“Maybe.” She pulled her legs up under her, tucking them sideways. “I won’t even charge you the going price. Consider it a bartered payment for services rendered.” Catherine patted the mattress beside her. “For taking such good care of me.”
Sean chuckled. “All right.” He got onto the bed and moved to sit beside her.
Maybe this would keep her mind off of her recent near-death experience.
Maybe it was time for him to talk about Vegas Four.
He drew a deep breath and realized he had no starting point. This wasn’t going to be a simple story starting with the valiant knight and ending with a happily-ever-after.
Catherine watched him struggle in silence, not interrupting his mental battle.
“Why don’t you ask me questions and I’ll try to answer them,” he offered. It was all he could think of.
Before she could speak he held up his index finger. “Within reason. I don’t know if I want you knowing all my secrets.” He forced a smile. “I like being a man of mystery.”
Catherine folded the damp cloth and placed it on the floor, away from the wooden night table. “All right. Let’s start with the simple stuff. How long have you been working as a courtesan?”
“Eight years. This is my second contract. All Guild contracts are for five years.” Nothing confidential there; the Guild requirements were public knowledge.
“What did you do before you signed up?”
“I was an actor. After that, a sanitation plant manager.” He laughed at her expression, a mixture of horror and curiosity. “A garbage man, in other words. I supervised other garbage men but I had my own route to follow every day, picking up trash bins and cleaning them out.” He mimicked the action of emptying a garbage can with both hands, hoisting them up over his head.
Catherine frowned. “A garbage man? But I thought—” She gestured at him, fingers fluttering. “Your training—”
“Not many people walk into the recruitment offices fully trained for this type of job. The Guild takes care of that, picking out your assets and building on those to create a good courtesan. But you need some natural talent to start with, of course.” He waggled his eyebrows, seeing the flush on her cheeks. “I passed the preliminary interview with flying colors.”
She shook her head. “A garbage man who ends up working on a Mercy ship. I can see why they demand you keep your past secret. Hardly the romantic image the Guild would want to project.”
“It’s not our images we project.” Sean shifted his hips rather suggestively.
He rested his head back on the wall and waited.
So far, so good.
Nothing he couldn’t handle.
“Where were you before you joined the Guild?”
And right into the fire.
“Vegas Four.”
Her eyes narrowed and he knew she was going through the math, doing the numbers and hoping she wouldn’t get the right year.
He’d save her the effort.
“Yes I was there during the outbreak.”
Catherine looked away. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be there. I read reports but—”
“It was as bad as you can imagine. And worse.” He closed his eyes, summoning up the images. “What I was talking about before, about men losing control. I was there, I saw the animals take charge, the raw emotions overriding what made us human.”
The pain in his chest started, an angry worm threading its way through his body.
“We were supposed to be civilized men and women carving out a new life on a new planet. We worked together as a team, everyone doing their best to make the colony better. I didn’t ask for the job of garbage man. I pulled the ticket from the hat and I didn’t dispute it because at that time and place it was what was best for all of us. They didn’t need an actor, they needed a strong body and a smart mind to organize and move the garbage before we made ourselves ill.” He shifted on the bed, stretching his legs out.
“When people started getting sick and dying we thought we could handle it by ourselves. We had the medical experience and the organization and the supplies to either contain it or cure it. We’d all had some basic medic training, enough to know how to handle outbreaks like this.” He saw Sara and Jacob in his mind’s eye, both smiling. “We thought it was another variation of the flu, that it’d run its course in a few days or weeks, taking a few lives but leaving most of us alive and weak.”
“Except it ran rampant and the death ratio was high, almost ninety percent,” Catherine said in a whisper.
“Yes. It gutted our infrastructure from the inside out. The disease wasn’t picky, it took its victims randomly. There was no obvious connection to point at, to research about. All we could hope for was to create a vaccination or some sort of cure and distribute it among the uninfected.”
“But there was no cure,” Catherine said. “I mean, on-planet. The antidote had to be manufactured elsewhere and shipped in. You didn’t have the facilities.”
“And time is money. Or, in this case, lives. It all started to break down when we realized the cure wasn’t going to arrive before the scales tipped in favor of the plague, when more of us were dead than alive. The riots—” Sean broke off, shaking his head.
“I remember when the first ships landed and transmitted back the photographs,” Catherine whispered. “The images were horrific.”
The pain in his chest jumped up to inferno level.
The burning vehicles.
The burning houses.
The burning bodies, stacked up to eye level.
