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

by H. E. Trent

  Esteben went to the door and opened it a crack. “If you don’t mind,” he said to whoever was on the other side, “perhaps you could find a different bed tonight?”

  The intruder went away.

  Esteben closed and locked the door, then tossed Headron a clean cloth from the face bowl.

  None of the bedrooms had attached bathrooms yet. Attached wet spaces simply weren’t customary, however Trigrian and Murki had been making plans to modify the house to account for the mixed composition.

  The best anyone could do, without resorting to streaking naked down the hall post-coitally, was to clean up using the big water pitchers and basins in the rooms, and then dump the water the next morning.

  While Headron cleaned up, Esteben settled into the bed beside Erin and pulled the covers over them both.

  He turned her onto her side and nestled her ass against the hard protrusion at his crotch.

  “No,” she said, squirming. She didn’t want anything near her ass at the moment, and especially not anything the size of that thing.

  “I wasn’t asking. I’m simply holding you.” He draped an arm over her waist and nuzzled the top of her head with his chin. “Look at him.”

  “Didn’t really need to be told to do that. He’s kind of hard to miss.”

  Headron shook his head, and smiled as he wrung water out of the cloth then swirled the rag down the length of his flaccid dick.

  “I imagine you’d think so, having shared your bed with him so many nights.”

  “Is that a note of jealousy I detect in your voice?”

  “Jealousy doesn’t come into play. I was where I needed to be.”

  “I see. And I imagine you’ll be going back there after the rains stop. The two of you can have your own little love nest, and I can have my bed back.”

  Headron draped the cloth over the side of the basin and turned in time for Erin to see him rolling his eyes.

  “Ignore her,” Esteben said. He raised the covers up for Headron to slide into on the other side of Erin.

  “Most girls don’t like hearing that,” she said.

  Esteben settled behind her.

  Headron lay on his back, smiling at the ceiling. “I imagine if you’d stop saying things we don’t like, we wouldn’t feel so compelled to tune you out.”

  “My opinion matters,” she said.

  “Of course, Erin. And I’ve heard it. Esteben has certainly heard it. We simply don’t agree with it.”

  “So, what, you’re just going to move into my room and take over my stuff?”

  “No,” Esteben said. “Nothing is final.”

  “Damn right it’s not.”

  “And besides, we’re more likely to all move into the cottage and leave this room open for some newcomer.”

  “Wait, I—” She squealed, because apparently, Esteben had seen fit to shut her up by mashing the devil’s doorbell.

  She scratched ineffectually at his hand, writhing uselessly. She wasn’t going anywhere. They weren’t going to let her go anywhere until they were done.

  He tapped repeatedly on her clit, sending tight, hot surges through her already overwrought body and making her double over as much as she could. Headron was in the way, but he kindly patted her arm and whispered, “There, there.”

  Esteben slipped his fingers between her thighs and up into her cleft. “How badly do you want to come?”

  She ground her teeth and locked her knees, but that was pointless, because he’d already pushed his fingers inside her and wasn’t likely to retreat.

  But he did.

  He pulled his fingers out of her. He put them directly into his mouth. “Mmm.”

  “Taste different?” Headron asked.

  Erin groaned and covered her eyes. She’d never been the kind of woman who was easy to scandalize, but they were doing a good job of it as a team. The old Marvin Gaye song “It Takes Two” suddenly came to mind.

  “If my memory is to be trusted,” Esteben said, “yes.”

  “How is it different?”

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” Erin said with some shame, “I’m right here.”

  “I don’t know how to describe it, beyond edible,” Esteben said. “Cunnilingus isn’t common in Jekhan trios.”

  As outrageous as the conversation was, Erin’s curiosity was working in overdrive. What’s a little more shame?

  “It’s not?” she asked and dropped her hand.

  Esteben shrugged. “It hasn’t really been in vogue. Certainly, we had knowledge of the intimate act through oral lore passed down from our human ancestors, but the drive to perform the act was very low.”

  “You’re irresistible, Erin,” Headron said. “You smell divine. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “You’re full of shit. Both of you.”

  Keep lying to me, though.

  “If I smell divine, it’s only because I’ve spent so much time in front of the oven waiting for bread to finish baking,” she said bitingly. “You smell flour, sugar, oil, and yeast.”

  “No, what we smell is not bread. He’s being quite honest.” Esteben settled his chin atop her head again. “Beautiful hormonal cocktail, as it should be.” His voice was a deep, sleepy purr against her back that had the opposite effect of what she needed. She needed to roll away and find someplace else to sleep that wasn’t between the two of them, but her body wanted her to stay put. It wanted her to fit herself even more snugly into the nooks that made up Esteben’s solid front. It wanted her to pull Headron closer so she could sling a leg over his body and thread her fingers through his satiny hair.

  The best she could do was stay very, very still and breathe through her mouth. They thought she smelled good. She thought they must have smelled even better. Pheromones muddled and collided, and she couldn’t tell which scent belonged to whom. She could only tell that the notes in her nose were strong and masculine, and evidently meant for her.

  They had her sleepier than a well-nursed kitten—absolutely sated.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  “Maybe Court was right,” she whispered to herself. “We’re ping-ponging hormones off each other.”

