by JoAnn Ross
If all terran homes were like this one, it explained why his mother had spent so much time in her greenhouse. Obviously flowers were more important to Earthlings—at least to the females—than the holodiscs had indicated.
A crystal dish shaped somewhat like the geometric Golden Spiral held dried petals that Sebastian easily recognized. Although the potpourri carried a different, spicier scent than that Mia Vardanyian made from her beloved moonflowers, the idea was the same.
Vowing to create flowers on at least one wall in his mother’s home as soon as he returned to Logosia, Sebastian stripped and, after emptying his bladder of all the tea she’d been right about him not remembering drinking, stepped into the shower, held out his arms—and waited.
Apparently, rather than sense his needs, words were required. “One hundred and ten degrees,” he instructed.
Nothing.
Realizing that he was dealing with extremely primitive plumbing, he turned the shiny metal knob. And was suddenly hit by a blast of frigid water. Having expected a sonic shower, he’d not been prepared for water. And certainly not water that felt as if it came from an Algorian glacier.
Belatedly he noticed the black letters etched into the knob. Reaching out, he turned toward the H, rewarded when the water began to warm. Experimenting, he twisted the knob even more, until the streaming flow was as blessedly hot as the sulphur geysers on Ontarian.
Glancing around, he found an alcove cut into the tile. In the alcove was a pink rectangle he suspected was a cleansing bar. He wet it, then rubbed it between his palms. The resultant fragrant froth reminded him of his rescuer.
Tilting back his head, Sebastian closed his eyes and reveled in the glorious feel of the hot water pelting his skin, sluicing over his shoulders, running down his legs. Ten minutes later, the small room was engulfed in a cloud of steam, and he’d never felt more relaxed in his life.
It crossed his mind that if there were such showers on Logosia, the pharmaceutical company that made Valdox would go out of business.
He stepped out of the ceramic cubicle and stood there on the fluffy white rug, legs and arms outstretched again, waiting. When he realized that no unseen light or warm breeze was going to dry him, that he was actually expected to do it himself, he looked around the room, saw the stack of flowered purple towels, took one, and began rubbing it against his skin to soak up the moisture.
After drying his body, he opened a metal cabinet and found the toothbrush she’d mentioned, wrapped in some sort of crackly transparent wrapping and thankfully labeled, or he wouldn’t have recognized its purpose.
The toothpaste, too, was labeled. As he spread the blue gel onto the bristles, then scrubbed them over his teeth, Sebastian wondered how the woman maintained such a dazzling smile using such primitive dental care.
That task out of the way, he brushed his wet hair into reasonable order, decided to pass on the treacherous-looking razor, and dressed in her brother’s clothing. Then, following an unfamiliar-but-alluring scent down the hallway, he found himself in a warm and cheery room.
The room was a virtual treasure trove of wood products. The walls were covered with warm, rich golden planks that gleamed like a sunrise over Galactia. Interspersed among the planks were dark knots. The floor was wood, as well, but a darker hue than the walls and roughly scraped. In the corner was the same sort of tree he’d been stumbling through last night, covered in twinkling white lights.
The cat he vaguely remembered was lying on a rug with a design that displayed three trees draped in the icy snow he’d been stumbling through last night, eyeing him with unblinking yellow eyes.
Walking over to the window—real glass, Sebastian realized, pressing his fingers against the panes momentarily—he saw Kirby Pendleton standing a few meters away from the house, at the edge of a stand of yet more coniferous trees that reached up toward the sky.
It was still snowing, although instead of blowing sideways in gusts, the hexagonal ice crystals were floating down from the slate sky like drifting feathers.
She was wearing that hooded coat again, a bright splash of scarlet against the white snow, gray sky, and dark green trees. Her mittened hands were scattering something over the ground.
He watched, intrigued as a flock of birds descended from hidden branches and began snapping up what he recognized to be a variety of seeds and bread crumbs. They were, as birds were throughout his own galaxy, unreasonably greedy.
They chattered loudly, pecking at one another, fighting over the brown and black seeds as if their lives depended on it. Which, Sebastian considered, gazing around at the glistening white world, was undoubtedly true. He had a feeling that the feathered gluttons were dependent on this woman for survival.
As was he.
He noticed with surprise that she was actually talking back to the flocking birds. Since none of his studies had shown that Earthlings possessed the ability to communicate with other species on their planet, he was forced to mark this down as yet another irrational aspect of human behavior.
He made a mental note to pass his observation on to Rosalyn, who had made quite an illustrious career for herself studying alien social behavior. His sister had risen like a comet through the stuffy ranks of the xenoanthropology department at the science institute, overcoming both her dual heritage and her gender.
Apparently finished both with the feeding and the conversation, Kirby headed back to the house, trudging through the knee-deep snow. When she saw him standing in front of the window, she stopped momentarily in her tracks.
Their eyes met through the clear pane of glass.
And the awareness that flashed through his mind staggered him.
For that single heart-stopping moment, Sebastian Blackthorne felt every bit as disoriented as he had last night while stumbling blindly around in that frozen white alien world.
