He shook his head. “I have some bars along for when I get hungry.”
“Bars that survived a decon shower?” She didn’t recall him carrying a pack or anything except his bolt bow. Her armor came with a couple of storage nooks and a utility belt, but mostly for carrying a tiny first-aid kit and patch kit for small suit breaches. “They must be small.”
“They are.”
He looked over at her, meeting her eyes without letting his wander. She had been carefully doing the same, though his briefs left the majority of his legs exposed, including muscled thighs and calves that could share space with his torso in that bodybuilding magazine. She shouldn’t be ogling them, however, not when they had serious problems to deal with. And it seemed particularly inappropriate when he’d made a point of mentioning that his wife had died. He hadn’t said how long ago, but he probably didn’t have new relationships on his mind.
She expected him to suggest a plan for getting on the shuttle when it came down and sneaking aboard the warship to find that converter.
Instead, he said, “Are you going to put on clothes at some point?”
“What, you don’t think this is our uniform?” She should have been mature and immediately run to her cabin and changed, but she always hated being corrected or reminded of her failings. She leaned back and made a point of thrusting her chest out and crossing her legs. The towels weren’t gargantuan, so she was showing as much thigh as he was.
His gaze flickered downward for the first time, and a trill of excitement—almost triumphant—jittered through her veins.
“It’s marginally better than the yellow suits,” he said.
“Perhaps I’ll suggest to NASA that it meets Dethocolean approval for exploring strange, new worlds.” She shifted her legs and stood slowly, keeping her towel around herself but taking her time, thinking he might want to glance at some leg again.
But he looked back toward the control panel, as if the diagram showing the shields up was the most exciting thing in the cockpit. Of course, if he’d been the one who’d fixed the shields, he had good reason to look at the diagram with satisfaction.
“I know I have a sharp tongue,” Mick found herself saying, standing next to his shoulder instead of heading to her cabin, as she should have. Why was her body insisting on doing things against her mind’s wishes? “And I have a feeling I shouldn’t trust you or feel safe with you aboard my ship, but I appreciate the help you’ve given us. Given me.”
He nodded once, not looking at her. “Good.”
She found it troubling that he didn’t assure her that she could trust him and should feel safe around him. She lifted a hand, tempted to touch his hair. It had dried as tousled as it had been before, with a slight curl to it, and she wanted to comb her fingers through it, to see if she could wrangle it into submission. Or maybe she just wanted to see if it was as soft as it looked. Her other hand could rest on one of his broad shoulders. She imagined she could feel his body heat radiating off him and that she would feel his warmth through that thin shirt.
Her gaze followed the curve of his shoulder down to his pecs and further. She hadn’t intended to look at his crotch, though if one wore nothing but one’s underwear, one was inviting such looks. But her wandering gaze snagged there, on the bulge between his thighs. More than a bulge. He was hard, she realized with a start, his penis trying willfully to thrust a hole in his underwear.
From his studied indifference, she hadn’t expected that. Maybe he wouldn’t mind if she started playing with his hair. But to what end? Was she going to have sex with him up here in her cockpit? With a man she’d only known a few hours?
A man who had saved her life…
A man who’d done his best to protect her crew…
A man who’d been fixing her ship while she slept.
“Ariston,” she said softly and touched his hair, though she had no idea what else she wanted to say to him. “I’m sorry that you lost someone so important to you. It’s hard enough to lose friends. I can’t imagine… more.”
He didn’t respond. Nor did he move at her touch. He was completely and utterly still. Like an animal poised to flee? Or a man trying not to give in to temptation?
She told herself to back off, to give him space. Maybe he was thinking of his dead wife right now. What if he was still faithful to her? What if he felt like an ass for being aroused by some strange woman?
A cry of alarm came from the sleeping cabins, and Mick jumped away from him.
He started to rise, too, but she hurried to say, “I’ll check on that,” and rushed out, shutting the door behind her.
She needed to put space between them, between her and a man she couldn’t trust. She also needed to put some clothes on and think about her mission, about all the impossible things that needed to be done so she could get her ship flying again. She didn’t need to think about the way his soft hair had felt brushing over her fingers. Definitely not.
8
Ariston released a long, slow breath after the cockpit door slid shut behind him, leaving him alone, alone without a very beautiful and very naked woman standing next to him. Touching his hair. By all the gods in the pantheon, he’d been on the verge of leaping up, pinning her to the bulkhead, slamming his fist against the door controls, and locking them in for a frenzied night of screwing.
They might be strangers, but she was definitely his type. When he’d walked into the cockpit to deliver his report and found her sleeping in her seat, her head back against the rest, and that towel drooping tantalizingly low on her breasts, just shy of showing a nipple, his first thought had been to go find a blanket to drape over her. But instead he’d stood there, rooted like a tree—or a pervert—getting harder and harder as he admired her luscious skin and perfect contours. Thoughts of being a gentleman and getting a blanket to cover her had warred over far more lascivious thoughts, of touching that towel lightly, causing it to fall open, to leave her entire body on display for him. He didn’t think he would have done that, but he couldn’t be sure in retrospect.
