Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  But was she fighting an urge to run to him or away from him? Strike that. Maybe it was better if he didn’t know.

  Her little StarDog seemed to be warming up to him and accepting him into her pack—or clowder, or boogle, or whatever term was used for a StarDog family. Little Luna was now just as likely to jump onto his shoulder as Ketsia brushed by him in the corridor as she was to stay with her mistress.

  And Ketsia didn’t seem to mind.

  Sometimes, the pint-sized creature would stay with him for haras, chittering, cooing, and purring softly beside his ear. Not helping, little one.

  He had no idea what she was going on about. If only he could speak StarDog, he might be privy to her mistress’s deepest secrets.

  No, cancel that. He didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to know what the beauty really thought of him.

  Luna suddenly jumped from his shoulder and skittered across the deck and up the wall to a duct outlet—her method of moving quickly between decks—and disappeared.

  Flight Deck seemed suddenly quiet and secluded without the little beast for company.

  And without Ketsia.

  Jagger kicked back in his flight couch, folded his arms, scanned his readouts, and stared out into the emptiness of the Bradley Rift.

  Captain Navene Jagger was quite possibly the most fascinating man Ketsia had ever met. It had taken days of living and interacting together, alone aboard the Banshee, before she finally began to see through the layers of staid Carduwan officer to the man at the core.

  Luna had seen through him much sooner.

  As soon as the little StarDog started warming up to him, Ket knew there had to be a prince in there somewhere. Luna was never wrong about people. Ever.

  Yes, Jagger put up quite a solid front—often arrogant and aloof. Sometimes rude. Occasionally scornful. But she’d had a few rare glimpses at another side of him. Like those brief moments when they’d shared their visions of creatures swirling in the depth of the Rift. He’d even laughed once, and she’d been completely enchanted. It was a genuine laugh, unhindered by layers of protocol and decorum.

  She wanted to hear that laugh again.

  She hoped it would be soon.

  Once in the galley, she opened the chiller and selected a meal then paused and selected a second. Jagger had been parked at the pilot console for most of the morning. He’d probably appreciate some lunch.

  A short time later, she carried their meals up the lift to the Flight Deck.

  Stepping off the unit, she noted the slight angling of Jagger’s helmet to the left, a subtle pointer that he was aware of her presence. There was no way that tiny gesture should’ve unleashed such a large flock of butterflies in her midsection, but it did.

  “I brought you some lunch,” she said, extending the steaming bowl of marro-broth and rice as she approached.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” he told her.

  She shrugged. “You’ve been sequestered on Flight Deck for hours. I thought you might be hungry.”

  He accepted the bowl from her with a nod. “Thank you.”

  She settled into the co-pilot console and cupped her bowl in her hands. “Anything on the scopes?”

  “Nothing. But that can be deceptive. Here in the Rift, the sensors wouldn’t pick up another ship unless it’s right on top of us.”

  Ketsia did a quick scan of the sensors on her faceplate. “That’s unnerving.”

  “Good with the bad,” Jagger answered. “It means other ships can’t detect us either. Not in the usual way.”

  “Can they detect us in an unusual way?”

  Jagger didn’t look her way, but his mouth quirked in a soft smile before he answered. “Yes. Via visuals. Line of sight.”

  “So that’s why you’ve parked yourself up here on Flight Deck? So you can watch for anything that might be coming?”

  “Partly.” He flicked a couple of switches on his monitor and swiveled in his flight couch, tilting the visor up to take in his surroundings. “But partly because it’s a chance to fly the legend.”

  Ketsia smiled “I didn’t know Banshee was considered a legend.”

  “Oh, yes. Zaviar Mennelsohn’s grand experiment.” Jagger ran a hand over the console. “His original B-class vessel.”

  “Zaviar,” Ket repeated quietly. “Jaeo’s brother.”

