“I’ll keep that in mind.” Jamie ducked her chin again, releasing him from her gaze, and swiped her finger through the hologram to change the display. “I also ran a couple of searches while Ankari was talking to the captain, to figure out who Lord Felgard’s most notable friends were, at least the ones in the public databases, to see if any of them live here. You said Mandrake’s bounty originated here, right? From one of the cloud cities? But you didn’t know which one?”
“No, I—” Sergei had still been thinking about alluring lips and captivating eyes, but he made himself focus on her words. “Who’s Lord Felgard?”
“The captain didn’t tell you about that? He and Ankari kind of… killed him.”
“Kind of?” Sergei asked.
“I wasn’t there for the final moment, but apparently, one of his carnivorous plants actually ate him. But he might have been shot and then had the plant thrown onto him. The captain and Ankari might have had something to do with that. It’s not their fault, you see. Felgard was after our business in the first place and had us kidnapped, and—oh, it’s a long story. I just figured that if you want to know who’s after Ankari and the captain now, it would make sense to start with friends of the recently deceased. And eaten.”
Sergei couldn’t help but smirk at her irreverence. “I see the deaths of finance lords distress you greatly.”
“Oh, yes. Greatly.”
“After both of them, you said? As far as I saw, Mandrake was the only one with a bounty on his head.”
Jamie nodded. “I don’t think anyone actually saw what happened in the end. There was some pilot flying an escape shuttle for Felgard, but Lieutenant Sequoia blasted that out of the air before it got off the island. It’s natural that people think a mercenary would be responsible, I suppose. Ankari is just a sweet, innocent woman, after all.”
“Uh huh. I saw how sweet and innocent she was today when she was planting her heel in that downsider’s ribcage.”
Jamie had been alternating between grins and mischievous gleams in her eyes throughout the conversation, but her face faltered now. “Yes, she’s very competent. I wish…” She sighed, dropping her gaze.
Sergei groped for something reassuring to say. Not everyone had a combat background, and there was nothing wrong with that. She had proven she had other ways of taking care of herself. He was already impressed with all the skills she had learned at such a young age.
“Never mind,” Jamie said and turned the display toward him. “There are three people who came up as matches, a finance lord—er lady, I guess she would be—who owns a private city in the southern hemisphere, and two aspiring finance lords who also live on the planet. One is here in MountSky Central. He’s a real estate mogul who has a chain of luxury spas that operate throughout the system.”
Sergei propped his chin on his fist and studied the picture and bio for the local person, a fit man in his forties or fifties. “Fletcher Fergusson of New Ayr? Sounds pretentious. What was his connection to this Felgard?”
“According to the public record—and when Ankari was researching Felgard, she found out that the public record isn’t necessarily all that accurate—they share an accountant and have gone on safaris and alien ruins tours together. They own—owned—a corporation together.”
“Any chance any of those four mainframe security computers are located at this Fletcher Fergusson’s home or place of business?” Sergei asked.
“No, I already checked, but that doesn’t necessarily make him innocent.”
“And does Fergusson own that corporation outright now? The one they jointly held?”
Jamie flipped through a couple of screens. “It looks like it. Tantamount Tours, Inc.”
“So Fergusson gained something from Felgard’s death.”
“Yes, it seems so. But he might have lost the comforting presence of Felgard’s wit and friendship in his life.”
Sergei grunted. “You’ve got a sarcastic streak I didn’t see at first. You’re not quite as innocent as I thought.”
Jamie opened her mouth, as if she might protest this description, but she ended up shrugging sheepishly. “You’re here as a favor to the captain because you feel you owe him one,” she pointed out. “People do do things for purely emotional reasons, not because money or power is at stake.”
“Hm, I suppose. I tend not to think of these wealthy people as being… people.”
“If anything, they’re probably more likely to give into human nature than the rest of us, since they can buy their way out of repercussions.”
