by Frost, E J
Snowburn
E. J. Frost
Snowburn
Copyright © 2014 by E. J. Frost
All rights reserved.
www.ejfrost.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable for criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. By purchasing an authorized electronic edition, you are supporting the author’s rights. Thank you!
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Cover art by Alexandria N. Thompson
www.gothicfate.com
Interior book design by Bob Houston eBook Formatting
ISBN: 1497397863
ISBN-13: 978-1497397866
Dedication
To my family, physical and virtual, you know who you are.
And to Carina Persson, DeeGee Timms and Jamelith, for keeping the faith.
Chapter 1
Movement.
It catches at my modified senses. Jerks my brain onto high alert. My mind’s been idling as I move along the familiar path through the spaceport. Turning over possibilities: what I want for dinner, what I can find for entertainment afterwards. There’s Maier’s poker game, but the idea of sitting in his claustrophobic cube, filling my lungs with the stink of the punters’ anxiety while I fleece ‘em, ain’t doing anything for me. Still, I’ve got three days to kill before my next flight. Maybe it’s time to hit the Delta.
Small, deliberate movement in my peripheral vision wipes all those thoughts from my brain.
I hyperfocus. A woman. On her own. No visible weapons. No obvious modifications. My brain slows down a fraction at the lack of threat and takes in small details. A flash of pale skin through ripped fishnets as she draws up her knee. She props a well-worn boot against the plaz fence separating the restricted area of the docks from the rest of the spaceport. The jet wash off a launching Starflare blows white-blonde rat-tails a few shades darker than her skin around her shoulders as she turns her head to look at me.
I’ve seen that pale skin, those long rat-tails, before.
It takes me a moment and then I place her. Yesterday. Round the same time and place. Only then she wasn’t making it obvious, the way she is now. The rat-tails were tucked under a slouchy hat; the pale skin hidden under loose black fatigues.
So she’s been watching me. And now she’s decided to make her play. Interesting.
I pretend to ignore her. I’m a busy man. Twice as busy as I used to be, since I’m living two lives now. My old life as Hale Hauser: ex-S.A.W.L., escaped convict, declared dead in the wreckage of a prison transport two years ago, but you never know when a stray piece of DNA will trip a watcher program somewhere.
So while I’m laying low and being careful what I touch, I gotta keep up appearances in my new life as Sandringham Snow, master of the short hopper, Spinning Marie, transport for the legal and not so legal throughout the Vespers System.
I pass the girl, moving steadily down the walkway but not too fast. Leaving enough distance between us that she’ll have to lunge if she tries to come at me. She doesn’t look big or tough enough to be a peacekeeper, but the only place those kind of assumptions get you is back in the hole.
“Hey, mister,” she says. Loud enough for me to hear her clearly but not loud enough to draw attention from the other pilots, passengers and random passers-by on the walkway. “Are you a pilot?”
I glance over my shoulder at her. “D’you need one?”
“Yeah.” She falls into step with me. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure.”
She catches my hand. The warm shock of skin on skin nearly makes me stumble. I’m not used to being touched. Not like this. Not without paying for it. She tugs on my hand and when I don’t resist, leads me off the walkway into the warren of side streets that wriggle around the port like maggots through meat.
I follow her curiously. Waiting for the catch. The sting of transdermal drugs on my palm. Heavy breathing in the alley ahead. But there’s nothing. Her hand is warm and soft in mine. The alley’s silent until we turn the corner and there’s a burst of pounding bass music as a door opens and shuts ahead of us. Too loud for my modified senses. Too conspicuous for Snow’s low profile.
“Not there.”
She glances up at me. Pale blue eyes within kohled circles. Light from the haylon street signs catches on small metal rings through her nose and ears. “There.” She nods at a door further down the street. Very little haylon. Very little noise.
I nod. I like her taste.
