by H. E. Trent
“Just mine.”
“Yep. Because—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Luke waved dismissively at him. “Best friend.”
“You could do better than me, anyway.”
“Probably, but there’s something to be said for familiar.”
“Familiar gets lots of people in trouble.”
“No shit. I only had one reason to be glad that Precious volunteered herself for this trip, and that was because she needed to put some space between her and her ex, and was due for an intervention.”
Owen pulled on his jeans and sat on the bed’s edge, shirtless.
Ais’s immediate instinct was to curl her body around him, but she hadn’t forgotten that she was angry and that she needed to tell him.
“What was wrong with the ex?” Owen asked.
Luke shrugged, grabbed a tablet from one of the clothing piles on the floor, and bent to scratch the top of Nestor’s head. “The usual drama. You know, like, she’s a psychopath and Precious has a bad habit of becoming codependent.”
“What the hell happened?”
“There isn’t enough air in this room for me to tell those stories. Maybe Precious will gather everyone around one night and we can have a campfire. Instead of ghost stories, Precious can tell you all about her girlfriend. That chick was deranged.”
“But Precious kept going back.”
“Not sure what her appeal was, to be honest. Maybe Precious just got too comfortable and didn’t want to start from scratch.”
“She’s got a lot going for her. She could do better than comfortable.”
“Yeah, the whole family is in agreement on that, especially Ma. Ma told the chick to her face she didn’t like her, and you know Ma’s not like that. She’s more of the passive-aggressive sort.”
Luke sat near Ais’s shins, and suddenly the tablet in his hand began to shudder.
“What in the hell?”
“Answer,” Owen said.
Luke swiped the flashing message on the screen and turned the device’s camera away from the bed. “Hey, Court. You looking for Owen?”
“Yeah, our granddad was live on COM a few minutes ago. He wanted to conference with you guys.”
“About what?” Owen got off the bed and grabbed his shirt from the floor.
Ais pouted.
“Literally everything under the sun, I guess. Lillian’s trying to put scouting crews together for the lady retrieval missions, and the Jekhan Alliance needs some ground support in Buinet. He wanted to see what you guys could do to rustle up some possible volunteers in Little Gitano. Maybe Allan can activate his network of scruffy rebels or something.”
“I’ll help any way I can,” Luke said.
“Good. We need to move fast.”
Ais grabbed Owen by the shirt and shook her head hard.
“Shh,” he whispered. “I’m not going anywhere yet.” Toward the tablet, he said, “What about our Tyneali problem?”
“We’ll keep an eye on Ais.”
“Take me with you!” she hissed.
Owen shook his head and joined Luke in front of the camera. “When?”
“Dunno. Call him back. He should be at the desk for the next fifteen minutes or so.”
“We’ll call him.”
“Also, dinner’s ready.”
“We’ll be out.”
Luke killed the connection and set down the tablet.
Ais glared at him, then Owen, and then grabbed her dress.
“Aw, come on.” Luke looped an arm around her waist and pulled her back to the bed. “You’ll have plenty of time to cuddle later. We just need to go have a conference call with Salehi and probably Marco real quick, and then we can have dinner, and then you can both get back to work torturing me.”
“You create your own torture, Luke,” Owen said.
“Maybe I’m more masochistic than I thought. I mean, I know there’s no chance in hell I’ll be a permanent guest of this party, but can’t I just enjoy the benefits while they last?”
“You’ve never been that hard up.”
“I’m not hard up.” Luke shrugged. “Just don’t like being single.”
“It’s okay to be single until you find the right person. Don’t go rushing into shit like Precious unless you want to attract your very own psychopath….or was that your plan?”
Luke was quiet for too long, and Ais wondered if the thing Owen warned against held a glimmer of appeal.
But then Luke grunted. “Eh. I’m sure you’ll keep me on the straight and narrow.”
“All the way from here?”
One of Luke’s dark eyebrows sprung upward. “Who said I was leaving?”
Annoyance temporarily squashed, Ais turned to see him a little better. “You stay?”
He shrugged and gave Ais’s rear end a somewhat predatory squeeze. “I’m certainly open to the possibilities, even if they are non-Owen possibilities.”
Behind her, Owen sighed.
“You fuckin’ friend-zoned me,” Luke said.
“But at least you know I’m not bullshitting you. You’ve known me long enough to know better.”
Luke pursed his lips and rolled his gaze over to Ais. “What do you think?”
She scowled. “I think…need less friends. Too much…share.”
“Hmm?”
Groaning, she picked up the tablet, engaged the right bit of software, and then said to the device in Tyneali, “You don’t get to share any more women.”
There was a brief delay while the machine translated, and as the men, apparently, tried to make sense of the words.
Then Luke said, “Aw, you kicking me out of the cuddle pile already? That’s cruel. I just got here.”
She closed her eye, sighed, and lifted the tablet again. Into it, she said, “I mean he doesn’t get any other women to share with you. Just me. I don’t want to hear about the others.”
After a minute, Owen shifted his weight in her periphery and said quietly, “They didn’t mean anything.”
“You touched them.”
