Finders Keepers

by Linnea Sinclair

  But even now his gaze followed her, took in the soft curves of her hips and thighs as she walked. There was a narrow gray door on his right. She twisted its latch.

  “Sani-fac,” she said, pushing the door open. “Need more towels, let me or Dezi know.” She pointed to the opposite wall. “Closet and drawer space in there.”

  “Useless, at the moment.” He shoved his hands into his pants pockets and grinned sheepishly.

  She tilted her head in momentary confusion, and then a slow smile crossed her face. “I might be able to help out. I’ve got some stuff in one of the storage lockers.”

  No hard-goods replicator on board then, either. “Don’t go to any trouble—”

  She waved away his comment. “No big deal. Besides, you might be rather ripe by the time we hit Rumor if I don’t.”

  “I will bathe daily. I promise.”

  She smiled, more warmly this time. He saw the tension in her shoulders relax.

  So this is how we do it. Light quips. Keep it friendly. Play on her concern. Maybe he should learn to let his pain be more evident. She’d judge him to be less threatening then. An injured man. Alone.

  It was all arguably true. He’d just never showed weakness, in any form, before.

  He motioned toward the corridor. “And now, your ship. You have repairs I can help with.” He let his arm fall back to his side and, for the first time, didn’t suppress the wince of pain.

  “From the looks of you, you need a couple hours downtime first. Dezi and I can start—”

  “It’s just some soreness. Besides, much of the delay is my fault. You’ll finish more quickly with my help.”

  She hesitated, crossed her arms over her chest. He could almost see distrust warring with compassion in her eyes. He had always avoided any awareness of human emotions before. But suddenly they interested him. Or rather, Trilby Elliot’s interested him.

  Her expression softened. Compassion won.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding. “I’ve got a problem with a booster interface you can tackle.”

  She was testing him. It was a minor problem, a booster interface. He could solve that in twenty minutes. Getting her to trust him might take a little bit longer.

  He was forced to revise his twenty-minute estimate as he sat in the boxy maintenance cubicle on the hyperdrive deck, paging through the schematics screens. The room was little more than a converted storage closet. And when she leaned on the console, peering over his shoulder, he found himself increasingly distracted by her presence.

  It was just because, he told himself, he wasn’t used to having his work scrutinized.

  He was staring at a particularly troublesome configuration when it finally dawned on him what was missing. “I need to see the data for your primary systems interface.”

  “Sorry. That’s on a ‘need to know’ basis, Vanur. And right now—”

  “I am familiar with the phrase.” He arched an eyebrow. There were those in the Empire who’d been known to wonder if he had a patent on the expression.

  “Well, so am I, so we have something in common, Rhis-my-boy,” Trilby was saying. She laughed lightly. “I’ve heard stories about you, you know.”

  For a moment his gut tensed. Then he realized she was speaking in general terms. You meant the Zafharin Imperial Fleet and its reputation. Not one Zafharin in particular. He brushed off her comment. “We Zafharin pride ourselves on our discipline.”

  A discipline that demanded a masking of pain, though, try as he might, not of annoyance. He returned to the data on the screen, fingers toying impatiently with his lightpen or pulling distractedly at his mustache.

  Her ship’s analytical equipment was in a state of disrepair that was blatantly unacceptable. He called her away from her own work on a relay panel in the corridor behind him, counted to ten while he framed his request.

  “I need a datalyzer. One that was manufactured in at least the past twenty years. Please.”

  Wordlessly, she handed him a unit from her tool kit. He flipped it on. The small screen flickered and died.

  His facade cracked. He swore in Zafharish. “How you work under these conditions is a—”

  Trilby grabbed the small unit, smacked it against her thigh, then flipped it on again and handed it to him. The screen glowed brightly.

  He glared at her. “This is ridiculous.”

  She left, inexpertly hiding her laughter under a coughing fit.

  Imperial arrogance. No, maybe that wasn’t quite right, even if the Zafharins were famous for it. Even if Rhis seemed to have his fair share. It was probably more accurate to lump Rhis’s struggles with her ship’s components as something more generic. Something Shadow had taught her long ago, in Port Rumor.

