Betina Krahn by The Mermaid Read Free Book Online Page A

out of the Athenaeum Lecture Hall on a tide of congratulatory fustian and male bombast. To hear his esteemed colleagues tell it, he had just been tapped for the greatest honor since the Almighty charged King Arthur with the quest for the Holy—
    “There you are!” Sir Parthenay caught up and fell into step beside him as he strode along Cromwell Road. “Well done, my boy.”
    “You must be joking,” Titus growled.
    “Not at all. Excellent opportunity here. Haven’t seen such interest in marine science since that Verne fellow published that story
Twenty Million Leagues
—”
    “Twenty
thousand,”
Titus grumbled. “Submarine boats and rampaging giant squid. Had everyone terrified to stick a toe into the water for fear of being strangulated by a sea monster.”
    “Ah, yes.” Sir Parthenay shook his head fondly. “Interesting stuff.” Then he came back to the matter at hand. “Just think. You’ll be away from the rut of routine … sleeping in the fine sea air … not to mention swimming with a very fetching ‘mermaid.’ You know, of course, that Sir Isaac will be green with envy.” When Titus stopped in his tracks, glowering, Sir Parthenay chuckled. Clapping one hand onthe younger man’s shoulder, he hailed a cab with the other. “I’m off to the train station. Have to be back for a meeting, first thing in the morning, or I’d stay over and have dinner with you.” As he swung up into the carriage, he grinned. “Can’t wait to hear your report.”
    Titus was left standing on the corner of Cromwell and Gloucester roads, staring after the cab, wondering how in hell he had gotten himself into this mess.
    He had come to this wretched “mermaid” meeting with the noblest of intentions: confronting and discrediting a scientific sleight-of-hand artist, a fraud in a tawdry fish tail. He had read her preposterous book and prepared to confront her with its obvious flaws. But from the moment he walked in the door nothing had gone quite as he had anticipated.
    He had expected the old boys in the royal societies to fawn, toady, and welcome Celeste Ashton with open arms. They didn’t. He had expected a lively, perhaps even heated, discourse on the scandalous claims and observations made in her book. There wasn’t one. He had planned to lead the attack on her ridiculous notions. He found himself calling a halt to it instead.
    His disillusionment had begun at dinner, where he heard exaggerated recountings of passages from her book … stories bearing no semblance to anything she had written … which he found exceedingly strange, since what she
had
written was quite sensational enough. It soon became apparent that only one in ten had ever set eyes on her work, but nine out of ten considered themselves experts on it. Then as the port was passed around for a third time, there was ribald speculation about the young woman herself—conjecture on her worldliness and experience—and on the best way to “clean and scale” a mermaid.
    By the time they filed into the auditorium, the “gentlemen of science” were in anything but a gentlemanly mood. Some of the old cods at the back were downright pie-eyed. Their subsequent disrespect and crude, ill-informed questionswere nothing short of an embarrassment to the scientific community.
    His irritation with his fellow members’ behavior, however, was equaled by his dismay at the unexpected nature of Miss Ashton herself. In the short time he had studied this “mermaid problem,” he had grown accustomed to picturing her in terms of the sketches in the newspapers … as a leering spinster, a fish-tailed siren of the sea, a voluptuous fishwife, or a bluestocking with webbed feet and the face of a trout.
    But this Miss Ashton didn’t look the slightest bit like a cartoon Lorelei or a virago with gills. He closed his eyes and there she was again … just inches from his face … blond and blue-eyed … curvaceous … well-spoken … intrepid beyond imagining. And there he was,