SeaChange Read Online Free PDF

the
counter tucked under her arm. She’d also put the T-shirt back on over her
swimsuit, thank goodness.
    “Thanks.” He nodded toward the mate’s chair beside him. She
sat, but he noticed she took great care not to touch him at all as she moved
past. Oh, goody, she was feeling awkward too. He took a cookie, gestured for
her to do the same. She did, nibbling it gently, making him jealous of the damn
thing. So he turned away.
    “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” She gestured at the sunrise, under
which the San Diego skyline was starting to take shape.
    He shrugged. “I guess. You should have seen it before the
high-rises went up. It was even prettier then.”
    She smiled. “Since some of those high-rises are more than
twenty years old, I guess that means you grew up here.”
    Shit. Stuck his foot in it that time. He brazened out the lie.
“Mostly.”
    “I’m from Minnesota,” she replied with a wry grin. “And even
though I spent summers on the Lake Superior shoreline, I still can’t get over
the sheer vastness of the ocean.”
    “Minnesota?” He didn’t know why that amused him. She’d look
cute in a furry parka that covered everything but her nose. “So what brought
you out here?”
    “Dolphins,” she replied. “I got my bachelor’s degree in
zoology at Northwestern. That’s where I met Brad. I was a scholarship student
from the Great White North, and he was a trust-fund baby from Glenview,
Illinois.” She must have seen the query in his eyes. “Chicago’s version of La
Jolla,” she explained. “Lots of old, old money.”
    “Anyway, we both came out here for grad school, hot to be
the next Jacques Cousteau. Of course, once we got out here, we discovered that
roughly half the students at the university were Midwestern kids with the same
idea. There was no way we could have all studied marine mammals. I studied
lizard behavior for my dissertation. Brad did his on bird migrations.”
    “Why not? It’s a big ocean.”
    She smiled wryly. “Because in order to do graduate work on
something, you have to have a professor willing to sponsor you, and funding to
do the research. Both of those are severely limiting factors.”
    Jake hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense. “So
then what?”
    “Well, shortly after we both got our degrees, Brad’s
grandfather died and Brad came into a chunk of the family money. He swung a
deal with the university for us to do our post-doctoral research at the Weston
Institute, with him funding the project. So for the last year we’ve been
camping up and down the Pacific coastline, documenting the movements and
behaviors of the white-sided dolphins.”
    “Sounds like interesting work.”
    “It is. They’re such incredible animals, smart and social,
and funny.” She practically glowed with enthusiasm, her grief momentarily
forgotten as she talked about her work. “I’ve always believed that they
understand much, much more than people give them credit for.”
    She was right about that, he mused. White-sided dolphins
were the species linked with his people and he’d spent lots of time swimming
with them when he was younger.
    They stared at the shoreline for several minutes in awkward
silence, sipping coffee and eating the cookies until they’d finished the pack. “So,”
she finally said, her voice a little hesitant. “Now you know my entire life
history. Okay if I ask you a little bit about yours?”
    “Go ahead.” His cover story would withstand any questions
she threw at him, and he supposed she was within her rights to ask about the
man she’d just kissed.
    “What is it you do for a living, Jake Delos?”
    “Ever heard of Travis McGee?”
    She shook her head, her silky hair tumbling around her
shoulders and making him want to bury his face in it again. “No. Is he your
boss?”
    Jake laughed. Goddess, she was so damn young. “He’s a
fictional character, written by an author named John MacDonald from the sixties
through the eighties. McGee is an