by Tamsin Ley
Qaiyaan made a surprised sound. “Psychic computer hacking. Interesting. How did he end up a test subject?”
"Doug was a hacker for the cartel and knew a lot of backdoors." She didn't want to go into the whole backstory of how she'd fallen hard for a cartel smuggler named Seloh, how he botched a job then tried to run. The cell leader made an example of him by torturing him to death, and she'd been unable to help. From that point on, she'd begged Doug to look for a way out. "The ‘corp Syndicorp offered us a deal."
“You turned on the Whylon Cartel? That’s a good way to end up dead.”
“I know. But it was that or the prison mines on Nunam-qa. The cyber-sensitivity testing was a sort of witness protection program.”
A growl of disgust came from Qaiyaan’s throat. “Slaves for the corp, or dog meat for the cartel. Either way you lose.”
She shivered, thinking of what awaited her at the hands of the cartel’s enforcers. Unlike Syndicorp, the cartel wouldn’t send assassins—they’d send torturers. “When the doctors wanted to move him to a new secret test facility, he refused to leave without me.” She sucked in a shuddering breath, realizing how much she missed him. “He and I are twins. We’ve been through a lot together.”
Qaiyaan still had his arm around her and gave her a gentle squeeze that made her eyes prick with tears. The deeply masculine strength of him was more comfort than she’d felt in a long time. Telling the truth to this man came far too easy. Don’t fall into trusting him just because he’s gorgeous, she reminded herself. Seloh was gorgeous, too, and look where that got him. Keeping men at a distance kept her heart safe. Her brother was the only man who could ever know the real her.
But she didn’t see much harm in what she’d revealed to Qaiyaan so far. She continued, “The doctors at the facility did everything they could to get Doug to cooperate. Then I woke up one morning, and he was gone. The doctors told me he’d changed his mind.” Her heart was pounding double time as she remembered those last few days without him. “He’d never leave without telling me. Never.”
“You think they kidnapped him?”
“I knew they had. I tried to hack into the Syndicorp systems to find out where he'd gone—where they'd taken him—but they had firewalls within firewalls, most leading to dead ends." She half-laughed. "If the situation'd been reversed, Doug could've found a way of using his cyber-sensitivity."
“That still doesn’t tell me how you ended up in a cryo-pod on a gutted passenger ship in the middle of unclassified space.”
She licked her lips, remembering that awful moment when she’d been offered a chance to join her brother. “A ‘corp rep called me and told me Doug was refusing to do any of the tests at the new facility until I joined him. I insisted on speaking to him, and they let me, but he couldn’t say much. But he did say they would transport me if I agreed to travel in cryo.”
“Why in cryo?”
Her throat and chest felt tight as if experiencing the helplessness of the freeze-chamber all over again. "If I was frozen, I couldn't access any travel logs or destinations. They want to keep the lab's location secret." In addition, the cryo had been to stabilize her nanites for space travel; not only did she suck at hacking, her nanites were what the doctors called "high strung" and didn't respond well to external stimulation, such as burn drives. But she couldn't tell Qaiyaan about her nanites. "Now I wonder if they ever meant for me to reach the lab at all. I'm worried about Doug, and I don't know how to find him."
Qaiyaan’s handsome face twitched with disgust. “You can’t trust Syndicorp.”
"That's what I told Doug when we first joined the test program, but he said he'd do whatever it took to keep me safe." She shook her head. "He's always been overprotective."
“I would be, too.” His voice was low and seductive. Attentive in a way that surprised her.
She was pouring her heart out to this man, this stranger she knew absolutely nothing about. Her gut instinct was screaming at her to confide in him—an unfamiliar sensation for a grifter who grew up on Whylon. She needed to deflect the conversation long enough to regain her balance, then she’d decide how much more to tell him. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
His eyes had been attentive and concerned until that moment. Now they turned stormy. Behind her, the muscles of his arm bulged with tension. “Not anymore.”
"Oh." For some reason, she hadn't expected that answer. The same instinct that told her to trust him now urged her to comfort him, and she wasn't exactly the nurturing type. She placed a hand on his knee. "I'm so sorry. What happened?"
He shook his head, his braided beard sweeping his chest. “Syndicorp killed them.”
Her mouth grew dry. She might have more in common with this pirate than she’d imagined. Her parents had died at a young age, leaving her with little more than vague recollections of their presence. Now she only had Doug. And if he was dead…
Before she could ask another question, Qaiyaan continued. “Syndicorp destroyed my entire race, actually.”
The way he said it, so matter-of-fact, suspended her worries about Doug. “Your entire race? How?”
Qaiyaan’s eyes flashed like solar flares. “A genetically modified virus that was supposed to be harmless. It caused a chromosomal mutation much like cancer in Deniadan females and spread like a plague across the planet. Every female died within months after Syndicorp began testing.”
