“I didn’t do that.”
“You did. Twice.”
“Well, I was excited.”
“Good.” He pulled her closer, and they kissed for a while, not talking much after that.
* * *
Viktor woke to the faint scent of lavender and lilac in the air and the feel of soft tousled hair draped across his arm. He also woke hard, with his shaft pressing against Ankari’s thigh, memories of the night igniting his nerves. The map still glowed in the center of the room, giving him enough light to admire her sleeping form. His loins stirred further at the sight of a bare breast rising and falling gently with her inhalations. He tugged the Basaltar mink fur blanket up to her shoulders, lest he be tempted to disturb her sleep with further explorations of her body. Her sumptuous, responsive, agile body....
Down, boy.
The clock on the wall said it was early, and they had been up late. Very late. He would let her rest, simply enjoying the feel of her in his arms, the scent of her beneath his nose. He lowered his face to her hair, rubbing his cheek against it. He resisted the urge to growl, “Mine,” though only because she had teased him about growling.
Despite his resolve, his fingers strayed under the blanket, following the sleek line of her waist, the tender skin of her abdomen, drifting up to circle her breast, cupping the soft mound with his hand. She shifted, letting out a soft sigh, and he paused, a small part of him abashed that he might be caught fondling her and a much larger part of him hoping she would wake up and throw her arms around him, and that they would enjoy a couple of hours before he had to be on the bridge.
He rubbed his thumb across her nipple. It hardened beneath his touch, but Ankari’s eyes remained closed. He glanced at the clock again, trying to find the resolve to leave her alone, but the blanket shifted, falling away from her and revealing that breast again. He couldn’t ignore such an invitation. He leaned over her, exploring that pert nipple with his mouth. He licked and sucked, his own body responding, throbbing against her thigh, begging him to move on top of her, into her...
A hand found the back of his head, fingers curling into his hair, and he looked up. Her eyes were open to sultry slits, watching him through lashes that dusted her cheeks. His arm muscles quivered as he fought the urge to lower himself onto her right then.
“Did I wake you?” he rasped, not quite managing to sound apologetic. It was more of a pleading, Did you—I hope—want to be woken?
“Yes.”
“Do you mind?” Viktor lowered his lips to her breast again, hoping that if she did, she would forget soon. He slid his other hand down her waist, to the inside of her thigh, and found hot slick moisture there. He breathed in, the smell of her arousing him as much as the feel of her body.
“You can wake me like that any time,” she murmured.
Her words were like a starter’s gun, and he lowered himself onto her, taking her lips in his, shifting himself between her legs. She smiled against his mouth, wrapping her arms around him, arching into his body, letting him know that she didn’t want him anywhere else. He found her warm entrance and crashed into her, a wave surging up the beach. Their movements quickly became fast, frenzied, as if they had been apart for months instead of a couple of hours. They came together, the wave becoming a tsunami, a great blast that stole all of his strength and left him atop her, his face buried in her neck.
“You’re very good at that,” Ankari whispered in his ear, her nails scraping lightly down his back.
He feared he’d been doing little more than answering his body’s desires, but he accepted the compliment, knowing he’d taken his time and pleased her the night before. “I’d like to wake up to you in my arms every morning,” he said. It sounded hokey and maudlin, but he couldn’t find non-crude words for telling her about how he usually had nothing more than his hand when he woke up hard and that this was much better. He decided she would appreciate it more if he moved so he wasn’t crushing her with all of his weight, so he pulled her over with him, holding her against him, stroking her butt, not ready to leave her warmth yet.
“I’d like that too.”
The comm chimed, and Viktor sighed. At least someone’s timing had been better today, even if it was still two hours before his shift. Ankari kissed him, extricated herself, then pointed toward the door that led to the latrine.
“Mandrake here,” he said, watching the sway of her naked hips as she walked through the hologram to reach the door.
“Thomlin, sir. We got word back from Felgard. He refuses to meet you at a neutral location and sent the coordinates for the shuttle port on his private island instead.”
“He has his own shuttle port?” Viktor asked dryly.
“Apparently so, sir.”
“All right. How long until we reach orbit?”
“Less than three hours.”
“Good. Mandrake out.”
The comm fell silent at the same time as Ankari padded back across the room, allowing his admiration from a different angle this time.
She paused at the edge of the bed. “Do you need to get up?”
Viktor lifted the blanket. “Not yet.”
Smiling, she snuggled in beside him, and he wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“You look like you were planning on going into his base, not meeting in a neutral location.” Ankari waved toward the maps hanging in the air.
“Yes, I just made the request so he would believe we meant to deal straight, prisoners for money, that’s it. He has all of the advantages in his own lair, so he can’t be surprised that I’d want to do the exchange somewhere else. If I hadn’t made the request, he might have been suspicious.”
“He doesn’t have all of the advantages, either way.”
Viktor arched his brows.
Ankari smiled and slid her hand along his forearm, lightly tracing the muscles with her fingers. “You’re an advantage.”
Her faith pleased him. He hoped he would deserve it in the end.
