by H. E. Trent
Kent walked to the bucket, reached in, and mixed up the slips a bit.
“The new catch this week is that you can make multiple wagers. You want to try to mack on more than one lady at once? Well, god help ya, but feel free to try. Of course, multiple wagers doesn’t guarantee you’ll get more than one name, or even one at all. There are still way more of you than there are of them. Understand me?”
Everyone muttered agreement except Jasper.
Twenty-three hundred credits minimum, and Kent had thought up a brand new way of potentially screwing them. He’d worked in military intelligence before defecting. He understood all too well how to manipulate people.
A few more men stepped up to the credit swiper and put in their bets.
Jasper held back, glancing again at the ladies on the board. He had no way of knowing if any were worth the risk, but he was sick of being lonely, and if he didn’t put in his wager, he’d have no shot in hell at getting close to any woman in the directory. The participants banded together and shouldered out any prospects who hadn’t paid up. If he so much as said “Hi” to a lady in front of the feed store, one of those assholes could swoop in and either distract her or shame him until he went away. He’d witnessed that firsthand at least three times with men who were out of the loop.
“If you see guys outside of our little cabal trying to cozy up with ladies you know are on the list,” Kent said, as if he’d been reading Jasper’s mind, “you’re obligated to steer the suckers away the best you can—and peacefully, you hear me? We’re not trying to start blood feuds over this shit.”
More muttering.
Jasper ground his teeth, ready to be done with the ordeal.
In or out?
He still hadn’t decided. There were some beautiful women on that board, but beauty didn’t guarantee a love match. He wanted stability, not just possibility. Guys like Tevo could be less picky. Jekhans were used to taking whatever partners they could get.
“One more change,” Kent said, holding up a hand.
There came a collective groan from the room, including from Jasper.
Get on with it, already.
“New this week, if a guy does a draw and doesn’t like the name he picks, he can chose to double his buy-in and toss her back, assuming there are any ladies left. Naturally, doing so may get you someone you like even less, but that’s the price you pay for gambling.” Kent clasped his hands together, and grinned like a shark. “All right. Three minutes to buy your entries. Chances depend on number of entries and so on.”
Jasper looked once more at the board, and his gaze tracked immediately toward carmine skin, violet-colored eyes, and hair the color of his abuela’s Black Velvet variety of roses. Red with some smoke in it.
The Merridon sisters held a certain appeal to a sex-starved savage like him, but they were notoriously closed off. After what they’d gone through, they had the right to be.
Still…
Putting a face to the scheme made the betting so much more personal. Made him want to invest more so he could he could take a woman home and love on her the way she needed. He’d show her that there were men capable of worshiping her the way she deserved, and that they weren’t all the same.
He’d never make her regret giving him the chance.
Any of the three would have been the right age, and their brother had a Terran woman as one of his partners. They wouldn’t be completely hostile toward Jasper simply for him being from Earth, though they certainly had the right to be disgusted by him for a host of other reasons.
Valen. Ara. Sera.
He would have been thrilled for a chance with any of them. If one didn’t like him, maybe she’d warm up her sister for him instead.
The way he was thinking—like some kind of perverse opportunist—was unrecognizable to him, but he stepped up to the swiper. He had no way of knowing how much the other men had bet, only what the minimum was. He bet twice that to get two shots at a single draw, and hoped that investment would be enough to at least be able to pull a slip. He would likely be digging into his old MRE stash to feed himself by the end of the week unless his supervisor decided that Jasper deserved a spontaneous bonus.
Forty-six hundred fucking credits.
“All right!” Kent tapped the lid onto the bucket, picked up the container, and gave it an energetic shake. He set the bucket down, pulled the lid up, and pushed a lamp closer to the bucket. “Let’s get this party started. Lala?” he called over to his wife.
The Jekhan woman behind the makeshift bar crooked up one of her reddish eyebrows.
“You want to update the board for me? Please and thank you and I love you?”
Lala sighed, corked the bottle of Gitanan ale she’d been pouring, and then cut one of the drinkers a side-eye. “Don’t touch that when I walk away.”
