The disembodied voice of Pippa’s long-lost mother rising from the backseat was disconcerting enough without adding the experience of riding in a luxurious car sailing down the highway, past shadowy boulders and a barren nightscape, speaking of drug dealers and weird gifts. It was too surreal. Like a dream from which she couldn’t wake.
“Your name isn’t really Jean?” Pippa asked, straining for a memory—and normalcy.
“Like you, I have a lot of names. Your father called me Gloria. Gloria Jean Wainwright Malcolm. We met at a family reunion and were distantly related, but he was all logic and science.”
Her father. She’d had a real father.
“Don’t think about it, Pippa,” Oz suggested. “You’ve had too much for one night. We’ll be in El Padre shortly. Sleep on it.”
“But what about Donal?” She found the yellow brick road again, found her footing. The bears might still be out there in the night, but they hadn’t caught her yet. Oz was at the end of the road. She muffled a laugh at the fantasy conjured by his name. She ought to write a book.
“I can’t tell you where Donal is,” Jean—Gloria—said sadly. “Four years ago, I heard the seal song. That’s the reason the Librarian thinks we can help. That’s why I’ve come out of hiding. The seal song is what my grandmother called a siren song. And it’s designed to call children.”
Silence fell inside the car as they digested this unreal and explosive new suggestion.
***
“No arguing,” Oz told Pippa after he’d settled Gloria Jean into his room at the B&B. The older woman had been too exhausted for them to torture her with more questions. He steered the Mercedes toward the day care. “I’m not leaving you alone tonight, and I’m not asking any more of you than a pillow for my head.”
It was costing him to say that. He wanted to drag her to a microphone and set her loose with that damned song in front of an audience of every child in the country to see what happened.
But the steel-spined Pippa he’d come to know looked so broken. He’d have to be more of a heel than he already was to push her more. He didn’t know what in hell had happened back there, but he’d been terrified he’d almost lost her.
And it mattered. Losing her mattered big time. Oz didn’t want anyone or anything to matter again, but Pippa had somehow grabbed him by the throat. She was this beautiful gossamer work of art that currently occupied his sky, fascinating him, and he didn’t want her dashed to the ground.
So he was taking this one cautious step at a time, keeping an eye on the prevailing wind until he had her safely reeled back.
“Do you think this is all some elaborate hoax?” she whispered.
“Could be. Doubt it, though. Did you have some kind of flashback when she started singing?” His heartbeat still hadn’t settled down after that terrifying moment when she’d begun keening and shaking. She’d done that once before, when he’d first called her Syrene. This time, she hadn’t come up fighting. And that’s what had terrified him.
He could scarcely see the pale patch of her nape above the hoodie as she stared at her hands in her lap. He could almost feel her pain. He grimaced at recalling Gloria’s pointed message about empathy. The woman had to be a witch. Even he’d never consciously realized he could sense the emotions of others. It might explain a lot, if he thought about it. But Pippa came first.
“I saw the car exploding.”
She spoke so softly he barely heard her, but the words were enough to send his mind reeling. “You saw it? How old could you have been? Three?”
“I guess. I don’t know my real birthday. But I remember. I remembered the song, the way she changed the words, and it was like unlocking a box where I’d stored all the memories, the good ones and bad ones both, because I couldn’t handle the bad ones, the smoke, the flames, the horrible…” She shuddered. “The screams. I don’t know how anyone could have survived.”
“You can’t remember accurately after all these years. Gloria said you were rear-ended. There might have been time for everyone to escape before the gas tank burst. Cars usually don’t explode like they do in movies. We’ll have to ask her in the morning.”
“She’s real, isn’t she? I’m not imagining this? I do that sometimes when I’m writing.”
“You imagine talking turtles when you write?” he asked in amusement, parking the car near the walk down to her house. “Do you need to go to your studio, or are you wound down enough for bed?”
Her head snapped up, and her luminous eyes nearly glowed in the dark. “I’m okay,” she said in wonder. “I think I’m okay. You have no idea how long it’s been… Let’s go to bed.”
Exactly what he wanted.
Exactly what he shouldn’t do—get mixed up with another whacked-out woman who thought villains were after her.
Chapter 23
Fighting his doubts, Oz unzipped his jacket as he followed Pippa inside her bungalow. He dropped it over the cushions of her flowery orange couch, decided the black looked out of place against the feminine colors, and looked for a place to hang it.
Pippa sailed toward the bedroom, disregarding his discomfort. Women generally hung around him, taking his coat, offering him drinks, looking after him. Pippa—Siren?—just assumed he could take care of himself. She was right, but the experience was a little disconcerting, especially after the evening’s pyrotechnics.
Finding a tiny closet off the hall, he hung up the jacket and then used the guest facilities, giving Pippa time to herself. Finding her mother in the desert had to be difficult emotionally. He already knew she had problems dealing with emotion. If her memory of that night really had come back, the trauma had to be overwhelming.
He probably shouldn’t be here, but the instinct—or empathy—he relied on to build his business said she shouldn’t be left alone.
