Freefall_The Great Space Race

by Elsa Jade

  “Maybe you could’ve used that Intergalactic Dating Agency.” Her dark eyes widened. “I can’t believe that’s even a thing.”

  “It’s not, anymore. They ran into some trouble with Earther brides disappearing.” He sighed with exaggerated drama. “There goes my only chance.”

  She patted his hand. “I know you’ll find someone, someday. You’re tall, handsome, and you go after what you want. I mean, look, you’re going to win the Great Space Race. What, er, mate could resist you?”

  He looked at the faint, shimmering gold fingerprint that the kyapa-sho had left on his skin, as if she’d marked him. The soul of fire and wind, stunted in him ever since the egg, stirred under her touch. “Maybe I just haven’t looked far enough.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she said, raising a small cloud of pepper as she patted him again.

  They finished the meal, feeding each other ever spicier bites of the drakling favorites he’d recommended and a few other dishes he didn’t recognize. By the end, they were both gasping and laughing, teary-eyed and burning-tongued. She grabbed the goblet in the center of the table and gulped desperately.

  “I give up,” she choked. She wiped one hand across her brow. “You’re too hot for me.”

  He reached across the table to wipe the smudge of golden powder from her temple. The feathery softness of her black hair brushed his knuckles, like the cool night air breathing out of the vast desert on the homeworld he hadn’t seen in forever.

  She blinked at him, looking a little startled, and he showed her the dust on his fingertip.

  “I don’t think I can take another bite without bursting into flame,” he confessed. To counteract the confused look in her eyes, he whisked the goblet from her grasp and chugged down a few mouthfuls.

  “Hey, that—”

  “Not bad,” he said. “The bitterness cancels the heat. And at least it’s iced. Good choice to finish.”

  He forced his gaze off the plushness of her lips, puffed and reddened by the spice. “I declare you the winner of our side challenge,” he said hastily. “I need to check our course one last time, so you can take the bed first.”

  He wished he hadn’t thought of that puffy red bed so soon after thinking of her lips…

  She propped her elbows on the table. “I thought you locked in our course.”

  “Things change.” Like his awareness of her. She was his teammate, his responsibility, not…anything else. No matter what else the waking spirit inside him might feel.

  He needed to win the Great Space Race, and—in a strange parallel with his chosen day job behind a desk, clicking through numbers—that had absolutely nothing to do with his feelings.

  Chapter 7

  When Luc disappeared down the short corridor toward the cockpit, Amy stayed in her seat for a long moment. What had happened? They’d been having so much fun, better than any date she’d ever been on. And then he’d just taken off, a pretty impressive feat in such a small space. Well, at least she’d won the spice challenge.

  Although she felt like she’d lost some other chance.

  Squelching her disgruntled confusion, she pushed to her feet and cleaned up the galley from the remnants of their meal. The heat of the drakling pepper lingered inside her, the bite mellowing to a glow. It really was tasty. If only she could share a Sichuan pepper with him. But Earth was very far away.

  Keenly aware of the distance, she left the galley. After only one quick glance down the corridor toward the cockpit, she resolutely turned the other way to head for the back bedroom. She couldn’t wait to find the first gem of the diadem, but somehow she thought maybe the most important part of the adventure wasn’t happening out in that big universe.

  It was happening right here.

  Well, not right here, considering she was here and Luc wasn’t. She cleaned up in the en suite bathroom—it was almost as big as the bedroom and even more opulent, a blatant reminder of the ship’s original purpose—and returned to the bedroom. She felt a little as if she’d been banished to the far reaches of the ship as punishment for some infraction, but what? At least she’d been sent to bed with her supper. And it had been a long day—or night, or however long it had been.