“Yeah. I told you that. That happens when people have sex.”
“I don’t like to think about them.”
“We won’t talk about them then. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset. Like I said, a guy my age is almost always going to have had some encounters in his past.”
“Maybe you’re the one who should be locked up.”
After a translation delay, Owen scoffed and took the tablet from her. “Are you jealous? Seriously?”
She ground her teeth.
“I think she is,” Luke said. He blew a raspberry on her belly and snorted. “You really shouldn’t be, though. Owen compartmentalizes like you wouldn’t believe. I doubt any of those women left much of a psychic imprint on him. If anything, they left more of one on me because I’m a sucker that way. I fall a little bit in love with everyone I meet.”
“Way to be a bi stereotype, Luke.” Owen bent at Ais’s feet and held her opened dress out to her.
Ais didn’t see how being that sort of stereotype was a bad thing. In her opinion, more love was better than less, but she knew she had a bias. She was used to having less.
She cut Owen what she hoped was an incendiary glare, but he was on the wrong side and couldn’t see her eye.
Somehow, she’d have to make him understand that she wasn’t interested in games, and if he thought she was a toy, he needed to wise up quickly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The following morning, Owen used his limited amount of energy to hold Ais still on his lap for the doctor’s laser scalpel. She was practically thrumming with excitement, and he certainly understood why she would be. For the first time in her life, she’d be able to see well out of at least one eye, but the doctor had made her wait until he’d finished treating the second before he’d take the first patch off. He’d claimed she’d be looking around the room too much and moving the eye he needed to be operating on.
She may have been keeping her head
and eyes still, but her hands were nervous little things, and her legs kept twitching against his.
“Where do you get the energy?” he asked on a yawn, and then put his forehead against her shoulder.
“Excited,” she said.
She and Luke had been up all night, chatting and flirting—or at least Owen thought what they were doing was flirting. It was hard to tell with Ais—and Owen had resorted to rolling in between the two of them at three a.m. to shut them up. He’d forgotten that Luke liked to sprawl in bed. Owen was going to kill him, right after he had a nap.
“I know you’re excited,” Owen said, “but you’re hard to hold when you’re squirmy.”
Dorro snorted. “You could put her down. I’d probably do all right with her on top of the counter.”
“Nah. I’m all right.”
Owen didn’t especially like being cooped up in the main house instead of in his cottage. People came and went all day, some who lived there, and some who visited to do business with Court, Murk, and Trig, but no matter where Ais went, she drew looks.
He could trust the Jekhan males that had already been attached to mates. They were generally disinclined to stare overlong. It was the rest of the men who got his hackles up. They peered at her as if Owen wasn’t even there and that he didn’t have a claim.
He rubbed his hands down the sides of her arms and furrowed his brow.
Do I?
He hadn’t given much thought to what Ais was to him, but perhaps he needed to. She was an important part of his day. He actually looked forward to seeing her. He missed her touches when she wasn’t nearby, and even missed her pouts. In a few days, he’d gotten used to having her and that damned dog take up a sliver of his bed. He’d gotten used to having someone be in his space when he got home, and he’d never expected that to happen. He assumed he’d die alone like Michael, only for different reasons—different illnesses. Michael had a grocery list of medical issues. Owen’s sickness was self-flagellation.
He closed his arms around her waist and gave her a squeeze.
She squeezed his hands in return.
Why that thrilled him so much, he couldn’t speculate on.
“Be still,” Doc whispered. “I’m almost done.”
“Sorry. That was probably my fault,” Owen said.
“Are you going to be a bad influence on this young woman?”
“Probably,” Owen muttered.
“Probably already is,” Erin said from across the kitchen.
“Be kinder.”
“No. If anyone’s going to let you know about yourself, a sibling should, don’t you think?”
“You’ll frighten her away. She’s not used to Terran family dynamics.”
“Neither were any of the Jekhans on the farm when they got here. They adjusted to all the McGarry quibbling quickly enough.”
“You kidding?” Amy asked. “McGarry quibbling makes the best entertainment. It almost seems scripted sometimes.”
“I assure you,” Owen said. “It’s not.”
“Aw, we’ll be nice,” Erin said. “If we get Owen upset, he’ll take Ais back to his hidey hole and we’ll never see her again.”
Ais giggled.
Owen rolled his eyes. He could admit that what he’d done hadn’t been his best or most mature plan, but in his opinion, things hadn’t turned out so badly.
Eileen entered the room, humming.
Owen recognized the distinctive tune that seemed to be her trademark, and the cowgirl was probably the only person on Jekh who knew all the lyrics to “Yellow Rose of Texas.”
He looked up, anyway, and saw her join Erin and Amy at the end of the table.
“Did I miss the removal of whatever that thing is in her neck?” Eileen asked. “Salehi wanted to know if he’d get a chance to take a look.”
“You’re calling him Salehi again?” Erin asked. “Uh-oh. What’d he do?”
Eileen blinked. “I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” she said in her usual deadpan twang.
“Yes, you do. Whenever you start calling him ‘Salehi’ instead of ‘Edgar,’ he’s done something to piss you off. What’d he do?”
