searching for pippies along the shoreline. This was the most perfect place.
    ‘You’re welcome to join us but you don’t have to come in with us, Jack,’ Kate said, quite kindly. She’d slipped her hand into Harry’s and to Jack’s astonishment Harry didn’t tug away. This was a child who’d hardly let himself be touched since his parents had died. ‘We can have fun ourselves.’
    ‘I’d like to come,’ he said, thinking he did not want to be excluded from the fun his nephew could have with this woman.
    Fun? He thought of the story she’d told him last night, of the pain she’d gone through, and he thought, here she was, dispensing fun.
    ‘Then you need to know the rules,’ Kate told him. ‘Harry and I were discussing them while you dawdled.’
    ‘I did not dawdle.’ Astonishingly, she was laughing at him.
    ‘You did so dawdle, didn’t he, Harry?’ She chuckled. ‘But for the slowcoaches, here are the rules again. The main one is no touching.’
    No touching? He’d been expecting touchy-feely stuff. Riding the dolphins? Maybe not, but close.
    ‘Dolphins don’t like being touched except on their terms,’ she told him. ‘All the dolphins in this pool were born wild. They’re here because they’ve been injured, or orphaned, or somehow left so they can’t survive in the open sea. But that doesn’t mean they’re pets. Some of them will nudge us. Hobble, for one, is a very pushy dolphin, but it’s for him to decide, not us. But they do like playing. In the wild, dolphins surf. They seem to leap just for the joy of leaping when they’re wild and free. But what’s happened to them in the past means that they can’t be free. Even though this pool is half the bay wide, it’s not enough. They get bored so it’s up to us to make them happy.’
    And as she said it she walked into the water, lifted a beach ball floating in the shallows and tossed it far out.
    It never hit the water. As it reached the peak of its arc a silver bullet streaked up from the surface. The dolphin’s nose hit the ball square on, it rebounded, another silver bullet flashed from nowhere, the ball rebounded again—and landed in the shallows in front of Kate.
    Harry had been standing behind Kate, open-mouthed with awe. Kate took a step back to stand beside him.
    ‘This is our favourite game,’ she said idly, and Jack couldn’t tell whether she was talking to him, to Harry or to the dolphins. ‘But it makes me tired.’ She lifted the ball again and threw, with exactly the same results. ‘My arm aches,’ she said. ‘I’ve been tossing it for ages. That might be all I can do today.’
    ‘I will throw the ball,’ Harry said.
    ‘You’d have to throw it far out,’ Kate said dubiously, looking out to where one of the dolphins was rearing out of the water as if checking to see if the ball was returning.
    ‘I can.’
    ‘If you think so,’ Kate said, and stepped back still further.
    She didn’t pick up the ball for him, though. The ball was floating about six feet in front of the little boy, in the shallows. He’d have to wade forward.
    For three months Harry had been totally passive.