by H. E. Trent
“Maybe I’m having a hard time understanding why you’re here,” Luke said.
Here we go.
The crease between her eyebrows deepened and she gave her head a slight shake. “Pardon me?”
“Most of the women who signed up for the website didn’t have much going for them back on Earth. For them, coming here is as much about turning over a new leaf as it is connecting with someone. I guess I’m not sure that fits with the vibe I’m getting from you.”
Cue the lies.
Pressing her fingertips together atop her lap, Autumn tilted her chin up and expelled a clipped scoff. “What sort of vibe are you getting from me?”
“Kinda disinterested, or perhaps you’re purposefully keeping your enthusiasm locked down. And if so, that begs the question of why. Also, you had a pretty good gig before coming here. Why would you give that up?”
She blinked. Just blinked, though he could admit she performed the act with an impressive amount of hostility.
Let’s have it.
Alex leaned back onto his forearms and crossed his legs at the ankles. He almost felt sorry for the woman. He’d been on the other end of Luke’s third-degree treatment before, and he wouldn’t have recommended that anyone volunteer for it.
“We spoke a number of times before you signed off on the permit for me to come to Jekh,” she said. Her voice was on the hostile side of neutral.
If Luke noticed, he didn’t react. But then again, he rarely did. Alex was the only person who could trigger him with the slightest provocation.
“Yeah, but there’s a hell of a difference between transgalactic COM conversations where you’re seeing body language and facial expression on a delay and having someone right in front of you,” Luke said.
“You think I’m prevaricating?”
He shrugged again.
“A shrug rather than you saying yes doesn’t make your answer any kinder. If you’re going to call me a liar, say it outright so we can clear the air once and for all.”
Evidently unmoved, Luke started twirling the weed again.
Alex bobbed his top foot and looked from Luke to Autumn, wondering who’d be first to break.
Autumn turned her glare on him as if she’d finally remembered they had a witness. If she was thinking she could send him away with a stare, she could hold her breath and see what happened.
“Look,” Luke said, pulling her attention back to him. “A few months ago, all I was thinking was that you looked like you had your shit together. Granted, with everything that was going on then, I might have been a little more distracted than I would have liked. Still, I had the best of hopes and so did Brenna and Ara when they did all the checks and verifications. The last thing I needed was someone who’d get all the way to Jekh and decide the lifestyle isn’t for her. Or someone who came here for all the wrong reasons. I brought you here with companionship and my future in mind, so I need you to be honest with me. Are you here because you want that, or are you motivated by something entirely different?”
“I can’t believe you’d— After I came all this way to—” Autumn’s jaw flapped like a flag in the wind and her cheeks turned red as a ripe tomato.
Alex reveled with smug satisfaction. Honest people didn’t have to work so hard to defend themselves. If they were righteous, they could explain themselves in a heartbeat, and apparently, Dexter Ray’s right-hand lady was short on words.
Luke tossed the remnants of his lunch into the bag and straightened. “Come on. Give me something. Tell me anything to make me feel better about this. As of right now, I feel the way I always did when I was chasing leads on a case and things weren’t adding up.”
“So that’s what I am to you? A case?”
“You’re deflecting,” Alex said.
She whipped her head toward him and closed her eyes to slits. “Why are you even in this conversation?”
“Because I know things, and I shared those things with Luke.”
“I see. So, the two of you are ganging up on me. Why? What could you possibly know about me that would merit this sort of treatment?” She scoffed and pressed her hands to her biceps and rubbed. “Absolutely nothing is what.”
“The things I shared weren’t about you specifically, but your family.”
“You don’t know a damn—”
“Stop.” Luke let out a forceful breath and rubbed his eyes. “Look, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I swear, I do. More often than not, I wait for a viper to try to strike before I lop his head off. But I can’t discount what Alex knows.” He dropped his hands and gave her a direct look.
Alex.
He’d said Alex, and Alex was so unused to hearing his name in Luke’s voice, he needed a moment to figure out who that person was. He’d said it when they were in bed, of course, but that had different associations altogether. Whenever the man said his name, he was either going to be in the company of strangers, or fighting an erection. No in-between. He wasn’t sure what it meant that Luke had used his name.
Autumn looked at Alex again. She gripped her bag against her belly, legs folded in front of her in a manner that managed to be both prim and childlike. One of her feet tapped the air.
She wasn’t good with confrontation, but she was used to it. Alex knew far too many people like her.
“Where there’s smoke,” Alex said neutrally, “There’s generally fire.”
“And you think I’m smoking,” she spat.
He turned his hands over. “Your father is. You’re in his pocket, so you share the same stench.”
“Stench. I suppose having a civil discussion is out of the question if that’s what you think.” Her foot stilled. She looked slowly over her shoulder toward Cree.
Cree was oblivious. She appeared to be mediating a scoring dispute. Her hands were on her hips. Brow furrowed. Nose crinkled, and eyes narrowed in a way that was probably supposed to be stern, but she didn’t have her sister’s edge. She looked goofy, and that was probably why people couldn’t help but to like her. She hadn’t absorbed the Ray stench yet, and if she was lucky, she never would.
