Was it? Hell, he’d agreed to try and work it out with Greta. Sort of. At least he’d explained the whole mess to her. And he was only going over to hide out for a while in Drew’s house.
That actually sounded bad. Shit. “Did it ever occur to any of you that I might not want to be pushed into an arranged marriage?”
“Arranged m-marriage?” His father looked puzzled.
“Well, practically.”
“You’re f-frightened.”
“Of the Clan? I’m the only one who has the guts to go out the front gate these days.” He folded his arms around the flute to keep himself under control.
Senior shook his head. “Falling in l-love w-with her, g-getting a p-power.”
“I’m going to do right by her, whatever that means,” he gritted out. “And I got a power. I can write music. Big fucking deal. You can now have elevator music any time you want.” There, he’d admitted he was never going to be what they all wanted him to be. Admitting that to Senior, more than anyone else, was like grabbing a knife by the blade.
“Where were you g-going?”
Lan deflated like a popped balloon. He knew very well that Senior had not changed the subject. His father had always been able to see right through him. Well, at least up until the attack. He glanced over to the house across the bluff. “I guess I just need some distance.” He liked to think that was all it was, that he wouldn’t have started running to Drew’s house and not stopped until he hit Hollywood, or maybe Wisconsin. But he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
“Not what y-you n-need.”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “So, you gonna give me ‘the talk’?”
Senior shook his head. “T-too much effort.”
“I have a feeling you have some advice.” Lan heaved a breath and let it out.
“You w-want control. N-no one has that. But have the g-guts to think th-things will w-work out.”
Lan shook his head. “I hate to tell you, but that was a talk.” How strange that a man who had been made into a former shell of himself could speak with such optimism.
Senior managed a lopsided shrug. “Ab-breviated.” He looked thoughtful. “I l-like her. She’s had a hard l-life.”
“A spoiled pretty girl with too much money and too much attention?” Lan scoffed.
Senior raised his eyebrows and just nodded. “Ashk her.”
Senior knew things about her Lan didn’t. And Senior had told her he’d been attacked. They…they had a relationship, strange as it seemed. More than she had with Lan. He thought of Tris telling him to get to know what Greta’s favorite color was. They were all in this together. Lan stared at his boots. His father didn’t say anything else. Damn it. Lan would gut it out, because he owed Greta that, not because that was what his father wanted. He looked up the drive, lined with oleanders, toward the road he wasn’t taking north to Hollywood.
“I’ll give it a week.” Lan said it like a threat. “A week of hopeful optimism.” Yeah, like you could just turn it off and on.
Senior nodded. “Sit with m-me for a while.”
He hadn’t slurred his ‘s.’ Huh. That was the first time Lan had heard that. He threw himself down into the opposite corner of the bench, clutching the flute. “No lectures,” he warned.
“D-deal. W-watch the sunset. M-maybe play?”
Wow. Two non-slurred ‘s’s. But more than that, his father was making sense. He wasn’t drifting in and out of the conversation. He was totally aware. And he wasn’t angry. When had Senior gotten better? Not that Lan had been around to notice.
“Elevator music, coming up.”
They both turned a little in their seats. The sun was turning into an orange step-pyramid as it sank below the steel-blue horizon of the sea. Lan felt himself slowly unclenching. He picked up the flute and fitted the mouthpiece to his lips. The music was in him. He just had to let it out, let it speak for him. The music floated out, plaintive, tentative.
His father was still in there. Lan had thought he’d become pretty much a vegetable after that head wound and coma. But he wasn’t. In fact, maybe he was a little more understanding than he would have been before. It struck Lanyon that if anyone knew about fear, about having no control over your life, even about not being enough to do the right thing or face the future, it might just be his father. He chanced a glance Senior’s way. The notes spiraled up into the evening air. He expected his father to be watching him, a look of disapproval or something on his face. But he was just watching the sunset, its ruddy glow bathing his face.