  Resigned to her loneliness, she changed into a thin tunic she’d decided would serve as pajamas. Knowing Luc must be paying for her shopping spree since she didn’t have space money or whatever, she hadn’t wanted to get too fancy, but the soft, flowing shirt that came midway down her thighs was nicer than most of the clothes she’d left behind on Earth. She clambered into the overstuffed bed and lay back with a sigh. Even though she’d figured out how to use the sonic body and mouth cleaner, the scent of the exotic pepper still lingered in her skin, as if some hot drakling had run his hands and tongue all over her…

  Well, that was a fantasy even more impossible than alien abduction. But if all she had was fantasy…

  “Luc Amaveo of the Flamewalker clan,” she whispered to herself. Eyes closed, she let one hand drift over the silky folds of the tunic to slip between her thighs. The condescending aliens of the universe had decided what closed-worlders didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. So she figured what certain tall, dark draklings with jade eyes didn’t know about her open legs wouldn’t bother him—

  “Amy?”

  With a horrified squawk, she bolted upright, slamming her knees together, which only snagged the nightshirt high on her thighs. “L-Luc?”

  The big, still shape in the doorway seemed strange. But of course it was him. Who else was on this ship? Who else in this galaxy even knew her name? Considering he was her only link with home, she probably shouldn’t be molesting him, even in her fantasies.

  When he didn’t speak again or enter the bedroom, she shoved the nightshirt down awkwardly and fumbled for the bedside light controls. “Are we there already?” Last time, he’d awakened her when they reached Primaera, but she’d thought they had a longer passage ahead of them to reach the Yestrian Republic.

  “Are we…where?” The mood lighting in the bedroom, low and tinted, didn’t do much to reveal him, but his voice sounded strained.

  She frowned. “Where we’re searching for the first gem in the queen’s crown?”

  “The queen…” He swiped one hand over his face as she’d done when the peppers had finally gotten to her. “According to legend, the queen had many lovers.” He stared. “Have you?”

  Oh geez, he must’ve seen her touching herself… A flush hotter than the peppers—a tangled weave of embarrassment and excitement—made her clamp her knees tighter. Like she should probably keep her mouth closed. But she found herself saying, “Not many. Three, actually. Although maybe the first one didn’t count, because we weren’t really lovers, we were just both tired of being nerdy virgins…” She choked down the rest of that sorry story, wishing she’d kept her mouth and legs shut on that one for sure. “Uh, why do you ask?”

  “That’s one more than me,” he said in a tone she couldn’t identify: envy, irritation, something darker? “The first one found out I was thirteenth and stopped returning my comms. The second didn’t care about that number, just the amount of galactic credits in my accounts.”

  Amy winced. “Those were not nice guys—”

  “The third said she would be my lover, but nothing more. And by then I wanted…more. I’d run the equations in my head, and I no longer wanted to be…only.”

  “Oh, Luc…” Amy paused. Wait. She? Not a guy but a she? Was the translator working or was she still stuck in her fantasy?

  He raked his hand through the dark twists of his hair, ruffling them into agitated spikes. His biceps, revealed by the leather-like vest, bunched hard as he gripped the back of his skull. “Amy, what was that drink in the goblet?”

  “In the…” She struggled to switch gears from sexual preferences to beverage choices. “It was coffee.”

  “Coffee?” He reared back. “That wasn’t coffee. Coffee is hot and dark. I’ve seen it.”

  “Since we were doing a
spicy challenge, I thought an iced coffee would be better. And the food processor had a version of cream to cut the burn—”

  With a groan, he smacked his head against the door jamb, hard enough that she pushed herself to the upturned rim of the bed with a cry of alarm.

  “What’s wrong? Luc, talk to me.”

  “The coffee. I told you, it…affects draklings.”

  “Makes you restless, you said. It does that to me too, keeps me awake if I drink too much. Caffeine does that.” Although she couldn’t blame the spice or the coffee for her wakefulness. She knew exactly who to blame for that: him.

  And he seemed to blame her.

  Why was he asking all these sex questions when he’d said he wasn’t into beings like her? Or…had she just thought he’d said that because of her own insecurities?

  He rolled his forehead against the jamb to direct a piercing jade stare at her, and she recoiled in shock.