“He’ll have good security too,” Viktor said. “I had my men trying to dig up information on any meetings he might be attending or public appearances, times when he’d be away from his base and we could ambush him, but he stays in his sanctuary these days, making others come to him. We’ll land and go in with a small team, our prisoners’ escort ostensibly. I’ll have another combat shuttle waiting over the mainland, ready to come in and help if needed.”
“Do we need to do anything?”
Stay out of the way and don’t risk getting hurt, he wanted to say, but she wasn’t the type to hide behind a man’s battle armor. More than once, she’d said she was willing to go in alone. Because she didn’t want him to feel obligated to help or to risk his people on her behalf, he knew, but he hoped he had a chance to show her just how valuable his people were. How valuable he was. When that had started mattering, he wasn’t sure, but it did now, no doubt. He kissed her shoulder.
“Is that a no?” Ankari asked, amused.
“Talk to him if you like, distract him. Figure out what he wants with you in the first place. If he’s busy trying to get something from you, he’ll be less aware of us and what we’re doing. Just don’t go off with him and let him dismiss us. I don’t want to lose sight of you.”
“I’d definitely rather be standing at your side. But if it’s possible we can reach an accord with him, make him a legitimate client, I think it’d be wiser to pursue that instead of jumping to violence. As you said, I’m sure he’ll have a lot of defenses, a lot of security people around. My guess, the only logical guess I’ve been able to come up with, is that he wants to force us to work for him illegally, chained in some basement, or to work on some project that we wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do on our own. But maybe we can get creative and make a deal.”
Viktor’s arm had tightened around her at this talk of forced service and basements. He made himself relax. “Will you think me unforgivably bloodthirsty if I admit I’m hoping he drives us to kill hi
m?”
“You don’t think we’d ever be safe again if we just walked away with a deal?”
“There’s that, but mostly I’m irritated that he betrayed me to all those other bounty hunters. I’m irritated that he’s caused you to be hunted and endangered, and I’m also irritated that he’s ultimately the reason that I lost my doctor. I want to jam a rifle down his throat and shoot. Many times.” His voice had descended into a low hard register as he spoke, and he checked Ankari’s eyes, worried he might have alarmed her. This wasn’t exactly bedroom talk.
She wore a thoughtful expression rather than an alarmed one. “She surprised me too. Your doctor. I think I understand her now, but when she came to see us... I wasn’t expecting her to become one of our would-be kidnappers.”
Viktor’s first instinct was to brush away this topic, to steer Ankari back to their plans for Felgard, but her words about understanding Zimonjic’s motivations made him pause. He so rarely spoke of personal matters and private thoughts to others in the company—even when he’d had Doc Aglianico, their meetings had been infrequent and had usually involved alcohol—but there were times, such as when he lost someone on his team, that he wished he did have someone who could commiserate with him. Punching the bag was an outlet, but when the anger waned, he was still left with an emptiness that grew harder to ignore as the years passed and the number of fallen comrades increased.
“I didn’t expect her to betray me,” Viktor said. “I wouldn’t have included her in that board meeting if I had.” Nor would he have authorized the use of deadly force if he’d thought for a second that she would be on that shuttle. “She was one of the inner circle. Even if she hadn’t been with us as long as the others from Grenavine, she understood.”
Ankari twisted her head to look in his eyes. “Can I speak openly about something?”
He frowned. “Of course.” It wasn’t as if she was one of his soldiers.
“Since I haven’t known you that long, I don’t know if it’s my place to... advise. Or, uhm, judge...”
“You wouldn’t be the first to point out my flaws.”
“I don’t know if this is a flaw exactly, but from what I’ve seen, you seem to put the Grenavine natives, the ones who work with you, anyway, onto a pedestal. Well, not a pedestal exactly. But I think you trust them more quickly and more fully than you would someone from another world.” He opened his mouth, but she rushed to add, “I don’t mean to imply that your people aren’t trustworthy or quality comrades—even Zimonjic thought she was acting for the greater good, protecting you from yourself.”
He closed his mouth. He had gotten some of the story from Sethron—the sergeant had been injured instead of killed outright in the firefight, and Viktor hadn’t had the heart to execute him after seeing Zimonjic on the deck. But he was still struggling to accept what she had been trying to do and how he had let himself become so unapproachable that she hadn’t thought they could find a solution that didn’t involve mutiny.
“All I’m saying,” Ankari said, “is that you seem to believe being from your home world and having shared the loss that you had makes them automatically more dependable and less likely to go against you. Even with me, you were only interested in me after learning about my father and my past, that I’d come from a destroyed world too.”
“It was the fact that you knocked Striker on his ass that interested me.” Actually he had found her attractive even when she was slumping against his chest, nearly unconscious after that first crash.
“All right, but you started to trust me more when you learned I was Speronian, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but also because you had learned mashatui from your father and that I knew honesty and integrity were always taught alongside with kicks and punches in that art.”
“And then I kissed you so I could steal your key,” Ankari said. “I wasn’t being all that honest with you.”
Viktor grunted. “You were a prisoner trying to escape. Your actions didn’t mean you couldn’t still be a person with integrity.”