Lan turned back to the sunset himself. The music took on a more determined, tense feeling. A week. He could do a week.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‡
First Lan had to get through dinner. Greta spent the meal staring at her plate and blushing, while the family pointedly ignored her distress in order not to increase it. It was hell knowing the whole lot of them knew exactly what Lan and Greta had been doing, knew they were irrevocably linked by their DNA, and knew the pair hardly knew each other. Lan felt like a heel, because he was tongue-tied and didn’t know how to help. He sat there like a lump, eating Eggplant Parmigiana. A lump with a huge erection under his napkin. How was he going to try to get to know Greta if he was painfully erect the whole time? He could smell that she was aroused as well. His senses were almost overwhelmed by the whole intensity thing, but he could pick that scent out of all the others drifting in the room like some kind of damn bloodhound. Senior was trying to give him encouraging looks. Tris, on his right, elbowed him in the ribs a couple of times and jerked his head toward Greta. His mother was bestirring herself as she hadn’t in ages to be attentive to their guest. The whole experience was excruciating. The air felt oppressive. He elbowed Tris back, ignored Senior and gulped some of the Chianti in his glass. He couldn’t concentrate on the conversations swirling around him. Hell, he could hardly breathe. He needed to get out of here. Greta was getting fidgety in her seat, too.
He’d rummaged around in his room and found the flute-holster that his mother had made him when he was a teenager, before all the stuff with the Clan had hit. Lan had wanted a way to have portable music always with him. So his mother took some fine, tooled Mexican leather and made a belt that held his flute and strapped to his thigh. The thing hung low enough on his hip that he could bend to sit. It was really quite ingenious. Having an instrument with him wasn’t curing his discomfort, but he’d be a basket case without it.
Kee caught his attention by using Greta’s name. Actually she’d addressed Greta directly, the first of any of the family to do so. “You said today you weren’t sure you wanted to be an actress, Greta. Maybe you were just speaking in general, but I thought you might have had some other career in mind.”
Greta flinched at the sound of her name, jerked her attention around wildly until she could fix on Kee, and blushed furiously. “Not really,” she practically whispered. “I mean, nothing definite.”
“It sounded to me like you’d been considering the matter pretty carefully,” Jane said, smiling. That smile could soften anyone. “I noticed that the security staff brought over a telescope from your apartment. Could that have any bearing?”
A telescope? Wow, that hit from left field. Maybe she was into spying on her neighbors, or whale watching or something.
“I…I know it sounds stupid.” Greta cleared her throat. “I’ve always been fascinated by stars. UCLA has a pretty good astronomy program. I was thinking of taking some time off from acting, maybe. I mean, I don’t know. Bernie—my agent, that is—Bernie says I’m a shoe-in for the girlfriend in the next Amazing series. But getting tied down in another franchise…” She trailed off.
Lan saw his family exchange meaningful glances.
“Stars, huh?” Tris asked as he elbowed Lan in the ribs again. He succeeded in making it look at least half accidental. “Sounds fascinating.”
Greta looked up at Tris and her face softened a little. Her eyes went unfocused, like she wasn’t really seeing him
. “Yeah, it is.” She jerked back to reality, looking embarrassed. She rushed into speech. “I mean I was reading this paper that was given as a lecture to the Swiss Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics on active galactic nuclei and it posited that those galaxies that are still expanding at a really fast rate are actually accelerating to near the speed of light, which might explain why the universe started expanding more rapidly about two billion years ago.” She glanced around nervously. “I know no one but me cares about stuff like that,” she mumbled.
“No, no…” Pretty much everyone but Lan and Senior protested. “We love it.” “Do go on.” “Astrophysics, of course.” And like that.
Greta looked almost frightened at their sudden enthusiasm. Lan couldn’t stand it anymore. He stood so suddenly, his chair fell over with a crash. He didn’t care. “Come on, Greta,” he said into the abrupt silence. Had that come out like an order? He didn’t know much about Greta, but he had a pretty good idea that girls like her didn’t take kindly to orders. Her expression confirmed that. Hell, he was only trying to extract them both from an intolerable situation. “Uh, it’s a clear night. We could take your telescope out on the lawn.”
