The Keepers: Christmas in Salem by Graham Heather & Leblanc Deborah & Pickering Kathleen & Ciotta Beth

Author:Graham, Heather & Leblanc, Deborah & Pickering, Kathleen & Ciotta, Beth [Graham, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, Paranormal, Contemporary, Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Fiction
ISBN: 9780373885817
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

A gust of wind startled Katie Sue awake. She blinked against the pitch black to get her bearings. She felt so drugged from their lovemaking that it took a moment for her to remember that she and Jett were ensconced within the sleeping bag on the beach. She couldn’t guess the time.

Jett rose on one elbow. “Why are you shivering? My coat is impervious to the cold, so it should block...”

He stopped speaking and reached outside the sleeping bag. Alarm filled his voice. “Katie. My coat. Can you feel it?”

She hurriedly unzipped the sleeping bag and they both scrambled from the down cocoon. Naked, on hands and knees in the cold, they felt around for the precious skin that under any other circumstances Jett would have guarded with his life.

His selkie coat was gone. Stolen.

How on earth had someone managed to come so close unnoticed?

He’d been careless with his precious coat because of her. She’d driven him to distraction with her pleas. Her need. Without his pelt he could never return to the sea. The guilt weighed like lead on her chest. “Oh, God, Jett. It’s not here.”

He didn’t answer, just quickly dressed in the jeans and fisherman-knit sweater she’d brought, his movements agitated.

She shimmied into her clothes in the freezing air, aching for the passion they’d shared only moments ago. When she and Jett had met again as teenagers, she’d begged him to stay with her forever. He’d told her how his mother, Miranda, had given her selkie coat to his father as a pledge of her love. Katie’s hopes had risen, only to be cruelly dashed as he shared the rest of his mother’s story. Years later, his father had died unexpectedly without telling Miranda where he’d hidden her skin. She died of a broken heart from losing her lover and her only way back to the sea, forcing Jett to promise he would never make the same mistake. What a fool she’d been now to hope he might break that promise.

“Can you light the lantern?”

He spoke calmly, but she knew he was racked with turmoil. Within seconds the small area around them was illuminated.

No selkie skin anywhere.

“What the Devil?” He raised his face into the air. “Do you smell that?”

Katie Sue took a breath, noticing sand, seaweed and salt water. “All I smell is ocean.”

“No. Wood smoke. Pepper. Flint.” He sniffed some more. “Leather.”

Their gazes locked in the lamplight. As a Keeper, she had an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, because she knew what Other possessed that scent, but she didn’t dare say the word out loud.

Jett did. “A shapeshifter.”

Shapeshifters were one of the few paranormal species that posed a danger to selkies. Selkie pelts could be used to create powerful potions to enhance shifter abilities. While universal law stated that shifters would not prey on selkies, the occasional renegade broke the law, damning a selkie to an abbreviated life. In almost all cases, unless a selkie had a binding emotional tie to a human, a selkie stranded on land against his or her will perished from heartbreak.

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