“I appreciate that you were willing to think well of me, especially if that’s what got me here now.” She smiled and stroked the side of his face. “I just think it’s worth remembering that we’re all... people, no matter where we came from and what’s befallen us. We have all the failings of humans.”
He wanted to point out that he was very aware of the failings of humans, but he kept his mouth shut, grudgingly admitting that maybe her observations were worth considering.
“Perhaps this is too heavy a topic for before breakfast,” Ankari said, dropping her hand to his shoulder and rubbing the side of his neck with her thumb.
He didn’t mind heavy topics when they came with rubbing. Unfortunately, he should get up if they were going to be in orbit soon. There was still planning to do and meetings to call. “I can offer you breakfast if the night’s exercises made you hungry.” He shifted her aside so he could swing his legs over the edge of the bed.
“Certainly, and we can discuss something lighter while we eat. Such as... who this Willow fellow is.”
Viktor grunted softly. “I’d hoped you’d forgotten about that.”
“Not in the least.”
“It’s what my parents named me. You’re doubtlessly aware that trees, bushes, and flowers are—were—an important part of Grenavinian culture and religion. Plants have inspired a lot of names. I never found Willow to sound particularly manly, and when I got out into the rest of the system, I came to find it even less so. I wasn’t quite as brawny at eighteen—that’s when I left home to join the fleet—as I am now, so I was worried about being bullied. I signed up using the name Viktor, and that’s what it’s been ever since.”
“Why did that monk know it?”
“I’ve worked for the Buddhists before. Even though druidism was our official religion, there were a lot of Buddhists on Grenavine, too, and many of the temples out there today have Grenavinian roots.” He gave Ankari a significant look—she hadn’t yet crawled out from beneath the covers. “Speronian too. Anyway, they must have researched my past at some point, because they have me in their databases. I think they just insist on using the name because hiring a Grenavinian named ‘Willow’ is more in line with their tenets than calling in an ex-Crimson Ops soldier named Viktor.” He walked across the cabin to the kitchen wall and fished out a pair of glasses along with a couple of sausage-and-cranberry logs.
“Interesting. So your name changes, depending on the needs of the caller.”
“Guess so.” He plucked an apple from one of the trees, pulled out a few vegetables, and cut everything up for the blender. He hit the coffee button, too, in case one experience with his green drinks had been enough for Ankari. “What are you going to call me?” he asked a little warily as the blender wound down.
“That’s a good question. I confess I’m inordinately attracted to your soldier side...” A wry smile—or maybe that was a concerned one—flitted across her face. Right. Because being drawn to a killer wasn’t all that socially redeeming. There were times even he found it repelling and thought of heading off to pastures less bloodied. Unfortunately, he wasn’t qualified to be much else. He’d been a troublemaker as a kid and an awful gardener—nobody had been surprised when he had left home young to join the military. “I do like the idea of you having a sweet poetic side,” Ankari added.
“Hardly that.”
“A thoughtful philosophical side?”
“Hm.” Viktor took the glasses, mugs, and logs to the desk. “If you find you like being here for breakfast often, I can probably locate a chair.”
“The privileges of rank, eh?” Ankari shed the covers and walked over to join him at the desk. He admired the view and dearly hoped she wanted to spend more nights with him. Many more. Distracted by the thought, he almost missed the twist to her face—that was definitely wryness this time—as she picked up one of the sausage bars. “Which do not, it seems, extend to receiving better meals than prisoners get.”
<
br /> He probably shouldn’t admit that he actually liked the prepackaged food logs from Dekaron VI. He’d had various kinds of shelf-stable field rations and found these tastier than most, with all the requisite vitamins and minerals. Perhaps the titling lacked flare, but he liked a thing that stated what it was without pretension.
“Prisoners don’t receive fresh vegetables.” Viktor waved to her glass.
Ankari picked it up. She didn’t sneer, but she didn’t bounce with enthusiasm, either. “A perk only available to those who sleep with the captain?”
“Actually, there’s a hydroponics room and anyone on the crew can pick the vegetables and berries in there. Even Striker could have snatched you some if you’d gone through with your night of amore with him.”
Ankari had been in the process of taking a sip and managed to snort some of the drink up her nose at his comment. He smiled, pleased to have amused her.
“Did you just say amore? Maybe you’re a poet after all.”
“When you’re done, we’ll meet with your partners and my team and make our battle plan to maim, kill, or otherwise slay Felgard.”
“Or... maybe not a poet.”
“No,” he agreed.
They chewed and drank in silence for several minutes, made companionable by the way she leaned against him.
Eventually, she asked, “Will we be putting on clothes for this meeting?” and gave him a pat on the butt.
“I do allow for a liberal dress code here.”
“So, as long as we have a patch on our shoulders, we’ll be acceptable?”
“Yes.” Viktor had actually gone to a command meeting naked once. He decided that was a story for another time. They had a lot to do before heading down to Paradise.
Chapter 15
A sparkling blue ocean stretched beneath the shuttle while a cloudless azure sky filled the air above. They zipped past small islands, but the craft did not slow. Ankari, sitting beside Lauren and Jamie, watched Viktor for cues.
Mercenary Instinct (a science fiction romance) Page 24