Greta’s frown turned to relief. “It’s pretty heavy.”
“Think I can manage.” He motioned her to the door and she hastened to get up. She was as glad to get out of there as he was. He let her lead the way out of the dining room. He had to step over the fallen chair, but he wasn’t going to humiliate himself further by stooping to right it. She took the stairs off the foyer silently, tripping up them lightly. She really was a graceful creature. An image of her writhing above him, impaled on his cock, shot into his mind and he pushed it down. He wasn’t going to throw her down on the lawn and bury himself in her. He was determined to talk to her—he had to say more than just telling her the family mythology and how screwed she was. Senior was right. He owed her that.
When she opened the door to the blue guest bedroom, Lan couldn’t help exclaiming, “Holy shit. This is your telescope?” The thing stood on a tripod at shoulder height and had to weigh a hundred pounds. It looked like some kind of an alien.
She caressed the tube and smiled. “Yeah. Rover’s pretty special. He’s a Sky Rover ULT 130 with a triple super refractor. Amazing clarity.”
She called her telescope Rover and patted it like a dog. This chick was out there. “Well, uh, let’s get this downstairs.”
“You don’t have to, really,” she protested. “We can just open the window here.”
“I’d, uh, sorta like to get out of the house, you know?”
She nodded with a rueful mouth. “Okay. Let me just break down his tripod.” She flipped some tabs on the tripod legs and eased Rover down.
Lan helped her collapse the fat tube against the shortened legs. He hefted it onto his shoulder with a grunt. “How did Edwards get this thing upstairs?” he muttered to himself.
“It was actually that nice young man, Ernie,” she said, as she pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. “He really works out. Is it too heavy? We really can just set it up at the window.”
She’d noticed Ernie worked out, huh? Lan’s lips thinned. “No problem. Light as a feather.” He tried not to stagger as she opened the door for him. “Let’s just go down the back stairs.”
*
Greta followed Lanyon down the tiny back stairs, so different from the grander staircase at the front of the house. The house was old enough that this might have been the servant’s staircase in a former age. The thick adobe walls would keep the house cool on hot days and keep out the Pacific storms in winter. Of course, the place had been immaculately maintained and had all the modern conveniences. It was really a wonderful house.
Wonderful family, too, in spite of how difficult dinner had been. A loving, big family, who would really be there for each other if any one of them were in need. Oddly, that’s what they had been trying to do tonight—be there for her and Lan. It was very dear, in a way.
The only problem was they had magic powers and DNA from Merlin, the wizard of Camelot, and a group, apparently with greater powers, was trying to kill them.
God, the whole thing was unreal. And they all thought she shared that gene. Wild. Maybe that was why her heart was beating so hard in her chest as she opened doors for Lan and stepped out onto the terrace. He was trying hard not to huff and puff with Rover on his shoulder.
The minute she got out into the starlight, she felt calmer. Lan had been right to get them out of the house. She stepped off the terrace and on to the big lawn that sloped down to the sea. The ocean was dead calm. She could hear the quiet lapping of the waves against the rocks below. Their rhythm was almost as comforting as the starlight. Some things were bigger than little human fears and problems.
She picked a spot in the center of the lawn and Lan heaved Rover off his shoulder. She helped him right the scope. They worked together to extend the legs. The viewing wouldn’t be especially good with so much water vapor in the air, but they’d be able to see something. She couldn’t help remembering the first time she’d seen him naked, right on this very lawn and what he was doing. Oh, God. Focus on the stars. She tilted the scope and fiddled with adjusting the view.
“You ever stargaze much as a kid?” she asked.
“I wasn’t the Boy Scout type. I can pick out a few. Cassiopeia. the Dippers.” He looked up and pointed to the south. “Always kinda liked Orion. Those three stars that form the sword there made it so you could always find it. Later of course, I interpreted ‘sword’ more liberally.”