Sergei scratched his jaw, noting that his short beard was in need of a trim and also that his most recent observation was true, that Jamie wasn’t all that innocent in the ways of the world. Or maybe naive was the more appropriate word. She still struck him as innocent and inexperienced in a number of ways. Such as… had she ever been with a man? If her father was as protective as she had implied, and it hadn’t been that long since she left home, perhaps not. All the more reason for him to turn his mind away from such thoughts. She deserved some handsome young pup who adored her and would make sure her first time was pleasurable. Of course, he might be the perfect person to ensure that her needs were put first. After all, he knew what it was like to have a horrific first time. He would want to make sure she enjoyed hers, that she was treated like a queen.
He swallowed. He needed to stop thinking about her in sexual ways. What was wrong with him? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around attractive women before. He had always managed to keep his mind on work. Maybe it was the fact that every new layer she revealed simply amplified the attraction he had felt toward her from the beginning, including the fact that she had done all this research for him in twenty minutes and that she hadn’t felt any need to gossip about him to her friend, even when he had provided what had to be scintillating gossip material. She probably hadn’t gossiped about anyone in her life.
“You’re thinking about visiting him tonight, aren’t you?” Jamie gave him that heart-stopping grin again. “Skulking into his house? Or, excuse me, infiltrating it.”
Sergei cleared his throat and shifted his leg so it would block her view of something new that had come up. “I was thinking… Uhm, you’re right. Even if it’s unlikely that this man has anything to do with Mandrake, it might be worth checking him out.”
“If we take the information in the public record as trustworthy, the odds could be as good as one in three that he has something to do with the captain,” Jamie pointed out. “And if not him, one of the other men lives on one of the cities we’re slated to visit later in the week. And the finance lady… We would have to think up something clever to find a reason to dock on her private island. But Fergusson—look, his office is only a mile away. At the Blue Heron Day Spa. I wonder if it’s possible to get a meeting with him. I could go with you, maybe pretend to talk about something related to our business, and you could look around while he’s paying attention to me.”
Sergei didn’t want some lecherous business mogul paying attention to Jamie, but had she just offered to go along with him to check on the man? “Why… I mean, I can find out where he lives and go tonight. You don’t need to endanger yourself.”
“Hm, I don’t know. His home looks pretty secure.” She turned the display toward him again. When had she looked up the blueprint to Fergusson’s palace in the city? She was fast. “Might be easier to get to him in his office. Though we’d have to check. He might not take appointments, or he might be booked for months out. Maybe I could put on something sexy and give his assistant a sultry smile. I’m not very good at that, but I could probably manage it over the comm. What do you think? Does he look like the sort of man who would make time for a young woman?”
“Er, maybe?” His mind had hiccupped at her offer to put on “something sexy.” What exactly might that be?
“And if we get in, maybe you can talk straight to Fergusson. Act like you’re one of the people who’s hunting the captain and that you know you can get hi
m…” She snapped her fingers. “On account of your shared past. That would mean that you can get close. There’s some verisimilitude there, eh? But you could tell him you want a hundred thousand aurums instead of fifty. Yes, if you try to bargain with him, he’ll bargain back if he’s the right man. And if he’s not, he’ll give you a blank look, and we’ll know he’s not the one. A couple of hours wasted, but nothing more. But I wouldn’t be surprised if all these people talk to each other. He might let slip a clue about who set the bounty even if he’s not the one responsible. What do you think?”
“That you’re…” Thinking faster than I do, Sergei thought. “That if you’re willing to go along with me, and if we can get an appointment to talk to him, I’d be foolish not to accept your offer.”
“Good,” Jamie said with enthusiasm that surprised him. Dare he hope she was excited at the idea of spending time with him? Going off on some adventure together? She glanced toward the front of the shuttle. “Ankari was trying to put me to work making comm calls for the business. Did you hear that? I know she was joking, but I’m really not that busy, and I feel bad saying no, but I don’t like administrative stuff. I’m much better with parts than people.”
“Me too,” Sergei said.