His crass logic wondered if Gloria Jean counted as his finding Pippa’s family so she had to do the show. More than ever, he was realizing he needed Pippa, not some substitute, if he meant to find Donal.
Receiving no signals one way or another from his hostess, Oz wandered back to her bedroom and heard the shower running. Which immediately conjured images of Pippa, naked, that steered his course of action. They both needed a good dose of reality, and there was nothing more real than sex. He flung off his shirt and began unfastening his jeans. Entering the steamy bathroom and seeing her slender back through the clear glass shower brought his prick straight to attention.
She didn’t look up as he entered the bathroom. The thickness of her silence warned she’d retreated to that cave she’d been hiding in for years. He had a few ideas on how to drag her out again.
Dropping the rest of his clothes on her tile floor, he joined her in the spacious shower with its double showerheads. She kept her back to him. He helped himself to the Irish Spring, grateful she didn’t use one of those perfumed soaps that would leave him smelling like a bordello.
Oz sudsed his hands, reached around her, and began bathing her breasts. She jerked in startlement. Before she had time to fight, he pressed his arousal against her buttocks while soaping the pert nipples begging for notice.
“Yesterday, I let you take charge,” he murmured, rubbing the soap lower. “Tonight is mine.”
“No, I can’t. We can’t.” She whipped her head back and forth, wriggling in his embrace.
“Tell me that again later. Right now, your brain is so full of boogeymen that you won’t sleep anyway. Let’s just relax and see where this goes.” He dipped his hand between her legs, and she groaned, threw back her head, and opened for him.
***
Pippa cried out in frustration after Oz teased and aroused her into acceptance and then stopped his lavish attentions to turn off the water. She pounded his back when he played Neanderthal and hauled her into his arms to carry her from the steamy shower fantasy.
“What are you doing? Put me down, you lumphead.” She grabbed at a towel as they passed by the bar.
“Pardon me for thinking of your comfort, but a tile wall does not constitute a soft mattress.” He strode the few yards to her bed and dropped her on it.
She’d only lit a small bed lamp earlier, but it was enough to highlight the powerful planes of Oz’s torso and thighs as he remained standing, gazing down at her with smug male satisfaction.
She wanted sex, not admiration. She scrambled up, intent on stripping the quilt back to the sheets. Oz reached for a bottle of expensive moisturizer she kept beside the bed.
Eyes widening, she pushed the cover off with her feet and retreated against the pillows propped on the wall. “That’s for my face,” she warned.
His grin was wicked and sexy beyond measure as he poured the cream into his palm. “So I’ll rub your cheeks. Turn over.”
“No! I hate massages.” She didn’t know why she was being so obstinate except she hated taking orders and not being in charge. Which was his point, apparently.
His erection could compete with a stallion’s. What did the damned man think he was doing by slowing down what could have been a great slam-bang moment? “I don’t like people touching me,” she warned.
“Tough.” He wrapped a big arm around her waist and flipped her over before she could believe he would dare. Kneeling over her thighs, he prevented her from rolling off the other side. “My turn, remember? I get to call the shots.”
He pressed the heels of his hands into her shoulder blades, pinning her to the bed. She could throw him. She knew how. But he began spreading the warm lotion over her back, kneading knotted muscles, and she couldn’t summon the energy to continue their power struggle.
“No going to sleep on me,” he warned, rubbing circles at her lower back, then slipping lower. “We’re just getting started here.”
Pippa buried a moan in her pillow as he stroked and teased her buttocks with deft hands. She was damned ready to fall apart, and he hadn’t done anything except touch her. She’d never been this easy.
When he began massaging her thighs without touching where she ached, she bit the pillow in growing frustration.
“You’re too quiet,” he chided. “You don’t have to be quiet for me. Scream, if you like. It’s music to my ears.”
“You bastard—” She flipped over so fast, she nearly tossed him off.
He recovered his balance rapidly, shoving his knee between her legs and holding her shoulders down while he leaned over and covered her mouth with his.
She grabbed his surfer’s locks, swearing she would pull them out. Instead, she merely gripped his hair and let his tongue possess her mouth so thoroughly she couldn’t have screamed if she’d wanted.
She arched into him, demanding satisfaction, but he took his time. The delicate rose fragrance of the lotion wafted around them as he stroked her face and buried his hands in her hair. She could taste the coffee on his breath and feel the stubble scraping her face, and still she struggled for more.
She needed his touch, this reality. She needed whiskers and coffee and lumpy knees and creased sheets and the musky scent of sex. The play of powerful biceps when she grabbed them. The surge of male arousal between her legs.
She sang out her need when he turned his greedy mouth to her breasts. She pleaded and gasped and writhed and came alive. The cotton batting she’d wrapped herself in fell away. Oz was real. Solid. He didn’t live only in her head. He wouldn’t dissipate with the dawn.
He flipped her to her stomach again, raised her on her knees, and shoved so deep inside that she felt him rub her belly from the inside out.
And she shattered. With a wild cry, she came apart in one stroke. She shook and sobbed as he moved inside her, teasing her with his fingers, driving her higher, until she keened with desire and followed him to the stars again.