7
Although it took an effort, Sebastian recovered quickly. By the time the door opened, he was feigning interest in the fire blazing in the large stone hearth. There had been a fire in his bedroom, too, he recalled.
Although such method of heating a room was distressingly primitive, not to mention being an almost sacrilegious waste of rare wood, he couldn’t deny that the fragrance of the burning log and the way the heat waves radiated against his outstretched hands were most pleasing.
“Well, you definitely look as if you’re going to live,” she greeted him as she entered the kitchen.
“I believe I am. Thank you for letting me use your shower. The hot water was very enjoyable.”
“I’ll bet it was, after yesterday.” She shrugged out of her thick red coat and hung it on a hook.
Her woven blue trousers were identical to the ones she’d given him. They fit her a great deal better than his, he decided, taking in the way they hugged her very feminine hips. She was wearing that same tunic, which, for some reason, had a growling animal he recognized from pictures of extinct Earth animals to be a bear. Beneath the dark blue material, her breasts were softly rounded. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers to resist the urge to touch them again.
“You said your sister runs an inn?”
“Yes, Emily. She’s the eldest and was working for the Boston Winfield Palace Hotel when she decided to come home and turn our old family house into a B and B. My other sister, who’s eleven months older than me, is Shelby. For some reason—my dad always blamed pregnancy brain fog—my mother seemed to get stuck on names ending with y when naming her children.
“My twin brother was going to be either Ridley or Bradley, but my father put his foot down and insisted on the right to name his only son, which was awfully lucky for Nate, don’t you think?”
What he thought was that her eyes were incredible. Looking into them was like looking into two shimmering pools from the tropical neighboring planet Roshinia. Pools he’d be more than willing to drown in.
“That’s my brother’s name,” Kirby continued cheerfully. “Nate. Well, technically, Nathaniel afte
r Nathanial Hawthorne, who’s supposedly a cousin of the Pendletons several times removed. My father, who was a big reader, loved his allegories. Especially ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ where Hawthorne points out how Puritanism deprived people of joy and encouraged the sin of pride by showing off their rigid idea of morality.
“Despite him having referred to women writers as a ‘damn scribbling mob,’ which really irritates me, I have to admit that Hawthorne’s work turned out to be timeless. His themes, especially in The Scarlet Letter, remain relevant today, over a hundred and fifty years later. How many authors can you say that about?”
Fortunately, her question appeared to be rhetorical, because Sebastian had no idea what she was talking about. He also didn’t want her to stop. Her voice reminded him of music. He could listen to it for hours.
Small talk was an alien thing to Logosians. They were far too reserved to engage in idle conversation. Also, due to a highly developed intellect and need for exactitude, they preferred choosing one singularly appropriate word when other species might use two or three less perfect ones. The terrans who visited his parents’ house had always been fairly talkative, as were the Freemasians, that alien group responsible for construction and repair on the planet.
And, of course, the gregarious shuttlecraft agents from Blarninian were infamous for being able to talk a blue streak when trying to convince you to purchase a shiny new model of transportation, even when your current one was quite sufficient. But even the most loquacious outlanders would have appeared taciturn when compared to Kirby Pendleton.
As her words came at him like pulsars, Sebastian tried his best to keep up, but even with the ecumenical translator decoder working at full speed, he couldn’t comprehend half of what she was talking about.
A slight grinding sound caught his attention. Sebastian glanced over at the wall where a small replica of a house hung. As he watched, a door opened, and a toy bird popped out of the house, chirped a few times in a ridiculously artificial voice, then disappeared behind the door again. Belatedly he realized that the foolish-looking little bird had counted off the hour. What a strange, illogical way to tell the time.
“What of your parents?” he asked after the door had closed behind the bird. “Are they living in their home that your sister turned into the inn?”
“No. My father died a few months ago.”
Although it was irrational, since he’d had no way of knowing, Sebastian could have kicked himself for having been responsible for the light fading from her remarkable eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“So am I.” She shrugged. “He was a wonderful man. Everyone loved him.”
“My father was most revered, also,” Sebastian heard himself saying.
“Oh? Is he—”
“He passed on as well,” Sebastian said. “Last year. I am just coming to grips with the idea that he’s gone.”
Death on Logosia was not a time for grief. It was, Sebastian had always been taught, merely the natural order of things. The old giving way to the new. However, when his father had ceased to exist during the last solar revolution, Sebastian had experienced a startling deep feeling of pain and an even stronger sense of loss that were distressingly, and distinctly, human.
“Grieving takes its own time,” Kirby agreed gently. “How is your mother taking it?”
“She doesn’t say very much, but I suspect that she is still grieving, because she has immersed herself in her work a great deal more than she did when Father was alive.”
“That’s the same thing my mother did. The day after the funeral she was off to Tahiti, where she’s currently painting natives like Gauguin. Some people might consider her taking off to the tropics to be self-centered, but it’s because she cared so much about Dad that she couldn’t bear to stay here without him.”