Fixing her gaze back on Alex, Autumn cleared her throat and ground her teeth. Apparently, she wasn’t the sort of villain who’d bark and bray at an accusation. She met her opponents head-on and he didn’t doubt for a moment that she was plotting her next moves.
He didn’t trust her. Unfortunately, he also understood why Luke hadn’t passed her by in the database. She was an interesting-looking woman, which wasn’t to say that she had odd features or that she was “handsome” rather than pretty. She was pretty, but she was pretty in a different way than her sister. Cree had all the classic trademarks of beauty, but Autumn had a face that was actually memorable. Hers wasn’t a face that would get skimmed over rather than read, assuming one could manage to look at it for long. Her eyes held a breathtaking intensity. All of her frustration and anger mixed into the brown.
“What do you think you know about me that’s so awful?” she asked him.
That wasn’t an outright refusal of wrongdoing.
He looked at Luke to see if he was catching the same conversational nuances. Luke nodded.
Alex twined his fingers and spun his thumbs around each other. “Do you know how I make my money?”
“To be perfectly honest,” she said, “I know very little about you.”
“No worries. I take no offense.”
She rolled her eyes.
“For the most part, I prefer to fly below the radar. I get more done that way. But the money I have that doesn’t come from my family is earned through investments in various things, including real estate.”
“And, what, you think you have some insider information?”
“I don’t just think, I know. I know which projects you managed for your father and I know how they turned out.”
“I—” She didn’t try to defend herself. For a moment, she stared with her mouth agape, cheeks flaming red, and eyes flashing with fury. She balled her
hands into fists and pounded them against her thighs. “This is pointless. You can’t possibly understand anything about what I do.”
“Just give me something, Autumn,” Luke said. “Give me some reason that makes sense. Tell me that you’re really not the kind of person who’d cheat people.”
“I’m not. You should believe me.”
“But that’s not what your work says.”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you. The fact that I’m here right now should be enough.”
“All that tells me is that you’re running from one scheme to start another.”
She scoffed. “If I were going to do that, I certainly wouldn’t come here under my real name. I haven’t tried to hide anything, and if you look deeply enough, you’ll see that I’m being perfectly honest.”
“Yeah, but being honest doesn’t make you a good person. It just means you don’t waste energy in lying. You’re not doing a very good job of defending yourself.”
“I don’t see the point. Nothing I say is going to be enough. I could repudiate my father here and now, and you won’t believe me. I could tell you that none of the outcomes of those projects that you claim were built to cheat people were due to anything I did. I could tell you that you only see the tip of the bullshit iceberg where Ray Enterprises is concerned and that it’s people like me who spot problems and try to fix them before they go public, even if we’re always a step behind. That’s not going to be good enough for you, is it?”
“Autumn, you’re splashed all over the company website and listed as a VP. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“That I’ll be one of the first to take the fall if anything happens. Look at the past five years of press releases and see who steps up to the plate when shit happens. Look at whose name is attached to those mea culpas. Nine times out of ten, I get thrown under the bus without even being given a heads-up first. He knows I won’t sue him for defaming me.”
Alex rolled his eyes.
Luke cringed and flicked a bit of sand off his pants. “If that’s true, you should have left sooner.”
“You can’t fix people like Dexter Ray,” Alex said. “They don’t change, so I’m not going to buy the line that you hoped to be a leveling influence on him, if that was going to be your next excuse.”
“People always have choices,” Luke said.
“I—” Again, she cut off her words and made those fists, but perhaps she didn’t see the point of speaking further. She’d dug her own hole.
She wasn’t going to change Luke’s mind. Alex knew that about him. Once he’d formed his impression, anyone would be hard pressed to sway him elsewhere. After all, Autumn figuratively looked, sounded, and walked like a duck.
That meant she was a fucking duck.
Autumn began to tap her foot again. “So, what does this mean?”
Luke rubbed his eyes once more. “I don’t know what it means yet, but I need to be perfectly upfront and say that I don’t really trust you. And let’s be clear about something, here. When I let my friend Sera put me into that database, I didn’t expect that I was going to experience love at first sight with whoever I shook out of it. My hope was to at the very least get someone I’d be able to build something with, but maybe my standards were too high.”
“You’re implying that you scraped the bottom of the barrel to get me.” Her monotone delivery of the accusation was chilly as a winter day in Oslo.
“I’m not implying anything,” Luke said. “I’m only saying that reputation means something, and yours is questionable, and you’re not really mounting a passionate argument in your own defense.”
Beyond her shaking foot and grinding her teeth, she wasn’t doing all that much responding. She had to know that Luke was right. She had to know that nothing she said was going to salvage Luke’s impression of her.
And Alex was glad. He wanted her gone.
“I think it’d probably be best if we just…we didn’t do this,” Luke said. “You understand what I’m saying?”
Autumn notched her teeth into her bottom lip and looked at her sister in the distance.
“We’ll figure something out so you can go home without losing face, or whatever. We’ll come up with some good excuse. If you want to blame me and say we just weren’t compatible, that’s fine, too.”
