by Robyn Bachar
“Do you dance?” Ryder asked.
Jiang froze mid-stride, like a vid set on pause. Her body radiated tension from the hunch of her shoulders to her hands curled into fists. The sight clashed with the Jiang he knew—under normal circumstances she was calm and confident, though often a little melancholy. This new, anxious Jiang was wound so tight he worried that she would explode.
He had several ideas on how to distract her, though few of them were appropriate.
“What?” she asked.
“I asked if you know how to dance.” Ryder swung his legs over the side of his bunk and stretched. “You always turn down shore leave so you’ve never been clubbing with us. Are you opposed to dancing, or is it just not part of your skill set?”
Jiang swayed as though off balanced by the sudden change in topic. “Why?”
“Well...” He approached her slowly. “We’re stuck here. We’ve got forty-seven hours before we reach our destination. We’ve gone over the mission parameters so many times that I can recite them backward and forward in three different languages. We need something to do. Otherwise you’re going to keep doing laps around the cabin until you either carve a path in the decking or wear out the soles of your boots.”
“So you want to dance with me.”
“I could dance by myself, but it’s not as fun.” He grinned, and was rewarded with seeing a degree of stress ease from Jiang’s posture. “Unless you’d rather do something else. Strip poker?”
Jiang laughed. “I’m still scarred from the last time we thought that was a good idea. I never needed to see that much of Tomas.”
“Yeah, no one should be forced to look upon his narrow ass.” Ryder shuddered in mock horror, earning another chuckle from Jiang. “That’s a no to strip poker. It’s for the best. Dancing is the better option. Aerobic activity. Gets the blood pumping.” His mind went off on a daydreaming tangent of ways that strip poker could have led to aerobic activity, and he swallowed a sigh of wistful disappointment.
Jiang tilted her head as her brow furrowed. “Hmm. I’m not sure. My instinct is of course I know how to dance, but I haven’t tried. Maybe I don’t know how.”
Ryder bowed. “Then it would be an honor and a privilege to teach you.”
“Shouldn’t we be focused on the mission? Practice hand-to-hand techniques? Data retrieval methods?”
“No, we’ll just overprepare. We need to blow off some steam to keep our minds and bodies flexible.”
“Flexible?” A sly smile spread across her face like sunrise after a long, hard night. Hot damn.
“You can never be too flexible,” he said gravely.
Jiang nodded. “Such is the way of my people.”
“Great. Now we just need some music.” Ryder grabbed his tablet. “This ship has a top-notch sound system. I’m sort of surprised that they didn’t gut it and sell it.”
Jiang snorted. “I’m sure they had their own pre-pirating playlist. Something to rev up for maximum bloodshed.”
“My money’s on something with lots of drums and electric guitar. All frenzy, no style.” Ryder shook his head. “Bloody pirates. Here we go.” He selected a song, and smooth Spanish guitar filled the cabin.
“I was picturing something more...clubby.” Jiang raised her hands and bobbed to the typical thumping beat of a dance club.
“Too simple. Much as I do enjoy shaking my assets, that’s pretty mindless. Not good enough to distract us from the pressure of the mission. I was thinking something more complex. Like the tango.”
“Which is...?”
Ryder tossed his tablet onto his bunk and then shook his head in dismay. “Core colonists. It’s a crime how little Earther culture you know. No respect for your roots.”
Jiang placed her hands on her hips. “Hey, I have long-term memory damage. I could have a doctorate in Old Earth history for all you know.”
“True. This is a formal dance—a ballroom dance, technically. I haven’t done it since school, so I may be a little rusty. I can’t promise that I won’t step on your toes.”
“Wait. You went to dance school?”
Ryder grinned. “Nah. I took dance classes in school, because I was smart enough to realize that it’d let me get up close and personal with all the flexible girls. Best decision of my academic career.”
Jiang laughed. “That’s terrible. Brilliant, but terrible.”
“The ballet portion was the trickiest part of the course. It’s not easy to hide a teenage hard-on when you’re wearing tights and a tutu.”
She shook her head as she failed to stifle a smile. “I have heard of ballet, but I can’t picture you in tights, or a tutu.”
“Lucky for you, there are no tutus in the tango. It’s a very sensual dance, all about connecting with your partner.”
“You want to teach me a sexy Old Earth dance?” she asked.
Fuck yeah. Ryder wanted to grab a handful of her long black hair, tilt her head back and kiss her until she was weak in the knees. To strip her naked, toss her down atop his bunk and bury himself in jasmine-scented heaven.
Completely inappropriate. His head knew that he should be ashamed for thinking that about a crew member, but his heart lifted at seeing her smile return, and his rock-hard cock had no shame whatsoever about what it wanted.
“Absolutely,” he said.
* * *
She looked him up and down speculatively. There were several dozen reasons why sexy dancing with Ryder Kalani was a bad idea, but foremost in her mind was the problem that they were crew members. Or at least they had been crew members—maybe they’d both been fired, and were going to receive their walking papers after this mission.