“Scout’s honor,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think you have an honorable bone in your body.”
“Aw, why you gotta be like that?”
She gave the man a sardonic bow, and Jasper snorted.
“Welcome to Jekh,” she said. “How long have you been here?”
“Ten years,” the guy muttered.
“Then you should know how we are.” She moved to the board and picked up a piece of red chalk. Jekhans were fond of red, being fairly red themselves. The Tyneali had been dickering with the gene pool for a thousand years or more. The hybrids were, for the most part, human-appearing, but their coloring was redder than humans’. The Tyneali were red from their hair down to their toenails, not that he’d ever seen their toenails, but he could guess.
“All right.” Kent turned on the randomizer on his tablet and, with a flourish, tapped the screen. Every bet was connected to that application.
Jasper’s heart stuttered.
Please, not Black Velvet.
“You’re up, Vin.”
“Fuck yeah!” Vin sauntered up to the bucket, shoved his hand in, and rooted out a slip.
“Well, who did you get?” Lala called out.
“Gerti.” Vin nodded and pursed his lips. “Okay. Cool.”
“You keeping her?”
Vin shrugged. “May as well. Can’t afford to bet again.” He carried his slip to Lala and then moved toward the bar. He couldn’t get a drink, but there were pastries set out for anyone to take.
Jasper leaned against his support column once more with his arms crossed and watched two more men pull names. One was Brenna.
He grunted again. Even Tevo scoffed, likely thinking the same thing as Jasper. Brenna wasn’t gonna give that guy the time of day. She was such a nerd. There was no way in hell she’d even be able to carry on a conversation with a guy who, by his own admission, hadn’t seen the point of reading a book in the last six years.
“All right…” Kent tapped the screen again. “Jasper! You’re up.”
For real?
He stood dumb, staring. He’d been hoping, of course. After all, he’d transferred a shitload of credits into Kent’s bank account, but part of him hadn’t believed he’d get a draw, much less such an early one.
“Come on, man,” Ken said. “Let’s go.”
Jasper dragged his tongue across his lips and pushed away from the column he was holding up. He’d gotten a pull. He actually got to pull a name.
He approached the bucket and, closing his eyes, dropped his hand into the bucket and let his fingers walk a bit. He felt far more of the bucket’s plastic than he did paper. There were only ten names left. He said a prayer to whichever god would hear him that he hadn’t wasted his money, and then asked for forgiveness for praying for such petty shit in the first place.
Jasper hoped that whomever he pulled would be receptive. He didn’t want to make a second pull, and if he were impulsive again and decided he had to, he’d be broke until his next paycheck. He’d thought he’d left that “living poor” shit behind when he’d left Earth.
“Well? Who’d you get?” Kent asked.
> Jasper unfolded the paper he’d pulled and smoothed it against his knee before reading.
“What’s the name?” Lala called over impatiently.
Jasper furrowed his brow and read the name again. His brain made sense of “Merridon” first, and his heart gave a triumphant gallop.
“Jasper!” Lala nudged.
“Shit. Sorry.” He walked the slip over to her.
“Sera Merridon,” she called out.
Black Velvet.
He peered up at the board to confirm her stats. She was the youngest of the three sisters. Lala took the bio down and filed the poster into the portfolio case before Jasper could get his fill of looking at the woman.
“Good luck,” someone muttered. “I hear she’s been in the pool for nine months. No action.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kent said. “Just like her sisters. I suspect that her big sisters aren’t gonna settle down until she’s squared away.”
“Why’s that?” Jasper asked.
Kent cringed.
“Nope. Don’t make up pretty words to tell me. Give me the truth. I don’t know anything about those women.”
“Okay, normally we’d tell you to read the deeper dossiers in advance, but I guess you’re new enough that you haven’t seen them all.”
Lala rolled her eyes. “For goodness’ sake, she has a small child and an arm that doesn’t work. She was sold into sex slavery and got brutalized so badly that the nerves in her left arm stopped functioning. Would you like to throw her back and re-pull?”
“I—” Shit.
Jasper pushed a hand through his hair and stared at the bucket.
