Free Betina Krahn by The Mermaid Page B

ended precipitously at the edge of a cliff. Titus’s heart thudded when she veered from the path and disappeared over the edge of the cliff.
    Hurrying to the edge of the cliff, he glimpsed a stepped path leading down the side of it, and reluctantly followed. He was still burning from their confrontation, and fixed his gaze on the swaying blue skirts ahead of him.
    Infernal female—having the temerity to disparage his work and compare him to a
fishmonger
. He was a respected researcher, a professor who held a chair at Oxford. The list of his papers and presentations was as long as his arm. True, his method of inquiry wasn’t dashing, or adventuresome, or wildly romantic. Why was it that people—even some who should know better, like his colleagues on the Cardinal College faculty—persisted in promoting the myth of the great romance of discovery? The old boys talked about research in grandly overblown terms, as if it always involved sailing up the Nile or wading through Amazonian swamps or being bitten by some exotic vermin in some exotic climate. Yet another symptom of encroaching senility, he was convinced.They had forgotten the details of their earlier days and now simply made some up.
    The truth was, real science involved precious little glamour. Real science was methodical, exacting, and sometimes even unpleasant. Real research employed grit and determination in the dogged pursuit of elusive but critical details. The study of ichthyology didn’t require sailing the seven seas, and it certainly didn’t require making oneself
into
a fish in order to study fish!
    His eyes narrowed.
    Celeste Ashton clearly hadn’t the first idea of the methodologies of legitimate scientific investigation. If she did, she wouldn’t be dragging him down to the water in the dark to witness God-knew-what. Then it struck him like a thunderbolt: she was hauling him down to the water at dusk … declaring dolphins don’t sleep …
    She had something up her sleeve. He could just feel it.
    He took a deep breath and rolled his aching shoulders, forcing them to relax. Forewarned was forearmed.
    The beach was a pale crescent at the heart of a large, rounded cove. To the right, a rocky finger of land jutted out into the sea and formed a protective barrier that kept the water of the cove more placid than that of the surrounding shoreline. When they reached the bottom of the cliff, she struck off across the beach and he trudged through the soft sand after her, wondering briefly if she meant to charge straight into the water, clothes and all. But, with a glance back over her shoulder, she corrected her course.
    “Where are you taking me?” he called out as she climbed several rocky steps to a path.
    She pointed toward a dock and boathouse near the mouth of the cove.
    “A boathouse? You cannot mean to go out in a boat now … tonight … with darkness coming on?”
    “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone out at night.”
    “This is idiocy,” he muttered, following her up the stepswith an eye on the water breaking against the rocks just below his feet.
    “I prefer to think of it as
determination”
she shot back. “I am experienced at sea … you would be perfectly safe with me at the tiller … day or night.”
    Her at the tiller. His teeth ground together. Wouldn’t she love that?
    He stalked along after her, so intent on his thoughts that he didn’t watch where he was putting his feet. When a board cracked underfoot, he jumped ahead to a sounder plank, then turned to look in horror at the splintered wood and the darkness beneath it.
    “Oh, and do mind where you put your feet, Professor.” He couldn’t see her face, but could somehow tell from the sound of her voice that she was smiling. “Some of the wood isn’t quite what it used to be.”
    “See here, Miss Ashton …” He drew up behind her as she opened the rough planking door to the tumbledown boathouse. Smells of rotting algae, damp wood, and musty canvas rolled out of