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

by H. E. Trent

  “With Erin in the middle.”

  “Like I said, just get into a room—alone—with the two of them and see what happens.” Amy pulled away and grabbed a muffin off the cooling rack. She had an unusual tolerance for Terran wheat. He hoped that some intrepid scientist would study her and figure out which genes made that possible so they could be switched on in other people.

  “I mean, we’ve got a perfect opportunity, right?” She took a bite. “We’re pretty much trapped in this house for a few days until the storm passes. You won’t be able to completely avoid them, no matter what you do, so you might as well test the waters.”

  “I understand. I think. Your use of so many Earth idioms confounds me at times.”

  “Eh. Watch enough of their television programming and you’ll absorb them without knowing you are.”

  “Who has time for television?”

  She thumped his back and walked away, taking another muffin as she went. “You do. We’re stuck here, remember?”

  His stomach lurched at the mischief in the grin she tossed over her shoulder at him.

  Stuck, indeed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Erin honestly hadn’t given much thought to sleeping arrangements since the start of the storm, but given the sudden crowd in the main house and the rapid approach of bedtime, Courtney certainly seemed to be.

  In the gathering room, when Court paced past Trigrian for the fifteenth time in a minute, he grabbed his mate by the waist and pulled her into his arms. “Stop fretting.”

  Erin, lounging somewhat haphazardly on one of the rounded benches on the first tier, scoffed. “You’re telling a McGarry not to fret? You should know better by now.”

  “I know better.” He gave Court a kiss on the cheek. “That doesn’t mean I won’t stop trying to recondition her.”

  “Good luck,” Court muttered through a tired smile as she put her head back on Trigrian’s shoulder.

  Erin had the sleepy feeling, too. Every muscle in her body was screaming either for rest or for her to consume enough caffeine to confuse her brain into thinking she’d slept.

  One of Owen’s new motion sensors had gone off during dinner, and he and Erin had hurried out to the gate only to find some sort of Jekhan sheep-goat creature had gotten stuck while trying to squeeze itself under the fence.

  Owen had freed the skittish animal with Erin’s help—all the while pondering aloud if the beast might taste good—and they’d returned to the house sore and drenched. She wanted a hot bath and to go to bed, but the bath would apparently have to wait until they’d worked out the sleeping arrangements. With all of the refugees and farm hands under one roof, that was not likely to be an easy feat.

  “This is what we deserve for never getting around to clearing the junk out of that fourth bedroom.” Courtney escaped from the cage of Trigrian’s arms and paced.

  Trigrian ground his teeth and gave Erin a searching look.

  Good luck, bud. She’s all yours.

  “We’ll make doing so a priority once the storm passes,” Trigrian said on a sigh.

  “You’ve got the baby and a belly full of another one.” Erin turned her face toward the bench cushion. “You’re obviously not going to get displaced from your room.”

  “But who’s going to be sleeping with me? You and Amy? Brenna?”

  “This isn’t summer camp. Given the bisexual tendencies of probably ninety-five percent of the males on the farm, divvying rooms by gender isn’t the safe bet you think.”

  “You assume that any of them find the others attractive,” Trigrian said sourly.

  “True.” Erin pushed up onto her forearms and wriggled her eyebrows at him. “But who all do we have? There’s you and Murk. Esteben. Headron. Owen. Herris is around here somewhere. Always forget about him. He’s rarely here.”

  The man was still on his unceasing hunt for the daughter he’d gotten separated from during the riots. He’d barely made his way back to the farm from his last jaunt, depressed and empty-handed, in time for the storm to start.

  “And we’ve got the two farmhands,” Trigrian said.

  “Lelto and Callo. Shit, that’s right. They’ve been so quiet.”

  “Afraid we’ll kick them out,” he said. “They offered to sleep in the barn, but that would be utterly unacceptable.”

  “How about we put Trig, Murk, and Esteben in one room? Owen, along with the farmhands—who are brothers, by the way—can sleep here in the gathering space along with Headron and Herris. Kerry and I can sleep with Erin, and then Fastida, her mother, and Brenna can take the last bedroom.”

  “What about Amy?” Erin asked.

  “She’s skinny and can squeeze wherever. She can flip a coin and decide whether she’d rather have baby feet in her face all night or listen to Fastida talk shit in her sleep.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Great. I’ll go implement it.” Court started walking away as if she were going to do just that, but she stopped, turned on the heel of her soft-soled Jekhan-style shoes, and pointed to Erin.

  “What?”

  “Did you get a message from Amy’s pile o’chips?”

  Erin closed her eyes. “Yeah. Probably the same one you got.”

  “Who was the message from?” Trigrian asked.

  “Lil Devin, and she encoded the shit out of it. Took twenty minutes for my personal COM to crack the encryption.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Just to tell us that she was sending someone off-planet to fetch our grandfather.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Nope. She didn’t give a lot of information, so I guess I can’t really believe she’ll come through.”

  “We’re used to that, though,” Erin said. “She never says much. I guess she doesn’t want us to get our hopes up.”

  “More likely that she thinks we still don’t trust her. She’s a smart lady, but she’s really gotta start forgiving herself. She didn’t ask the Fates to bestow her with a megalomaniac little boy. I feel sorry for her.”

