Leashing the Tempest (Arcadia Bell #2.5)(5)

“Clear skies or not, it’s windy and cold out here,” I said, squeezing Lon’s knee. “Come on. Let’s move inside the salon. Jupe, you can test out your knack on Kar Yee, if she’s still willing.”

Jupe waggled his brows at her. “What do you say, Kar Yee? Are you?”

“If you promise to play nice,” she answered, leveling him with a semi-threatening look.

“I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“You can. My dad says real men don’t make promises they can’t keep.”

“Oh, really? Thank God that doesn’t apply to real women.”

While she herded him toward the cabin, I lagged behind to have one last look at the ward on the swim platform.

“What is it?” Lon asked.

“You aren’t at all interested in why he has this?”

“He was a little nervous when you brought it up, but mostly embarrassed. Maybe the boat got robbed while he was sleeping on board. Captain’s pride, or something.”

“Maybe.” And perhaps I was being overcurious about something that wasn’t a big deal, but upon closer inspection, I noticed the ward didn’t just circle the hull of the boat. It ran up the ladder to our level.

I pointed this out to Lon, and we traced its path to where we stood. “It’s hidden on the underside of the railing.

He bent low and tilted his head to inspect. “Clever.”

From the railing, it ran across the deck through a line of recessed lights in the flooring. “Hard to see in the sunlight, and the lights probably disguise it at night.” My gaze followed the line of Heka up the outer wall of the cabin. It was brighter in one spot. I moved a blue-and-white-striped life preserver ring to reveal a series of arcane symbols painted on the wall there.

“Reinforcement?” Lon asked.

“Like a cornerstone,” I agreed. “Don’t recognize all these symbols, though.”

Lon and I held each other’s gaze for a moment; he didn’t recognize them, either. “Interesting.”

More like suspicious. Maybe the good captain would be willing to tell me the name of the magician who had erected his ward once we got to the reef. It could be nothing. Could be artistic flourishes that didn’t add anything to actual ward; my bar had a bit of this in the binding symbols painted on the floor, a the flhelping them to better blend with the Tiki-themed decor.

But as I took one last look at the unfamiliar symbols under the life preserver, I felt an uneasiness tighten my chest. And I wondered if I maybe should be less interested in who set the ward and more concerned about

what exactly it was protecting us from.

“Sixty-five degrees,” Jupe read from a GPS screen on a wall inside the salon. “Winds gusting at sixteen knots. What does that mean?”

Lon leaned down to peer out the windows circling the cabin. “It means I’m not going to get any decent photos until we get farther down the coast away from that storm.”

“This blows. I wanted to see some blue wales.”

“Patience.” Lon sat on a curving sofa, beckoning me to join him. He pulled me sideways into his lap and wrapped his arms around mine. “All right, Jupe. No dangerous dares. No intimate questions.”

Jupe’s face pinched. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means don’t ask anything creepy,” I translated.

“Like . . .” Jupe trailed off, a devilish look in his eye.

Oh, God. Here we go.

“Like, don’t ask about her safe word?”

“Safe word?” Kar Yee repeated. “What the hell is that?”

Lon cursed under his breath.

“You know,” Jupe said, smiling one of his lazy smiles that brimmed with a delirious suggestiveness he only partly understood.

“Is that one of those whips and chains things?” Kar Yee said.

Jupe nodded, eyes widening with sordid interest. “In case things get out of control.”

“No whips and chains,” Lon said, his patience wearing thin. “No safe words. Where the hell do you get these things?”

“Jack told me at school.” Jack. Jupe’s BFF. That shy little Godzilla-loving Earthbound was always taking about crazy stuff with him. “He said everyone has them these days. Don’t you and Cady have one?”

Lon snorted. “Yeah, it’s a little word called ‘no.’ ”

“That’s it?”

“No need to complicate things.”

Well, when it came to Lon and me, there was really no need to say it all, frankly. Maybe an occasional “too deep!” or “my leg’s cramping!” or perhaps a frantic hand signal to indicate that the sexy choking was about to turn into an SVU case.

“ ‘No’ is the only safe word you’ll need,” Lon said in his tough-dad voice. “And if you ever hear it out of a girl’s mouth, you’d better stop whatever horrsticible thing it is you’re trying to do to her.”

“I wouldn’t do anything horrible—I mean . . . jeez, Dad.” He glanced at Kar Yee, slightly mortified. “Don’t be weird.”

“Yeah, Lon,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Don’t be weird.”

Lon clamped a warm hand around my knee. “You’ll be saying no later if you don’t watch it,” he whispered close to my ear.