She blinked again, and shifted her weight. “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Me neither,” Amy said.
Eileen harrumphed and crossed her arms over her chest. “You think I’m so easy to read?”
Erin and Amy performed synchronized nods.
Eileen sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes. “Okay. Maybe we had a small disagreement over how we’d be handling the lady-retrieval issue.”
“Oh, boy,” Erin said. “In what way?”
“Well, I might have said that there was really no need for us to be on the same ship if we’re trying to divide and conquer, you know? Lillian’s going to want to split us up into teams, and you gotta have some folks in each one who know all the nuances of the mission. It doesn’t make sense, in my opinion, to have both Salehi and me on the same vessel.”
Amy and Erin shared a look.
“Well, it doesn’t!”
“What did Salehi say?” Amy asked.
Eileen studied her nails, and muttered, “Something about us being partners and how Lillian didn’t recruit me to be flying off half-cocked.”
“You do work well together, don’t you?” Erin asked carefully.
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. I can do this.”
Owen sure as shit didn’t doubt that she could, but being the usually smart male he was, he was going to keep his mouth shut.
Obviously, the doctor was adhering to a similar strategy. His maroon eyes had gone round, but he’d pressed his lips tightly together as he worked, at least until Eileen had stopped viciously muttering about “chauvinist fly-boys.”
During Erin and Amy’s stunned lull, Dorro cleared his throat. “I’ll scan Ais’s neck as soon as I get this bandage on her eye, and just before I peel off the other. I figure there’s no good reason for her to try to watch me excise something from her neck if there’s anything there.”
Ais shuddered.
Owen rubbed her arms some more. “You done?”
“Indeed. That eye took a bit more tweaking than its twin, but I think she’ll have a more than satisfactory result.”
“Want see,” Ais said.
“In due time, dear.” Dorro sealed the edges of the bandage, and took a step back. He made a circular gesture at a spot on the right side of Ais’s neck.
Owen nodded and leaned back to give the man room to work his scanner.
The handheld device was silent as the doctor hovered it between her neck and shoulder, but the display flashed wildly.
Leaning a bit, Owen could see that the results weren’t baseline. There was definitely something in her neck that didn’t belong.
Dorro gave Owen a pointed look.
Owen grimaced.
“I…believe I have just the thing in my bag.” Dorro handed Owen the scanner.
After a moment of rummaging in his rolling medical kit, he produced a sanitizing spray, which he applied to her skin.
She giggled and tried to shrink away, but Owen held her too tightly. “Cold. What is?”
“Just a bit of cleaner so we don’t introduce infection,” Dorro said, and added in an undertone as he removed the cap from a long, thin syringe, “It also numbs a bit.”
The spray obviously numbed a lot because she didn’t seem to feel the insertion of the wiry needle under her flesh or his injection of local anesthesia into the area.
“Given the collar cut of the Jekhan dresses that are currently in vogue, I’d hate for you to have a scar there. I’ll do my best to be precise.”
Brow furrowed, Amy came closer, and mouthed to Owen, “How big?”
Owen widened his eyes and hoped that response would be sufficient.
Cringing, she turned her back and paced by the table.
Dorro produced a bladed scalpel from his bag, turned on the task light installed between h
is loupes, and pointed to the scanner.
Owen held the device near her neck.
Dorro looked between it and the prepared length of skin, and Owen closed his eyes before he made the first cut.
He wasn’t afraid of blood. He’d never been squeamish, but he couldn’t fathom that she’d had that spidery-looking implant under her skin for so long, and she hadn’t known that anything was out of place. It’d become like any other part of her.
He opened his eyes, though, so he could watch. He wanted to make sure every part of that thing was out of her.
Dorro gestured to Eileen, who’d moved closer. He indicated that she should grab a tray, which she did, and then held it ready for him.
With forceps, he carefully tugged the long, thready legs of the device free of Ais’s neck muscle. There were ten, inch-long filaments, each with silver at the tips. Owen hoped that meant all ten had come out whole.
With those hanging limp, Dorro turned his attention to the base lodged into her neck. The disk was about the side of a dime, and had a small nub in the center, which was likely what Ais had been able to feel through her skin. If Owen had been reading the sensor correctly, once Dorro lifted the disk, he’d be in the clear. There was nothing beneath that.
He slid one prong of the forceps beneath the disk, wriggled the stubborn little thing side to side and, finally, it came loose.
Eileen furrowed her brow as he dropped the tracking device onto the cloth-covered tray.
Doc shooed her, mouthing, “Take it away.”
She nodded and left the room with Erin on her heels.
Amy filled in the spot Eileen had left.
Dorro scanned Ais’s neck once more. There were no flashes on the screen. No hits.
He nodded. He would have known better than anyone in the area if there were anything else there. He’d removed hundreds of tracking chips from refugees.
Owen breathed, and deeply. Ais had already had two close calls, and if there was any way at all to minimize further discoverability, he wanted to try it. He was afraid for her…and maybe for himself. She’d created a new standard that he’d forever compare every other woman with.