Crux: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 2)

by H. E. Trent

  “Did they, now?” Try as he might, Esteben couldn’t picture a woman Erin’s size subduing anyone. Supposedly, she was in the range of average height for a woman of Terran lineage, but compared to the average Jekhan woman, she was a dwarf. Courtney was even shorter. She always looked so frail standing between her two men, but she’d proven time and time again there was nothing weak about her.

  Esteben found the Terran women to be so…cute, regardless of his biases toward their race in general. He wouldn’t throw any of the ones who frequented the farm to work or trade out of his bed. Especially not Erin. He had a special fondness for the gray-eyed harpy, in spite of the hard kick to the nuts she’d given him when he was ill in Buinet. At the time, that had been her only means to control him. He’d been wild, she’d been alone with him and frustrated, and had done what she had to, short of shooting him.

  He liked not being shot.

  “I bet she’d make a good fuck,” he said to himself, rubbing his chin.

  “What?” Murk asked.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said she’d make a good fuck. As long as the ‘she’ in question isn’t my child’s mother, you can fuck whom you’d like. I’m assuming you don’t mean her. I’m assuming your brain has recovered beyond that disconcerting state where you hopped from one idea to another without any sensible order, and that you’re talking about Erin.”

  Esteben shrugged. He didn’t see the point of denying the truth. “She seems like the sort who wouldn’t lie there listlessly, sighing and pleading with me to just hurry up. She might even move a little.”

  “She’s not Jekhan.”

  “Is that your way of confirming that Terran women are lustful?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t speak for all Terran women, and I’m certainly not going to give you any hints as to how Courtney behaves behind our closed bedroom door.”

  “I don’t need you to give me any hints. She certainly gropes you enough when she thinks no one’s looking for me to suspect that she’s an adventurous one, indeed.”

  Murk grinned. “She does have some difficulty keeping her hands to herself where Trigrian and I are concerned. I don’t think we’ve complained yet.”

  “I’m certain that where Courtney is involved, complaining would not only be unwise, but reckless.”

  Murk turned his hands over in concession and pushed away from the counter. “Shall I walk with you, or can I trust you’ll make your way to the crew on your own?”

  “I take it the industrious McGarry siblings aren’t far from here, then.”

  “No. They’re starting work out by the old hunter’s cottage Owen currently occupies. Five-minute walk. You know the way.”

  “Indeed.” Esteben turned his legs slowly off the bed and set his feet onto the floor. “I’ll use that five minutes to finish this dreadful coffee and enjoy my last remnants of solitude for the day.”

  “Haven’t you had enough solitude in your life? It’s not like our kind to want to be separate from others for so long.”

  “What I need and what I want aren’t necessarily the same thing.”

  “What do you need? And what do you want, Brother? You’ve never had a problem expressing that which you wish to acquire, so speak the words. Perhaps I can help you.”

  “I believe you’ve done enough for me, Murki.” Esteben clasped Murk’s shoulder on the way to the door, grabbed the last small wedge of cheese from the end of the counter, and then put his canteen to his lips as he stepped outside into the blinding sunshine.

  “Ugh.” He shielded his eyes, and did his best to ignore Murk’s throaty chuckles as he strolled away.

  Working outdoors had always been something other people did, not Beshnis. But as Murk repeatedly said, if Esteben wanted to stay, he had to contribute. He did what his brother required of him, not only because he wished to avoid conflict as much as possible with his closest relative, but also because he had to start becoming concerned with his reputation again.

  Murk was right that their kind didn’t tend to isolate themselves for long. Esteben craved touch as much as any Jekhan male. He simply wasn’t ready to be around people, besides Kerry, for more than an hour or two at a time. He wanted to be able to go home to his own bed in his dark little cottage where the only needs he had to be concerned with were his own.

  If he were alone, no one could insult him for being unable to convince his brain to work the way it had before Shaid had institutionalized him. They wouldn’t fault him for not being able to put pretty spins on words the way Murk did.