She shook her head slightly, as if to shake off painful memories. She walked over to a clear glass container and poured a dark liquid into a mug, causing fragrant steam to rise.
“Would you like some coffee?”
Having no idea what he was agreeing to, but anxious to please, Sebastian said, “Yes, thank you.”
He curled his fingers around the container she was holding out toward him, took a tentative sip, and found, to his surprised pleasure, that it tasted rather like the caffoid tablet he chewed each morning. But much, much better. And a decided improvement over the herbal teas his house droid prepared. Teas that tasted like chlorophyll.
“This is wonderful.”
Kirby rewarded him with a smile. “What a nice thing to say. Unfortunately, coffee is the apex of my culinary skills. Of course, even that took a lot of practice. In fact, on my first night working the graveyard shift at the Venice Police Department—oh, no!”
She slammed her cup down on the counter. “I forgot all about it,” she moaned.
Pulling on an oversized yellow mitt that looked like one of the gloves worn by members of the confederation fleet’s decontamination team, she opened the lid of a red container on the counter.
“Oh, damn. It’s ruined.”
He studied the blackened contents of the pot. “So it seems. May I ask what it was?”
“Grandmother Pendleton’s pot roast.” Kirby’s shoulders slumped. “It was supposed to cook for ten and a half hours at two hundred degrees.”
He studied the arcane dial he took to be a thermostat. “The temperature is set at two hundred degrees.”
“But I was supposed to turn it off last night. Nate was coming to dinner.”
“It was my fault,” he offered in an attempt to soothe the lines etching her brow. “You were distracted.”
“No, it’s not your fault.” She dragged her hand through hair that this time Sebastian mentally compared to the gleaming hue of the copper silicate ore mined on the planet Orionas. There were so many different colors it appeared almost to change hue depending on the light.
“I’m too much of a Yankee at heart to spend the money on a newer model with a programmable turn-down control. Not that it would matter all that much, because unlike my sister, who’s the Martha Stewart of Maine, I’m a lousy cook,” she muttered.
Although he had no idea who this Martha Stewart person might be, her obvious distress tugged at something elemental inside Sebastian. “But you make very good coffee. I believe you were telling me about when you first learned to make it so well,” he reminded her, irrationally wanting to make her smile again.
He was partially successful. Although her faint smile lacked the dazzle of her earlier grin, Sebastian found it no less appealing.
“You’re just trying to get my mind off my failure.”
“Yes,” he responded with absolute Logosian honesty. “I am.”
She looked at him curiously for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, getting back to my days in California, you have to understand that I really wanted to fit in, to become part of the squad.”
“Highly understandable,” he agreed. “Teamwork is often preferable to individual effort.”
She gave him another brief, inquisitive glance. “Yes. Well, anyway, I offered to make coffee for the men, which I realize would make most feminists, my sister Shelby and my mother included, hit the roof, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Her sister and mother sounded like Rosalyn, who was constantly lecturing about female rights. Although Sebastian could understand his sister’s frustration, and he could even admit that she was the one woman who was probably intellectually equal to a male, he could not, in good conscience, agree with her desire to abolish the rigid structure of what was a very efficiently run patriarchal society.
“One taste and the desk sergeant threatened to lock me up and throw away the key if I ever poisoned his police force again.”
“You poisoned the police?”
“Not really,” Kirby assured him. “I was only speaking figuratively. But I did decide right then and there not to put the sergeant to the test.
“So, I called
my sister Emily—”
“The Martha Stewart of Maine.”
“Exactly.” She nodded her bright head. “I got her recipe for coffee, and after working my way through nearly an entire can of beans, I finally got it right. Emily makes perfect coffee, but then, she always does everything perfectly,” Kirby said without rancor. “I also got this recipe for the pot roast from her. You can bet that Emily never turned a piece of chuck roast into charred shoe leather.”
Sebastian couldn’t understand her concern about the pot roast. It was obviously ruined. So why dwell on something she could not change?
This woman was quite possibly the most illogical being—other than the gossamer-winged flitterflies on Evian 4—he’d ever come across. But she was also vastly, unnervingly appealing.
“You were a clerk on this police force?”
From the way her soft curves molded the trousers and bear tunic, Sebastian had the feeling that she’d look pleasingly attractive in the thigh-high dark blue tunics worn by the Logosian police clerks.
“I was a cop,” Kirby corrected.
“A what?”
“A cop,” she repeated.
In his ear, the ecumenical translator told him the unfamiliar word was a colloquialism for a law enforcement officer.
“Actually,” Kirby said with discernible pride, “I’d made detective before I quit to move back here.”
“You were a police officer?” He didn’t even try to conceal his disbelief.
“Detective third class. And now I’m the police chief of Rum Runner Island, which truthfully isn’t that big a deal since the entire force consists of a part-time deputy, Danny Mayfair, and me.”
“A police chief,” he murmured, failing to understand what type of skewed logic could allow a female to work at such a dangerous post.
“That’s right.” Her eyes narrowed, and red warning flags that did not appear to be embarrassment, but annoyance, waved in her cheeks. “Do you have a problem with that?”