  “Your eyes…” she whispered. “They’re glowing—” Bright as flames, but luminous and otherworldly as the gold-green light of a thousand fireflies.

  He closed his eyes, extinguishing the light, and turned away to retreat down the hall, but his fist was still clamped around the door, as if he’d accidentally locked himself on the threshold of the bedroom.

  Her heartbeat stuttered, all her nerves flickering like another thousand fireflies answering his radiant call.

  Cautiously, she extended one bare foot toward the floor, but he swung around.

  Those glowing eyes pierced her. “Stay there,” he said, his voice pitched low, like a growl. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just needed to know what was in the drink.”

  Ignoring his demand that she stay, she slowly slipped over the rim of the bed. The nightshirt rode up over her knees, but she ignored that too. Her teammate was obviously in distress.

  “You’re scaring me by not telling me what’s wrong,” she said softly. “Is something in coffee toxic to draklings? If we need to get you help, we’ll stop the race—”

  “No.” He let out a hissing breath and said again in a more measured tone, “No. I’m not in any danger. But you might be.”

  She froze when both her feet hit the ship’s cool decking. “Okay, now you’re scaring me by telling me.”

  His laugh was edged with something like anguish. “Being the runt of the clutch, I didn’t inherit any of the drakling strengths. So I thought I’d avoided the weaknesses too.” He swayed, and she tensed herself to run and catch him if he fell, but his grip on the door—his dark skin lightened to amethyst over his knuckles with the ferocity of his hold—kept him in place.

  “What weakness?” She knew excessive caffeine could cause headaches or a racing heartbeat, even arrhythmia. But the goblet of iced coffee hadn’t been that big and they’d even shared.

  He dropped his head between his hunched shoulders. “I…feel the urge…to mate you.”

  “To…” She sank back onto the bed, then immediately bolted out of it. If he’d said what her translator thought he’d said…

  “But I won’t,” he said, almost as hastily as she’d moved. “I will fight the urge. I must.”

  Because he considered it a weakness to want to mate with her.

  She narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t have any drakling strengths, so how are you fighting this…uh, urge?”

  The jade fires in his eyes flared. “I am counting stars in my head to stop myself from throwing you back on that bed.”

  Her knees wobbled, and she reached behind her blindly with one hand to brace herself on the rim. “Good thing there are a lot of stars.”

  “Not enough,” he said. “I may have to move on to other cosmic phenomena.”

  How many beings on how many planets circling those stars were getting lucky tonight?

  Not trusting the quiver in her knees, she sat on the ledge of the bed. Her sensitized nerve endings practically screamed at the soft hem of the nightshirt dragging up her thighs. “You didn’t take advantage of me when I was naked and unconscious after the trans-dimensional transference. And I know I’m not what you were promised, not what you wanted.”

  His jaw flexed, and the purple scales at his temples were more obvious than ever. “That was before…” He swallowed hard, the knot in his throat bobbing. “For some reason, you make it worse.”

  She screwed her lips to one side. “The story of my life.”

  “No.” He shook his head hard until the dark twists of his hair were bristling. “It’s not you. It’s me.”

  She groaned. “Luc, you probably don’t know this, but that’s the biggest brush off ever on Earth.”

  He made a little noise not too much different from hers. “It is everywhere else in the galaxy too,” he admitted. “But I mean it. It really is me. Or…something about you that does something to me. I’ve never felt the wild urges like this.”

  For a silent, seething moment, they stared at each other across the small, red boudoir. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, and the flicker of the jade light was like a signal of some sort, one she wasn’t experienced enough to read. “Maybe we should stop,” he said slowly. “Stop the race. It’s just a silly contest for a fake crown, and I don’t want you to be in real danger, not from me. It would be better for you away from me.”

  That was what had torn her family apart, the idea that somewhere over there was better, safer, more opportunity, more chances. When all she’d ever wanted was to be with someone who loved her. Even if that love is just some sort of coffee-induced lust that would fade with the caffeine.

