“I guess not.” He replaced his cup on its opalescent saucer. “Do you like her?”
“I’d be silly not to.” Then apparently feeling that wasn’t quite the right note, Kenzie added, “I’m glad she’s your friend.”
Baz snorted. “Me too. Her enemies have a life expectancy that trends rapidly to zero.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she chided and set her tea next to his. “Baz, there’s something I want to tell you.”
“Yeah? There’s something I need you tell you, too.” His xel interrupted them. He glanced down and thumbed up the message in compact mode. It had Kris’s signature on it.
Did you?
His fingers tapped: Wait one. Locking on now— “I mean, something I want to ask you.”
Affirm.
Kenzie glanced from the xel to his face. “Okay. You go first.”
Baz reached out and took her hand. “I was gonna do this different—more formally, y’know—but the way things are right now—tonight—I thought, um . . .”
“Yes, you thought?”
“I thought, maybe I should just ask.”
“Ask what?”
Baz took a deep breath. “Ask if you’d marry me. I mean, would you marry me?”
Kenzie blinked, her pretty mouth opened and closed twice. “Yes, Ferhat Basmartin. I’ll marry you.”
After an extended kiss and bill settled, they stood up to leave. His xel beeped again.
Did you?
He tapped. Affirm.
Did she?
Affirm.
See? Piece of cake. Congratulations.
~ ~ ~
152 days earlier
Oscoda, Michigan,
Great Lakes Province, Terra, Sol
“Kris?” Huron’s voice carried down the long hallway, filled at this moment with rich golden light from the late sun slanting through the diamond panes. It played in the petals of the hundred orchids set in the wide sills of the noble gothic arches that enclosed those panes and touched so warmly on the array of paintings hung on the opposite wall that it made even Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet, hung in solitary splendor in its alcove, look decidedly less somber.
“In here,” Kris called from the west-wing office she used as a workspace while at the estate. She’d gone there to check their fleet calendars. They were on leave all this week, but she’d said she wanted to see what calamities had built up in their absence; there were always a few. That was over an hour ago.
She heard his footsteps on the ancient hand-milled flooring—unknowably ancient as it was American oak, inlaid with French walnut, that had been salvaged from the frigid lightless anaerobic depths of Lake Superior—softening to a whisper as he crossed the study’s thick Aubusson carpet.
Coming to a stop behind her, Huron looked over her head at the open display. “How’s it going? Are we dead yet?”
“No,” she answered, closing several hovering windows. “Lucked out this time. So far.”
His hands came to rest gently on either shoulder. “Do you need any help packing?”
“Shit”—muttered under her breath. She checked the time. “Are we late?”
“No. We’re doing okay. Don’t worry.”
Kris dropped her head and rubbed at the tense spot between her eyes with two fingertips. Where were they supposed to go this time? Zurich? Vienna? Samarqand? Some fuckin’ place on the other side of this fuckin’ world. And what the hell was the guy’s name?
“So who’s this guy again?”
“A family friend. It’s just a party, Kris. No big deal.”
“I thought you said he was the Prime Minister of Antigua.”
“No. Not for a couple of years. He’s out of politics, may not even run again.” His fingers were massaging her shoulders now, measuring the tension.
“How many old girlfriends ya gonna have there?” The bite in her tone owed nothing to jealousy: the sexual mores of Homeworlders were a morass Kris could find no logic in—there was no telling when something you said or did would plunge you up to your neck in a random unpleasantness—and while it took a dedicated personal secretary with a staff to keep track of Huron’s social and political connections, it would take a regiment to keep track of all his old flames. You never knew where you’d run into one, and it could get tiring.
“Look, Kris. This thing usually goes on for a couple of days. We can be fashionably late—as in tomorrow. Or we can just cancel. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
Of course you will. So fuckin’ reasonable—always no muss, no fuss. She flicked his hands off her shoulders with a twitch. “Would’ja just back the fuck off some, okay?”
“Sure, Kris. I’ll be in my office.”
She heard his footsteps retreating, the muted echoes going down the hall, and ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. Goddammit. She’d done it again. Was she ever gonna fuckin’ learn?
Shaking her head, Kris popped open the display again and logged back into her fleet account. A batch of new emails arrayed themselves across the top of the screen. Three of them were starred. It required a hard-key to access those, and she didn’t have one for this system. Rafe probably had it.
Shit.
Reaching up, she opened a chat window and pinged his office.
“Hey, Kris,” Huron answered.
“Sorry to bug you”—feeling more than a touch shamefaced. “I need the hard-key for this box. You have it?”
“I don’t. It should be in the desk in the study. Shall I get it for you?”
“No, I’ll get it.”
“Try the top row, third drawer from the left.”
“Thanks.” She flicked the window shut.
The desk in Rafe’s study was a strange and ancient heirloom with an inconvenient roll top. It had a plethora of cubby holes and drawers which made it a challenge to find things, unless you understood his peculiar method of organizing it. Kris didn’t, and arguably neither did he—at least not perfectly—because the hard-key wasn’t in the indicated drawer. She had to poke through half a row before she located it.
