by Elsa Jade
He eyed the heavy plasteel panel he’d removed earlier. In the lighter gravity, he had no problem hefting the big rectangle even by himself, though the weight and honed edges were hazardous enough to make an impromptu weapon.
He hated to impose on his carefully hoarded supply of free nanites, but what better way to show his devotion than to bleed for her?
Perhaps an aesthetically pleasing gash on his upper bicep? But that might hamper his mobility too much. Instead, he brought the sharp edge of the pane down across his bare chest in what he hoped would be an impressive diagonal arc. Underestimating his own strength, enhanced by the lighter gravity, he wielded the panel with more force than he intended. The corner of the plasteel slit across his pectoral muscles and bit down hard into his flank, ripping through the custom fit jeans that he’d commissioned on Earth and now would probably never enjoy again.
An unintentional curse slipped from his lips, louder than he meant, and the panel slammed against the hull with a hollow clang. Gray blood, more transparent than usual since his nanite load was low, flowed over his chest and soaked into the waistband of his pants.
Well, he needed to get those off anyway.
“Troy?” Nell peered out through the hatch. “Did you hear—? Oh! What happened?” In one jump, she was at his side.
“I slipped,” he said. Which was true. “An accident.”
“An accident? I thought Thetas were all graceful and flawless.”
“I thought so too.” He grimaced as she dug through the emergency pack she’d emerged with and pulled out an aid kit. This was what he’d wanted—to trick her into putting her hands on him—but suddenly it bothered him that she was witnessing his fumbled attempts. “I’ll take care of it.”
She twitched back. “You fix the ship. I’ll fix you.”
“I can do both,” he snapped.
Her clouded gaze lifted to his. “I know. That’s what we both do, right? Try not to crash, try not to bleed, forget asking for help because we can’t believe anyone else will be there.”
As he stood frozen, the truth of her assessment biting deeper than the sharp edge of plasteel, she applied the sealant gel across the wound on his chest. The gel heated and foamed, its antimicrobial properties sinking into the wound, and he hissed out a pained breath.
She flattened her palm over the unmarred side of his pectoral. “Easy,” she soothed. “Hold your breath for a second while it sets and it won’t hurt so much.”
He did as she suggested and, without moving a muscle, muttered, “You say that as if you have experience.”
“As a child, the empress was…an empress. She did not always treat her toys as gently as we would’ve liked.” She blew a breath across the gel, and somehow the cooling seemed to sink past the throb of the wound, relieving the pain. “I learned how to fix myself because broken toys got thrown away.”
He put his hand over hers, pinning her palm to his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said in a voice as ragged as the edges of the wound. “I’m sorry you were taken in my place.”
“Well, I guess I’m getting my revenge now, aren’t I?” But the furrow of her brow didn’t ease despite her ruthless words. She tugged her hand free of his, her fingers trailing down to the shorter but deeper gash next to his hipbone. “This looks bad too.”
“Despite the location, I didn’t puncture anything…important.” He gave her a crooked smirk.
She snorted under her breath. “Well, thank the Lord for little miracles.”
“And big ones,” he said blandly. And then let out a very ungrateful oath as she sprayed the gel into the second wound.
When he clenched his butt muscles—inadvertently, he swore—his ripped jeans threatened to slither right down his hips to the alien ground. Only the tackiness of his blood and the sealant kept him decent.
Again, she blew on the froth, cooling the pain he’d caused himself. But despite the analgesic properties of the gel, a different kind of heat and a deeper kind of ache sank into him. Her touch, her breath, just her presence quickened all those extra nerve endings he’d told her about. More than blood or healing gel, their shared experiences bound them together.
And his secret mission for them to fall in love, of course. He swallowed hard. “I need to tell you something.”
“You need to get some different pants on,” she said with a fretful note in her voice.
Since she’d noticed, he flexed his butt muscles again, letting the fitted denim shimmy lower to expose a bit more of his skin. “I had some trouble on Earth before you came for me, and I lost most of my nanites. Your blaster shot and the cuffs weakened my systems. If I die—”
She reared back. “Die? You won’t die of a couple scratches.”
“It’s a little worse than scratches. See?” He tugged at his waistband to show off the gray bloodstains and she blanched. “Just know it wouldn’t be entirely your fault. I’m like one of those broken toys you mentioned. And all the glue may not be enough to put me back together on the inside.”
“But if I take the cuffs off you…” She bit her lip, clearly not convinced.
“Wouldn’t matter. Even without the cuffs, my nanite renewal rate has been seriously compromised, to the point that I can’t control my biological processes enough to calculate likely repair and survival scenarios.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to tell you because you seemed so proud to have captured a shroud.”
The wrinkle of her nose twisted the old scars on her cheeks. “So I didn’t need the cuffs to catch you?”
“Hey now, I’m low on nanites, but I still have my pride. I wouldn’t have given myself up with no fight at all.” He poked at the hardening foam on his chest before slanting a glance at her. “But since we share some of our inner workings, I couldn’t let you think that you’d killed me if this careless injury takes me down.”
She shivered. “You can’t die, not before you fix the ship.”
