As I mentioned last week, I just got back from South Padre Island, where I picked up this mug from Sea Turtle Inc.
My grandson loves turtles, so I'm looking forward to taking him with us on our next trip. It's a great facility. It reminds me in a lot of ways of Shorebird Nature Center at the Berkeley Marina where I worked as a docent for many years, and which I used as one of the models for Oberon's Marine Nature Center. Excerpt from Sound of a Voice That is Still below. But first...
Ryan headed back to the center the following morning in a lighthearted mood. It was a beautiful day, he decided as he gazed around him appreciatively. No, a perfect day. The sky was blue and only partly cloudy. Butterflies floated on the breeze. Bright blooms of yarrow and sourgrass poked their way up through the banks of ice plant that bordered the path. And here and there, a renegade poppy was already in flower. His dog sniffed delightedly at the fragrant air.
Closer to the cottage, the brackish marine scents of the shoreline gave way to the softer smell of pine. A few hardy daffodils clustered around the building’s foundation, braving the perpetual shadows cast by the surrounding trees to raise their yellow heads to the sky.
Ryan couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this good. Things were working out so much better than he’d hoped they would. Yesterday he’d managed to defuse the potentially dangerous relationship between him and Siobhan, and for once without things blowing up in his face. Even his leg seemed to be less troublesome than usual, despite all his recent hard work.
They’d had wonderful luck with the tank. They’d gone to the Marina’s more protected side, by the docks where the boats were berthed, to find suitable rocks. Many of them were encrusted with creatures he hadn’t ever seen before. Like green and orange striped anemones, velvety red sponges, and tunicates shaped like delicate vases of translucent yellow glass. They’d even found another sea slug—this one called a Spanish Shawl. An enchanting little creature; magenta and sky blue with feathery, fringe-like projections of tangerine all down its back.
They’d gotten fish, too. Silvery shiner perch and smelt and a small starry flounder.
He thought of how Siobhan had held the flounder, suspended in water, in her hand. She’d explained how its left eye had migrated from that side of its body, over the top of its head to the other. 2Though he’d tried hard to listen, it was her hands and her long, tapered fingers that had captivated most of his attention.
Afterwards, he’d taken her to bed. Almost losing himself, as he had the first night, in the wonder of her. She seemed as magical and unlikely a creature as any she’d shown him. An impossible combination of contradictions. So bright and dark, cool and warm, gentle and strong. Her arms and legs had held him captive even as she’d opened herself to his invasion. Her soft cries and the rippling contractions of her climax were a siren song he had neither wish nor will to resist.
And then he’d left her.
Her soft, naked body had lain curled beneath a comforter of shell colored cotton—just like a hermit crab, he’d told her, surprising a sleepy, little laugh.
“A hermit crab?” Moonlight glimmered in her eyes as she gazed up at him. “Gee, Ryan, I don’t believe I’ve ever been compared to a crustacean before. At least not to my face. You’re a real charmer, you know that?”
Sound of a Voice That is Still
Oberon, Book 3.0
Buy Here: SoundVoice
Some wounds take a long time to heal, others never do. Four months after being wounded in the line of duty, Ryan Henderson is beginning to fear that his is of the latter variety. He's a patient man, but a poor patient. As winter drags interminably on, he's growing desperate for distraction--anything that might take his mind off his injury, before he goes insane.
Siobhan Quinn could give the injured officer a lesson or two in living with pain. It's been ten years since her life was changed and her heart critically wounded as a result of the tragic accident that robbed her of her family. She knows firsthand how grief can cripple a soul and drive a sane mind over the edge.
Sometimes it seems like Spring will never come again. Sometimes, the only alternative to living in inner darkness, is death. Your own, or someone else's. In the depths of winter, Ryan and Siobhan will have to make a choice: to help each other heal…or die trying.