He’d read a lot of the files in a hurry, and hadn’t known that about her. He knew the Merridons had gone through some shit, but hadn’t known about the injury.
Or the kid.
Granted, all women on Jekh, save for the most isolated, had likely endured at least a little during the long Terran occupation, but he knew that some ladies had to have been in worse straits than others. The last thing some needed was a dead-end courtship with a chick who’d already been tossed back a few times, and good for her for protecting herself.
But…her sisters. Rules or no rules, he could try to soften them up if Miss Sera shut him out. Three chances for the price of one.
Maybe he wouldn’t be lonely by the time all was said and done.
Lala sighed and cocked her hip impatiently. “Well?”
He stared at the bucket again, drummed his fingertips against his biceps, and then shrugged. If push came to shove, he could say later on that he’d merely taken one for the team.
An expensive one.
“Okay,” he said. “Sera Merridon, it is.”
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OTHER JEKH SAGA STORIES
ERSTWHILE
As an adamant opponent of Terran settlement on the planet Jekh, Owen McGarry made his family name synonymous with “traitor” on Earth. Lobbyists standing to profit from off-world colonization hinted that the Jekhans were preparing to declare war. Nearly twenty years after Owen’s supposed death, his granddaughter Courtney wants to learn the truth—even if she has to travel to the far-flung colony to do it.
Court soon learns that not only was her grandfather right about the Jekhans, but that conditions on their world are far more hostile than she feared. Terran forces decimated the population of the resident human-alien hybrids, and the people who remain seem to be all out of fight. That is, except for the pair of men Court finds hiding in her basement.
Fugitives Murki and Trigrian see a future in Court. On a planet where so few women remain, she has the potential to be the mate the lovers need. And more, she could become the advocate for their people that her grandfather didn’t get the chance to be.
When the corrupt local government seeks to punish Court’s friends and family for her actions, she has no choice but to make a stand. If it takes a riot to make the people on Earth see that they were misled about Jekh, she’s more than willing to start one. After all, her reputation couldn’t possibly get any worse.
___
CRUX
Erin McGarry fears she’s becoming the very thing she hates. She traveled to the planet Jekh to get her big sister, Courtney, out of a jam, and now Erin has become a colonist, too. In spite of the planet’s unstable political environment and ongoing rioting by the native Jekhans, Erin fears that retreating to Earth would mean she’d never see Courtney again.
To complicate her ordeal further, as one of very few women on a planet of desperate men, people expect Erin to pick a lover—or two—and settle down. With the Jekhan race having nearly been obliterated by Terran colonists, Erin refuses to help further dilute their culture. But at least two men think Erin’s objections don’t hold water.
They may have been enemies at first sight, but Esteben Beshni and Headron Jiro intimately bond over a common goal: making Erin their mate. Just when they think they’ve made headway with convincing her, the men’s efforts are choked by the reemergence of Erin’s long-missing grandfather and by unsettling revelations about the abductors who created the Jekhan hybrid race. If they can’t convince Erin that a mixed-culture ménage is the intergalactic ticket to happiness, they may miss their chance to have children.
How can they help rebuild Jekh if the one woman who wants them both is too idealistic to commit?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
H.E. Trent is the science fiction romance pen name of USA Today bestselling and award-winning author Holley Trent. She’s the author of dozens of sexy, snarky romances set on Earth and beyond.
Connect with her online:
Website: www.holleytrent.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/writerholleytrent
Twitter: www.twitter.com/holleytrent
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2016 by H.E. Trent
Excerpt of Wager © 2017 by H.E. Trent
This book is published by Holley Trent
www.holleytrent.com
[email protected]
Also available in paperback.
Print book ISBN-13 978-1539793946
Print book ISBN-10 153979394X
All rights reserved. No parts of this work may be reproduced without prior consent of the author except for short quotes used for purpose of review.
Salvo is a work of fiction. Names, locations, and events are either created by the author or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people or locations is coincidental.
Cover art design by Clarissa Yeo/Yocla Designs
Copyedited by Tasha Harrison
Proofread by Cassie Hess-Dean