  “His genius older brother.” And Drea’s father. “May he rest in peace.” Jagger did a quick check of the blip that had entered scan range. No heat signature. Just a rock. “The siblings had a bitter falling out. Part of the reason Jaeo changed his name to Gant, as I understand it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not sure. Except…” Jagger paused to tug at the collar of his flight suit, “it had something to do with a woman, and it happened over ten calendars ago.” The Mennelsohn brothers’ feud had erupted just after he and Drea had parted company, so he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the events. “Anyway, this ship was Zaviar’s champion. The first ship to prove his theories that DEDspace existed. The first vessel to cross the flashpoint barrier. That was some thirty calendars ago, right here in the Rift.” If his memory served, Drea’s father had had some crazy notion that the charged particles in the Bradley Rift interacted with Dark Energy Dimension space. But it was a crazy idea that had proven to be right.

  “I don’t know much about DEDspace…except that it hurts,” Ket remarked.

  Jagger turned his head back to the stars. “The price we pay for slipping the bonds of 3D.”

  “To gain, we know pain,” Ket quipped.

  “A classic Jaeo-ism.” Jagger gave her a grin. She wished she could see the expressive brown eyes that accompanied it.

  Ketsia gestured to the monitor. “Would you mind if I take the controls for a bit?”

  After the last episode, she didn’t know how Jagger would react to her request, but he just shrugged with a bob of his helmet. “The con is yours.”

  “Practice makes practiced,” Ket replied with a smile. “Sheeban. Co-pilot Adey Tion, assuming command.”

  The ship pinged as it traded the control to her drive helmet. She gave the instrumentation a quick scan, noting nothing untoward in the status of the various systems and controls. Then performed a visual sweep of the surrounding Rift.

  All quiet in outer space.

  Though her inner space was quite another matter altogether.

  Jagger observed Ket from the relative obscurity of his helmet. Bringing him lunch. Keeping him company. Now assuming control of the ship and loitering on the Flight Deck for a time. It was almost like she enjoyed the camaraderie. “Practice makes practiced,” he repeated. “You picked that up from Jaeo, too.”

  “Actually…” He noted the long pause and the tension in her voice. “Jaeo picked it up from his bondmate Lonna, and Lonna picked it up from my sister. They were close friends.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “Had.”

  Jagger looked her way. It was obviously a topic better not pursued, but he couldn’t contain his curiosity. “She wasn’t rescued from Ithis with you and the others?”

  “No.” Ketsia seemed to fold into herself. “She died about a year before Operation Reset.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jagger squinted at some of the readouts. Poor kid. Must’ve been tough on her to lose her sibling.

  “Her death is the reason Sair escaped.”

  Jagger’s mind went instantly to torpedo lock. Ketsia’s sister was the reason Sair ran? Why? How? He struggled not to show any reaction to her statement. “Was he somehow responsible?”

  “No. But he blamed himself for not protecting her…” Ketsia fell silent, and though Jagger couldn’t see her eyes, he could read her grief in the slump of her shoulders and fall of her head. There was a lot more she wasn’t disclosing, but he didn’t want to press her. Not now. His curiosity about Sair’s previous entanglements could wait for another time and a different avenue.

  Yet it seemed Ketsia’s sister had been the catalyst for
everything—for Sair’s escape and the fated meeting with Drea. Like the fabled butterfly that flapped its wings on Parol and caused a tidal swell on Veros, a series of actions and reactions had made ripples in the universe, and the sum of that force had robbed him of his future with Drea.

  Like Hades. There was no force. There was only you being a heartless idiot.

  Right. He needed to put a lid on this. Find a way to douse the burn of past mistakes to stop them from flaring back to life, again and again.

  But then Ketsia drew in a deep breath and added her quiet but cool addendum, “Sair was my sister’s bondmate.”

  “He…” Their convo had just jumped to flashpoint in a hurry, and he was struggling to give chase. Sair had bonded with her sister while a slave? “How is that even possible?”

  “The usual way. They exchanged vows.”

  “I meant how was he allowed to bond?”

  “You know who he was? What the Network discovered about him?”