She leads me through the quiet door. Locals bar. Smatterings of people clustered around their drinks. Low hum of conversation. Clink of glaz. Some anonymous and unappreciated bastard playing a magnellon towards the back, so quietly the drone of conversation almost drowns him out.
The girl’s internal propulsion cuts out at the bar. She turns and looks up at me. Pale oval of a face in the bar’s low lights. Pale pink bow of a mouth that shows white teeth when she speaks. Pale blue circles of her irises around huge black pupils. The bar’s dim but not dark enough to make her go owl-eyed. She’s high.
I lean into her, ostensibly to give her my drink order, but really to catch her scent. She doesn’t smell strongly, mostly of soap, and underneath a warm, musky, female scent. No herbs, no chemicals. Smells clean.
After naming a local brand of beer – real beer not the algae-crap they serve in the haylon-lit places – I could step back. Give her a little space. Let her cool down and see what her eyes do. Instead I stand close, so close the air between us warms from the heat off our bodies. Reach one hand into the back pocket of my fatigues so my chest and shoulders flex. Watch her pupils dilate until there’s just a thin rim of blue.
“Uh.” She clears her throat. Drags her eyes away. Orders two beers from the bartender who is doing a bad job of hiding his smirk.
I take the bulb she passes me. Wait while she pays. Hard credits. No wonder she brought me here. Hard credits wouldn’t be accepted in the haylon-lit places. Both Hauser and Snow are fond of hard credits. Easy to steal; impossible to trace. But, then, both Hauser and Snow have the skill and lack of conscience to get and keep hard credits. That this girl carries them, without visible means of offense or defense, raises her a notch in my estimation.
She takes my hand again once she’s paid. Her skin’s cool from handling the drinks. Warms quickly against mine. She leads me to a booth towards the back. Close enough to the musician that no one’s gonna hear us over the music. Far away from the bar’s other point of interest: two silver-skinned Mods who are kissing flamboyantly across a table near the door. Everyone’s watching the silverfish, but trying not to be obvious about it. No one’s gonna pay any attention to us. Even when she pulls me into the booth next to her instead of sitting across from me. Even when she tucks my hand against her thigh and keeps her fingers wrapped around mine.
I could break her hold in a split-second if I needed to. But that split-second could be the difference between reaching a weapon in time and not. I draw my hand out of hers slowly. Lean into her so she knows I’m not rejecting her. I’ve never had a woman come onto me so physically before. I like it. I like everything about her so far. Except maybe the piercings. Hope she doesn’t have too many in other places. I’m not a fan of metal against my skin.
She looks up at me. From under a curtain of bangs and blonde dreadlocks. Out of those deeply-kohled, hugely-dilated eyes. A kitten-pink tongue flicks out and wets her full lower lip. I follow the movement with my eyes
, let her see that I’m watching and that I like what I see. Her breath catches. Shallow breasts rise under a black tank. In the bar’s dim light, against the black neopoly of her shirt, her skin glows like pearl.
She finally looks away and color flushes her cheeks. Even her ears flush around the silver hoops. I chuckle.
“What can I do for you, Miz—?”
“Kez.” She shifts on the genSkin seat, crosses her legs and presses her knee against mine. The color in her cheeks fades; her pupils contract. She’s back in control. Or thinks she is. “I need to move something from Kuus to New Brunny. Interested?”
Very. But not in her shipment. “What’s the deadline?”
“Pick up tonight at midnight.” There isn’t really a midnight on Kuseros, which has a twenty-three hour day, but even the natives call the last hour of the day ‘midnight.’ A leftover from our collective origins on Earth. “Drop by five a.m.”
Not a tight schedule, particularly in the Spinning Marie, which is a better ship than her original owner deserved. Although the girl’s asking me to drop into a war zone. New Brunny’s been in a permanent state of shitstorm for the last three months while the peacekeepers have been trying to put down water riots. She’s also living dangerously if she’s only lining up a pilot now. Midnight’s less than three hours away and Kuus is all the way on the other side of the long valley that makes up the Western Colony. She’ll need a ship to make the pickup, much less the drop. “What’s the package?”