  What any lover of Esteben’s was going to get was bluntness, urgency, and more than a little self-loathing.

  He tossed his cheese rind into the compost bin on the way past and brought coffee to his lips once more.

  “As the Terrans say, ready or not…” he muttered. “Here I come.”

  ___

  Esteben was glad he’d taken the five minutes to gather his thoughts. Thanks to his calming walk, he was actually able to keep his mouth shut on one of his typical berating quips when he arrived at the rear of Owen’s cottage.

  He first saw the blond man who knelt beside a large open crate and wearing his usual Terran garb—denim pants and a shirt of a material Esteben believed was called flannel. The sturdy fabric suited the wildly vacillating daily temperatures of the region’s cool season.

  Owen McGarry was an interesting-looking man, for sure, with his softly curling, short-cropped hair and full beard. Those startling blue eyes like his sister Courtney. The same forbidding stare as both of his sisters. Although Courtney was minuscule—even for a Terran—and Erin somewhere nearer the realm of average, Owen seemed to have grown up just fine. He wasn’t as tall as a Jekhan male, but he certainly didn’t have any problems looking any in their eyes. Owen might have made some male a more than suitable partner, but as far as Esteben had observed, Owen had expressed absolutely no interest in taking a lover, male or otherwise.

  It wasn’t the sight of the no-nonsense Owen that immediately rankled Esteben’s already-frayed nerves, however, but Erin.

  She was leaning on a worktable, sliding a hammer from hand to hand across the rough surface, and looking a thousand kilometers away. She usually shared her brother’s preference for Terran clothing, but she’d apparently added a new garment to her rotation—one that was absolutely not hers. He knew, because he watched her through his window. He’d know her from a half kilometer away.

  Esteben set his canteen atop the table and pressed his hands to the edge, desperate to feel something solid and substantial. Desperate to get a grip.

  “Good morning,” he pushed through clenched teeth.

  “Morning,” she said quietly, and turned.

  Erin didn’t owe him smiles, but that didn’t stop him from feeling aggrieved that he didn’t get one.

  Her lush lips were pressed into a forbidding line and eyes were lacking their usual mischievous spark.

  “You cut off all your hair,” he accused. Almost everything he said lately sounded like an accusation, and he wasn’t so sure anything could be done about that. He needed practice. Much more practice.

  She swiveled her gaze upward as if she could actually see what wasn’t on her head anymore. “I cut it this morning. There was a huge debate for days last week. I guess you’ve been out of the loop.”

  “I have been, I suppose.”

  “My hair will be easier to care for like this,” she added after a moment, and her gaze fell to the canteen briefly before she turned back to Owen.

  “Our women tend to wear their hair shorter.”

  She nodded, and affected that thousand-kilometer stare again. “Yeah, I’m aware of that tendency. I think Fastida would be bald if her mother hadn’t taken the clippers away from her.”

  “Which is Fastida?”

  “Of the Jekhan women, she’s the younger, not-Amy one.”

  “Ah.”

  Fastida was one of the refugees from Buinet that Trigrian and the othe
rs had brought to Little Gitano along with Esteben. He didn’t remember the transport. He’d been having one of his blackouts and didn’t remember anything from that day.

  “Whose tunic are you wearing?” Esteben asked, but he suspected he already knew. He could smell the other man’s essence, that baker’s. He just needed to hear her confession so she couldn’t accuse him, again, of leaping to ill-formed conclusions.

  She looked down at her front, and tugged the hem that fell mid-thigh. The garment was far too large for her, but she’d belted it, and added a pair of tights that looked most incongruous with her rough black boots.

  “Headron let me borrow it. The hood is better than the one on my sweatshirt, and this puppy’s got deep pockets.” She jammed her fingers into the pockets and wriggled them as if to demonstrate.

  “Borrow,” Esteben muttered.