Fate had caused her to start dreaming, her face growing visibly distressed, and he hadn’t had to test his morality further. He’d shook her shoulder gently, figuring she would have wanted to be woken from that. When her eyes had flown open, the most horrified expression within them, he’d wondered what dream had plagued her. He’d almost asked, but he couldn’t imagine she wanted to share whatever it was with a stranger. A stranger that she didn’t, by her own words, trust.
He was surprised she’d shown him as much sensitivity as she had, being sympathetic about Zya’s loss and hinting of losses of her own. She’d been so tough before. He hadn’t expected her to have a gentler side, at least not one that she would reveal to him. The juxtaposition between hard and soft appealed to him, far more than it should.
He looked down at his cock, sighing at it for the second time in four hours. He ought to run off into a private nook and jack off. Maybe it wouldn’t be so quick to rise up then.
Hells, he was alone in the cockpit… But the lav would be better. Easier not to make a mess. He rolled his eyes at himself, both because he was going to go do it and because he was far too old to have these problems.
As he stood to leave the cockpit, he heard voices through the door. Damn it. He needed some trousers. No, he needed his armor. It should be dry by now. That wouldn’t do anything to help slake his need, but at least it would keep everyone else on the ship from knowing about it—including her.
He was positive she’d looked down and noticed the tent his penis had erected. A part of him had wanted to find something to throw over his lap, not that there had been anything on hand he could have used. Another part of him had wanted to let her look her fill, to know he was a big man and could satisfy her any way she wanted.
“Idiot,” he grumbled to himself and hit the door controls.
He walked out into an argument. The woman, Dev, and two men he hadn’t been introduced to were gesturing expansively, pointing at the
deck, the airlock, and the engineering section while throwing words back and forth. Fortunately, the scantily-toweled Mick had disappeared, so his annoyingly fertile imagination wouldn’t receive more fuel for the moment. Unfortunately, the group was blocking the corridor back to the lav, and to the airlock where his armor was drying, so he couldn’t slip past easily.
“If we might have to leave as early as tomorrow,” Dev was saying, “we should go out and take some samples now. We can’t come all this way for nothing.”
“We’re not going out while those gun-toting thugs are out there,” said a man with bronze skin and the broscha seed-shaped eyes of the Zhu Que people. He wore a tank top with a bandage over his shoulder, so Ariston assumed he was the one who’d been injured in the shooting earlier. “And we’re not leaving in the morning. We didn’t come all the way out here to be turned around by random chance.”
“As soon as those people go away,” the second man said, a blond fellow holding a steaming mug of some beverage, “we can go about our work, but for now—”
“They’re not going away,” Dev said. “We can’t let them. The captain said we need to get a part from their ship. And to do that, we have to sneak up on their shuttle.”
“We? You’re going along? With what as a weapon? Your soil-sampling stick?”
Soil-sampling stick? Was that a typical tool for a ruins scavenger? Ariston supposed so. It might be useful for them to date the ruins site and maybe figure out when the volcanos had last erupted.
“Probably not me, since I don’t know how useful I could be in a fight,” Dev said.
“Not very.”
“Hey, now,” came another man’s voice from the corridor, the red-headed Woodruff. Apparently, he’d woken from his nap. “She’d last longer than you, Lee. At least she came out to help me earlier.”
“Which was oh-so-useful,” Lee growled. “We’re lucky we’re not all dead now. Or crazy. I know I’m not the only one who woke up yelling out because of bad dreams. Something here is affecting us negatively.”
“The planet isn’t haunted,” Woodruff said with a long-suffering sigh.
“Of course it isn’t haunted. I didn’t say it was. But something’s bothering us.”
“I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye,” the blond man said, his voice lowering. “Even in here. But we’ve been careful with our decontamination procedure, and most of us haven’t even been outside yet. I don’t know what it could be.”
“We could have been dosed with something. That guy who randomly showed up with…”
Lee trailed off because Dev tugged at his sleeve. She’d noticed Ariston and nodded toward him now. The group fell silent as they all looked over at him.
He was glad his cock was finally taking a break, but he’d feel even better when he got his armor back on, the bottom half at the least. Too bad Woodruff had been fairly certain nobody here had spare clothing that would fit him. He felt like an idiot walking around in his underwear. He was just glad he’d thought to don the long-sleeved shirt, since it hid his telltale tattoo.
Thinking of it reminded him that this might be a good time to figure out exactly why these people were here, whether they were trespassing with the intent to raid or trespassing to study the ruins for some academic reason. That would still be a crime in the eyes of the Confederation, but a lesser one.
“What are the soil samples for?” Ariston asked. He might get more information out of the scientists than he would out of Mick.
Not that he’d asked. Maybe he should have come straight out and asked why she was here. He supposed he hadn’t wanted to force her into lying to him.
“We want to understand the history of the ruins and the planet,” Dev said, her eyes brightening, “and determine the mineral and nutrient composition of the soil to see if it would be fertile and—”
“Who are you?” Lee asked, holding his hand up and stepping in front of Dev.