  Incompetence bred by authority.

  Jagan had it, enough to fill a black hole. She’d just lost sight of that under his pretty words, fancy presents.

  And the Conclave had it. Hell, that’s what the Conclave was. Authority, governmental authority. Incompetence by committee.

  As for Rhis Vanur, he couldn’t help that he worked for a government. He understood need to know because he’d probably been told more than once that he didn’t qualify for that need.

  Fighter pilots rarely did. Go there, shoot that, try to bring the hardware back in one piece.

  With a soft sigh she realized Rhis was probably more interested in getting back to the Empire than the Empire was in getting him back. Her scanners, myopic as they were, showed that no one had come looking for the Tark. If they were concerned about the fate of their pilot, they would have looked.

  But Trilby knew from firsthand experience that people were expendable to governments and corporations. Hardware could be recovered at any time.

  She had to remember that, had to stop lumping him in the same category with people like Jagan, or the trip back to Rumor would be hell for them both. He was only a lieutenant. He took orders; he didn’t give them. His arrogance was cultural; Jagan’s was cultivated.

  Twenty minutes later, she stepped into the corridor and saw him swaying in his seat. He clearly belonged back in sick bay, not in the small, stuffy maintenance room.

  At the sound of her footsteps he turned. The shadows under his eyes had darkened. She put out one hand, tentatively. He glanced at her offered hand with disdain, his spine straightening at the last moment.

  “Why don’t you go lie down? A few hours’ delay won’t—”

  “I am fine.” His right hand lay flat against the console, his arm braced. His body language spoke out loud and clear: I am Zafharin. I can deal with pain.

  “You’re a liar,” she replied easily as he glared at her. “If you collapse here you’ll block the doorway. So get your ass down to your cabin. I’ll wake you in four hours or so.”

  “No, I—”

  “The cabin has a comp.” She stepped over the raised door tread, leaned her arms against the high console. “Read in bed if you like. But right now I don’t think you should be sitting up. Or standing.”

  He pushed himself to his feet. “There is nothing wrong with—”

  She caught him as he staggered against her, her arms encircling his waist as he pinned her against the bulkhead. “Whoa, flyboy, whoa!”

  She felt his weight sag, his face hot against her hair. She reached out blindly for the intercom panel by the door. “Dezi! Get down to maintenance, now!”

  He struggled slightly. “Nav, vad yasch—I’m okay. I’m okay.” His voice was strained, soft. But he didn’t pull away from her.

  When Dezi grasped him under the armpits, Trilby had the fleeting impression he was reluctant to let her go.

  He woke, climbing out of a very soft, Trilby Elliot-scented dream to find himself in a small darkened cabin. Alone.

  “Lutsa. Lights.” His voice cracked, dry. He stumbled into the adjoining sani-fac and gulped down a glass of cold water, then splashed some on his face. His Trilby-dream had faded, though he could still remember the pale silk of her hair against his face. Her arms a
round him—

  —had not been a dream. The close confines of the sani-fac brought back the shape of the maintenance cubicle. And his less-than-impressive collapse against her.

  So much for his infamous Zafharin discipline. So much for his infamous control. Both faded like a vapor trail whenever he was near her.

  He was probably just overtired. He’d strained his physical limits with this last mission. Even he needed time to heal. But his current situation hampered that.

  Still, tiredness was not an excuse for the way he was handling this situation, this Trilby Elliot. He knew that. Her unlikely combination of sarcasm and softness rankled him and intrigued him at the same time. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt his control slip through his fingers as easily as silken mist.

  But then, his current situation didn’t permit him to be who he was. He was born and bred for command. He’d never had to repress his finely honed instincts before. It unsettled him—almost as much as Elliot’s presence did—and he took another mouthful of cool water while he rearranged his attitude.