In important ways, Rafe’s desk could be taken as a metaphor for his life: it was complicated, compartmentalized, and full of surprises. The surprise Kris found in the fourth place she looked was bigger than most: a carefully preserved sheet of paper with the design for Kenzie’s sleeping dragon tattoo on it.
Rafe detested clutter. He didn’t keep things in his life—or in his desk—that did not have meaning. The meaning here couldn’t have been more plain: he and Kenzie had once been attached. Rafe was no scalp collector: his fighter’s fuselage bore no trace of his victories, nor did he record his amorous conquests.
Kris knew full well that people were marked by their past relationships. And they might choose to wear those marks—or keep them in a desk drawer. But that Rafe would preserve a token of a girl he must’ve loved over a decade ago implied things about him Kris had never considered.
She shut that drawer and went on searching until she found what she was looking for.
Back at her desk, she plugged in the hard-key and opened the emails. The 361st Strike Wing still hadn’t submitted their readiness reports and she didn’t have a status on the eight birds they’d sent in for repair. Logistics hadn’t answered her yet on when they could expect the upgrades for those SLQ-32 missile pods that they were supposed to fit on the wing of Sabers transferring over from Fifth Fleet. No word on her transfer either. Dammit. She filed the emails, opened the scheduler and started typing again.
* * *
Kris was all too aware she had an unpredictable temper. The rigors of combat induced in her a fiercely focused concentration that at times became a kind of rapture. The stresses of ship-life she hardly noticed and the foibles of military bureaucracy, while intensely irritating, rarely ascended to any higher level. But the day-to-day humdrum complications of living in the Homeworlds, especially on Earth, could make her distinctly out of sorts and any sense she was being manipulated, especia
lly if it touched on (or appeared to touch on) her status as a colonial and former slave, quickly made her livid.
She did not like having spats with Rafe and she truly regretted it when they did, but every once in a while something would snap way down inside and she’d lash out at him, all too often for reasons that made no sense to her later. It didn’t help that the spats were almost entirely one-sided: when bit, Rafe refused to bite back. Instead, he’d look at her with this impenetrable calm she found infuriating when she was in that mood. She’d seen Rafe truly angry once and while she never wanted to experience that again, his tendency to become increasingly unflappable the angrier she got—his calm, even voice always saying the right thing—could make her feel helpless. And if there was one thing Kris hated more than another, it was feeling helpless.
It wasn’t his fault. None of it—or hardly any of it—and she could not blame him for the way he acted. She also tried not to let it obscure the fact that, in many ways, her temper was greatly improved. But paradoxically, that made it worse. She’d only just learned what it was to share herself openly with someone else; to embrace and trust and love them, and these episodes made her feel like she was fumbling something infinitely precious, unbelievable fragile, and infuriatingly slippery. And every time she dropped the fucking thing, they’d go through the Humpty-Dumpty phase in which Huron (much better equipped than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men) would patch everything together again and tell her it was all right, sounding exactly as though he meant it.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Kris found Huron in his office, reviewing his afternoon’s worth of messages on his xel. Her bare feet made almost no sound on the hardwood floors and none on the carpet, but his unusually good hearing had noticed her approach when she reached the top of the stairs and he turned just as she walked through the doorway.
Kris hesitated there for a moment. She was nude, which was usual when they had the estate to themselves, and had been usual even when they didn’t for the short period it took Kris to grasp that downsiders didn’t share her casual attitude to wandering around without clothes.
“Hey there,” he said quietly and she came over and put her arms around his neck.
“Rafe, that was a shit thing to do to you. I didn’t mean it—snapping like that.”
“It’s okay, Kris. I understand. I should’ve known better.” He brought his palms up along her back.
“Nah, don’t—it’s not you, I mean.” Her eyes lifted past him and out the grand curve of windows that overlooked Lake Huron, all dappled silver in the distance. “It’s just that . . . there’s no fuck’n outside down here, y’know? I like it and all but . . . that gets to me, sometimes. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She leaned down, he met her halfway, their arms began to tighten and they kissed. A long deep artful kiss, artfully shared and at some point in the middle of it, Kris’s right hand found its way to his crotch and began to make its presence felt. When the kiss ended and their faces were still so close as to almost touch, she murmured, “Did’ja mean it when ya said we could get there tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Ya sure? I’m not fuckin’ this up for you?”
“Of course you aren’t.”
“Okay.” Her right hand squirmed cunningly in his lap. “Then I wanna—look, I know I’ve been a bitch lately. I’m sorry. I wanna try to make it up to you.”
“Kris, there’s nothing you have to—”
“Stop it.” She pinched his earlobe gently. “C’mon. You can’t tell me you’re not interested—I’m holding the proof.”
He chuckled and leaned back, giving her more room. “I’m not going to win this debate, I am?”
“No.” She pushed him even farther back with a hand on his chest as the other completed his liberation. “And you shouldn’t even fuck’n try.”