Regardless, sex between crew members almost always created drama for the whole ship after the relationship soured. It was hell to be trapped in a metal box in the blackness of space, unable to escape the person you’d broken up with. It was one of the reasons the captain’s brother, Tomas, was banned from visiting the Mombasa’s engine room—Tomas left a trail of broken hearts in his wake, and it was bad for the engineers’ morale. Jiang frowned as she imagined the awkwardness of avoiding Ryder, of losing his friendship and never seeing another grin beamed in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
She straightened and approached him. They stood toe to toe, and she craned her neck and peered up at him. Why did he have to be so damn tall? He had to be a foot taller than her. It almost made her want to invest in a pair of high-heeled boots.
“I’m not uncomfortable with the idea of dancing with you.” She raised her hands, unsure where to put them. Ryder took her right hand and held it in his.
“You put your left hand here.” He positioned it atop his shoulder, and then put his free hand around her, high on her back. Ryder was shirtless again, and his skin was warm beneath her palm. Jiang was eye-level with his chest, and she swallowed the sudden urge to lick him and discover whether he tasted as good as he looked.
Focus, Chen.
She cleared her throat. “Okay, now what?”
“There are a few different styles for the tango, even core colonist ones. We’ll start with a basic ballroom step for now. There are two components to a formal dance like this. First, you maintain a hold.” He lifted his arms, and Jiang was immediately distracted by the flex of his muscles. If nothing else, he was right—it was nigh impossible to think about the mission now. “And second, one person leads and their partner follows. They move together like one unit.”
“Who leads?” she asked.
“Me.”
“Why?”
Ryder grinned. “Because I’m taller. And you’d have a hell of a time trying to dip me.”
“Dip you?”
His grin widened, and he suddenly turned and spun her.
Jiang squeaked and grabbed hold of him for balance as he bent one knee and nearly lowered her to the floor, her hair brushing the deck.
“Hey!”
“Problem?” Ryder waggled his eyebrows, and she laughed.
“Don’t drop me,” she ordered mock sternly.
“Never.”
The teasing glint in his eyes vanished as his expression shifted from playful to hungry. Jiang licked her lips—his face was inches from hers, close enough that she could feel the brush of his breath against her skin. With his arms locked around her, holding her aloft, the warmth of his body enveloped her. She felt vulnerable held in this awkward position, yet completely safe—Ryder would never drop her. Her skin flushed with lustful heat as she imagined him lowering her to the deck and—
Focus, Chen. This was a mission, and Ryder was a member of her crew. She cleared her throat again. “Pick me up.”
“Yes, boss.” He rose and set her on her feet in one fluid motion.
Jiang raised her chin. “Okay, Chief. So I can’t lead unless I can dip you? That seems unfair.”
Ryder grinned. “Nah, I’m just kidding. You can lead once you get the hang of it. For now I’m the expert, so I’ll lead.”
“Yes, boss.”
His grin widened. “Careful, I could get used to that.”
“Have you ever thought of having your own ship?” she asked. “You’d make a good captain.”
“Nah. You?”
Jiang shook her head as she returned to the proper hold. “No. Too much drama. So, hands here, and then what?”
“We move together. In sync. This is a box step. I move forward.” He took one slow step forward. “And you move back.”
She blinked up at him, instantly forgetting that she was supposed to be stepping back. He was so close—too close. She nearly hopped as she retreated, and he chuckled.
“Close enough. Now we move to the side.” Ryder maneuvered her to his right. “Then I step back.” He drew her back with him, but Jiang overcompensated and stepped on his toes.
She winced. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry. It takes a lot more than that to dent these feet. Now we move to the side again, and then repeat.”
Jiang nodded. “I think I got it.”
“You’re good at hand-to-hand combat, this should be easy.”
In theory, he was right, but the reality of learning to dance with Ryder was far more complicated than trying to drop him in a wrestling match. At first she kept her head down as they waltzed around the cabin, watching the placement of her feet until the steps became familiar, but after a few turns around the room, Ryder chucked her under the chin.
“Head up,” he said. “You’re supposed to meet your partner’s eyes.”
“Why? I know what you look like.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “It’s part of the challenge. Can’t see where you’re going, so you trust your partner to lead.”
She nodded, but stumbled again. Trust itself was a challenge—trust was earned, but he’d earned hers. The next few steps were clumsy, but she settled into the rhythm as amusement sparkled in his eyes. Hazel eyes. Why hadn’t she noticed before that his eyes were hazel? Too much time being distracted by his dazzling grin, or the way his laugh sent a spiral of heat through her core.
Damn it. This was precisely the reason she didn’t go clubbing with the crew. She wasn’t ready for this—to desire someone when she could barely remember the husband she’d lost. How could she embrace love again without properly mourning the father of her only child?
