“Ermengilda?” Mitch asked.
“Yeah,” Davey laughed. Then he sobered. “But don’t kid Mom about it.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She likes it.”
Mitch’s brown eyes lightened to amber. His mouth quirked at the corners when he looked at her.
She was beginning to wish she were anywhere but here. “I haven’t thought much about her lately,” she said weakly.
Davey’s big blue eyes turned downcast. “Aw, Mom, couldn’t you try, just a little?” he wheedled.
She glanced at Mitch, who seemed to be enjoying her discomfort. For a moment, she thought about how good that harsh face looked, lit with the seeds of laughter.
She owed him this, at the very least, for all he’d done for them. Mitch had had little laughter in his life, she was almost certain.
So she swallowed hard and tried to ignore the steady glow of those dark eyes as she searched for the thread of her story.
“So where were we?” she asked Davey.
He climbed up on her lap, a smug smile on his face. “Ermie was laughing when that dumb boy was tickling her.”
She poked him gently in the ribs. “Princess Ermengilda, young man. And the Prince isn’t dumb.”
“But he has blue eyes, right? Just like mine?”
She smiled. “Just like yours.”
“And we get to have a sword fight?”
Perrie heard Mitch’s chuckle and glanced up to see him shaking his head. “What is it about boys and fighting?” she asked.
His face sobered. “Men protect. That’s part of who we are, since time began.” A darkness crossed his face, a stab of pain that made her want to soothe, to seek out his sorrow.
Had he failed to protect someone? Was that the sadness that filled him?
“Mom?” Davey wiggled in her lap. “So what’s next?”
Perrie jerked her gaze away from the man who was such an enigma. Drawing a deep breath, she grasped for the threads of the story.
“When we left them, Ermengilda was laughing so hard she couldn’t swim away. The Prince of the Pretty People was tickling her belly, and she felt all her bones turn to jelly. The next thing she knew, she was way up in the air, gasping for breath—
“Prince of the Pretty People—ack.” Davey turned to Mitch and rolled his eyes. “Men can’t be pretty, can they, Mitch?”
“It was never a goal of mine.”
He wasn’t pretty, no. But he had a hard, dark beauty of his own. Compelling…haunting…his face was one she would never forget.
“Then what, Mom?” Davey asked.
Mitch turned back to his whittling, and Perrie grasped at scattered thoughts.
“The Prince was looking at her very closely. Ermengilda was a little nervous at first, but she was sure he didn’t mean to harm her. So she spoke to him first.”
“Fish can talk, too?”
“In my story, they can.”
Davey shrugged and settled against her chest. “So what did she say?”
“She said, ‘If you’ll tell me you love me, I’ll become a beautiful princess and we can marry.’”
“What did the Prince do?”
“He laughed and almost dropped her.” Perrie wasn’t sure which rewarded her most, Davey’s broad smile…or Mitch’s soft chuckle.
She went on. “When she recovered her wits, she looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’”
“‘You’re just a fish,’ he said. ‘Besides, I don’t want to marry anyone.’
“‘But you have to,’ she cried out. ‘Otherwise, I can’t become The True Princess.’
“‘What’s a true princess?’
“‘The True Princess. The one who inherits the kingdom and tells everyone what to do and everyone lives happily ever after.’
“The Prince snorted. ‘I wouldn’t live happily, if you were telling me what to do all the time.’”
Davey giggled. Mitch’s mouth curved at the corners. Perrie wanted to be clever and witty and keep them both smiling, but she had no idea where this story was going.
“But just then, Ermengilda couldn’t say any more. She couldn’t breathe except in gasps.
“‘What’s wrong?’ the Prince asked.
“‘Can’t—’ She tried her hardest to speak. When nothing else would come out, she tried to flap her gills on his palm in Morse code so he’d understand that she needed to get back into the water.”
“What’s Morse code?” Davey asked.
Mitch grinned as though he was very familiar with Davey’s penchant for questions.
Perrie wished he would face her, so she could see those dark, haunted eyes lighten. She stirred herself to answer. “It’s a system of long and short taps that translate into letters.”