  “Me, too. I’d be mortified if some kid of mine turned out to be a steaming garbage pile like Reg.”

  “Why would she even bother telling you the scheme?” Trigrian asked.

  “Probably because she thinks we’re going to have to shelter Granddad, or that his presence on the planet will create some additional fallout,” Erin said.

  “As if we’d mind a little more chaos.” Court sighed. “What do you think he’s like after all this time?”

  “I’ve wondered that, too.” Erin forced her body upright and pulled in a deep breath. So tired. “I’ve wondered if he’s been thinking about us, or Grandma. I wonder all the time if she’d even recognize him.”

  “Of course she would.”

  “Maybe.” Erin shrugged. “Maybe not. She’s certainly changed a lot.”

  “And he’s supposedly been in stasis for many of the years he’s been gone so he probably looks exactly the same as when he left.”

  “Good thing he was so much older than her to start with.” Erin chuckled. The senior Owen had always joked that he’d robbed the cradle, but the truth was, the woman who later became his wife had been seventeen at the time of their meeting. They’d married the day she turned eighteen. He’d been thirty-one. “What’s a few years in stasis to true love, anyway?”

  “What do you think he’d say about us?” Court smirked.

  “He’d probably shake his head and apologize to God for not setting a better example.”

  “In my opinion, he set a fine example,” Trigrian said.

  “You’re so sweet.” Court circled back to him, pushed up onto her toes, and planted a tender kiss on his jaw. “And to think,” she said, looking at Erin. “He already has me, and he’s still nice.”

  Trigrian smiled and slid aside the closet door he’d moved in front of. The rarely accessed cubicle held cloaks, pillows, and spare linens. “I don’t want to think about what sorts of men you entangled yourself with before you ca
me to this planet if being treated poorly is your general expectation.”

  “Yeah. Don’t think about them,” Erin said. “You’ll just get angry. They were good-looking, though. They were disgusting, self-centered twatwaffles, but all incredibly attractive. I guess that’s fine when you don’t intend to keep them, huh?”

  Trigrian growled, but Court probably didn’t hear him. She’d picked up her pace and moved even faster out of the room.

  Erin chuckled to herself. There was nothing more amusing than teasing an attached Jekhan male about his mates, and in spite of the hard time she gave Murk and Trig at times, she really did admire them and respect them for how well they treated her sister. Erin couldn’t have picked better men for her if she’d tried…and on Earth, she’d certainly tried more times than she cared to recount.

  Erin shuffled tiredly toward the bathing room. Situated on the opposite end of the house from the kitchen, the room contained a tub the size of the largest aboveground pools on Earth, but it was set into the floor and the water was heated using several quiet, efficient pumps that also kept the contents pure. She’d mistakenly called the room that contained the only bathtub on the property a “bathroom” upon arrival, and had been quickly and vociferously corrected by both Trigrian and Murki. The semantics mattered to them. On Jekh, bathing was more about self-care than sanitation and, in spite of the size of the tub, bathing alone was normal and expected.

  Erin hadn’t taken much advantage of the bathing room—showers were far more efficient at the end of long days—but she had time on her side and sore muscles in need of tending.

  She shook out a bit of grass that had somehow clung to her hair during her tango with the sheep-goat and tapped the stereo panel Court had installed at the start of her pregnancy. Court was a small lady and just didn’t do pregnancy well. Her men had been pushing her to spend more time in the water, and she’d reluctantly obliged.

  As Erin grabbed towels from the shelf, she smiled at the queued playlist. Old favorites of their grandparents. The blues her salt-of-the-earth grandmother always shook her hips to when she was elbow-deep in biscuit dough. The rapid-paced fiddle music their other grandmother tapped her foot to while folding clothes.

  The R&B. The country. Something from all four. Erin missed every one.

  “Ugh.” She ground the heel of one palm against her eyes and forced the tears back in. “At least they’re alive and I know where three of them are.”

  “Who?”

  She dropped her hand, opened her eyes, and found a barefooted Headron leaning against the doorframe.

  All at once, she was aroused and distressed at the sight of him. He was so beautiful and so kind, and almost every encounter with him made her grin. She couldn’t have him, though, and she hated that her aroused body kept betraying her. Under different circumstances, he would have been a man she’d want to hold hands with during movie dates, and who’d she’d wake up every morning with sweet kisses and slow sex. She’d live to see him smile, instead of feeling guilty that he enjoyed her company too much.

  This has to stop.

  She rubbed her temples and turned her gaze toward the clear water. “Close that door, would you? You’re letting the steam out.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt you. You weren’t in the bedroom, and I needed to know where you were.”

  “I’m here.” She set her towels on the ledge behind her favored bench in the deep tub. “Washing off the sheep-goat taint. Come on in and keep me company.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m not Jekhan. Bathing isn’t a religious experience for me. I assure you, you’re not committing any major gaffe.”

  “So, I can assist you?”

  Slowly, she unbuttoned her pants, cringing all the while. “You know, I’m a big girl. I don’t really need the help. You can join me if you’d like, though.”