“Organic. Fifty kilos give or take.”
Could be anything, but at fifty kilos it’s unlikely to be drugs – too heavy – or a body – too light – which is where I draw the line. Most shit is tolerated in the Vespers, but getting caught transporting drugs or bodies is a one-way ticket back to Tol Seng. “My cut?”
“Three thousand. Soft.”
Credit wands are useless to me. They’re validated by fingerprint and I burned mine off long before I landed on Kuseros.
“Twenty-five hundred. Hard.”
The pink tongue licks out again. Is she trying distract me with the promise of that mouth? I reach out and drag the pad of my thumb over her wet lip. Brush the backs of my fingers across the swell of her breast as my hand drops back to the table. Two can play at that game, and I play harder than she does.
Her pupils dilate again. Breath catches and her chest heaves as she takes the next one.
“Deal,” she says breathlessly.
“And twenty minutes out back.”
“Uh,” she stammers, blushes furiously.
“Deal?” I lean into her a little more.
“Fifteen.” It’s such a soft whisper that I lean closer to catch it. Breathe warmly into the shell of her ear, buried in the dreadlocks.
“You’ll get more out of it if it’s twenty.”
Her eyes squeeze closed, soft pink mouth drops open. “Deal,” she finally manages.
“Let’s go.” We leave our drinks untouched. I lead her this time, with my hand in the small of her back. A more intimate and controlling guidance. She makes no objection as I steer her past the musician making complicated patterns through the magnetic fields of his instrument, through a swinging door that leads to the toilets, past some doors marked ‘Private’ and through the one marked ‘Exit,’ to the obligatory dark alley behind the bar. Directly behind the bar it smells of stale beer and grease, so I steer her further into the shadows until the stink and the occasional noise from the haylon-lit place down the street fade and all there is is darkness and her rapid breathing.
I stop her by a convenient wall that looks neither too dirty nor too rough for what I have in mind. “Here,” I say as gently as I can. She halts, compliant. But she’s trembling under my hand. No matter what kind of thrill-seeker she is, she must be at least a little scared by the idea of giving herself over to a stranger in the dark.
“Rules,” I say. I run my hand up her back, grip the collar of her jacket and pull it off her. She rolls her shoulders so it slips down her arms. Still compliant. I drop her jacket onto the pavement. Shrug out of mine and drape it over hers. The spring night’s too cool to take off our tanks, which is disappointing, but what the night air is doing to her nipples makes up for it. I enjoy the view for a moment before turning her around to face the wall. “Rule one, your hands stay here.” I place her palms against the cool permacrete. She leans into the wall with a sigh, rests her cheek between her hands. “Rule two, dead puppies ain’t no fun. You want me to stop, you say so.”
She turns her head slightly to look at me over her shoulder. Teeth and eyes and silver hoops glint in the dark. “Dead puppies?”
“Uh-huh.” Seems a safe enough safe-word. Dead puppies have never figured into sex before, no matter how strange it’s gotten.
“Okay.” She arches her back, lifting her ass a little, so it brushes my groin. I don’t need any further invitation. I reach around, pull open the fly of the tight, shiny shorts she’s wearing over the fishnets and push them down over her hips. The fishnets are suspenders, outlining her long legs, baring her ass, sexy as hell. No underwear. I shape her soft ass with my palms before reaching around, spreading my hand over her belly, and cupping her mons. She’s bare there: smooth skin under my fingertips. I finger her for a moment, until she moans. Then I bring my other hand down on that soft, round ass. Hard.
She jumps at the spank. Cries out and tries to twist around.
“Rules,” I growl and she whimpers, clinging to the wall.
I spank her again, the slap punctuated by my voice, rough and angry. “How long you been watchin’ me?”
“T-two days.”
She had to think about it. Fucking liar. I spank her again, hard enough that my palm stings. Hard enough that she jumps and trembles. Hard enough that wetness slicks the fingers I still have between her thighs. She may not have asked for the spanking, but she likes it. “How long?”