Jiang drew to a stop and forced a smile. “Thanks. I think I’ve had enough for now. I don’t want to break your toes before the mission.”
Ryder chuckled. “You’d have to stomp a lot harder than that. You sure you don’t want to try a few more steps? We haven’t even ventured into official tango territory yet.”
“Save it for the next lesson, Chief,” she said. Anxiety fluttered in her stomach when she realized that her words implied there would be further lessons. Did she want that?
“Got it. We’ll stop here, but no more pacing.”
“Agreed. I’m done pacing. I’m going to meditate instead.” And do everything in her mental power to banish all lustful thoughts about Ryder Kalani.
Chapter Five
The shuttle arrived in the system without trouble, which in itself was odd. An occupied star system had border patrols, random comm chatter and other signs of interstellar life, but everything in the Arzamas system was quiet. Too quiet. A contaminated colony should have been broadcasting an automated warning to keep ships from landing, but there was nothing. If they hadn’t found records of the location no one would have known the colony existed at all.
“Ready?” Jiang asked. She’d donned her armor and equipment in record time, but Ryder frowned as he flexed his fingers.
“Almost.”
Pins and needles numbness pricked at his palm and spread through his hand, and that was not a good sign for his backup prosthetic. He should’ve had the thing looked at before he left, but he rarely gave the backup a second thought. His primary prosthetic was so reliable that he could almost forget it wasn’t the real deal. Almost, if not for the nightmares and flashbacks.
The tingling might be repaired with a simple fix like resetting the bond with his stump or replacing a failing power source—or at least it would be simple under normal circumstances. He didn’t have the tools or the time to make repairs, and if it was a complicated fix... Shit. He didn’t have a backup for his backup. He might be without an arm until they returned to the Mombasa.
Ryder flexed his hand one last time before tugging on his gauntlet. He’d suck it up and deal with the numbness for now, and worry about it later. He donned his helmet and sealed his armor. They weren’t expecting combat on this mission, but the suit would protect him from the radiation contaminating the colony and any other nasty biological hazards. Didn’t mean he liked wearing it. In his opinion the helmet’s bells and whistles interfered with reaction time—it was nice to have thermal vision, but not when it distracted you from spotting movement, just as the open comm channel was convenient but deafened you to the environment’s ambient sounds.
Plus it was a bitch to cram his dreads into the damn thing.
Ryder activated the comm in his helmet. “Good to go.”
They stepped into the airlock and sealed the door behind them. The pleasant voice of the shuttle’s computer informed them that decontamination would commence in ten seconds.
“Kinda seems extraneous,” he said. “Doing decontam before entering an abandoned colony that’s too hot for habitation.”
“Agreed, but it’s standard procedure,” Jiang said. “Besides, we wouldn’t want to bring some bug from New Hong Kong that might evolve into one of Maria’s mutant aliens.”
Ryder chuckled. “It’d be a change. It’s depressing, you know. Never finding aliens. You’d think we would have run into little green men by now.”
“If there’s intelligent life out there, it’s smart enough to keep out of humanity’s way. We have a long, bloody history of not playing well with others.”
“True.” The fact that they were deep in enemy space was a testament to that.
The decontam cycle finished, and the outer airlock door opened. With a hiss of hydraulics the ramp dropped, and their boots rang loud against the metal. Arzamas-16 had been constructed on a barren world with almost no valuable resources to speak of. A rugged mountain range surrounded the colony, jagged gray peaks spearing toward the bleak sky like broken fangs. The mountains had doomed the colony, trapping the radiation in the valley and concentrating it.
“This view isn’t very scenic,” Ryder said.
“It doesn’t need to be. Colonies like this are built for function, not form.” Jia
ng raised her tablet and tapped a few commands. “I’m inputting the local map into our HUDs. The main research facility is on the other side of the colony.”
“There’s another side? I have boots bigger than this place.” A map overlaid itself across his heads-up display, complete with an estimated distance to mission target. The settlement was tiny, with only enough habitat modules to support a few dozen families.
“At least it won’t take long to search. Let’s move out.”
“Do you think they had enough time during the evacuation to leave security measures behind?” he asked.
“It’s possible. Keep your eyes open.”
“Yes, boss.”
Ryder grinned as Jiang’s helmet turned in his direction—he could almost see her scowl behind the visor.
Ryder hadn’t spent a lot of time visiting colonies. During the war he had been deployed to a few core colonies, but the core colonies were different from small outposts like this. As the first successful permanent settlements the core colonies had time to grow and expand into their own unique worlds. But Class 3 colonies were difficult to keep afloat—they struggled from not enoughs. Not enough resources, not enough funding, not enough manpower, and so on. Arzamas-16 looked as though it had suffered from a bad case of not enoughs. The prefab structures huddled together in dull concrete clusters. Ryder blinked, wondering if his HUD had been somehow set to black-and-white, but no, their surroundings were just that monochrome.
“Do you remember anything about your childhood?” he asked.
“What? Why?”