"My wife!" Nathan roared suddenly, and I jumped. The Sea Dog exploded with the sounds of hands clapping and thumping on tables. A warm feeling spread through me. I had a difficult time defining the sensation. It was like every person here was connected somehow through an invisible web. When the applause died down, Nathan leaned into the microphone. "One last thing, before we get the party started. I never had the pleasure of meeting Trina, Mira's mother. But I feel confident in believing that the woman who gave birth to Mir must have been one in a million. Let's have a minute of silence for our absent Mother of the Bride."
The Sea Dog fell quiet again, and the faces relaxed. My eyes skimmed over to my dad, whose face looked even paler than usual, and whose eyes were downcast. As though he felt my eyes on him, he looked up. The clashing of our gazes felt as loud as a thunderclap and a cold feeling slithered down my spine. He was not enduring this minute of silence with fond memories and affection. A moment before I heard Nathan thank the crowd and release them, Hal's mouth twisted with derision. People began to get up and move about, and the moment passed. I looked away before Hal did, my mind spinning.
Nathan pulled me into a hug. "Now we can relax, yeah?" I nodded against his shoulder and closed my eyes, melting into him and shoving the memory of my father's frown away.
35
"There's a father-daughter dance?" I hissed at Crystal, as the DJ announced the first song.
"You didn't know? How can you not know? Everyone knows!" she hissed back.
The crowd had spread out around the dance floor and the music had already started, a country song with a man's voice singing about giving his little girl's hand away in marriage.
I was trapped. I didn't want to do this and Crystal could see it all over my face.
"I'm sorry, Mir. Honestly, I thought you knew! You don't want to?"
I blew out a breath. "It's fine. It's only for a few minutes." Whatever was going on with my dad, I didn't feel prepared to deal with it, especially here and now.
Hal had stepped onto the floor and was waiting for me to join him. I crossed the dance floor, trying to fix my face into an expression of pleasure and hopefully managing neutral. I put my hand on his shoulder and rested my other in his palm. His hand was cold and calloused. There was no softness about him anymore. The first day I'd seen him, he'd at least been warm and had expressed a care for me. Now, he felt rigid and mistrustful. It had to be the memories, or the dreams, or whatever they were. After a half-minute of dancing stiffly and without speaking, I took a breath.
Hal got there first. "Are you a witch, too?" he said, low in my ear.
That's the conclusion he'd come to? "I'm not a witch," I said, just as low. My siren voice began to swell at the base of my throat, as it did whenever my identity was at risk. I swallowed it down.
"Your mother was." His hand clenched around mine. "She tricked me into loving her."
The room spun and blurred. Nausea crawled up my throat and my mouth began to water. Nathan's face whirred by, watching us closely. A few couples had now joined us and were moving gracefully around the floor.
"Did you trick that poor man into loving you, too? Are you just as manipulative as Trina?"
"I didn't trick Nathan into anything, Dad."
He said, "I should go and warn him right now. I should have stopped all of this before it happened."
We'd stopped dancing. We dropped our arms away from each other and faced off in the middle of the dance floor. My siren voice thrummed in my chest, humming like a generator. I was afraid to speak. Afraid of what might come out with all of these people around us, with Nathan nearby. I swallowed hard and whispered, "Get out."
A lone violin string had escaped along with my whisper and Hal's face softened. Immediately, he turned and walked through the crowd, knocking a glancing blow off one couple. He made a beeline for the exit and was gone, the sound of the door closing behind him was lost in the music. A few people watched him go, then gave me a curious look. But by that time, most of the guests were dancing or talking and not paying me any attention. Two more seconds of the bride standing in the middle of the dance floor without a partner was going to draw eyeballs.
Just as I turned to find him, Nathan appeared and swept me up in a dance. "What just happened, Mir?"
"Dad remembered he had somewhere to be," I said. "Trust me, its for the best." My siren voice had dissolved the moment my father had left. I swallowed, my mouth dry.