Sean rubbed at his eyes. “The rule for sanitation engineers was we weren’t supposed to pick up medical waste, ever. That was for the special units the Council created. They’d come out to the funeral homes and the houses and the hospitals and pick up the bodies to take them to a special area for burning. There was no burials, no cremation other than the fires to try and keep the plague contained. Everyone got a few muttered words from the handful of priests who dared to stand by the edge of the pits.” The rough laugh tore at his throat, shocking both of them. “The special units gave up after the first week—those who weren’t dead or deserting to take their families out of town and run for the mountains. By the end we were tossing the bodies into the backs of our garbage trucks and running full loads to the fire pits two, three times a day.” He swallowed hard. “We became field medics, doing what we could to keep the survivors going even as we hauled away the dead. The medical staff was overwhelmed and we could, at least, get around with our trucks, keep on our routes no matter what and help the living. We delivered foodstuffs and did what we could for the survivors before we dragged out the dead.”
“Did you have any family there?” She took his hand.
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “You’ve seen my portfolio?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “I couldn’t help it. Belle showed me everyone’s.”
“This wouldn’t be in it.” He forced a smile. “The Guild doesn’t want all of the little details given out to the public. I worked as an actor on Ares before any of this.” A note of pride crept in as he recalled the shows, the applause of the crowds.
Catherine nodded.
“Sara and I, we met and married there. She was working as a salesperson in the box office when I came in with my troupe, fresh off a series of shows on one of the space stations. One night she came to the back rooms after a performance and told me how much she liked my work.” He smiled, remembering the shy woman approaching him for the first time. “We fell in love and got married a month later. She didn’t have a problem continuing on with the troupe when it’d come time to rotate to a new venue but I did—she deserved a stable home, not living out of a suitcase. When they offered free passage to Vegas Four for homesteading couples we jumped at the chance to head out an
d start a family.”
He stopped talking for a second, the mental images threatening to overwhelm him.
Catherine squeezed his hand. “You must have been pretty good on the stage to woo her from there.”
A coarse laugh broke free. “I guess so. But when we got to Vegas Four there was no place for actors, only garbage men. I didn’t mind, not when I found out she was pregnant. A single man can live on cheap noodles but you can’t raise a family on an actor’s salary.”
His chest ached but he fought through. The pain was cleansing in some way, the hurt of keeping it inside easing. “Sara, she decided to keep Jacob home from school when it started. We all thought it’d be a temporary thing, a rush through the sick and weak among us and it’d be over. It was a horrible thought, a cruel thought, but when you settle on a colony world you tend to think in those terms.” Sean brushed his knuckles over his heart, pressing down. “Two weeks later we went to the hospital with Jacob. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t—”
His chest tightened.
He couldn’t breathe.
Catherine put her free arm around him. She began to stroke his hand slowly, making shushing noises.
“We buried him the next day in the back yard. I wasn’t going to take him to the pits, I couldn’t do that to him. Sara was heartbroken, so upset.” He wheezed through the pain. “I stayed home that day and let my men do their jobs. Those who were still alive and willing, that is. Those who weren’t looting and running wild, taking advantage of the situation.”
“I heard it was bad,” she whispered, so faint he could barely hear it. “I had no idea—”
“What I said about losing control I said from seeing it up close and personal.” He spat the words out, resisting the urge to grind his teeth together. “Our leaders, the men we’d elected to take care of us all, raced to their ships and tried to leave. It was only the blockade and quarantine that kept them in place, forced them to stay with the rest of us. They retreated to their walled estates with their security systems and watched us break down, watched the society we’d carved out of the wilderness descend into barbarism through their security cameras.”
“They abandoned you.” She rubbed his arm now, fingertips dancing over the light blue fabric. “They weren’t fit to lead.”
“Sara was the one who told me to go back to work, told me I was needed. She could cope, she’d be fine as long as I came home every day.” The words stuttered out. “My men needed me to carry them through this. It wasn’t so much the plague now but the bodies that kept stacking up, the horrible results of so many deaths now taking their toll on those of us who’d survived the first rush. The smell, the—” He stopped, tasting the foul stench of decay in the back of his throat.
Catherine didn’t say anything.
“The contaminated water, the rotting food, the—” He caught his breath. “And the plague was still running through us, picking off a second wave. Then the third and the fourth.”
He looked at his hands.
Rock-steady. Not a twitch.
“A few days after I went back Sara fell ill. I came home from a shift and found her on the floor, gasping for air. I did what I could with my limited supplies but it wasn’t enough. We went to the hospital and lay in one of the hallways. There were no beds available.”
His fingers trembled. “It lasted only a few hours. We didn’t have any body bags left.” The tears were flowing freely down his cheeks now, unchecked. “I took her home and buried her in the back beside Jacob, in her garden. She’d loved that garden, worked so hard on it. I couldn’t take her to the pit and dump her in with the others. I couldn’t do it to her. So I put her under the rose bushes we’d paid so much to import and that she’d loved so much.” He coughed. “Then I got back on the truck and kept doing my job.”
“Until the relief ships arrived.”