She cocked her head, and he realized he might have just implied he had some secret aptitude for mechanics.
“Parts of people,” he amended, though he immediately winced. That had been macabre. Even if it was true. Walking through a graveyard or a crematorium would bother him a lot less than dealing with crowds of people. He doubtlessly found the idea of performing customer service even more horrifying than Jamie did.
“That’s awful,” she said, but her smirk encouraged him. She stood up. “I’ll go see if I can make that appointment, shall I?”
“Yes, but wait—” Sergei jumped to his feet.
She arched her brows.
“I want you to know how much I appreciate your help with this. It would have taken me all day to do the research you did in a half hour.” Or all week. “Is there anything I can do to return the favor? Aside from getting you out of secretarial duties, that is?”
Jamie chuckled, then tapped her lip thoughtfully, gazing out at the promenade. One of the mechanical elephants was ambling past, no less than four children dangling from its back. She didn’t seem to see it. She turned her gaze toward him and looked him up and down. For a mortified second, he remembered the earlier problem that had come up—alas, his intermittent sexual thoughts had done nothing to deflate it—and started to shift his hips away from her, then decided a silhouette might be worse. He stood absolutely still, hoping her perusal had been brief enough that she hadn’t noticed anything untoward. Maybe she had even noticed something she liked. He knew he was being delusional, but she was taking her time responding, and for a moment, he allowed himself to wonder if her answer might be a request for him to show her the ways of love that she had only read about in books.
“Could you teach me to fight?” Jamie asked.
His dreams of tender lovemaking shattered. “Er, what?”
“Not to be a mashatui practitioner or anything fancy, but I’d like to be able to defend myself from attacking downsiders. And—” her eyes and her voice lowered, as if from shame, “—from groping mercenaries too.”
“Someone on the ship has groped you?” Sergei whispered, his voice harsh, almost hoarse with the surge of anger that filled him.
She winced at his tone, and he struggled to calm himself. He knew all about the shame that came from being a victim, but if someone was bothering her, he wanted to do something about it. Mandrake should have done something about it already. This wasn’t the Fleet where he had no power over superior officers; it was his own company, damn it.
“Does Mandrake know?” Sergei asked.
Jamie looked up, her eyes widening. “No, no, it’s nothing to bother him with. It’s just the not-so-accidental brush-ups and the comments that I’m probably not supposed to hear. When I tried to take one of Sergeant Hazel’s judo classes, it was fine when I was working with the women, but a couple of the men… Look, it’s not a big deal, nothing to bother the captain with. It just makes me uncomfortable on the ship.” Her eyes had lowered again, such a contrast to the grinning woman who had plotted an infiltration on the fly.
Sergei wondered if he was getting this admission because he had shared an admission of his own. Maybe she knew he would understand. Did she know he would very much like to give her a hug? He clasped his hands behind his back instead.
“I thought if I knew a few defensive moves, I’d have a little more confidence,” she said, “and the courage to look them in the eye and tell them to back off. But knowing any one of those men could beat the tools out of my box—I’m afraid to rock the boat. Or the ship.” Jamie shrugged. “They never bother Ankari.”
“Of course not. She’s sleeping with Mandrake.”
“No, it’s more than that. She beat up Striker when we first came on board, when we were still prisoners. That got around, and nobody bugged her even before it was common knowledge that she was seeing the captain.”
“She beat up Striker?” Sergei probably shouldn’t have sounded delighted, when Jamie sounded miserable relaying her experiences, but the notion of a girl knocking Striker on his ass tickled him. Oh, Sergeant Hazel could handle him, but she was as muscular as a lot of the men on the ship and had been born with a gun in her hand, if one believed the stories.
“Yeah. And nobody bothers Sergeant Hazel, either. I assume they all know she can defend herself. And Lauren… Well, she hardly ever leaves the lab, and she’s always so absent-minded that she probably wouldn’t notice a horny merc rubbing up against her.”