“Why, you prurient man.” She laughed. “I did too. Did you know the middle star in his sword is not a star at all but a nursery galaxy for emerging stars? It’s much farther away than the actual stars we see next to it.” She swung Rover to the south. She could feel the tug of Lan’s body on hers as he stood just behind her, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets. Now was not the time to get wet. That didn’t stop her. She rushed into speech. “Orion’s brightest star is Rigel. It’s that one down on his left foot. Sixth brightest star in our sky. It’s a blue supergiant just about at the end of its life. It’s fusing heavy elements in its core, which is what makes it so bright. One of these days it’s going to explode and either become a supernova or shed its outer layers and become a white dwarf.”
“Should I be worried?”
She chuckled and fiddled with the focus on the eyepiece. “Only if you worry about things that might happen in the next million years. Or maybe it’s already happened, and the light from the explosion hasn’t reached here yet. Either way, it could be a long time until we know about it.” There was what she was looking for. She beckoned him to the eyepiece of the scope. He had to crouch a little to see through it. “Focus okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Wow.”
She knew what he’d be seeing. Of course, everyone had seen star pictures these days, ever since the Hubble. But when you first saw the haze of light of the background galaxies punctuated by the familiar bright forms for yourself through the lens of a telescope in your backyard, the feeling was always the same. Wonder.
“The fuzzy light in the middle?”
“Yeah. That’s the star nursery.”
“Cool.” He stood. His eyes roved over her body and heated.
Oh, dear. “The reddish star in his right shoulder?” She pointed to the sky. “That’s Betelgeuse. It’s an M-type red supergiant. It won’t have a choice of what to become. It will just go supernova.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the kind of star they are and their composition.”
“How do you know what they are made of?” he asked as he stared through the lens.
“By the light,” she said. It never ceased to amaze her. “The light spectrograph is different, depending on the elements present in the star’s matter.”
“That makes the stars different colors?” He sounded really interested.
“No, the color depends on how hot they’re burning.” She looked up at the constel
lation with her naked eye. “Betelgeuse is cooling, so he’s red. Rigel is white—he’s hotter. See the star on the other shoulder? That’s Bellatrix.”
“I thought she was a character in the Harry Potter books.”
“You read Harry Potter?” She didn’t think of him as a reading type.
“Everybody read Harry Potter,” he said. He must have realized he was raking her body with his gaze because he turned and tried adjusting Rover’s viewer himself.
Greta cleared her throat. “Well, she’s also a star and a peculiarly bright one for her mass. But that’s because she’s burning very hot. It creates her luminosity and gives her a blue-white color. Here, let me help.” As she stepped in to adjust the view, he backed away. Good, because she was about to spontaneously combust. She pushed Rover’s lens upward and bent to fiddle with the focus. When she stood, she gestured to the eyepiece and hoped he didn’t notice her hands were a little shaky. She could smell his arousal. This heightened sense stuff was killing her.
He bent to look as she backed up. He looked for a long time, which gave them both some time to regroup. When he straightened, he said quietly, “That was really beautiful. I can see why you’re fascinated.”
“I guess I’ve always found it a bit of a refuge.” She stepped up to the telescope. This time he didn’t retreat. His scent cascaded over her. Heat seemed to radiate off him in the cool beach air. She lost track of her thoughts and shook her head to clear it. Stars. She had to get back to the stars. What else could she show him?
He cleared his throat. “Senior said something about you having, uh, had problems?”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t aware that Lan was on good speaking terms with his dad. “Brian’s a good man. I guess I sort of opened up to him. Don’t often do that.” As she glanced up at him, she saw him looking kind of surprised. “What, you think I spill my guts to every tabloid reporter in town?”
“No, it’s not you…well, it’s Senior. He hasn’t always been a touchy-feely guy. I guess I was surprised you’d talk to him like that.”
The Magic's in the Music (Magic Series Book 5) Page 19