Kneeling, Kris took the length of him into her mouth; sliding it between her lips, reveling in the many textures; the silkiness of the skin, the thin lines of the veins, the delicate granularity beneath the oval crown. She felt it grow harder as his hips begin to push, daring her to take it all. She opened her throat to him willingly and heard his deep, almost guttural sigh. She had considerable skill in this art and she used all of it with precision. Her expert tongue embraced and teased him, lingering on the small sensitive spots that made him tense, working them relentlessly for long moments before broadening to lave away the pent-up urgency. Huron stood it for quite a while but then his abdomen began to move in a deep rhythm and she stopped teasing. He lifted suddenly and she accepted the jets open-throated, running her agile tongue over the sensitive underside with each pulsation until they finally ebbed and died away. At last, he gathered her now damp body into his arms and she pressed her male-scented lips to his.
“Did’ja like that?” she asked a minute later.
“What do you think?”
She grinned and nipped his lower lip with sharp teeth. “Yeah—guess so.” Slipping out of his lap she reclined across the carpet in front of him, opening her legs in a thoroughly brazen invitation. “That was just the appetizer, y’know.”
His eyes glided from one end of her long sleek sweetly muscular body to the other, lissome and alive with so much promise. He cleared his throat. “You—um . . . wouldn’t like to take this to—”
“No.” She winked at him and gave her hips a slow undulation. “Floor. Floor’s good.”
It was all the answer he needed.
Kris lay on her side on the thick, richly patterned silk-and-cashmere carpet, reveling in the aftershocks that coursed through her body and from time to time, giving way to brief fits of shaking. She probably could have done without those little fits—it was a trifle embarrassing having them go on this long—but Huron lying behind her and tenderly swabbing her torso with a warm damp cloth likely had something to do with it. It kept reminding her of everything else his hands could do.
She’d set out this evening to please him and she had, she knew that. But somewhere in the course of their lovemaking, the tide had turned. Where, she couldn’t tell. Rafe had this trick of massaging her back which, combined with everything else he was doing, created sensations she could never hope to describe. They moved like a powerful wave in deep water, barely rippling the surface until it began to come inshore, where it would start to roll and build and then, just before it broke, he would bite down on her trapezius and—
She shuddered at the memory of it and felt a slight change in the pressure of his touch.
“How ya doin’ there?” he asked very softly, so close his breath tickled the back of her neck.
She rolled over, nudging him on his back so she could slide onto him. Brushing his hair away from his eyes—the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen on a man—she replied with a question.
“How the hell do ya do that?” Sex with Rafe generally hovered somewhere between awesome and amazing, but they didn’t always click like they just had. Far from it . . .
“Dunno. ’Fraid I wasn’t takin’ notes.”
It was funny how he got that little drawl back in his voice when they fucked, so different than the crisp polished diction of his on-duty voice, and not at all like the rougher accent she heard when they were out with his service buddies. A gentler tone, almost sweet.
“Smart ass.” She kissed one side of the crooked grin. “You make all your girls feel like this?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“C’mon. Don’t bullshit me. Do ya?”
“Not to the best of my knowledge.”
She ran a fingertip across one dark level eyebrow. “Betcha do. Ya just don’t wanna tell me.”
“Do I have a line of retreat open here? Cuz I don’t think I’m gonna win this one either.”
“Nope. Gotcha surrounded.”
“Shall we discuss the terms of surrender then?”
“Sure. Is it tomorrow yet?”
“Uh-uh. Barely twenty-one-thirty.”
�
�Good. Cuz—um . . . I wanted to ask you somethin’ . . . personal.”
“As part of the surrender terms?”
She shook her head. “It’s about someone—Kenzie.”
A small ripple of surprise ran through his abdominals. “Kensington Lennox?”
“That’s her real name?”
“Yes. No one calls her anything but Kenzie, though.”
Kris couldn’t ignore the minor irony. For the first few months, Rafe had pretty much stuck to calling her Loralynn, but more recently old habits had resurfaced and they’d drifted back to Kris.
“You were together, right?”
“After the last war. When I was out of the Service.”
“Long time?”
“Almost two years.” He shifted underneath her a fraction of a centimeter. “Can I ask how this came up?”
“I met her.”
That brought his head up. “You met Kenzie?”
“I had dinner with Baz while you were gone. He brought her. They’re getting married.”
“Baz and Kenzie are getting married?” His look of surprise shifted to a bemused grin with a chuckle to match. “Damn. It is a small universe after all.”
“Yeah. She was . . . special to ya. Wasn’t she?”
A breath of silence before he answered. “Yes, she was. Kenzie will always be special—wherever she is. Whoever she’s with.”
The image of the little sleeping dragon again flashed into Kris’s mental eye. “She’s still got that tattoo.”
“The sleeping dragon?”
“Uh huh. I saw it in your desk this PM. Did—ah . . . did you design it for her?”
“I had quite a bit of input. Did she tell you what it means to her?”
“Uh huh.”
“Are you okay with it?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d they meet? Baz and Kenzie?”
Now Kris shifted, slipping down next to him. “It was her sister. She’s sick—”
“Yeah, she’s had Ballard’s.”
“Y’know about that?”
“She contracted it while we were together. Kenzie went back to Fredonia to take care of her.”
“Is that what happened between you guys? Her sister?”
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 11