  She put her hand on the rim of the bed next to her and then scootched to one side, making an open space. “We’re not quitting, Luc,” she said slowly, as if she was soothing a wary wild animal. “All my life, I quit things that got too hard, so afraid to let people down that I let myself down.” She lifted her chin to meet his glowing gaze straight on. “We can figure this out.” She gave him a little smile. “You’re an accountant, after all, so figuring should be your thing, even if I’m not your thing.”

  With another hissing, growling groan, he took one step toward her. His arm stretched out behind him, his fist still taut on the doorjamb. But then his grip broke loose and he all but staggered toward her, as if her gravity was too much to resist.

  Uh, she hadn’t meant to unleash the beast… But he came to rest perched on the ledge of the bed next to her. With a long sigh, he slung one long arm behind her shoulders and buried his face in the crook of her neck. The gust of his hot breath across her throat made her shiver.

  But that was nothing compared to the fine tremors that racked him repeatedly. Waves of heat undulated from his body, like a living earthquake, as if hard, protective places inside him were cracking and shifting and moving into new shapes, fire pouring around the seams.

  Tentatively, she put her arm around him. She matched her breath to his, counting for what seemed like an eternity before he finally let out a softer breath.

  “Draklings mate for life,” he murmured. “We fuck with abandon until we mate, but once we do… We call it hush-kuh—the upwelling wind that never lets you down.”

  The sentiment seized her deep inside. To never be let down… Just as abruptly, fear spiraled in behind. Such a bond meant she’d be expected to hold her own—hold someone else—as well, and she’d never been able to do that.

  But despite the downsides that paralyzed her, his twelve brothers had obviously seized their chance, with what sounded like typical drakling boldness, if they were all getting married at the same time.

  She was no drakling, wasn’t even the interstellar explorer whose adventure she’d stolen.

  But…she was here, and no one else was.

  “It’s just the coffee,” she soothed him. “It’ll wear off. You didn’t drink that much.” Or had he? Dammit, she was a fake adventurer, not a drakling doctor.

  “I feel…empty, as if I’ve just been drifting but didn’t notice until now.” His voice had turned dreamy. “B
een this way for awhile.”

  She stifled the urge to snort. “Upcoming weddings have that affect across the universe, I guess. Us single people start thinking about what we’re missing.”

  “Not me,” he argued. “I added up my options and knew I’d end up alone. Thirteen equals no one.”

  “Well, you missed a number,” she said tartly. “Because you didn’t figure on me.”

  He lifted his head to look down at her. The jade lights in his eyes spiraled endlessly inward, and she found herself tilting toward him, her insides aswirl as if she were falling.

  Slowly, he reached up to twine his fingers in her hair. “When I left you in the galley, I reviewed some of the best practices and procedures manuals from the Intergalactic Dating Agency in regards to Earther females.”

  Her scalp tinged at the faint tug on her hair. “I…didn’t know dating had best practices and procedure, for Earthers or anyone else.”

  “Are you curious?” His tone dipped into a lower register.

  It was the coffee talking, she knew that, but damn, he was sexy when he was caffeinated.

  Not that she would take advantage of him in this condition.

  She just had to keep him busy until the coffee wore off, keep his mind—or body—distracted from the apparently arousing effects, and stop him from cancelling their race. He’d be back on track to his buttoned-up, by-the-book self in no time, probably completely forgetting this intimate interlude.

  She couldn’t hold back a regretful sigh, and his gaze dropped to her mouth.

  “Earthers have kissing,” he said abruptly. “According to the Intergalactic Dating Agency.”

  “Uh…” Despite her very best efforts not to react, her tongue darted out to moisten her lower lip. “Yeah. Yes, we do. Do draklings?”

  “Fay-il,” he murmured. “The first spark that becomes a flame.”

  Oh, that first spark seemed to be licking at the base of her spine, sending shivers all the way up. “And…what is the second spark?”