Sergei had no trouble imagining that scenario. “They’re also not quite in your squadron.”
She frowned up at him. She hadn’t heard that expression? Or she actually didn’t know that she was, as the ancient fairy tale said, the fairest one of all? The sort of woman that reminded a man of the spring sun and grassy meadows and the innocent joys of youth? Granted, Sergei had never experienced any of those joys of youth, but he remembered a few of Mandrake’s stories about growing up in the near-wilds of Grenavine. Jamie was doubtlessly different from the jaded and hardened female mercenaries, soldiers, and pirates that the crew ran into on missions, not to mention the beleaguered prostitutes that most men had to settle for during shore leave. Even if she didn’t see it, he had no trouble figuring out why she might star in the fantasies of so many of the men on board.
“Never mind,” Sergei said. “That shouldn’t matter. You’re right—they should behave themselves.” He didn’t feel at all hypocritical saying that when he had been fantasizing about her since they met, no, sir. And what exquisite difficulty he would have grappling with her on a gym mat without letting his touches linger inappropriately. He was not the right person for this task. Why had she asked him? Sergeant Hazel was down here without anything more to do than he. And what about her friend Ankari? She clearly knew a move or two. Though, she was busy. Even now, her voice drifted back to them as she discussed treatment options with one of those callers. “I will teach you, for as long as you feel you need it, but most men should back off if you tell them to. Trust me, nobody’s going to beat the, what did you say, tools out of your box? Instead, they’ll probably slink away, crushed by your rejection.”
“That hasn’t been my experience.”
“That’s because you don’t reject them firmly enough.” He wondered if he was setting himself up to receive one of those rejections. No, he wasn’t going to ever proposition her. Hadn’t he already decided that? Too bad his hormones hadn’t gotten the message. “You had flowers where you grew up, right?”
“Yes…” She gave him a strange look—like how could someone not have grown up with flowers?—but it switched to a sympathetic one.
Sergei rushed on before she could ask if he’d had flowers. “Your scientist friend can correct me if I’m wrong, but flowers always h
ave some way to protect themselves from being eaten by animals, right? Like a bitter taste? Or a natural pesticide.” Where in the system had he come up with this analogy? He wasn’t even sure if he knew what he was talking about. “Or thorns,” he said, inspired.
“I suppose.” By now, Jamie must be wondering how her request for self-defense lessons had turned into a gardening chat.
“So, you’re like the rose. You’re vibrant and you taste good.” As soon as the words came out, he realized how idiotic—and perverted—they sounded. Jamie’s eyebrows flew up too. “I mean to animals. I think roses are edible to people, too, but what I’m saying is that you need to be like that rose. You need to grow a few thorns, so you can repel unsolicited advances when necessary. You don’t have to change your personality to become less appealing, but if you can scratch someone who comes on too strong, that’s all it’ll take.”
“It might take some time to figure out how to do that. That’s not my natural instinct. I’ve always avoided conflict and been shy around authority figures.”
“Well, we’ll work on it, all right? You’re probably right in that knowing you can defend yourself will give you more confidence to tell the Strikers on the ship to back off. And in the meantime…” Sergei looked her square in the eyes. “If anyone bothers you, let me know. I’ll be your thorns.”
She smiled up at him again, and his chest swelled with the realization that he would very much like to knock someone on his ass for her, to do anything necessary to protect her. Damn, he was obsessed. How had this happened so quickly?
“Thank you,” Jamie said. “It’s getting late, so I better go see if I can make that appointment.” She put a hand on his shoulder and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek, her lips sending a jolt of desire through him as they brushed his skin.
He caught himself reaching for her and stopped. Still smiling, she jogged toward the front of the shuttle. That had been the kiss one gave to a friend or a relative. Nothing more. He knew that. Somehow that knowledge didn’t do anything to tamp down his desire. How was he going to survive wrestling on a mat with her? Limbs entangled for throws and escapes…
Mandrake Company- The Complete Series Page 58