“I’ll try not to,” he said apologetically. “I’m betting I won’t. But what were the odds of you finding me?”
She turned her face away, glaring at the aid kit she’d discarded. “Is there anything else in there that could help you?”
“Maybe a consortium programmer. Or a good hacker.”
“What if I gave you back some of the nanites you gave me?”
He shook his head. “They aren’t mine anymore. Since they’ve adapted to you, they won’t just come back to me like circus cats.”
She frowned. “Circus cats? Is that a thing?”
“Anyway, I don’t have the tools to reincorporate your nanites into me.” He rubbed the edge of his thumb over his lower lip. “Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“No one could force them out of you now. They are keyed to you, and they’d fight to stay with you. But if you wanted, you could give them up to me willingly.”
She tucked her chin behind the high collar of her cloak. “I already said I’d share,” she mumbled. “We can rig up some sort of blood transfusion or something.”
“That would be too much like coercion.” He stared at her. “Too much like how James and those cowboys took from you.”
The clouds over her dark hazel eyes seemed to thicken. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“The nanites are very simple individually, but together they have something of a hive mind—almost a soul, if you will. You don’t have the cybernetic implants to control them consciously, so now that they are yours, you’d have to want to share them with someone.”
“But if drawing blood is too violent, how do I give it up to you?”
“Something we can both have. A kiss, maybe.” He let himself sway toward her, anticipating the yielding softness of her lips.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, a counterpoint to his unconscious dance. “I kissed you before,” she pointed out. “Did you take my nanites then?”
“Not take. It’s a giving, or it’s not anything.”
In the slanting light of the cool, bluish
sun, the blush on her cheeks was tinted mauve, clashing with the maroon locks of hair framing her face. “We should go back inside. The sun is dropping and so are your pants.”
Over the pang of disappointment at her strategic retreat, he forced himself to nod. “The power lines need time to de-charge, so we have to wait anyway.”
While she gathered the scattered contents of the aid kit, he gingerly climbed the gangplank into the powered-down shuttle. Heading straight to the closet-sized cleansing unit, he stripped off his soiled clothing as he went. He listened for the thud of Nell’s steps down the corridor behind him before he stepped inside.
She’d rejected him, but he could at least share a glimpse of what she’d turned down.
Leaving the door open to catch the last of the daylight filtering down the corridor, he cleaned up quickly, careful of the sealant across his wounds. No need to remind Nell of his alienness by leaking gray blood all over her ship.
Fortunately, she’d done a fine job with her ministrations and the wound covering stayed in place. Too bad she’d also sealed herself away from him.
When he stepped out of the cleansing unit—nowhere near as pleasant as an Earther hot shower—she was standing in the open doorway with the tube of healing gel and a length of fabric. Her jaw was set as hard as if someone had glued it in place and her hazel gaze fixed even more firmly on his. Through gritted teeth, she asked, “Do you need more of the sealant?” For just a moment, her focus flicked down to the slash across his chest.
He shook his head, flinging back his hair, still damp with the cleanser. “The lacerations are closed. You did a good job on them.”
“Well, you definitely need this.” She thrust the folded fabric toward him, and it unfurled into the soft drape of an armless robe, the kind a lady might wear for a quiet evening at home. Perfect.
“Let me dry off.” He used the flat blade of his hand to squeeze the cleanser off his body. Maybe he should’ve asked her to smear more of the gel on his chest, but she looked ready to fly away even without a functioning ship, and he didn’t want to push her too hard too quickly. She could just watch him, if that was what she wanted.
And she did watch, sideways and impatiently, but definitely looking through her lashes. So he lingered, just a little, circling his fingers around the sealant, skimming over the ridges of his abdominal muscles, up to the bulge of his pecs. A chill breeze breathed through the ship, tightening his nipples with a tingle that unfurled through all his sensitized nerves.
As he rubbed the last droplets of the soothing cleanser into his skin, she shoved the robe at him again with a growl. “Come on. It’s getting dark. We have to get the lights back on.”
He shrugged into the robe. Just as well there were no sleeves since it was sized for her and was too narrow to close over his chest, although he managed to get the decorative fasteners closed across his belly. “But the power lines—”
“To hell with the lines,” she burst out. “We can’t just sit here.”
“I suppose we could rush to reengage before the energy is properly drained and then explode on takeoff,” he drawled. “Or you could be just a little patient and exponentially increase our chances of surviving.”
She twisted away from him with a huff that was more frustrated than angry. “Being patient has never once brought me anything good. Everything I have that was worth a damn, I took for myself.”
Tilting his head thoughtfully, he ran his palms down the front of the robe. The material was soft and sleek against his skin, with a touch of cling so that every breath and shift of his body felt like silky hands petting him. Nell might have left her paying clients behind, but their grasping and clutching obviously hadn’t destroyed her sensuality.
“Who did you wait for?” he wondered aloud. “Who never came back for you even though you were so patient?”
The light outside had faded to a silver that turned the inside of the shuttle monochrome, washing all the earthy color out of Nell’s face. “Does it matter anymore?”
“It obviously did, to you.” He let his hands fall to his sides. “A lover? Your first cowboy, maybe?”