"He forgot his jacket," Nathan murmured against my hair. I could read his tone. He'd let it go for now, but he'd be sure to bring it up again later.
"So, tonight..." I said, pushing thoughts of Hal out of my mind and looking up at my husband.
"Tonight..." said Nathan waggling his eyebrows.
I laughed. "I can't believe you made us wait this long. I don't know if you deserve a medal or an appointment with a shrink. You know you were born in the wrong era, don't you?"
"Come on, I've already had to take too much ribbing from the guys."
"The guys know?" I looked around and caught the devilish grins of three different hockey players, watching us. "That explains their lewd expressions."
"They all think I'm nuts. They'd never marry someone without sleeping with her first. To be honest, I might agree with them under most circumstances."
"What?" I almost yelled. "Why did you torture me for eight months then?"
"Come on, Mir," he pulled me closer. "It's us. I didn't need to sleep with you to know you were the one."
"I don't know if I'm flattered or offended."
His chuckle vibrated against my chest. "You agreed to wait because I asked. That means the world to me, Mir."
"Fine, Reverend MacAuley," I said, and then paused. "I'm never going to call you that again."
"Thank you. That was weird."
"But tonight, all bets are off."
He nipped my ear and kissed my jaw. "Oh, I'm bringing my A game. Don't you worry."
My stomach dipped and fluttered. "How long before it's not inappropriate to bolt?"
A black limousine picked us up at midnight with instructions to take us to The Auburn, a luxury hotel at the heart of Saltford. Our luggage for the sailing trip had already been delivered to our suite, and the same limousine driver was to take us to the airport the next morning.
We almost ran through the lobby, hand in hand, and into the elevator. Nathan fell against me when the elevator doors closed, nuzzling my ear. I yanked on his bowtie and undid his top button. He pulled one of the daisy pins from my hair and my up-do began to collapse. The elevator stopped at the sixth floor and we separated and stood demurely apart.
A cleaning lady got on the elevator, eyeing my falling down hair and Nathan's undone bowtie. Her mouth quirked. "Congratulations," she murmured.
"Thanks," Nathan's face split in an enormous goofy grin. We stood there, vibrating beside one another, until the elevator stopped again and she got out.
She threw a last look over her shoulder and said, "Try not to break anything."
I was almost dancing in place while Nathan fumbled with the key and got the door open. He scooped me off my feet and pushed through the door backwards into the room. I tucked my feet in not to hit the doorjamb. The door slammed behind us and the room fell dim, lit only by a single table lamp on the other side of the bed. Nathan dropped my legs and pressed my back against the entryway wall. I was a virgin, but I was a siren first, and that meant no shyness or embarrassment. The desire to have him shoved out all other emotion. My skin began to tingle, emitting my siren musk. I swept my hands up under Nathan's jacket and pushed it off his shoulders. It dropped to the floor.
"Wait," I said, startled by my own thought. "So, you've never done this before either?"
"Why you wanna talk about that now?" He nuzzled my neck.
"Isn't it rare? A guy your age being a virgin?"
"I'm no virgin, Mir." He lifted me and I yanked up my dress and wrapped my legs around his waist, my fingers raking through his hair.
"Then why'd you make us wait?"
"Cuz, like I said. It's you." Nathan staggered into the suite with me wrapped around him. He stood at the edge of the bed. "I wanted the anticipation to build. Going too fast is over-rated."
"But..."
"Mira," he stopped my words with kisses. "Shush," he murmured. His voice sounded far away and hazy. He unzipped the back of my dress and slid his hand against my back. I let out a sigh of pleasure and shivered as he pulled the straps of my dress down, the cool air swept over my naked torso. Thoughts fluttered away from me like doves. He'd get no more protest from me. I couldn't remember what I was going to say anyway.
We collapsed backwards onto the bed. Nathan braced himself on his hands and looked down at me, his eyes devouring my skin. In the dim light, his eyes looked liquid and black, his face soft with desire. "You're glowy," he said. The words came out slowly. He trailed his fingertips down my chest.