“So, that’s it, then.”
“Unless you can tell me some good reason why it shouldn’t be.”
She wouldn’t. Alex knew she wouldn’t.
And of course, she didn’t.
She slid her tote up her arm, gracefully pulled her five-and-a-half feet erect, strode through the picnicking families, collected her sister, and walked to the ship.
“Fuck,” Luke muttered, flopping back onto the blanket.
“I told you she wasn’t up to anything good.”
“Yeah, but nobody wants to be the bad guy, you know?”
“You’re not the bad guy in the situation. She is.”
“But I’m still the one doing the dumping.” He expelled a laugh that somehow managed to be both quiet and slightly crazed. “Believe me, that’s usually easier for me. When you’re dealing with someone who’s supposed to be a one-night-stand or someone who’s just clinging a little more than you expected, you can redirect them if you know which part of them to appeal to. I was even friends with some of the chicks I rejected later on. But this is…”
“This isn’t the same.” Alex reached over and gave Luke’s hand a discreet squeeze. Autumn may have been slipping into the annals of their shared history but he still needed to be cautious. He was always being watched, and his family had eyes everywhere. He’d once been a pair of those eyes.
“Yeah. Not the same,” Luke said. “She came a long way to get here.”
“But not far enough to outrun her reputation.”
“I’m sure she didn’t expect to bump into you.”
“If not me, then someone else like me who knows a little too much would have caught up to her eventually.”
“Maybe.”
Oreva had his back turned and was arguing with the new referee about a goal, so Alex decided to take the risk and leaned in to pressed his lips against Luke’s.
Sweet, but too short.
Too many people watching. So much at stake.
Luke let out another frustrated exhalation and got to his feet. He cleaned up the picnic and then stretched his arms over his head. “Universe is a small place, I guess. People can run from their pasts, but they sure as shit can’t hide.”
“Too true.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For Luke, the worst part about letting Autumn off the hook the prior week had been dropping her off at the lodge and reading the look of genuine hurt on Cree’s face. Maybe she didn’t understand everything that was happening, but it wasn’t his job to cheer her up. He’d leave that to her sister. Autumn could explain why Luke & Autumn wasn’t going to be a thing, and why—unless Autumn found someone else to sponsor her immediately—both women would need to leave the planet.
Luke understood what it felt like to want to be liked and to not have his feelings reciprocated. The problem was that he wasn’t sure Autumn had any feelings. If she did have any emotional investment, she sure as shit hadn’t shown him.
He rolled over in his too-hard bed in the too-quiet Tin Can and tapped his wristband. “What time is it?” he asked the computer.
“Oh-seven hundred,” it responded.
“Shit.” He drummed his fingers atop his belly and stared at the dark ceiling.
He hated feeling like the bad guy when he hadn’t done shit wrong. That was all on her.
But maybe I should check on her.
He’d intended to make arrangements to get her on the next ship to Earth, but he’d gotten distracted by farm shit, and tech shit, and other shit.
And Duke had been prancing around with Oreva doing who-knew-what. He was supposed to have been back already.
Luke tapped his wristband again. “Hauge
,” he told the computer.
Three beeps.
A connection.
Hauge’s tired-sounding, “Hello?”
Luke sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Where you at, Duke?”
Duke let out a long, ragged exhalation. “Fuck if I know. Somewhere on the farm. After I dropped Oreva off at the lodge, I put on the ship’s autopilot. It did the parking.”
Luke sprung to his feet and patted the nearby chair for his pants. “What were you doing for a week?”
“Oreva got our company special permission to do some building. It’s a pay-into-the-system sort of deal. We put up low-cost housing in high-needs areas for the indigent, and when those are sixty percent complete, we can file for permissions on for-profit projects.”
“Yeah? Sounds like that guy’s gonna stick around for a while.” Luke grabbed a clean shirt from the dresser and pulled it on while stepping into his boots.
“I don’t know if he is or isn’t. He’s coy about it.”
“Probably in wait-and-see mode.”
“Could be. This is his first visit to Jekh, and I suppose he’ll need some time to decide if he likes the place. Also, he’s in a pretty serious relationship with a woman back on Earth.”
“He seemed to be having a good time the last I saw him.”
“Oreva is the sort of man who’d find fun anywhere he went.”
Just like Cree.
Luke pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to shake the thought from his head.
He wasn’t the bad guy, and he had to remind himself of that. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s doormat or anyone’s stepping-stone.
Fuck that.
“I’ll be over there in a few minutes. I’ll have my computer find your location chip. Bye.” Luke moved quietly through the hall so as not to wake his shipmate Edgar Salehi, and managed to get the outer door open without too much rattling.
His computer located Duke’s near the corner of the property nearest the road to town. A good haul for a guy who’d slept like shit, but all the same, he started jogging.
No use wasting fuel to start up his ship for a two-mile trip.
Duke was leaning in the doorway, rubbing his eyes, when Luke approached his ship. He looked like he’d been dragged through the maws of hell and lived to tell the tale.