May: Daughters of the Sea #2 Read Online Free PDF

pain.
    She was haunted by the notion that one of the sailors had died tonight. And then there was the other man whose body was yet to be recovered. Where was he now? But more insistently another question haunted her: Why did she have this certainty that she could have saved both of them?
    She listened to the storm, which had lessened somewhat. Having lived so close to the sea all her life, she knew intimately the sounds of wind and water in all of its moods. She could hear tiny noisesthat other people never heard. It was as if she could tease them out from the fabric of churning water. If she listened carefully she could hear beyond the roar of the storm and identify the rustlings of water as it swirled deeper beneath the crashing waves, the fizzing sound of the long curling combers that ran in over Tuckmanet Shoals a half mile to the east, and offshore in the deepest parts of the ocean the crushing undulations building into watery mountain ranges. She fell asleep with this music like a symphony eddying through her head. She felt her body break loose as she crossed the border into sleep and began to dream—surging, wonderful dreams of swimming deep beneath the surface. She felt the magnificence of her own body, its power as she melted into the water, becoming one with the sea and flowing through a dazzling underwater tapestry illuminated by the refractions of moonlight. At other times, the water was dark and yet occasionally shot through with odd, unexpected colors—a banner of seaweed glinting with a burnished luster.
    Thick in the folds of sleep, she felt someone shaking her shoulder, bringing her up from the wonderfuldepths of her dreams and into her small square bedroom with its pale gray clapboard walls.
    “May! May!” a voice said. She could feel the breath near her ear. She gasped and awakened suddenly. Rudd’s face was close to hers. May pulled the bedclothes up to her chin.
    “Sorry to come right into your room, but I knocked pretty hard. You didn’t wake up. Anyhow, we done found him. He washed up a half hour ago.”
    She blinked again. It took her several seconds to comprehend what he was saying. May looked straight into his dark eyes. He had a scar above one eyebrow, and even now in winter his skin was a deep reddish bronze as if he never spent a day indoors. She had thought he was older. Apart from the crinkled lines that radiated out from the corners of his eyes, he looked perhaps twenty, but she knew he’d been fishing most likely all his life. This thought made her feel as if a chill wind brushed just beneath her skin.
    She had grown up among fishermen. Eight out of every ten men in Bar Harbor were fishermen, so why should this one disturb her? He was certainly very attractive in his weathered way. She looked awayfrom him quickly and got up from her bed. She had slept in her clothes.
    “I have to go up to the lantern room to trim the wicks and wind the clockworks and bring my father something to eat,” she said as she rushed toward the door.
    “You’re a busy lady.” She felt a tiny pulse throb in her temple and averted her gaze. She was not sure she liked the term
lady.
It seemed constricting.
Like a girdle!
she suddenly thought, and almost laughed out loud. But she was well past her fifteenth birthday and it was not rare for girls in the fishing towns along the coast to marry at her age. She went to the stove and saw that it had a good fire going in it, and a kettle was about to boil.
    Rudd was at her side. “I freshened it up.”
    “That was very kind of you,” she said softly. “Thank you.”
    “Would you look at me when you thank me?” he asked.
    She felt the blood rush to her face. She marveled that he was doing this—this courting, was it?—infront of Captain Haskell and a dead man. She turned her head slightly and suddenly realized that Captain Haskell was not there. Nor was the dead man on the cot. “Where are the others?” she asked.
    “Well, the three half-drowned ones are