I looked down at my torso. The moonlight pouring in through the nearby window fell across the bed and across me. I wasn't glowing, but my skin had taken on a pearly quality. It definitely didn't look normal. Human skin didn't do that and I'd never done this before, so I didn't know it was going to do that, either.
"So beautiful," he whispered. He didn't seem to think there was anything abnormal about it. The excuse that sprang to my lips, that Crystal had given me some moisturizer with glitter in it, melted away.
He buried his nose in my hair. "You smell so good. I've never met anyone who smells as good as you."
My fingers went to Nathan's shirt buttons. When he finally threw off his dress shirt and I saw more of his skin than I'd ever seen before, my mind went completely blank and the siren in me took over. My legs clamped around him and rolled him over onto his back. I pulled my dress up over my head and tossed it away. I said the only word in my mind at that moment. "Baby," and bent to kiss him.
He could have taken it as a pet name. But he didn't.
"Your wish is my command," he said against my lips.
36
The next morning, Nathan and I loaded ourselves into the limousine. I felt fresh as a daisy but Nathan was bleary-eyed and couldn't stop yawning. Crystal had left our tickets in an envelope stuck to the back of the drivers seat and Nathan opened them to look at where we were headed.
"San Jose!" Nathan said.
"We're going to California?" I asked, peering over at the ticket and itinerary.
"Nope. Not California. San Jose, Costa Rica. We'll be catching a bus from there and taken to Playa Hermosa where we'll disembark. Exciting." His face split in a massive yawn. "Wake me up when we get there."
I laughed. "I've never been on a plane before."
"No?" Nathan put his arm around me and I cuddled against his side as the limo snaked through the city center towards the freeway exit. "You'll like it. It's fun."
I couldn't stop bouncing in my seat as the plane wheeled down the runway. Nathan and I watched out the window as the earth fell away beneath us. Around the same time Nathan started snoring, I began to feel very very wrong. My body felt inexplicably heavy and nausea clenched at my stomach. My neck and spine creaked under a steadily growing force trying to pull me down through the plane. I looked over at Nathan from under lead eyelids, my head wobbled and my neck crackled. His head was tilted to the side and his mouth hung open. I gripped the arms of the seat, let my head rest on Nathan's shoulder and closed my eyes. Merciful blackness finally took me and I didn't wake up until the plane jarred as the wheels touched down.
"Are we in Costa Rica?" I asked, without opening my eyes.
Nathan chuckled and touched my cheekbone. "No, we're in Houston. We have to change planes."
I covered my mouth to stifle a cry of dismay.
We had a five hour layover, which I slept through while Nathan read a Tom Clancy novel. By the time we boarded the next plane I was feeling almost normal again.
As the next plane took off, I paid attention to the changes in my body. For the first thirty seconds or so, I felt fine. Then the pressure began to build and didn't cease to increase until the plane leveled off. By that point I weighed approximately three tons and heavy invisible chains draped over every joint. I rolled my head slowly across the head rest to look at Nathan. He was wearing headphones and watching an action movie. Looking at the screen made my stomach roll. I stopped fighting the weight of my eyelids and let them close. A heavy black swallowed me up, crushed and enfolded me in its embrace.
37
"Do you notice anything funny about our shipmates?" Nathan whispered in my ear as we stood in line at the harbor near Playa Hermosa, preparing to board the ship. We were crammed into a small holding pen along with all the other guests. Surrounded by whitewashed walls, we couldn't see the night sky, the ship, nothing. I had no idea what to expect next.
I looked at those in the line ahead of us and behind us. "They all have grey hair?"
"What did Crystal sign us up for? A retirement cruise?"
I let out a laugh and clamped a hand over my mouth. Nathan giggled the way he did only when he found something funny but needed to hide it.
The line moved slowly because most of the people in it had long lost their ability to move at a snappy pace. There were a handful of younger couples. Nathan shared a knowing smile with a tall slender young man in spectacles. He had a long arm wrapped around a petite girl with red hair done up in pin curls. She looked like an actress from the thirties. She peered back over the tufts of grey hair and hats and smiled at me. Her lips had a dark brown gloss on them.