The turbulent clouds in her eyes darkened. “My mother. I was the youngest of seven children. On the first day of school when I was old enough to attend with my brothers and sisters, I was so excited. They even let me ring the schoolhouse bell. When we returned home for chores, I couldn’t wait for the little cakes she made all my siblings on their first days out of the house, but…she was gone. We waited for my father and my two oldest brothers to come in from the fields. They didn’t know she’d left. We all waited. But she never came back.”
With the shuttle powered down and the evening wind fading, there was no sound in the corridor except the faint hitch of her breath. But that little noise went through Troy like a blaster shot.
Being a shroud, he’d never had a mother. But he understood the concept of kin bonds because of his matrix. “Did you ever find out what happened?”
“Neighbors gossiped that she’d been over-friendly with the peddler who traveled between the farms, that she’d left to see the world, which of course she couldn’t do with all of us holding her back. But in those days, communications weren’t so easy as now. Or maybe she didn’t want to be heard from again.”
“That must’ve been hard for you as a child.” He’d never been a child either, but he could imagine.
“It felt like my fault. That she would’ve stayed if I hadn’t gone that day.”
The crack in her voice bothered him almost as much as a fracture in the plasteel panels of the ship. “You know that’s not so.”
“But knowing and feeling aren’t the same.”
He ducked his head. Was that the problem with him imprinting? He knew what had to happen, but he didn’t feel it.
She flicked one hand impatiently. “It was a long time ago. And maybe I was more like her than I meant to be. I didn’t want to be stuck on the farm forever, and when I left home to go west looking for her, I was definitely too friendly with the boys. So about that kiss.”
Never mind his enhanced shroud reflexes, he almost didn’t follow her conversational come-about. And somehow, even though he needed her attraction, it stung that she’d rather talk about kissing than share any more of her deeper thoughts.
He realized his fingers were plucking fretfully at the buttons down the front of the robe, and he forced his hands to still. “What about it?” He kept his tone light and curious, as if he hadn’t been thinking of it too.
“How would this kiss be different? How would I give the nanites back to you?”
“It’s…complicated.” Angling past her, he padded barefoot down the main corridor to the galley. He opened the bin with the pixberries and added them to the food processor. He consulted his inner recipe book and approximated an option from the shuttle’s limited formulary. Only then did he turn back to her. “Do you remember when I kissed you that night at the saloon? And you said you hadn’t felt that way in forever?”
“That was a lie.” She turned her face away from him. “I hadn’t felt that way ever-ever.”
A shiver went through him. Thetas were made to tease and torture to get the information they wanted, and yet she gave it up to him just because he asked.
In return, he found himself wanting to give more back to her than he’d intended. “That was when I blew my nanites into you. I’d never felt anything like that either. I only meant to give you enough to heal your infection as a trade for the location of James’s safe.”
“I told you about the safe in return for the diamonds and the drink,” she reminded him. “You didn’t have to heal me, especially when I didn’t even know you’d done it so I couldn’t reward you for it.”
She wasn’t wrong. For a Theta to do anything without reason or reward was aberrant. He fisted his hand in the gaping collar of the robe, suddenly aggrieved by the way it left him exposed. “Advanced Theta protocols leave space for acts of seeming altruism in order to recoup that
investment at a later date,” he informed her stiffly. “Maybe I would’ve come back again and stolen something else from James.” He glowered at her. “You, maybe.”
She blinked at him, and the faintest smile quirked her lips. “Aw, that’s maybe the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
He hadn’t meant it as a promise, but for some reason the softening of her hazel gaze sent a whisper of warmth across his bared skin. “That’s the kind of kiss it has to be,” he said, easing his grip on the collar. “Hopeful, but not expectant. Giving without restraint. Maybe the first and only, or maybe one of many, but somehow meaning more than any other.” He hesitated. “You might call it a true-love kiss.”
She jerked back, eyes widening. “Love?”
Grabbing both edges of the gaping collar, he gave a resentful tug to yank them closer, without much luck. “You did ask.”
“I thought you meant a kiss with, like…extra tongue or something.”
“Well, lubrication would ease the transfer, I suppose. Nanites are microscopic, but they are robots, after all.”
The galley processor chimed, and he reached into the processor to retrieve two beverage cubes. “Pixberry wine. The speeded fermentation won’t win any intergalactic awards, but the berries were too bruised to last anyway.”
Nell stared at the cube in her hand. “Because of the nanites, I can’t get drunk. If that’s what you meant by true love.”
“I know, and I didn’t.” He took a drink from his cube, swishing the very young vintage over his tongue. “Bit of a bite,” he reported. “But no worse than you to get in a half-price box on Earth.”
She glowered down at the cube. “What’s the point of drinking if I can’t get drunk?”
“Something doesn’t have to be bad for you to be enjoyable.” He tipped the cube toward her in a wry salute. “To getting our power back.”
“I guess I’ll drink to that.” And she did, emptying the cube in a few breathless chugs. Then she tossed the empty container onto the galley counter. “Now I’ll kiss you.”
He half choked on his mouthful of wine. “I thought we could get a little more in the mood.”