  She shrugged. “Maybe saying that he relinquished it would be more accurate. He’s got to know he’ll never get this thing back. He couldn’t have known about my track record with borrowing stuff, though, so I can’t fault him for his enthusiastic kindness.”

  Owen stood back from the crate he’d been rooting in and chuckled quietly. “I think you collect articles of clothing from your lovers the way some trophy hunters collect antlers.”

  Lovers. Esteben tightened his grip on the table edge.

  He hadn’t thought the baker had the balls.

  “Not just lovers,” Erin said brightly.

  “Any susceptible male who’d risk crossing your path, then.”

  “Anyone brave enough to consort with a McGarry should know they’re going to lose something in the ordeal. A baseball cap or a sweatshirt is a small price.”

  “And what do they get in exchange?” Esteben asked, somewhat under his breath, but she heard.

  She gave him the same sort of long stare that Courtney did every morning when she brought him food and his niece to say hello. The tendency must have been inherited.

  “Varies by the person,” she said flatly, scanning him from head to toe. “Are you volunteering to donate something to my collection?”

  “I generally prefer to be reimbursed for the things I have to lose.”

  She raised her gaze to his and cocked one hip. “You’d get the honor and privilege of seeing me wear it, but if that’s not enough for you, perhaps I could pay out of my coffee ration.” She rolled her eyes. “What’s left of it.”

  “Quit antagonizing him, Erin,” Owen said. “I’ve already got enough men in Little Gitano complaining to me about you.”

  She rolled her eyes yet again and unscrewed the cap of Esteben’s canteen. He suspected she was going to be disappointed.

  She squinted into the hole, groaned, and then muttered, “Damn.”

  “What is she doing to incite these complaints?” Esteben asked Owen, but he kept his gaze locked on Erin, who was looking at him somewhat obliquely.

  He could never tell if she liked what she saw. He used to be better at assessing what people thought about him. As a young merchant, he’d needed to be able to size people up quickly, but McGarry women weren’t easily readable in general. Not even Kerry was, and as her mother had reminded him—Kerry was an infant. Babies were supposed to be guileless.

  “I wouldn’t dare say she’s riling them up on purpose.” Owen held up what looked like a tiny antenna and squinted at it. “But there’s a general consensus in town that she’s being unfair by not picking some guy to pair off with.”

  Ah.

  Of course, a woman of her age and health would have probably been looked upon as a highly eligible mating prospect. Obviously, the baker believed as much.

  She shrugged. “I’m free to pair off or not pair off, just as I was on Earth.”

  “Yeah, and nobody’s going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, obviously, but you’ve gotta throw someone a bone. There’ll be riots. Those guys are hard up.”

  “We’re all hard up. Besides, I’ve been on this planet for less than a year. I’m still trying to get acclimated.”

  “Can you acclimate without teasing the male populace?”

  “What do you want me to do? I’d be teasing them even if I strolled through town wearing a burqa. They’re not particularly selective, and no girl wants to think she’s any guy’s only option.”

  “I understand that.” Owen handed Erin the little wire and then started rooting through the crate again. “But you’ve got to look at things from their perspective, as well. Just pick someone to show some superficial interest to, even if the interest is bullshit, okay? That’ll get the others to back off for a while.”

  “Whatever. You just don’t want to be constantly reminded that your little sister’s got more game than you.”

  Owen shook his head and extracted a handful of U-shaped nails from the box. “I’m fine with you being the party with more swagger if I don’t have to bear the brunt of the fallout. No one’s banging on my door looking for a hookup, and I don’t see that changing. They’re banging on my door to get me to intercede with you, and I hate being diplomatic, so fucking fix that.”

  “Okay. Shit.” She shrugged and, at Owen’s gesturing, walked to the fence post. “I’ll pick someone.”

  “Who?” Esteben asked, surprised by his sudden investment in that so-called superficial interest. “Headron?”

  She cast Esteben a sideways look.