We surrendered our passports in exchange for cabin keys, were given a welcome packet and led through a door and onto the dock. There, the ship sat, waiting for us.
"Oh, Nathan," I breathed. The Red Star and her four masts had been dressed with white fairy lights. Against the night sky and with the sea stretching out in front of her, she was something out of an artists dream. Classical piano music played by invisible fingers poured over the deck and spilled across the harbor, welcoming us. Two sailors in full uniform stood at the bottom of the gangplank. Two more stood on deck at the top, helping guests to board.
"Makes the Sea Dog look like a dinghy," Nathan said. "Don't tell Phil I said that."
"You built it."
"Yeah, but I didn't know what I was doing. I built a restaurant that looks like a ship. This is a ship with a restaurant on board."
"Two restaurants," I said, scanning the pamphlet. "And two swimming pools, a baby grand piano, three bars, a gym..."
"A denture clinic," a voice added. The tall slender man had his hand cupped around his mouth to add to our conversation. He started giggling, and so did the red-headed woman with him. Nathan snorted.
"Welcome aboard," said a young man in a sailor's cap as he took my elbow and led me up the gangplank. "Your luggage is waiting for you in your cabin. Orientation happens tomorrow at nine on the main deck. The ship disembarks in one hour's time."
We made our way through the ship to our suite. Our room was furnished in teak and rich navy upholstery with a golden knot pattern. Our luggage had been set on the bed. We dropped our jackets and carry-on's and made our way to the bow to watch as The Red Star set out for the open ocean.
Nathan stood with an arm on the railing on either side of me as I stared down at the dark water. My skin thrilled to the presence of salt in the air. The bowsprit jutted out sharply in front of the ship and heavy netting ran from the bowsprit to the forecastle railings, making a sturdy web over the water.
"Do you think we can go out on the net?" I asked Nathan.
"You can," answered a voice with a thick accent.
We turned to see a deeply tanned man in a white a navy uniform unfurling a rope from a post. "Wait until we're away from shore, and then you can crawl out and lay on it. Second best place on the ship," he said. He sounded Italian.
"Where's the best?" Nathan asked.
The sailor winked. "Now that's a closely guarded secret. You might winkle it out of one
of the crew in exchange for a drink. Frederik is especially fond of vodka. There's a free tip for ya." He turned away and hollered an instruction to another sailor high up on one of the masts.
"There's a challenge," Nathan said, looking at the half dozen sailors milling about the foredeck. "Which one of these pirates is Frederik?"
"I smell diesel." I sniffed.
"Yeah, they do have an engine. I imagine they'll use it to get us out to sea before shutting it off and resorting to wind."
When the ship began to move forward, I had a surge of happiness so intense that I had to close my eyes for a moment. Nathan was here with me, and we had two weeks of doing nothing but loving each other and enjoying the beauty of the ocean ahead of us. With all of the craziness leading up to the wedding, I hadn't time to go out to Devil's Eye Cove. As land became nothing but a line in the distance, and eventually disappeared altogether, I knew I wasn't going to be able to resist going for my own little treasure hunt, here off the coast of Costa Rica. The trick would be in finding the right time to escape unnoticed.
38
"You can register for snorkeling gear or book a sea kayak, just see this goofy guy here," a wide dark fellow with a Spanish accent slapped a blond crewmate on the back. "This is Frederik. Myself, you can call me Valdez, and he, Ian," he pointed to a towering man with skin as black as coal. "We make up your sports crew, come and see us for any activity your little heart desires and we'll get you set up."
All of the guests were standing on the main deck for orientation. We'd been taken through the safety instructions already and had moved on to the sailing itinerary and activities timetable.
"For those of you who want something a little more exciting than snorkeling or kayaking, there is an opportunity to scuba dive on a beautiful little Spanish wreck in the middle of next week."
Already, most of the grey-haired heads were shaking their heads 'no'.
Sirens and Scales Page 99