Lisa’s stomach turned over. No wonder he’d been so intent on saving her. The illness was personal for him. She was usually immune to guilt, but right now shame was making it hard to breathe. Her lie cheapened his loss. The deep, almost primal part of her urging her to tell this man everything threatened to blast right through her cartel-hardened exterior. Every girl needs a secret weapon, she reminded herself, a mantra from her days in the station slums. Back then it had been a knife in her boot or a magnetically charged hairpin for picking locks. Were nanites really so much different? She shook off the guilt. Keep him talking about himself. “Why would Syndicorp infect your planet?”
“Field testing a viral herbicide.” Qaiyaan’s eyes grew hard and hopeless as he stared at the wall past her shoulder. “When it became apparent the virus had jumped species, Syndicorp sterilized the planet. Survivors and all.”
If she’d thought the story was horrible before, now it was nearly unbelievable. Only planets with no sentient life were sterilized, most often prior to terraforming for colonization. “That’s… inconceivable. Why wasn’t it all over the news?”
Qaiyaan shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Syndicorp controls the media. They diverted attention to the civil war in the Pulati system and rerouted all the shipping lanes. That was fifteen years ago. The ‘corp made sure no one remembers the name of Denaida-Daru.”
Lisa was struck speechless. There’d always been rumors of that sort of thing, but no one ever believed it. Such an atrocity couldn’t happen without repercussions, could it? Backlash. Revenge. She looked at Qaiyaan again with new eyes. “You’re a pirate because you want revenge.”
He turned his attention to her, the deadness in his eyes suddenly sharper than any knife. “I’m going to help get your brother out of Syndicorp’s hands.”
A wash of relief flooded Lisa’s body, so intense it sapped her strength. She sagged against Qaiyaan’s arm and took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
His hand slid up her back, beneath her hair to her nape, his palm warm on her bare skin. Her heart skipped a beat. Maybe it was the endorphins rushing through her at his promise of help, but his lips looked imminently kissable. She felt like celebrating his promise of help. He was a partner, at least temporarily, both opposed to Syndicorp and wary of the cartel, just like she was. She licked her lips, noting his gaze following the movement. He wants you, too.
Without thinking any further, she leaned forward for a kiss.
Chapter Six
The shock of the human’s lips contacting his own shorted out Qaiyaan’s mind like a solar flare, sending fiery trails of
lust through his veins. The hand he held behind her head, the one he’d placed there to sense her pulse for truthfulness, was instead inundated by her desire. His blood went from red-hot to molten, settling hard at his groin. His pants were immediately far too tight against his crotch, and he shifted, sending his body even closer to hers.
She wove her fingers into his hair, sending tingles along his scalp. Holy Ellam Cua, he hadn't believed it was possible for a non-Denaidan to elicit a response like this, even if it was merely physical. He groaned against her lips. He shouldn't do this. Needed to pull away, now. Unlike his men, he'd never been comfortable engaging in foreplay with a woman, knowing he'd need to stop before consummation. But her kiss… Her kiss fed his soul like a long drink of water after a trek over the Favianese desert.
Her mouth moved against his with soft insistence, and he claimed her kiss, making it his own. Perhaps a few moments of bliss wouldn’t hurt. Wrapping his free arm around her waist, he drew her closer, relishing her soft body. Every part of her felt like it was meant to be pressed against him. She smelled of Denaidan lilacs and honey, warm and rich and completely edible.
Bending over her, he ravaged her mouth like a starving man, plunging his tongue into her to taste deeply. Before he knew it, she was lying back against his mattress, her breasts crushed against his chest, his hand knotted in her silky tresses. Every spot his skin made contact with hers tensed with desire and his erection was an agony of pleasure against her hip. How would it feel to plunge himself, long and thick, into her folds? It had been fifteen years since his few bungling sexual encounters with Denaidan women, but his body had not forgotten. His cock might not be able to experience that pleasure, but he could still touch her. Taste her. He could make her moan his name. What would she sound like when she came? A few intimate hours would serve him well in the lonely years to come.
Sliding a hand over the thin silk shirt, he cupped her breast, barely able to breathe from anticipation.
She, too, seemed as if she was starving. Her tongue matched his movements, flicking his teeth, stroking smoothly across his lips. Their shared breath settled deep into his chest, filling him with incredible warmth. His hand slid down her ribcage and molded itself to her waist, his thumb stroking her hip bone, highly conscious of her nakedness beneath the shirt's thin silk. More than he'd ever desired anything, he wanted to explore beneath the hem, discover her moist, hidden well, envelop himself within her heat.
As if in invitation, she arched, rolling her hips against him. He groaned again, knowing this fleeting indulgence was an illusion. He could never fully be with her. But the desire to grasp whatever he could before reality came crashing down overwhelmed him. He moved his hand back up to where a breast awaited him, nipple thrusting against the fabric. Cupping her soft flesh, he circled his thumb over the pebbled peak. The nipple grew even harder, and a whimper of pleasure escaped her. His cock jumped at the sound and his ionic senses reached toward her, seeking to envelop them in preparation for the most intimate act. The fuzzy sensation of her own resonance met him, spongy against his pressure. Inviting him to settle in. To find a home. That sexual resonance was a deep well only another of his people should be able to touch. Holy Ellam Cua, she was going to make him lose control.