  She cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and wondered if perhaps she could find a woman for them through a matchmaker.

  Headron curled his fingers over her waist and let out a long breath. “I suppose this is what normal feels like. Or close enough to it, considering the rural surroundings.”

  “Would you rather be in Buinet?” Esteben asked groggily.

  “Would you?”

  Erin opened her eyes, waiting for his answer. She couldn’t see his face, turned as she was, but she was curious. He was a city boy. They both were city dwellers, just like Court and Erin had been.

  Court had adapted, though, along with Jerry and Murki.

  “I thought I minded more,” Esteben said after a couple of minutes of silence. “But it’s not so bad, is it?”

  “I miss the bustle sometimes, and the unpredictability.”

  “Yes. The commotion is easy to miss, but I believe things are unpredictable here, too.”

  “Property disputes,” Erin muttered.

  Esteben grunted. “Plenty of those.”

  “Why isn’t there a land office or something? A place where people go to register for particular lots?” She freed herself of the men’s grips and rolled onto her belly so she could look at them. “I mean, I know the arrangement around here was that the Terrans were only pretending to have taken over, but what if there was some sort of small government office to handle that shit? Temporarily, anyway. Until all the cowboys go home. If there’s a system in place, they can’t try to buck it and then expect to take what they want scot-free.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Headron said. “Certainly, Courtney could register on behalf of Trigrian until circumstances change, and others could do the same for their Jekhan partners.”

  Erin meditatively fondled a curl over her ear. “The hard part would be spreading the word to make sure eve
ryone knows that nobody gets to keep any land around here unless the tract is logged and approved or something.”

  “There is no official government in Little Gitano,” Esteben said. “There never was, even before the Terrans came to Jekh. The village was always managed on common sense, and that was good enough for the locals.”

  “And I don’t want that to change. I don’t want Little Gitano to lose its charm. I want it to be more or less the same after all is said and done, with the exception that Jekhans aren’t afraid to show themselves.”

  “Perhaps you should call for a meeting in town and discuss implementing your ideas.” Headron planted one of his large hands on her shoulder and dug his thumb into the blade in a much-needed massage.

  So good. She practically melted into the mattress, becoming its newest immovable lump.

  He always knew what she needed, though. She was just a bratty, ungracious recipient.

  She lowered her head to the bed and sighed.

  “Someone else should,” she said. “I mean, I don’t mind broaching the topic to a group, but I know how things go. The moment you have an idea, people think you want to be the captain of the ship, and that’s not me. I’m an ideas girl, not a team leader.”

  “Perhaps you won’t be asked to serve in that way,” Esteben said. “There are plenty of military deserters in Little Gitano with leadership experience. Certainly, there are one or two who wouldn’t be opposed to spearheading such an initiative.”

  “Maybe. When the rain passes, I could feel out a couple of people and see what they think, starting with Allan.”

  While she was in town, she could also look into matchmakers.

  If push comes to shove, I’ll rustle up a woman for them myself.

  Preferably, one she never had to see. Just because she couldn’t keep them didn’t mean she wanted to have to look into the face of the woman who would.

  She’d never been into that kind of pain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “All right, hon, let’s try this again,” Eileen said to a very confused Ais.

  Reg’s Beauty was approximately twenty minutes away from entering orbit of the icy little rock Owen McGarry was supposedly in stasis on, and Eileen’s stomach was in knots. She hadn’t felt so nervous since the very first time she’d trotted her horse into a fairground arena for a barrel race, and that had been long enough ago that she didn’t want to do the math to figure out just how many years.

  The gravity of the situation had suddenly dawned on her.

  She was in outer-fucking-space in a tin can fueled by elements that didn’t even exist on Earth and that happened to be piloted by a man who was more gorgeous by the day with that damned beard of his he hadn’t thought to bring a razor to shave. Lord knew she liked a beard on a man. Also, she was trying to get a lady whose first language wasn’t English or any dialect of Jekhan to tell Eileen her life story in some semblance of chronological order. She suspected she would have better luck getting a dog to bark The Gettysburg Address.

  Sheesh.

  Pinching the bridge of her nose, she took a deep breath, and ignored Edgar’s chuckles from the captain’s seat.

  Ais, squatting behind them on the low stool she preferred sitting on, canted her head in her birdlike way.

  “All right,” Eileen said. “Who are your parents? Your mother and father?”

  “Don’t have.”

  “Because they’re dead.”

  “Dead? No… I…” Ais shook her head. “Don’t understand.”

  Eileen sighed and stole a glance out the front windshield.

  They were too damn close to that planetoid, and she had no idea of what they’d find when they got there. Edgar didn’t seem too stressed, but Eileen sure was. No one was responding to COM hails from Beauty.

  “Are you sure you don’t speak any Tyneali?” she asked him. “The computer’s translations aren’t making much sense.”

  “I never said I didn’t speak any.”

  Her jaw dropped. “You ass. You’ve been holding out on me!”

  He chuckled again, and she growled.

  Men!

  Looking at him and his devastatingly handsome face made her forget why “bachelorette” was not only her status, but also her calling.