“Good point,” the mug-holder said. “I was in the lab, taking readings of the planet’s surface, and then heard that there was some weird guy working with Woodruff on the repairs. This is an uninhabited planet. There aren’t supposed to be weird guys here.”
“I’m Ariston. And I’d argue that I’m not the weird one here, but I don’t know what the norm is for Gaians.” He looked at each of them, hoping to turn the questions back on them. “Are you all from Gaia?”
Dev opened her mouth, but Lee shot a glare at her, and she closed it. When Lee looked away, she stuck out her tongue at him. Woodruff smirked, though he gave her a swat on the arm that was probably supposed to suggest respecting her fellow scientists.
“You haven’t mentioned where you’re from,” Lee said to Ariston.
“He came down with the others,” Woodruff said. “That’s what Mick said. He told me he escaped from them.”
“Escaped?” came Mick’s voice from the corridor behind the group. She stepped out of her cabin, now dressed, though the blue trousers she wore hugged her thighs, showing them off nicely.
Ariston hadn’t heard her hatch open and wondered how long she’d been listening. He didn’t think he’d said anything that would prove him a liar, though he realized he’d adjusted his story somewhat from Mick to Woodruff.
An undercover agent ought to be much better at fibbing. Granted, Headquarters usually sent him on missions where all he had to do was get close enough to record criminals in the act and then arrest them. And the only reason he now served as an undercover operative was because he hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of continuing on as someone else’s chief of engineering, not after losing Zya.
All the Star Guardian ships had the same design, and he couldn’t imagine walking those corridors and going up to the bridge or the captain’s ready room and her not being there. He’d tried to retire then, having some vague notion of going back to the town where he’d grown up and drinking himself into a stupor out by the pond in his father’s backyard. Or maybe into death. He hadn’t been in the best frame of mind then. Admiral Chen, being loath to lose a good officer, had offered him this, a chance to go off and take out his aggressions by beating the snot out of bad guys before dragging them off to jail.
“They didn’t want to let me go,” Ariston offered, aware of all the eyes upon him. He wasn’t supposed to be the one on trial here. “As I mentioned before.”
And he had, even if he’d said he had voluntarily joined the salvage crew to start with.
Dev turned toward Mick. “As I was telling the boys, I want to go out and get my soil samples in case this is our only night on the planet. I want to make sure I take something home. Enough so our people know…” Dev glanced at Ariston. “So they know.”
Ariston watched her through narrowed eyes, wondering if soil was truly the something that she wanted to take home. Or did she have clues about the ruins? Maybe it was possible the Gaians knew about the culture that had once lived here and had insight into where interesting and valuable artifacts might be located, insight that the humans of the Confederation, who hadn’t achieved space flight until long after the humans here had died, couldn’t have.
“She’s not in command here,” Lee said, sounding petulant. Achilles’ aching heel, he wasn’t the one in charge here, was he?
“It’s her ship, and we’re in it.”
Mick rubbed her face wearily. Whether she was in charge of their mission or not—and Ariston silently hoped she wasn’t, so that she might appear less culpable in the eyes of a court—someone like her couldn’t enjoy dealing with scientists. Zya never had. Scientists and politicians had always made her short-tempered.
Ariston looked away, frowning at himself. He shouldn’t compare Mick to his memories of his wife. It seemed a disservice to both of them. Mick was her own woman, a unique person, and it disturbed him more than a little to think that his attraction to her might have to do with similarities to Zya. Logically, he knew it was more that they both fit—or had fit—into that tough, athletic mold of women he’d alway
s fallen for, even back in school, but it still felt like a betrayal to compare them.
Mick covered a yawn, then lowered her hand. “Like Lee said, I’m not in charge of you, but I highly suggest you don’t go out there while there are crazy thugs roaming the ruins.”
“Doctor Lee,” Lee said.
Mick rolled her eyes. Ariston caught her gaze and smiled, even if he didn’t understand the correction. Was this Lee also a medical practitioner? He’d assumed the Dr. Garcia that Mick had lost had been the ship’s surgeon. It seemed odd that such a small vessel would have numerous doctors.
“I can watch them,” Ariston said, partially because he wouldn’t mind going out to check on Eryx's men and partially because it would give him an excuse to enshroud his lower half in armor again. And to get away from Mick. He needed some time for his libido to cool its thrusters and for him to get some perspective. Further, he could watch what Dev and whoever else went out did and maybe figure out what they were here for. Dev might speak and reveal their mission, too, if Lee or Mick weren’t around to shush her.
“What?” Mick asked.
“I can stand guard while they work.” Ariston shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or another to him. “We can’t do anything else until morning.”
“I thought we were going to plan an ambush,” Mick said, though when she’d had him alone in the cockpit, she’d been fondling his hair instead of suggesting planning sessions.
Not that he’d minded. It had felt good. Too good.
“What’s to plan? They land their ship, and we pop out of the ruins and jump in before they can stop us.”
“There’s that we again,” Lee muttered.
Mick ignored him, her gaze solidly on Ariston, a slight squint to her eyes. A reminder that she didn’t trust him.
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