Read Online Immortal Sea by Virginia Kantra - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t, so she couldn’t even accuse him of lying.
    The young waitress returned to set a glass of wine in front of Liz and lingered. “Anything else? Another Scotch?”
    Morgan shook his head without glancing up.
    She pouted freshly glossed lips, twirling the ends of her blond hair around her finger. Morgan didn’t seem to notice. “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
    “We will,” Liz said. “Thank you.”
    The girl smiled quickly, uncertainly, and left.
    Liz sighed. Had she ever been that young? That hopeful and unguarded?
    Yes.
    She looked across the table again into Morgan’s eyes, dark and bright as a night full of stars, a night sixteen years ago when she was young and foolish and aching with possibilities.
    He looked exactly the same. Broad nose, sharp jaw, lean cheeks. His upper lip was still narrow, the lower one full, curved, and compelling.
    She yanked her mind back. Okay, this was bad.
    “I don’t even know your name.” Had she said that before, sixteen years ago?
    “Morgan.”
    Another memory, of sitting upright in her hospital bed, staring blankly at the application form for Zachary’s birth certificate. FATHER’S NAME.
    Unknown, she had written, the point of her pen gouging the paper.
    “Last name,” she said.
    He hesitated. “Bressay.”
    His accent, faint and indefinable, roughened on the word. She cocked her head. “What is that, French?”
    “Scottish.”
    She waited. Sometimes listening encouraged patients to talk better than asking questions.
    “Bressay is an island north of Scotland. Settled by the Viking longships.”
    He looked a bit like a Viking, big and brutally handsome with his hair like foam.
    Like Zack’s.
    He was Zack’s father . The implications made her head pound.
    She drew a painful breath. “How did you find us?”
    “I didn’t,” he said so simply she almost believed him.
    “Until I saw the boy yesterday, I was unaware of his existence.”
    She would have told him. If she’d ever had the chance. But he never came, he never called, he never contacted her.
    He never tried to find them. Her.
    The realization was like peeling adhesive back from an old wound. “So you’re telling me your being here is, what? Coincidence? An accident.”
    “Or destiny,” he said. “Fate has brought us together. Twice.”
    As if their one-night stand was more than lust on his part, stupidity on hers.
    “I don’t believe in fate. Bad luck, maybe.”
    Those pale gold eyes assessed her. “You consider the boy a misfortune.”
    “Of course not.” She pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples. “When I found out I was pregnant . . . My parents didn’t want me to have the baby. They said if I went through with the pregnancy, I’d have to take full responsibility for my choices and my child. So I did. I put myself through med school. I kept my baby.” She raised her head, the old resolve burning in her breast. “And you can’t just show up sixteen years later and take any of that away from me.”
    “No female among my people would choose as you did,” he said quietly. “I honor your choice.”
    The sincerity in his voice, the admiration in his eyes, caught her off guard. Since Ben’s death, she was used to getting through the days and the nights and the years on her own. There were rewards, sure. But precious few compliments.
    She blinked back sudden tears. “Thank you.”
    “But the choice is not yours any longer,” he continued inexorably.
    She stiffened, on the alert again. “Zack is my son.”
    Morgan regarded her steadily beneath hooded lids. “He is almost a man. He must make his own choices.”
    “You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. He’s fifteen years old and going through a very difficult time.” So difficult she had given up her practice and moved her family nine hundred miles to provide them with a fresh start. “You have no right to tell me how to raise my son.”
    “What about his rights?” Morgan asked.
    She