“Four! Four days.”
Another hard smack. Her ass-cheek has gone cherry-red, even in the dark; she’ll wear the marks of my fingers tomorrow. “Who sent you?”
“No one.”
She didn’t have to think about it but I spank her again for good measure.
“No one!” she cries. Nearly comes off the wall, then grips it like a lifeline. “I swear, I’m not working for anyone.”
“Why me?”
“You—” The hesitation earns her another spank and she sags against the wall, gasping. “You’re bald.”
True, but it seems like an odd qualification. I rub my hand over the hot, reddened skin of her ass. “Yeah, and—”
“I like – I like bald men.”
Interesting. Shaving my head’s never gotten me laid before. I chuckle. Stir my finger inside her. “You don’t say.”
“Please.” She rolls her forehead against the wall. “Don’t stop.”
I rub in slow circles while I open my fly with my free hand. Unleash the hardest hard-on I can ever remember having. I can almost hear the little monster roar. I press it between the cheeks of her ass while I push my finger all the way inside her. She’s tight, but not so tight I’ll tear her. I pump my finger in time to my thrusts against her ass. Let her think I might take her the other way. The way I am much too big for her. She’s shuddering, with arousal and a little fear. Not too much – she’s too wet to be really afraid – just enough to titillate. I slide my free hand up, under her top, find an enticingly hard nipple. Pinch and squeeze and roll it between my fingers until she’s gasping, each breath a plea, a prayer. Not quite ready to answer her prayers, I side my finger out of her, find the swollen nub of her clit with my first finger and thumb and pinch.
She cries out, a guttural wail that leaves no doubt what’s being done to her. I bury my dark chuckle in the nape of her neck. Her dreadlocks brush my cheeks, smelling sweetly of soap. I bite and suck the soft skin of her neck while I pinch and rub her nipple and clit in tandem. Grind my cock against her ass.
Her next cry has words in it. “Please! Please,
God, do it!”
She doesn’t need to ask twice, and in that moment, no matter how dangerous it is for me to leave a DNA trail, coming in her is all that’s going to satisfy me.
I shove her feet apart, hold her open with the fingers I was tormenting her with, bend from the knees to thrust up into her. She’s tight; I have to work it into her. I take it slow after the first thrust, penetrating her centimeter by centimeter. Wet and soft and oh so hot. Feels better than anything I can remember. She throws her head back, nearly cracking her skull into my nose. She’s lost in it. Beautiful. Once I’m all the way in her, I bite down on her neck to keep her still as I fuck her, one hand cupped over her mons, the other wrapped across her, fingers squeezing her breast. I fuck her hard: deep, powerful strokes, snapping my hips at the end of each thrust, taking her weight across my thighs, my back and ass working as I find my rhythm. A few minutes of that good hard fucking and she’s jerking and thrashing in my hold, swallowing a scream with each thrust. Sweat slicks the ass she’s madly working against my groin.
“Is that it, kitten?” I growl into her skin. “That what you wanted?”
“Yes!” she wails. “Yes, yes!”
I find that perfect rhythm, hard and fast. Pistoning up into her while I yank her down into each thrust. She’s shuddering all over, nearly throwing herself off the wall onto my dick, her body fisting around mine. I rub the fingers I’ve got gripping her mons against her weeping clit and feel her go. Her wail rises into an orgasmic scream. Her body squeezes mine frantically. Hands patter up the wall as though seeking escape from the climax that draws her whole body taut.
That’s all I need. I pin her hard against the wall while I shove into her for those last frenzied thrusts. Balls clenching tight, every muscle straining, and there and there and I’m there, emptying into her in bursts of heat and light and agonizing pleasure that leave me hollow and for a moment, totally at peace.
I lean against her, covering her body as she clings to the wall. Hell, I love sex. “Nice,” I murmur into her hair.