  His infamous attitude. He ran one hand over his face. Playing at being nice was draining him, tearing away at the hard-assed, arrogant son of a bitch he was supposed to be. Had been for over thirty years, until fate and the ’Sko had dumped him on the doorstep of one Captain Trilby Elliot.

  He sat on the edge of the narrow bed, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and tabbed on the comp screen. The skin over his wounds no longer itched. And the pain in his body had quieted to a dull roar. He let that be his focus. That and his mission. Not her smiles or soft laughter. Or her sympathy. She didn’t know who she was offering it to. She didn’t know what it was doing to him.

  Time to get back to work.

  His self-proclaimed sixth-hour deadline came and went while he was flat on his back in the Venture’s cramped maintenance tunnel later that morning. Repairs on an erratic datafeed line weren’t going well. Sweaty and exasperated, he sent Dezi scurrying out of the tunnel in search of “a Gods damned splicer that will work at least half the Gods damned time!”

  A few minutes later, a scuffling noise in the tunnel told him that Dezi had returned. It was the captain’s orders, he knew, that he not be left alone for long. But at least with the ’droid, he could be himself.

  “About time!” he snapped. He reached over his head, his fingers grasping the thin cylinder of what he hoped was a more efficient crystal splicer.

  The splicer wasn’t what he was used to, but it was better than the first one. It still took him five minutes to repair the hairline fractures.

  He flicked off the power on the splicer with a snap and closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the hard floor of the tunnel. A dull ache throbbed between his shoulder blades from working in the tunnel’s cramped quarters. But that didn’t make him half as uncomfortable as the fact that, even here, in the bowels of her ship, he was still aware of her presence. He could almost smell the sweet muskiness of that perfume she wore. It was as if she were haunting him.

  “Ridiculous,” he said.

  “I tried to warn you,” replied a soft female voice in his ear.

  His eyes flew open. He saw the object of his troubled thoughts kneeling beside him.

  “Bloody hell!” He sat up abruptly. His head made hard contact with a low ceiling tile. The large gray square teetered on rusty hinges. He reached for it just as Trilby did. Their arms collided, throwing her off balance. She collapsed onto his chest.

  He heard the sharp crack of the metal hinge snapping, saw the blur of movement out of the corner of his eye. Instinctively he clasped her tightly against him and rolled away, placing his body protectively over hers. The tile slammed against him, then slid to the decking with a loud clang.

  He felt her rapid breathing against his chest. “You all right?”

  “Umm, yes.” She tilted her head, bumping her nose on his chin. She was sandwiched between him and the tunnel’s curved wall. “You?”

  His head hurt. His back ached. The crystal splicer dug an uncomfortable gouge into his left hip. But his body blithely ignored all of this discomforting physical information and chose instead to focus on the softness and the scent of the woman beneath him, in his arms.

  Somehow in their grappling, her T-shirt had pulled up at her waist. His left hand rested on her bare skin, his fingers on the swell of her breast. His right hand lay against her neck, his thumb on the line of her jaw.

  He was acutely aware his mouth was only inches from hers. And that if he spoke, if he were to answer her question, his lips might just graze against her own.

  Startled, he realized that was something he desperately wanted to do. He needed to taste her, to feel the heat of her mouth on his. To brand her with his own heat, his own scent.

  “Sure you’re okay?” she repeated.

  “Wonderful.” He whispered his answer against her lips.

  She was all softness. He rubbed his mouth against hers, feeling her lips part, feeling her body press into his—

  She gasped, her hands pushing against his chest. She turned her face abruptly away. His mouth ended up, moist and hot, against her cheek for a moment before he finally understood what her hands were frantically trying to tell him.

  He lifted himself stiffly off her.

  “Just what in the Seven Hells do you think you’re doing?” She squirmed, shoving her shirt back into the waistband of her pants.

  He knew what he’d been doing, but had no explanation for it. It was a mistake. Another mistake. Like the one he’d made … was it only this morning? When he’d assumed she was a mercenary, taking him to Quivera.

  But that mistake had been understandable. This was damnably incomprehensible, to lose control so easily because of a winsome face, a soft mouth, a mesmerizing scent of powder and flowers.

