Sealed With a Kiss (Harmony Glen #15)

Chapter 1

CORA

The lake sings to me, like always.

Its voice is low and secret, meant for a sirena alone.

A murmur threaded through the water at my fingertips, familiar as my own pulse.

I trail my hand along the surface as our last paddleboard tour glides toward shore, and the lake curls around my wrist the way it always does, cool and knowing.

Kumusta ka na, it seems to say. How have you been?

Better than expected, I tell it without words. Business is good. The dock is mostly in one piece. And it is officially, gloriously summer in Harmony Glen.

Behind me, Rex paddles with those smooth, powerful strokes of his. Utterly relentless, utterly efficient, his were-shark nature making a straightforward task look like a personal military campaign against the water. I don’t turn around. I smile.

He hates when I call him out on it.

“And that, folks, wraps up our sunset eco-tour of Harmony Glen!” I call, pitching my voice across the water. The sound carries the way it was made to. Sirena gift, one of the few I’ve learned to lean into rather than suppress. “Remember: what the lake gives, we protect. Leave nothing but ripples.”

Five tourists follow us toward the shore, flushed and blissed out, the way people always look at the end of a good tour.

They’d spent the afternoon learning about the watershed ecosystem, and only some of that was fiction.

The part about the aquatic plants, for instance, was completely accurate.

The part about what was living in them was, let’s say, creatively edited.

My board grazes the sandy bottom and I hop off in one smooth motion, feet sinking into the cool, silty shore. A woman behind me wobbles on her rental board, arms pinwheeling, and I reach back automatically to catch her hand.

“Oh!” She grabs me like I’m a life ring. “Thank you. I always do that at the very end.”

“It’s the anticipation,” I tell her. “Your brain thinks you’re already on land, so your body goes ahead and agrees.”

“That was simply magical,” she says, still gripping my hand, her eyes round with genuine feeling. “The way you told the history of the lake. I swear I could almost hear those old songs. In the water.”

She probably could. My voice sometimes carries more than words. I’ve learned to keep the sirena on a leash during tours. Enough to make the stories land, not enough to cause the kind of trouble that results in noise complaints or municipal investigations.

“That’s Harmony Glen for you,” I say, tapping my throat and smiling. “Stories come alive here.”

Rex appears at my shoulder, all six-foot-three of him, broad-shouldered and completely dry despite having just paddled across a lake. Absolute show-off. His dark hair doesn’t even have the decency to look damp.

“Don’t forget to leave us a review,” he says with an easy grin, just a suggestion of fang in it. “San Pedro Eco-Tours runs on word of mouth and Cora’s cooking.”

I elbow him. “Ignore him. We run on genuine respect for the natural world and my extensive knowledge of local lake folklore.”

“And lumpia,” Rex adds, entirely straight-faced, which earns him a second jab to the ribs.

The tourists laugh, looping bags over their shoulders and drifting toward the parking lot with waves and thank yous and the kind of loosened, easy quality that people get when they’ve spent a few hours outside. I watch them go. The smile on my face loosens into something more real, and I exhale.

Good tour. Good day. That’s most of them, this summer. I’m not going to jinx it by saying so out loud.

Rex and I drag the boards to the storage shed in easy companionable silence, the kind that only develops between people who have spent enough time around each other that words are optional.

We’ve been doing this for about a year now. Running tours, bickering, taking turns closing up the shed while the other one grabs something cold from the Snack Hut that we also own and operate.

It started as just me and my water taxi, a way to spend time on the lake that I love, until Dr. Margaid Davis mentioned her concerns about the declining chain pickerel population, and suddenly my hobby became something more—a way to protect and educate.

It settled into a rhythm so naturally that it’s hard to remember what the lake tours alone felt like.

Probably quieter, I think. Also significantly less fun.

“Another successful tour,” I say, bumping his hip as we haul the boards onto their racks. “And the water sprites were on their best behavior today. Ish.” I add with a little wave of my hand.

He snorts. “Salli is a little menace that has serious boundary issues.”

“All water sprites do.” I grab the life vests and start hanging them on their hooks. “It’s a cultural thing.”

Rex racks the paddles with a single efficient sweep of his arm.

