Chapter Nineteen #3
Pax explained about the creatures born from the marriage of the sea-foam and the shoreline, whose language was wordless song that told of tides and storms to come.
Their voices were so startlingly beautiful that sailors had to traverse the seas with their ears stuffed full of cotton, lest they jump to their deaths in the freezing water in pursuit of them.
He cleared away their dinner plates and brought out a covered dish that had been sitting to the side of the hearth, keeping warm.
“Will you have coffee?” he asked.
When Josie said yes, Pax busied himself making the coffee and told the rest of the story.
“They are unpopular on many worlds because males often mistake their warnings for invitations,” he said.
Josie huffed softly. “This sounds familiar.”
He continued. “Their home world, however, is different. There are no landmasses on that world, only an ocean.”
Lifting the lid from the covered dish, Pax smiled at Josie’s delighted reaction, clapping her hands and rolling her eyes in anticipation.
“Cherry cobbler. Pax, you are amazing.”
The compliment fizzed through him like champagne and the sight of Josie licking her lips, chasing crumbs with the tip of her tongue after the first bite, heated the fizz into lust. Once again Pax was grateful he could take a seat, this time to hide his reaction to her pleasure.
“The sirens live on coral reefs jutting out from the surface of the water. Because of the different colors of sands and rocks, different parts of the ocean appear violet, blue, and green. One large swath of water rests above a coral mountain range and appears bright pink when their suns are on opposite sides of the sky.”
“Oh,” Josie said. “That sounds beautiful.”
“When Number Five stopped to take on the sirens, this was the first time I had ever seen an ocean.”
Pax paused.
Josie didn’t push. She took a last sip of her coffee, rose, and began clearing the dishes from the table.
“You don’t—”
Josie waved off Pax’s words and continued to clear.
“Words are hard,” he said. To her.
To himself.
Josie turned from the sink and wiped her hands on a dishcloth.
“They are,” she agreed.
The sirens hadn’t used words, not in the way other beings used them. Their songs would wrap around you at the solar plexus and pull you until you felt the ocean floor beneath your feet and the currents pushing your skin this way or that.
“The only words to describe that ocean are meaningless. ‘Awesome.’ ‘Overwhelming.’ ‘Majestic.’ ‘Terrifying.’ ”
None of these descriptors did justice to the intense beauty of the sirens’ world.
Josie walked back over to the table, picked up her half-full glass of wine from dinner, and took a sip.
“Number Five doesn’t use words,” she noted. “That’s a good thing. They can be slippery, meaning one thing if said in one tone of voice and the opposite if spoken in a different tone.”
He stood as well. Josie’s lips were slightly damp from the wine and her solemn gray eyes looked up at him from beneath her dark brown lashes.
“Would you like to see it?” he asked.
A wave of crimson bled across her face. “See it?” she asked, her voice breaking on the last word.
What did she think he meant?
He’d no idea, but Pax blushed, too.
“The sirens’ world,” he said quickly, his tongue heavy and thoughts skittering around his brain like pebbles shaking before an avalanche.
Why is it he could fight off a dozen rabid werewolves and barely raise his heart rate, but when it came to carrying on a conversation with this woman, he lost complete control over his bodily reactions?
“Oh.” Josie’s blush turned an even deeper red, bordering on purple.
The two of them were going to pass out from the blood rushing to their faces, and other parts, and it was purely out of self-preservation that Pax took her wineglass, set it on the table, and led Josie out of the kitchen and into his study.
“When they check in, we keep a record of each guest’s departure point,” he explained.
On one wall of his study hung a rectangular slab of he??Duri?·nlett, and opposite stood a well-worn couch.
Pax turned on the reading light at the end of the couch, pulled back a thick woolen blanket, and gestured for Josie to sit.
Once she did, he grabbed the remote and sat next to her—close enough to be almost touching—and messed with the buttons until he found the hotel guest ledger.
“Oh my goodness.”
Pax smiled at the awe in Josie’s voice as the scenes from the sirens’ world appeared on the he??Duri?·nlett screen. Having rewatched many times the breathtaking waves of pink, blue, and green smashing together to create iridescent foam, he could now turn his attention to watching her reactions.
As beautiful as the rainbow ocean might be, it was plain in comparison to the beauty of Josie’s face when full of wonder.
Maddy’s warnings had been in the back of his head all night but the sight in front of Pax drowned them out.
Number Five wanted Josie here, of that he was certain. He was doing his job by making the case for her and Amos to remain with them.
If Pax’s job meant he and Josie grew closer, who was he to fight it?