  “The computer is faster, Eileen. Standard Tyneali isn’t structured in a way that closely corresponds to any other language I’m fluent in. I don’t think our problem here is with translation, but with the quality of the questions.”

  “Excuse me?”

  If she sounded pissy, she couldn’t help the tone. They’d been in that ship for a week with way too damn many near misses from apparent pirates for her liking, and she was shedding like a longhaired cat in spring from the stress. Edgar was good at keeping Reg’s Beauty right at the outer edges of much larger ships’ sensors, but he cut things way too close for comfort in her opinion. She didn’t think his comfort regarding the proximity was the slightest bit cute.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “What I mean is she’s answering truthfully, but what you’re asking her about are foreign concepts. She may not have a mother or father.”

  “How would that be possible?”

  “Ask her.”

  Eileen spun her chair back to the waif, who was winding the long braid Eileen had made for her around her hand. “Ais, who looked after you when you were little?”

  “Uh…” Ais closed her eyes and clucked her tongue rhythmically for a few seconds before responding in that guttural Tyneali.

  Eileen didn’t bother asking the computer for a translation. She looked at Edgar. “What’d she say, Captain?”

  “I believe what she said loosely translates to something like ‘lab manager.’”

  “Well, shit, girl. Were you born or were you manufactured?”

  “Don’t understand,” Ais said.

  Edgar gave her a couple of halting sentences of Tyneali.

  “Oh.” She narrowed her eyes and dropped her braid. “Manu…factured?"

  “Created,” Edgar said.

  “Bit of him, bit of her. Yes.”

  “Who him?” Eileen asked. “Who her? Humans? Other hybrids? ’Cause you look more human than most of the hybrids on Jekh.”

  “No. Uh. Human…uh.” She turned to Edgar again and said a whole lot of things that had him grimacing and scratching his head as he tapped some course corrections into the console.

  “What’d she say?” Eileen asked.

  “I think—and please don’t take my word for this—she’s saying that she’s the genetic offspring of a Terran male and a hybrid female.”

  “But she doesn’t know who.”

  “The way I’m understanding things right now, I don’t think the parents know she exists, either. Sounds like the Tyneali are having themselves a damn good time trying to breed the perfect little pets. I don’t know if Ais is supposed to be the end product or if she’s just one step toward their idea of perfection, but I suspect the latter.”

  “You think they’re going to keep on messing around until they find the right combination of genes to make a civilization viable?

  “Unlike the one on Jekh? If we’re gonna talk conspiracy theories, yes, that’s exactly what I’d say.”

  “But why would they? They’ve already abandoned the place.”

  He cut her a sideways look and slumped low in his seat, looking something like a princely pirate with his uncombed hair, short beard, and the top few buttons of his black shirt undone.

  She sighed for no other reason besides hormones. She wished for menopause or something to come along and knock her libido offline, but she didn’t think it worked fast like that. The hot flashes she was having had nothing to do with waning hormones. The opposite, most likely. She probably still even had a few eggs left she could hatch.

  “You’re a cowgirl,” he said. “You should understand the drive toward perfection better than anyone. Don’t you try to breed each generation of cattle a little bit stronger? Don’t you try to
breed out undesirable traits?”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s so the venture is more efficient. Doesn’t do anyone any good to have a bunch of skinny, aggressive cows. We farm ’em to eat ’em. I don’t think the Tyneali are eating folks.”

  “No, they’re vegetarian, as far as I understand.”

  “You kidding me?”

  He shook his head. “Yet another thing no one tells you in the briefing literature. They were supposed to be these savage beasts that devoured human beings whole, but they’re these scrawny beanpoles with flat teeth and whisper-soft voices. They do hiss when they get mad, though.” He cringed. “Scary-ass sound.”

  “With as many trips as I’ve made between Earth and Jekh, I haven’t seen a single one.”

  “I’ve spoken with a few. They were quite charmed by my error-riddled translations. For the most part, the planet is just a snow globe they like to peer into. They don’t want to interfere with anything inside. They won’t even give the thing a good shake. I’ve heard there are a few who pop in discreetly to deliver supplies to some villages, but I have no way of knowing if that’s true.”

  “Is true,” Ais said.

  “Is it? How do you know?” Eileen asked.

  “My…uh, how said? Lab?”

  “Your lab manager?” Edgar asked.

  “Yes. Send tools, him, on ship mate.”

  “Huh.” Eileen spun around and saw the COM panel blinking like Christmas tree lights on the fritz. “What’s wrong with it?” She tapped the proximity scanner to eliminate danger from the list of very real possibilities, but that didn’t help. “Shit. Is something near?”

  “Possibly.” Edgar straightened up and slipped his arms through his seat’s harness. “Buckle up. Might just be reading a ship that’s in orbit around the planetoid, but in case it’s something else, I want to be able to jump to maximum speed as soon as possible. Ais, find a better chair and strap in.”

  She seemed to need a moment to parse his command, but she finally stood, stowed her stool, and then moved to one of the bucket seats near the star chart display.

  “Looks like there’s an incoming communication as well,” Edgar said.

  “Should we answer? What if they think we’re Reg?”