The casual, unconscious show of strength that has given approximately half the Harmony Glen population a complicated feelings situation about their local dive guide.

“Says the woman who sang to a pickerel for five minutes until it swam into her hand.”

“I was being efficient.” I hang the last vest with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. “And I thanked it before I released it.”

He gives me the look. The one that means he sees straight through me, always has, and finds the whole business deeply charming. “That why you were out there for five minutes?”

I throw a towel at his face. “Respect is respect in any language, shark boy.”

We lock up the shed and walk toward the cabin I use as an office.

A cheerful little cedar-sided thing twenty meters from the waterline, with a porch that catches the evening light and a sign out front that reads SNACK HUT in letters I painted myself, slanting slightly to the left because I did it freehand and refused Rex’s ruler on principle.

There’s a dry-erase board in the window with tomorrow’s tour schedule, fully booked, and seeing it still gives me a small secret thrill.

A year ago I’d have considered one fully booked day a minor miracle. These days, all of July is solid.

Rex drops into the battered Adirondack chair outside the door with the easy authority of someone who has sat in it so often it has taken on the shape of him.

“Three tours today, full book tomorrow, perfect weather for the weekend moonlight paddle.” He tilts his head back against the wood. “We are absolutely killing it, Cor.”

I lean on the porch railing and let the last warmth of the day soak into my shoulders. The sun is dropping toward the tree line on the far side of the lake, turning the water gold and rose and the deep copper color that I have never seen anywhere else. Harmony Glen light.

My grandmother would have called it sinag ng kaluluwa. Light of the soul.

“Don’t jinx it,” I say. But I’m grinning.

“I don’t believe in jinxes.”

“We are surrounded by magic and living myths. How in the world can you possibly believe that?”

“Which is exactly how I know jinxes aren’t real.” He pauses. “I believe in the reality of krakens. Not the improbability of jinxes.”

“There are no krakens in Harmony Glen.”

“Yet.”

I shake my head, push off the railing, and disappear into the cabin. When I come back out I’m carrying two cold beers from the mini fridge, and I hand him one and sit beside him on the top porch step, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch.

“To summer,” I say, and clink my bottle to his.

“To summer.” He drinks, then gives me the side-eye. “And to you finally letting me update your website so people can actually book tours online instead of calling your answering machine, which is from the previous century.”

“It’s from 2003.”

“Which is the previous century.”

“The 2000s—”

“Previous. Century.” He says it the way someone reads a verdict.

I drink. “I like talking to people when they call. Hearing someone’s voice helps me figure out which tour is right for them.”

He opens his mouth, probably to point out that this is a completely insane business practice in the digital age.

Then he closes it again. After a year he has learned which hills are not worth dying on.

“Fine. At minimum, let me set up a card reader so you’re not taking cash and checks like a traveling carnival. ”

“I’ll think about it.”

I won’t. But the offer will come back around in August, as it always does, and we’ll have this same conversation again, and he’ll sigh, and I’ll deflect, and then I’ll quietly look into card readers at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night and not tell him. This is our system and it works.

“Speaking of which,” Rex says, “we really need to talk about hiring someone. July’s completely booked and August is filling up fast. We can’t run three tours a day with just the two of us.”

“We’ve managed fine so far.”

“We’ve managed because you’re a superhuman work machine and I don’t sleep.” He tilts his head back against the porch post. “But we’re leaving money on the table, Cor. People are asking about September tours. We could expand if we had another pair of hands.”

“I know.” I pick at my beer label. “I just...I don’t know. It’s been us for three years.”

“Which is exactly why we should hire someone. Before we burn out.” He gives me that look, the patient one that means he’s not going to push, but he’s also not going to let it go. “Just think about it. A year into these tours and we’re already maxing out. We need help to keep this sustainable.”

“I’ll think about it.”

I won’t. But he’ll bring it up again in a few weeks, and I’ll deflect, and he’ll sigh, and we’ll have this same conversation in August. This is our system and it works.

We sit in the quiet while the lake settles into its evening self.

Softer, darker, the day-sounds of motor boats and tourist chatter giving way to frogs and the occasional splash of something in the shallows that might be a fish and might be Phineas doing his rounds.

Lights are coming on across the water. Somewhere in town, someone is playing music.