  “The, um, tile came loose.” It was a lame answer, but it was all his mind could come up with. He still tasted their kiss, the sweetness of her skin. And he still felt the warmth of her body where it had touched his, creating an even more intense warmth. Creating—

  “A tile. Came loose.” Trilby repeated his words as if he’d uttered gibberish. She was breathing hard, but some of the glitter of anger was gone from her eyes. “A tile came loose and that gives you the right to stick your hand under my shirt?”

  “I didn’t stick my hand under your shirt. I tried to pull you out of the way. We—”

  An access hatchway slid open overhead. Dezi’s metallic face filled the small square. “Captain! We’re back online. Communications is back online. We can—oh. Pardon. Am I interrupting something?”

  Trilby didn’t seem to hear the question. She glared at Rhis. “Don’t do me any more favors. Okay?” She glanced up at the ’droid. “I’ll meet you on the bridge, Dez. Now.” She shoved herself away and crawled hastily toward the tunnel’s exit.

  Alone in the tunnel, Rhis closed his eyes and lay his head against the flooring. Something had happened … something was happening to him. He didn’t understand it. He was acting like Rafi, for the Gods’ sakes! He’d been in this female’s company less than one full day and here he was panting after her like some gelzrac in heat.

  “Ridiculous,” he said. But his tone wasn’t overly convincing.

  “Insolent, arrogant, insufferable, Imperial bastard!” Trilby’s hushed but angry litany echoed the slap of her boots on the decking. She could have added “brilliant” and “too damned good-looking for his own good,” but she was still working herself into a frenzy over his negatives. She didn’t intend to even touch on Rhis’s positives until they parted company at Port Rumor.

  She stomped onto the bridge, then let herself collapse into her seat.

  Communications were back online. A long list of messages waited for her, not the least of which was the confirmation of the availability of the Bagrond run. That made her feel better. She quickly sent off her acknowledgment. Then, boots resting on the bridge console, she leaned back in her chair and brought up the armrest scre
en to review just what everyone had to say to her this septi.

  Neadi’s face appeared. Her skin was the color of deep golden coffee; her dark eyes sparkled. “Hey, Tril! Hope you get this.” There was the usual “working our butts off slingin’ beer and booze,” and then her friend’s jovial demeanor became serious.

  “Something’s going on. Yeah, I know, business has dropped off in the past few months, but hell, when haven’t the Indys had their ups and downs?”

  Neadi knew the deep-space transit business as well as Trilby did. She’d been raised on short-haulers, though ones larger than the Venture. But it was her and her husband’s pub adjacent to the spaceport that put them in a good position to hear what was going on in the traders’ lanes between Rumor, Bagrond, and Quivera.

  “Talk is that someone’s in bed with the ’Sko. Yeah, I know, I know.” Neadi held up one hand as if she could hear Trilby’s disbelieving snort. “Who sleeps with the ’Sko? The Zafharin, maybe.”

  Trilby’s mind flickered to a tall, dark-haired man one deck below. A small mental warning bell jangled softly.

  “We’re hearing whispers of an under-the-table agreement with one of the Beffa cartels. It’s got people thinking about the ’Sko attacks recently. If the ’Sko stop the small trade, then only the big guys, like GGA or Norvind, will work Gensiira. Which is big profits for them.

  “But it’s also big losses if the ’Sko’s real purpose isn’t to take out the small haulers but to entice the big traders into an area that’s been long known for its lack of patrols. The ’Sko will profit if Gensiira falls to them. But the Zafharin will profit even more if the ’Sko drive out you small operators and then the Empire moves in to annex us.

  “We might just be the incentive for the Empire to stop harassing the ’Sko out by Szed.

  “So be careful. Watch who your runs come through and what flight plans you file. It could be nothing more than jumpjockey gossip, but I know that you’ve been looking to spend some money on upgrades. Screw that, girl. Go for weapons. A new ion cannon’d be nice. A set of Lady-Fives even better. I’ve got contacts if you don’t.”