  “You steal his clothes.”

  She reeked of him.

  “Can’t be stolen if it’s enthusiastically given,” she said.

  The very beginnings of a growl started rattling Esteben’s teeth, but Owen waved Esteben over, too, forcing him to tamp down the reaction.

  Esteben didn’t want to be angry about such a foolish thing, but the Tyneali part of him that was concerned with imperatives like mating didn’t appreciate competition. Not even for women he had no real intention of possessing.

  “All right, you two,” Owen said. “This is pretty easy, if not tedious. We’ll each take a third of the components and will leapfrog over the person or people in front of us to complete the posts ahead. We need to put a sensor on every post. They’re very simple to install, just be careful not to break the coating as you nail them on. Once they’re attached to the posts, removing them will be nearly impossible. The coating will start breaking down and will bond the wire itself to the wood, drawing it in as the wood expands and contracts with weather. That means we won’t have to replace them any time in the near future.”

  “That’s awesome,” Erin said. “They were a bitch for you to make, weren’t they?”

  Owen grunted and pressed a wire to the middle of the fence pole. “Getting the right chemicals for the coating was the hardest part. I got lots of funny looks in town when I was going from business to business about them, but that’s understandable. Some of those chemicals are used to make explosives.”

  “I knew I should have been keeping a better eye on you when you were secluding yourself in Montana. Is that what you were teaching yourself? What all the fun chemicals were that could make things go boom?”

  “Yeah. Being a McGarry wasn’t the only reason I was on the terrorist watch list.” Owen pressed one of the special nails into the wood, pushed the metal in as far as he could with his thumb, and then took the hammer from Erin, who was gaping.

  “You’re not joking,” she said.

  “Nope. I wouldn’t joke about that.” He tapped the nail in, flicked a splinter away from the sensor, and stood up straighter.

  “How the hell did you clear emigrations off the planet, then?”

  “Don’t be naive, Sissy. They preferred for me to leave rather than stay.” He handed a small bag of sensors and nails to each of them and rooted two more hammers out of the open toolbox.

  Esteben hadn’t thought anything could shock Erin, but apparently her brother’s free time activities came as a surprise to her.

  “I don’t even know you,” she confirmed as Esteben walked two posts ahead.

  “Y
ou know me just fine. Just because I have a specific kind of knowledge doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything with it. You kind of have to know how to make bombs so you don’t accidentally make them while developing other things.”

  “Still. You didn’t tell me about the watch list.”

  Even after Esteben had walked out of earshot of their conversation, he kept glancing back at the fiery woman wagging a finger at her older brother, who had the good sense to at least look a bit contrite.

  Esteben knelt in front of his first pole of the day, and watched Erin storm away from Owen, still yelling over her shoulder.

  Jekhan women generally lacked the sort of temerity the McGarrys exhibited, so of course, Esteben was fascinated by their exchanges.

  She definitely wasn’t the kind of woman who would just…lie there and wait for her lover to get off. She might have truly been the opposite kind of woman.

  He intended to find out.

  She might have been Terran, but his cock didn’t care, and it’d been too long since he’d found pleasure between a woman’s legs.

  She’d feel like bliss, and when he was done rutting, she’d smell like him.

  Not like that damned baker.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Erin recognized that she’d perhaps been a little rude in snatching the fresh thermos of coffee out of Esteben’s hands, but she had needs, and apparently Courtney had decided to punish her again. She hadn’t included any for Erin in the lunch she’d sent Trigrian to deliver.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he’d whispered.

  He’d been gone before Erin could figure out what the warning was in reference to.

  Esteben crouched in front of her, one reddish-blond eyebrow raised speculatively.

  She uncapped the container and took a long whiff like the true addict she was. “Mean of her,” she muttered, and inhaled again. “I think she’s punishing me.”

  “Why would she do such a thing?”

  “Who the hell ever really knows with Court? She likes to make me guess.”