  “Yes.” Jagger expelled a slow breath. “I was there for the briefing on Spirit.”

  “Well, the Ithians knew, too. The premier gave him…certain allowances…exemptions that he would never have afforded to the other slaves. He allowed Sair and Saybin to bond.”

  Jagger jerked, twisting his head away. “Your sister’s name was Saybin?”

  “Yes.”

  The name Sair and Drea had given their infant daughter. Resentment flared in his gut. Drea had been so accepting of Sair’s sexual past that she’d allowed her daughter to be named for his former mate…

  Yet she couldn’t forgive me?

  The affront made his words come bitter and grating when they shouldn’t have been spoken at all. “It must’ve been difficult for him to be with you after she died.”

  Now Ketsia went quiet. She gazed out at the silent stars, her visor panning a slow arc from horizon to horizon. Then her voice came, cold as space. “For the record, Sair never touched me. Not in a sexual way. He was never anything but kind to me.”

  Wait. What? Jagger leveled his attention on her from behind the smokescreen of his visor. “He had the choice not to touch you?”

  Her chin lifted in defiance when she turned her head his way. “I was barely fifteen calendars old when I was added to the breeding stock. Not too young in the eyes of the Ithians, but Sair wouldn’t have it.”

  “So…” he muttered. “You’re a virgin then?” He mentally gave himself a punch for being so tactless.

  “I never said that.”

  Mental images of Ketsia in the arms of another man filled his head and twisted into a knotted cord of jealousy deep in his gut. “So what are you saying?” God, he had no right to question her. But—

  “I was with someone…once,” she confessed in a broken voice.

  “And it wasn’t Sair?”

  Her head snapped his way, her mouth set in a deep frown. “I told you it wasn’t.”

  “Yes. Right.” Jagger huffed.

  Ketsia cocked her head. Her voice carried an edge when she asked, “Why is that so difficult for a man like you to understand?”

  Jagger’s shoulders went rigid. “A man like me?”

  Her throat worked against the chin strap of her helmet and her mouth pressed into a thin line, but she didn’t respond.

  Did she know about his fall from grace? Maybe even from Drea herself? How did he expect her to see him then? As a cheater? A two-timer? A disloyal bastard?

  “What kind of man is that, Ketsia?”

  For a moment, she didn’t speak. Then, reaching up, she removed her helmet, slanting her head as she turned to face him. “A man who’s distant. Insulated. Isolated. Unreachable. Untrusting, even of himself.”

  Jagger clenched his teeth, baring them. “You’re dead wrong if you think that’s me.”

  It was a lie. She’d nailed it. She’d seen right through his defenses, swept aside the layers, and exposed the vulnerability he’d hidden away. He felt like he’d been stripped naked before her eyes.

  And not in a pleasant, desirable way.

  She continued to stare at him. And just when her scrutiny couldn’t have gotten any more agonizing, she said, “What happened, Jagger?”

  Jagger closed his hand like a claw on the armrest. “Don’t do this. Don’t bring Drea into this.”

  Ketsia’s mouth fell open. Shock and realization sparked in her eyes. “Drea? Drea Mennelsohn?”

  Gods! She hadn’t known. Here he thought she’d been taunting him, but she’d obviously had no idea of the history he and Drea shared.

  Until he’d just spilled it out on the deck at her feet.

  But Ketsia didn’t know the reasons Drea had left him. What an unfaithful wretch he’d been. What an undeserving bastard. And he couldn’t admit to that part. He didn’t want to see the loathing fill her eyes.

  “I need some water.” Jagger bolted out of his console and stalked to the lift, punching the controls to take him the hell away from her. While the unit descended, he stood rigid with his hands closed into fists at his sides.

  It had all been a game, just a stupid competition. A way for the students to thumb their noses at overbearing instructors at flight academy. Cockpit sex with his female peers. It didn’t mean anything, he’d justified to himself again and again. There were no emotions involved; it was just a stunt with a willing partner. An expected tradition.