Sean nodded. “Most of the leadership had survived, hidden away in their castles and forts. They came out and tried to take charge again. But many of us, the ones they’d abandoned, had had enough of them. Another wave of killing started, of revolution. If you survived the plague and the diseases, you risked being dragged outside and shot for simply surviving. By both sides—the leaders who wanted to stamp out any rebels and the rebels if they suspected you had anything to do with the government. Guilty because you didn’t die.” He looked at the ceiling. “I was a garbage man, I was a field medic, I was a necessary cog in the machine for both sides. Me and my men survived because everyone needed us to clean up the mess. But we stood by and watched it all wash over us, the guilty and innocent alike.”
He flexed his fingers. “In the end the riots claimed almost as many as the sickness had. But I lived and took the first chance I could to leave Vegas Four to start anew.”
“With the Guild?” Catherine probed gently, wearing a wisp of a smile. “You could have gone anywhere with the free passage offered to every survivor. Why, of all things, would you sign up to be a Mercy man?”
He looked at her now, unafraid of letting her see the raw wounds. “Without my Sara and Jacob anything I did was meaningless. A new world, a new colony—what would I do there? At least with the Guild I could help others find happiness, find pleasure where previously there wasn’t anything for them to live for. I lived in that world for too long, where love was a dirty word because it’d interfere with your survival.”
Her touch inflamed him, ripping open the carefully stitched scars he’d grown over the years.
“You did what you had to do. What you needed to do.” Her whispered words pulled him into her embrace, a reverse of what they’d done only recently.
“Yes.” There was nothing left to say. He felt empty, like the energy had been sucked out of him and only a shell left behind.
He wallowed in her arms, feeling the temperature rise around them. Her skin was silky soft where his cheek brushed against it. The pulse at the bottom of her neck throbbed under his touch.
There was silence for a few minutes, a blessed solitude. He drew a deep ragged breath into his lungs and found no pain there.
Catherine stroked his hair, fingers dancing through the black strands. “Silly question. Was there a large amount of Irish settlers where you were born? I wouldn’t have thought there’d be such a group on Ares, much less Vegas Four and your accent—”
Sean looked up at her. “None, actually.” He spoke plainly, something he hadn’t done in almost a decade. The words gushed over his tongue freely without the usual restraint. “I’m technically Irish by my bloodline. But no accent, hasn’t been in my family for years. The Guild taught me how to put it on. They said it adds an exotic air.”
“Exotic?” Catherine giggled. “An accent doesn’t make you sound exotic.” She looked at him with a weary smile. “There’s more to being sexy than just an accent.”
“Of course there is,” he said in a drawl. “Especially when it involves the tongue.”
Catherine giggled. She leaned forward—
And stopped.
Sean looked at her and saw the conflict in her eyes. She wanted this but was afraid to make that final decision, unable to push herself one step further.
So he made the choice for her.
He crossed that space and kissed her, pushing them both into a whole new reality.
Chapter Twelve
The world spun around him in a blur of sensations and emotions.
He was supposed to be the expert here; he was the one who was supposed to be in charge—even when he wasn’t paid to be. He’d been trained to act and react in a certain way guaranteed to evoke a positive response from the client. It was all about working the equations and delivering a wonderful experience while keeping himself in check and in control.
It was all gone.
He’d spent years building the mental shields necessary for this work. M
onths of training to build it up and keep him from feeling.
She’d torn it all away with a single kiss.
“Don’t move,” her whispered order came, freezing him in place.
Catherine moved to straddle him, pinning him to the mattress with her hips.
He didn’t move.
She needed this. She wanted to be in charge of something in her life, and right here, right now it was the two of them.
He needed this. He wanted to feel again.
She unbuttoned his shirt, first slowly and then with frantic urgency.
He kept his hands down at his sides, waiting to see what she would do.
Catherine pulled the open shirt off his shoulders and yanked it down his back, tugging his arms behind him and effectively trapping him.
A moan escaped but otherwise he didn’t say anything.
He couldn’t have formed the words even if he’d wanted to.
The shirt rested against the base of his spine, tangled between his fingers. He couldn’t move unless he ripped it.
He didn’t want to.
Not yet.
Her hands shifted away from his chest and moved up to his head. Fingers pulled at his hair, forcing him forward.
It wasn’t hard to obey.
Hot, moist lips devoured his, the heat burning away all hesitation. His hips bucked forward as she deepened the kiss and took total control.
Catherine gripped him at the back of the neck with one hand, the other sliding down between her legs to cup him through his jeans and squeezing with just the right pressure to drive him crazy.
He bucked against her touch but couldn’t get away. His self-control shredded, he was about to come in his jeans like a teenager on his first date.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Enough.
He wrestled his hands free of the shirt. A shake of his fingers and the tangled fabric flew away, letting him rise up to face her directly.
He was destroyed and totally at her mercy. She was in charge here and there was no denying it, no delaying the obvious. She was going to have her way with him and he was fine with that.
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