He came then, driving deep and bellowing his release as her muscles gripped him with her climax.
Before she passed out, he rolled them to their sides and spooned her securely in the curve of his big body. She didn’t need the cushioning of fantasy with male muscle securely wrapped around her.
***
They made love again at dawn, with the birds singing their mating songs outside the window. Made love, tender love without the power struggle of sex, just two human bodies coming together naturally for comfort and pleasure.
Pippa feared she could become too used to that. She was a grown-up now. She knew desire did not equal love, that need was no foundation for a permanent relationship. But she had been denied human touch for so long that she craved it with the desperation of the starving. And Oz was apparently the only man in the world who could withstand her Voice.
He protested when she rolled from the bed later. His bronze shoulders and big body took more than his fair share of her double bed. His feet hung off the end. His hair stuck up in a cowlick in back, and she grinned. Perfection had flaws.
She locked the bathroom door behind her, removing the opportunity for any more seduction. She needed a clear head to face the day.
She showered again, donned her robe, and left him to stagger out of bed while she squeezed fresh oranges in the kitchen.
The day was going to be a warm one. She wandered out to the pool, sipping juice and soaking up the sunshine. She wondered what her mother was doing.
Her mother. She played with the word, mashing it around in her mind. Pippa’s foster mother had encouraged Pippa to call her “Mother” when she’d gone home with them as a toddler, but she never had. She hadn’t been a very loving child. She didn’t think that would change now that a stranger had walked into her life claiming birthrights.
But things had changed. She knew someone with eyes like her own now. She was officially no longer weird. She let her mind wrap around that, absorb it, and let it settle comfortably. She wasn’t a space alien. Other people had turquoise eyes. Her family.
Oz trailed out wearing half-buttoned jeans and no shirt, chugging the juice she’d left for him. If he thought their half-dressed states meant more sex, he was about to be disappointed—even if he did look like a wanton sun god with his burnished bronze torso and gold-streaked hair. She couldn’t afford too strong an attachment.
“Singing the seal song will not return Donal,” she told him, shattering any harmony that might exist between them.
“Good morning to you, too. Do I push you into the pool now?”
She couldn’t stop her lips from quirking upward. “Nothing fazes you, does it?”
He gave that some thought. “All things are relative. I don’t think fazes is a good word to describe my usual response to obstacles, so no, things don’t faze me.”
A man who not only looked good at dawn and gave good sex but could talk intelligently too. Pippa wondered if there were any more like him out there and where they’d been all her life.
“Have you called Conan yet?” she asked neutrally.
“Nah. He’s got to sleep sometime, unlike us, apparently. He’ll let us know if he finds anything. Breakfast at the café?”
His ego didn’t seem deflated just because she was giving him the cold shoulder. That was good. They could maintain a safe distance.
“I can fix whole wheat waffles and strawberry compote. No bacon though. Greasy eggs or healthy food?”
“Whipped cream?” he asked hopefully.
She arched an eyebrow, turned on her heel, and returned to the kitchen. She wanted waffles. He could do what he liked.
***
Oz figured he could endure crunchy bread and syrupy fruit if it meant enjoying sunshine and Pippa’s hidden smiles.
She was a real piece of work, but he was enjoying her company, perhaps a little too much. He tried to define why a prickly string bean appealed to him, but it was like try
ing to describe admiration for a sunbeam caught in the prism of a raindrop. He apparently had an appreciation for subtle jewels. Who knew?
They were by the pool, cleaning the last of the strawberries from their plates—Pippa had found cream cheese and sweetened it for him—when his phone rang. He’d given Gloria his number.
He checked the screen, and Thank you texted across it. The Librarian. He held the screen up for Pippa to see. Her smile dimmed a little, but she nodded understanding.
They’d done what some anonymous manipulator wanted and received gratitude in recompense. Oz wondered if there was a screenwriter in the world who could make an audience suspend disbelief for a plot this absurd.
“Do you think she’s still here?” Pippa asked in that neutral voice she’d perfected to hide her fears.
“Who, Gloria? I think we’re her best bet, and she’s not a fool. We don’t know how long she’s been running and hiding. She needs her rest. Besides, the old lady at the inn is probably talking her ear off.”
Pippa blessed him with another of her smiles. He liked to believe they were coming with more frequency.
“We may have to rescue her again. Amabelle doesn’t know when to shut up.” She carried her plate into the kitchen to rinse it off.
Oz followed, wondering if there was still some chance of getting her back in bed. Sex would take his mind off all the questions no one was answering about Donal.
That his son might still be alive was such an immense relief that he didn’t dare consider it yet, much less try to believe it. He couldn’t trust a crazy old woman and an anonymous messenger. It could be a scam. At some point, he’d even given up prayer. He would just keep scraping away the dirt, as always. Action was all he had.
So, what action did he take next? Sex was good but didn’t find Donal. Call Conan and have his sleep-deprived brother hang up on him? Or hunt down the dotty lady at the B&B and drag information out through her tonsils? That might work.
Lure of Song and Magic Page 18