  Five times he’d gotten away with it. Five times he’d accepted the quaint handmade trophies, the lewd congratulations and thumps on the back from his friends and peers. And each time his conscience took him to task, his inner asshole told him it was all okay. No one was getting hurt. She’d never know.

  And besides, for the sake of staying focused on training, he and Drea had agreed to hold off on intimacy until after graduation, so…well, he couldn’t cheat on his fiancée when he wasn’t even sleeping with her. Right?

  Wrong.

  So, so wrong.

  Nothing could ever ease the memory of the shattered look on Drea’s face or the pain of betrayal in her eyes when she’d discovered the truth.

  She’d walked away. After first setting on him with a vengeance in the final academy dogfight exercises and stripping him of valedictorian honors, she’d walked away.

  He couldn’t believe he’d lost her. For seven calendars, he’d refused to believe. He’d tried again and again to tell her, and show her, how much he still loved her. That he’d do anything to win her back.

  He barraged her—with messages, audios, invitations, gifts—for all of those seven long calendars. She’d denied them all. Rejected his gestures just as completely as she’d rejected him. Until they both started flying for the Network, allies in a common cause. And then she’d had no choice but to talk to him. With communications re-established, he was sure they’d reconcile. He convinced himself that when enough time had passed to soothe her pain and cool her anger, she’d come back to him.

  Until the night she’d made her feelings clear to him at the officers’ dinner on Spirit. The same night she’d introduced him to an escaped slave named Sair.

  The lift door opened, and Jagger strode for the galley, drew a tall tumbler of water from the tap, and swallowed it down in several long gulps. He thrust it back under the tap for another fill, barely registering the gentle ping in his helmet or the blue letters flashing an alert that he had the helm.

  “Jagger.” All the muscles in his shoulders went tight at the sound of Ket’s voice in the corridor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was about Drea. I just—”

  He turned on his heel and marched up to her, stopping well inside her personal space. She watched him silently, with no helmet to obstruct that beautiful face or startled expression. He clawed at his own chin strap to release it, jacking the helmet off to drop it to the deck. Intending to tell her to stay the hell out of his head and keep the fuck out of his past.

  But she stood her ground, peering up at him with those lovely widened eyes, with those perfect, beckoning lips.

&nb
sp; So he kissed her.

  Hard.

  Without thinking. Without restraint.

  She didn’t back away. Didn’t flee. Didn’t slap him hard across the face, like she had every right to do.

  She froze. Clearly not enjoying his attentions…but accepting them.

  Haley’s Crest! What was he doing?

  She was his mission. His responsibility.

  He broke off abruptly, blinking himself back into the here and now. “Gods, Ketsia, I didn’t… I don’t… Crest, you have my apologies.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s completely wrong. I could be court-martialed for doing something so asinine.”

  She raised her soft hands to frame his cheeks and her black eyes met his. “This was between us. I promise you, no one is ever going to know.”

  “Why did you follow me?” he asked, his voice hoarse and choked. “Why come after me?”

  “Because you needed a friend.”

  “You think so? We’ve spent a few days together, and you think you know all about me? What makes me tick?” Jagger fought to control the resentment churning inside him—the frustration, the fascination…and the fury. “Do you know what I did to Drea to make her leave me? Did she tell you the whole ugly story?”

  His question hung suspended in time, until Ketsia slowly shook her head. “Drea never spoke about you.”

  Drea never…

  Her words sliced through him like a dagger. He couldn’t stand seeing the compassion in Ketsia’s eyes when she revealed how completely Drea had gotten over him.

  She never mentioned me?

  His heart turned to granite. “Let me fill you in. I cheated on her. Many times. Had sex with other women while we were engaged.” He saw how she took the blow of his words—the shock of the initial blast, the slow recoil, the measured recovery. “Now tell me, am I still the kind of man you want to comfort? The sort you want to pity?”

  Her dark eyes glinted. “I’d never pity you.”