Page 38 of Midnight Serenade
I sighed. “And Grace’s mom will be terrified. Please handle both of them as well.”
“You got it.”
Grace
I was collectingsea life like a chenille sweater collected lint. The ones that terrified me the most were the sharks that circled down below. A small pod of humpback whales protected me from them, as well as a few playful dolphins, some manta rays, several schools of curious fish, and the huge turtle who’d first joined me. He’d forcibly scooped me onto his back an hour ago because my strength was flagging and I kept sinking below the surface of the water, struggling to make it back up.
The sharks weren’t hurting anything, but they were still a terrifying presence for most of the sea life around me. They shifted nervously whenever the sharks circled too closely. Ironically, I somehow felt that the sharks were trying to protect me from the more aggressive species of sharks in these waters. Maybe through my siren spidey sense, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know how to thank the sharks—I didn’t know if I wanted them to be close enough to thank—but I was really grateful for them.
Everyone was quiet at the moment and relatively still. I think they were trying to allow me time to rest. I’d thought about taking the sea creatures and trying to follow the direction the ship had gone in, but I knew it’d be best for me to stay put. They always told you to do that if you got lost. And I figured lost at sea counted as the worst imaginable kind of lost.
I dozed for a while, shivering at the cool night air on my wet skin. The turtle was fantastic at keeping my head above water. I knew he could hold his breath for hours, but I wasn’t that fortunate. He had to be getting tired, though. I thought I remembered watching a documentary that said that sea turtles could pretty much rest anywhere, like the surface of the water or wedged under some rocks.
I patted his shell in gratitude again. “Thank you. You saved my life.”
I squinted into the distance. My eyes were grainy with fatigue, but were those...lightson the water? I was potentially hallucinating. This didn’t worry me as much as it probably should have.
“Mr. Turtle, tell me you’re seeing what I’m seeing.” The lights drew closer, and I was thinking all kinds of things. Ghosts on the water? Spirits from another realm? An insomniac captain that wanted to go fishing at four a.m.? I’d read somewhere that fishing boats had to set out early in order to get a bigger catch. Maybe he wanted a catch big enough to take a few days off?
I sat up on the turtle’s shell, squinting even more. The blurry shapes finally resolved into a ship. Anenormousship. Way too big for a fishing troller. “Oh my gosh! It’s a cruise ship!” As the ship came nearer, I started waving my hands frantically above my head and shouting at the top of my voice.“Down here! Hey! Down here!”
When it drew close enough to me to readKamariaon the side of the massive ship, I started to cry. Shouts sounded from the deck of the ship, and then there was a tiny splash that was probably Sebastian diving elegantly into the ocean from two hundred feet up.
Show off.
I turned back to my rescue team. The sea animals that had all come at my SOS. “Thank youfor coming to my aid. I will never forget any of you and what you did for me.” I kissed the turtle’s shell and slid off of him moments before Sebastian’s arms wrapped around me, enveloping me in his comforting embrace.
“Grace.”That one word held so much depth of emotion it made my eyes burn. I wrapped my weak, numb arms around him and held on with all the strength I had left.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.”
He held me tighter. He had even swam through sharks for me without even pausing to consider the danger.
“I’m so glad you came back for me,” I managed to say in a watery, choked voice.
“I’m moving in with you,” he said, completely seriously.
I laughed and buried my head against his chest. “I might let you.” I sighed. “Let’s get back to the ship.”
Chapter 14
Grace
Micaela was furious that she’d missed someone on my balcony, and Mama had declared in all seriousness that she was having a sudden onset of insomnia from now until the end of her life as she squeezed the life from me. Kazi wouldn’t let me out of his sight, and protestedloudlyif I so much as went tothe bathroom without him.
Sebastian was a whole other matter. He’d stubbornly moved in with me. Granted, my suite was quite spacious, with several bedrooms, butno one was occupying the bedrooms.They all just piled into the front room with me, as though we were all having one big slumber party. Sebastian’s employees came by with yet another bed for my front room, setting it up in the corner near the balcony and blocking it off with privacy curtains.
After that, things went downhill quickly.
Everywhere I went on the ship I felt eyes burning the back of my skull—lion eyes, mama eyes, vampire and shifter eyes, Micaela eyes, and bodyguards by the dozens eyes. Not to mention the eyes that were sometimes on me just because I was a siren. I started feeling like I was a specimen in a bottle.
After day two of our three days at sea ended with me hiding in the bathroom because it was the only time I got some peaceand distance from the constant presence of bodyguards, I knew something had to change.
I barged into Sebastian’s office. “If you assign one more person to be my bodyguard, I’m getting off at the next port and going home,” I growled, leaning over his desk with my hands planted firmly on the surface.
Sebastian looked up from a fancy ledger where he was manually entering numbers with a fine-tipped pen. “You know we have these new-fangled things called computers. They calculate things for you.”
His eyebrows went up at my abrupt change of topic. “Yes, but there’s something satisfying about entering the numbers and tallying the columns by hand that appeals to me.”