  He canted his head. A swath of his dark locks fell loose from his high bun and landed just at the corner of his upturned lips.

  She still couldn’t fathom that a man that beautiful crawled into bed behind her every night.

  She closed her eyes against the sight of him. Looking at him made righteousness a chore she’d far too willingly relinquish. He was just getting prettier the more she tried to ignore him, and no less kind.

  Maybe Jekh is just a different kind of Purgatory, and I’m stuck here until I learn not to be a shitheel.

  She sighed. “I mean, unless joining me would be ruining your religious experience.”

  “Looking at you is a religious experience.”

  “You’re full of shit, Headron, but keep talking, anyway.”

  They undressed quietly and set their soiled clothes into a shared pile. They were going to the same room, anyway, and their laundry would very likely end up being washed in the same cycle.

  “I’ve never bathed with a woman before,” Headron said as he stepped nude down the first of the two tub steps.

  “Really? Not even your mother?”

  “Perhaps when I was quite young, but I imagine my fathers would have borne the brunt of my care at that age. By the time I moved in with my uncle, I did a fine enough job bathing all the important bits of myself. Uncle had to tend to my hair, though.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Four.”

  “Four. Wow. I clung to my mother’s legs until I was six. My kindergarten teacher had to have a bit of an intervention because I was such a punk.”

  “You’re Terran,” he said reasonably. “Your mothers are…different.”

  “Right.”

  He was sitting too far away, so she reached across the staircase and grabbed his wrist. “Over here.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Headron,” she warned.

  Don’t wait for me to change my mind.

  He grinned and stepped around the stairs, settling in beside her on the stone bench.

  “Now put your arm around me so I can lean on it,” she said.

  “Like this?” He slung his arm around her as she’d instructed, and she closed her eyes, put her head against his shoulder, and slouched indulgently.

  “Mm. That’s nice,” she said.

  “You’ve bathed with others?”

  No way in hell I’m answering that.

  “I…think I was the one asking the questions,” she said.

  “I thought I’d answered satisfactorily.”

  “I wasn’t done.”

  “Oh.” He chuckled, or purred, or whatever dangerously sexy sound that was. Didn’t matter. Her body would have liked any sound he made just as much. “Continue, then.”

  “I guess I’m having a hard time grasping the idiosyncrasies of Jekhan biology that would cause women to isolate themselves from their children when they’re so young. Humans are wired a lot differently.”

  “Yes. I understand that Courtney and Murki had some conflict over the care of Kerry early on.”

  “They were getting in each other’s ways, which I guess was incredibly frustrating because they both expected the other to behave in a manner opposite to the way they were coded to.”

  “To be clear, men on Earth are not often primary caregivers?”

  “Nope. Because of that whole hunter or gatherer thing, I guess. Women tend to stick close to the home with the kids and men go off to slay beasts for dinner. Of course, in modern society, we’ve made allowances to help women use their other skills outside their homes. There’s group childcare, for instance.”

  “Unnecessary here.”

  “Yeah, I would imagine so since every child has three parents.”

  “And we typically live with several generations in one home. My Jiro grandfather spent as much time with me as my uncle.”

  Erin nodded and trailed a fingertip around his bobbing knee. Talking about his family always seemed to be a nervous trigger for him. She knew, though, that at some point, she needed to ask the tough questions, and no time would ever be any better than the present. She wanted to k
now things about him, and also, she didn’t want to monopolize the conversation every time. In spite of what he might have thought, worlds didn’t revolve around her.

  She planted her hand atop his thigh and squeezed, and that was a risk, because she wanted to touch so much more. Higher, and less tenderly. She wondered what noises he’d make then.

  Stop it.

  “When’s the last time you saw them?” she asked on a breathless pant. “Uh. Any of them?”

  He pulled some air through his teeth and slouched lower into the water. “The last time… The last time I saw my mother was just after the first soldiers arrived. She’d gone to visit her sisters on the southern continent, and I have no way of knowing what happened to her. She may be fine, for all I know, but if she’s collecting her messages, she’s certainly not responding.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not an uncommon story, unfortunately. I believe most of my family was separated during the assault on Buinet. My sire was imprisoned over some supposed insult along with my grandfather. My uncle—”

  “The baker, you mean?”

  “Yes. He had the good sense to grab me from the house before troops arrived in our neighborhood. My second father took his two children to their cousins, supposedly. I imagine they are well. There are often COM messages stored for his family name that hint to me that they’ve been collecting them. I leave them be for the most part. I assume that’s the safer option for all of us.”

  “You must not have been close.”

  “With my siblings?” He traced the shapes of her fingers atop his thigh beneath the water, and then laid his hand atop hers.

  Good. No risky exploration now.

  “No. Not so close, but I was much older. I didn’t know them because I was with my uncle. It wasn’t like with the Beshnis or with Trigrian’s family where there were several children in short succession.”

  “Or like Court’s kids.”

  A girl, and a little boy. According to the doc, Trigrian would have a son. He’d dreamed of having a daughter like Murk, but he’d gotten over the disappointment quickly enough. Jekh needed strong little boys, too, and Erin didn’t think Court would have a problem trying again for another girl once her body put itself back together following the birth.