Kate Hoffmann: Kellan

“I don’t believe in mermaids,” Kellan said. “And neither do you two. She was unconscious when I found her.”

Finnerty listened to her pulse, then removed the cuff. “Well, she’s here. And her vital signs are strong. What are you going to do with her?”

“I thought you could take her. To hospital, if need be.”

“She appears to be slightly hypothermic and possibly hungover. Now that she’s getting warm, she’ll probably wake up and be just fine. I expect the best place for her is right here-at least until she’s feeling better. Then you can take her back where you found her.”

“What? I can’t put her back on that beach.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll sort it all out,” Finnerty said as he rose from the sofa. “You’re a smart lad, Kellan. Now, my wife has dinner waiting and I’m late. If you need me, give me a ring and I’ll come back. Danny, let’s be off and leave your brother to nurse this pretty merrow back to health.”

Danny gave Kellan a shrug and followed the doctor out the door. “Bring me up some soup from the pub,” Kellan called. “And a bottle of whiskey.”

“No problem,” Danny said. “And I’ll fetch a bushel of kelp and some herring, too.” He was still chuckling as the door slammed behind him.

Kellan stared down at the woman lying on the sofa. He reached down and brushed the flaxen hair from her eyes, taking in the perfect features of her face. Finnerty was right. She had a look about her, something…extraordinary. “Otherworldly,” he murmured.

And familiar. Kellan couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen her somewhere before. And yet, he certainly would have remembered meeting her. A woman this beautiful would have stuck in his mind.

“If you are a mermaid,” he murmured, smoothing his hand over her temple, “then we’re going to have a very interesting conversation when you wake up.”

GELSEY WOODSON SNUGGLED into the warm recesses of the blanket wrapped around her naked body. Her head ached from the bottle of champagne she’d drunk the night before and her skin itched from salt water and sand, but she couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes.

She listened distractedly to the male voices, realizing they were talking about her. The one man was obviously a doctor and she stifled a moan as he took her blood pressure. There was another voice, her rescuer. The man who’d carried her up from the beach. She liked his voice. It was like liquid chocolate, smooth and dark and just a bit sweet.

Their conversation turned to mermaids and for a moment she was confused, until she realized that they thought she was a mermaid. That nearly made her laugh out loud. She’d always been one to indulge in fantasies. From the time she was a child, she’d woven a rich imaginary life for herself where she was a princess one day and a fairy queen the next, or a sorceress or an elf or a pixie with powers that could change her world in the blink of an eye.

And now she was a mermaid. Maybe that was for the best, she mused. For she certainly didn’t want to be Gelsey Woodson anymore.

Her stomach growled and she winced, remembering the humiliation of vomiting over the man’s shoulder. Though she was used to overindulging, bouncing around as he carried her had been a recipe for disaster.

She pulled the blanket up more tightly around her nose. Just a few more hours of rest would be enough. Then she could face the world again. But even though she wanted to sleep, she couldn’t help but be curious about the man who’d plucked her off the beach.

When the house went quiet, she slowly opened her eyes and looked around. A fire flickered on the hearth and the acrid smell of peat teased at her nose. She glanced under the quilt. Though she was certain she hadn’t undressed herself, she couldn’t remember who had.

Her mind wandered back to the previous night. Though she’d done her share of stupid things, especially when it came to her relationships with men, this might just top the list. A late-night phone call, an argument with her ex-fiancé and too much to drink had ended with her tossing a nine carat diamond ring into the sea before passing out on the beach. It seemed as if all her problems had become too heavy to bear. Not just the breakup, but the everything that had come before it-the fights, the paparazzi, the Italian police and the “incident.”

That’s what she’d taken to calling it. That’s what her Italian attorney called it. And that made it sound so benign. But punching a photographer was a serious offense, even if she’d done it while under the influence of another very expensive bottle of champagne and the misunderstanding that the photographer was trying to grope her.

And so she’d run away to Winterhill, to lick her wounds and await her hearing scheduled for late January. Her grandmother’s country house in Ireland was a place she’d remembered so fondly from her childhood. The windswept cliffs and brilliant green meadows had been her playground every summer, creating fantasies for a girl used to a solitary existence. She’d come back to find the center in her life again, to hide from everything that confused and frightened her. Though she’d lived all over the world, Ireland had always felt the most like home.

She drew a deep breath and winced, her head throbbing and her mouth dry as dust. Was this what all her therapists had talked about? Everyone had been predicting it. Had Gigi Woodson, tabloid princess and celebrity heiress, finally hit rock bottom?

Her father, Ellery Woodson, was a diplomat for the British government, and her mother, an American socialite. She was their only child and after the first eight years of her life, a pawn in their very nasty divorce. Bad behavior had come easily. It had been the only way to get her parents’ attention.

At age twelve, she’d been kicked out of her first boarding school. By seventeen, she’d been kicked out of more schools than she could remember. She had a brief spell of normalcy during her university years in Paris, when she worked on an art history degree and lived with a handsome French banker. But then her grandmother died, leaving her Winterhill and a large trust fund. At age twenty-one, the naughty Gelsey returned with a vengeance-and with a seemingly bottomless bank account.

She’d transformed herself from Gelsey Evangeline Woodson, well-educated daughter of a diplomat, to Gigi Woodson, party girl without a care in the world. For the first five years, it had been fun, like playing make-believe only with posh parties and exciting new friends. Even her mother had approved.

But in the past few years, her life had started to spiral out of control and she began to suspect that she really did care. That all the pretending didn’t make the loneliness and the insecurities go away. Maybe she hadn’t had the best family life and maybe her parents hadn’t really wanted her around. But she’d come to realize that the life she was living would never make her happy and the friends she had weren’t true friends at all.

Gelsey drew a ragged breath. So, perhaps this could be a fresh start. Today, this morning. Or afternoon. When she opened her eyes again, she could forget the past and start all over again. She could use what was left of her trust fund and build a simple life for herself, away from the glare of the spotlight and the flash of the paparazzi’s cameras.

Her thoughts dissolved and she fell back into a shallow sleep, content for the first time in a long time. Everything would be all right. She’d be safe here, in this tiny cottage. No one knew her in Ireland beyond the housekeeper at Winterhill. No one would care if she stayed away for a day or even a week.

She wasn’t sure how long she slept, but the touch of a hand on her face brought her back from a dreamless state of exhaustion. She opened her eyes and found him sitting on the floor near the end of the sofa and staring at her intently.