“Someone was prepared,” she said, and took a long drink of coffee, lifting her arm enough for Max to see the points of both nipples against the thin fabric of her T-shirt. Maybe if he rushed over to his room and jerked off as fast as he could, he’d have a chance at staying professional today?
When he looked back up, Sloane was watching him with one eyebrow raised. There went that plan.
“Give me ten minutes to put on something decent and I’ll be over,” she said, still smirking.
“Sure,” Max said. “See you in ten.”
Before he left, he gave up and checked her out again.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not a regular human language,” Sloane said when Max walked over, a short stack of books under one arm.
“Is it an irregular human language?” he asked, pulling up an armchair. He was careful not to drag it over the tiled floor of the Bellwether library.
“I’m so glad you’re here to ask these questions,” she deadpanned. Max grinned, put his stack of books on a side table, and settled into the leather chair. He was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a light blue linen shirt; he felt like he should be wearing a smoking jacket and top hat, or something. Whatever men wore to look fancy in armchairs in the early 1900s.
“Someone has to,” he said, and Sloane made a noncommittal noise.
“It’s not a major language,” she said, and pulled up the photo of the wall with black light writing on it, turning her laptop screen slightly toward Max. “It’s not Hindi or Farsi or Thai or Amharic or any of the common ones that don’t use the Roman alphabet. There’re hundreds of lesser-spoken languages with different alphabets, obviously, but my photo searching didn’t turn anything up.”
Sloane was half-sprawled on a sapphire-blue chaise, her laptop open in her lap, her back against the arm of the lounge as she gestured at the screen. Before she’d shown up for breakfast in Max’s room, she’d changed from see-through pajamas to a rust-red dress that went all the way to the floor. It hadn’t been until she’d sat on his bed to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch that he’d realized there was a long slit up one side.
Currently, one side of the dress was falling away from the chaise and pooling on the tile floor. Sloane’s leg was visible to her upper thigh. Max was having normal thoughts about it.
“And the Google photo search would’ve turned up the popular invented languages,” she was saying now. “Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki. I’ve got some more stuff to look at, but it’s probably nonsense.”
“Or a demonic alphabet that we can’t read because our human minds would be flayed open if we tried,” Max pointed out.
“Sure,” Sloane said. “Or it’s the language of demons who carefully melt candles in a safe environment and then take them to the attic full of old wood because they don’t want to burn anything down. I hear demons are big on fire safety.”
“They’d know.”
Sloane leaned her head back and turned her neck just enough to give Max a conspiratorial, amused look, then went back to her laptop. Max pulled the first book off the pile, crossed his legs at the ankle, and started flipping through it.
Twenty minutes later he was sitting sideways in his chair, with one leg over the other arm of the chair and one folded underneath himself, facing Sloane on the chaise.
“There were rumors that Belle was a witch,” he told her. “Apparently some tent revival preacher claimed that she made a deal with the devil for money and power, and the price was her husband’s soul.”
Sloane snorted. “That’s not even creative of him,” she said, scrolling down a webpage with squiggles all over it. “Men have been calling their female betters witches since time immemorial. It’s dangerous to have something a man thinks should be his, because the next thing you know, you’re bound to a pole and your feet are hot.”
Max flipped a page, because he wasn’t about to argue. “Also, if you get a coin from your lover and toss it into the koi pond?—”
“You poison the koi?”
“Well, yes,” Max admitted, skimming the page. “Which is why they don’t let you do that anymore. But if you did throw your lover’s coin into the koi pond, they’d be smitten with you forever, or until you go back to the pond and throw your hat in.”
Sloane had her head back over the arm of the chaise again, the tendons in her neck flexing as she looked over at Max. “It’s very practical of the koi pond to allow for a reversal,” she said. “Do you get the hat back?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Are you supposed to steal the coin? Or does the lover have to give you the coin?”
Max sighed and flipped another page. “It says get a coin, Sloane. It’s a book of hotel lore that was published in”—he checked the copyright page—“nineteen thirty-five. It also says that if you take a lock of your hair and burn it on the promenade under a quarter moon, you’ll find your true love within the fortnight.”
“Americans should use fortnight more,” Sloane said thoughtfully.
“Ooh, here’s a good one,” he said. “Write the full name of your beloved on a scrap of paper, tie it with string you previously wrapped around their wrist three times, consecrate it with your blood and theirs?—”
“Damn, okay,” said Sloane.
