Siren Song. Stephanie Draven

the bedroom. And though she’d fantasized about using her powers to hurt people if she needed to, she’d never actually done it. She just wasn’t that kind of person, was she?

      When Chloe left the booth, all she could think about was how Captain Alex Shore could know about her powers. And if they were real, why was he immune? She felt edgy. Freaked out. She just wanted to get out of the bar. She didn’t want to deal with Sophia’s protectiveness, but now her friends gathered around her.

      “Hey, are you okay?” Sophia asked.

      “Yeah,” Jay chimed in, his drumsticks tucked under his arm. “What’d that guy say to you?”

      “Nothing. He’s just a jerk. Stop hovering!”

      “Okay,” Jay said. “But only because I’ve got some great news! There’s gonna be a talent scout in the audience tomorrow.”

      Chloe blinked. “Seriously?” Between drunken binges and late-night partying, her bandmates had always talked about making a demo and sending it to a music exec, but Chloe always put it off. She worried that her magic only worked live. But if a talent scout was going to actually come to one of their shows…this could be their big break. After all the practicing, the annoying promo, she was finally going to get her shot. Even if she’d given a nanosecond’s consideration to leaving town, that was a nonstarter now.

      She was staying, even if Captain Tall, Dark and Dangerous wanted her gone.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Chloe was up early the next morning, restless. Hair in a ponytail, she slipped on a plain tank top over her favorite pair of faded jeans, then climbed over the mountain of pizza boxes in the living room and grabbed her guitar. She considered finding some breakfast, or maybe starting her day with a cold beer from the fridge, but she was too jittery for that.

      Settling on the chair by the screened-in porch, she strummed the first few notes of a new song she’d been working on. Soul-baring stuff that made her really uncomfortable. Of course, that’s what music was for, wasn’t it? Maybe it was time to stop hiding from her past. It wasn’t like it was secret. After she’d been rescued, it’d been all over the news….

      Chloe and Sophia had been assigned to a checkpoint, part of an effort to respect Iraqi culture by making sure that only female soldiers searched Iraqi women and children. Their position had been overrun and they’d been taken captive. Closing her eyes, Chloe sang the first verse, remembering the chafing sand against her body as they pinned her and yanked her pants down. The burning humiliation when they laughed. Her gut-wrenching revulsion at the sweating men working over her. And the pulse-pounding terror when they put the barrel of a rifle in her mouth to make her stay still.

      All the emotions came roiling up inside Chloe now, even the relief at having been rescued before those animals could turn their attention on Sophia. Chloe reminded herself that the important thing was that she’d survived it. Of course, then she’d been discharged. The military didn’t like to bring too much attention to these kinds of things. Chloe hadn’t wanted that kind of attention, either, and unable to stand all the questions, she took her guitar on the road and ended up here, sharing a rented house with Sophia when her tour of duty was up.

      Chloe liked their old row house with its weathered siding and back porch. She liked Nap Town, too. Annapolis was quaint and colonial. There was plenty of water. About as opposite a place from Iraq as she could find. Except for the soldiers. Well, sailors, really; she didn’t usually mind them. At least until one of them threatened her. That’s right. Captain Alex Shore hadn’t just accused her of murder, he’d threatened her, and she’d had more than her share of threats for one lifetime….

      Whispers at the back of his classroom stopped Alexandros’s hand, midstroke, at the chalkboard. He turned with a stern look, as he had no tolerance for tomfoolery. He was serious about passing on his knowledge of naval history—after all, he’d actually been there for most of it. Just as he was about to propose some form of discipline, the primal notes of a siren’s song shattered his concentration. The chalk in his hand fell away as the sound reverberated through him, sudden arousal threading through his muscles and sinews, luring him.

      His students didn’t react. They couldn’t hear it. They might be servicemen, but they weren’t his true comrades. They weren’t tritons; he was alone in this fight. Right now, the power of the siren’s song was driving him mad. He struggled through the rest of the lesson, desperate for class to end, all the while cursing himself for having ever thought that the siren would be sensible enough to simply pack up and leave. How many times in his life was he going to make the mistake of giving a siren the benefit of the doubt?

      Unlike ordinary men, he could resist the song of a siren, but he could also hear her from miles away. She had to go. He had to be rid of her. Annapolis simply wasn’t big enough for the both of them.

      He followed her voice a few blocks from the Academy and the City Dock, where he found himself outside an old historic row house. He went around the alley in back, where the music was loudest, and the effect on him strongest. He hopped the fence. Chloe was just inside the open back door. Eyes shut, guitar over her knees and completely alone in the most disorderly living room he’d ever seen. Softball equipment spilled over the makeshift coffee table, bills and papers scattered and a stack of empty beer bottles lined one wall. Amid all this, her voice emerged as a haunted, scratchy sound of violation and struggle.

      For a moment, just a moment, he could almost believe she really was just a talented musician. That there was some healing in her music. Then again, he’d been fooled before.

      He pried open the porch door. As her fingers strummed the end of the tune, she opened her eyes, saw him standing there and jolted up out of her chair. “Holy shit, holy shit! How did you find me?”