Breaking the kiss, he lifted his head to look down on her. Her ivory skin was nothing like a Denaidan’s lustrous copper, but it had a satin quality all its own. Her cheeks were flushed a delightful pink, the pupils of her slate gray eyes wide and dark as she gazed upward at him. Her fingertips stroked his jawline, tracing his beard with two delicate fingers to its very tip. The filaments there vibrated straight into his secondary heart. This wasn’t normal. He wrapped a hand around her smaller one, stilling her caress so he could think straight. “You sure you’re human?”
“Yes.” Her breathy answer once again made his cock throb painfully. “What is your race called again?”
“Denaidan.” He breathed deeply of her scent, wondering if the impossible lay here before him, both terrified and encouraged by what he was feeling. Could she be a mate? Testing the possibility might be deadly for her; during the moment of climax, a Denaidan male emitted an ionic frequency which nature had designed to cause a female of his species to ovulate. A successful match was binding. Permanent. Undeniable. The alignment required between mates was an almost spiritual thing, a combination of effort by both parties to create an empathic connection which could only be broken by death.
Unfortunately, the mating frequency destroyed a non-Denaidan partner’s synapses.
Because of that, any Denaidan with any self respect denied himself the pleasure of women. Qaiyaan’d heard that men on other pirate crews didn’t hold to such standards, but what a fellow captain allowed wasn’t Qaiyaan’s business. What remained of his people were no longer under any central governance, and each captain could choose to rule any way he chose. Qaiyaan’s crew were honorable men, and that’s all he cared about. He refused to endanger a female with his unbridled passion.
Lisa’s fingers had resumed tickling his beard, and his eyes were about to roll back in his head. He couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Yet her sexual resonance brushed against him as surely as her breasts crushed against his chest. What if he was passing up the one non-Denaidan in the galaxy who might, miraculously, be a match for him? Her lips trailed fiery kisses along his jaw, working upward until the tip of her tongue prodded the corner of his mouth. He groaned. There had to be a way to test his hope. If nothing else a way to convince himself to stop. What if instead of physical consummation, which meant a loss of control, he only used his ionic power? He could throttle his frequency. Test her power to accept him. If she showed any stress at all, he’d pull out.
Taking a deep breath, he sent out a tentative pulse, releasing tendrils of power along the outer shell of her resonance. The kind he’d send a female to see if her vibrations might possibly match his. Lisa shuddered, her fingers clawing against his shoulders. Her hips rolled against him again, sending his cock into a spasm.
“God, that’s good.” She murmured against his lips.
He placed his mouth over hers, devouring her words. It was good. So incredibly good. Connecting his frequency with hers felt as natural as breathing again after a long stint in void without a suit. Still kissing her, he opened his eyes, drinking in the long lashes feathering her cheeks, the slight arch of her brows, the tiny pulse of her veins beneath her eyelids. She brought one of her legs up and hooked it over his hip, drawing him closer to the heat between her thighs. He ground against her, imagining himself sheathed by her slippery folds. Plunging his tongue into her, he sent another ionic pulse.
Her eyes flew open in shock. She stared at him, brows drawn into a questioning line.
Then her eyes rolled back into her head, and her entire body went stiff as a board.
Lisa cracked her eyes open, lips tingling and swollen from the hot alien’s kisses, feeling cold where his body had been. Why had he stopped? Overhead, the lights of the med bay threatened to burn through her eyes straight into her brain. Qaiyaan appeared in her view, his shaggy head blocking the painful light. Concern tightened his features. “You all right?”
Her nanites boiled with nasty intensity and her head ached. Reaching a hand to her temple, she found Mek’s diode back in place. She ripped it away, exhaling with relief as the pain reduced to a simmer. “What happened?”
Over Qaiyaan’s shoulder, the young man with the scruffy beard—Tovik?—appeared, eyes bright with excitement. “She’s awake?”
Qaiyaan frowned, ignoring the young man’s question. The look in his eye was wary. “You had a seizure. Mek got his equipment working and was able to run some tests.”
Uh oh. Her weak smile faltered. They’d discovered the nanites. She braced herself, wondering what came next. “What kind of tests?”
The copper-skinned doctor appeared next to Qaiyaan, elbowing the big captain out of the way. “Don’t stress her. I’m not sure what sets the little buggers off.” Mek lifted her ey
elid and directed a bright light into her vision. She flinched and tried to twist away, but he pressed a cool palm to her forehead, holding her still. “Were you aware you’re infected with nano-bots?”
She scrunched her face in discomfort, grateful when he released her eyelid. Keeping her eyes closed, she nodded. Never in her life had she regretted a grift as much as she did at this moment. These men weren’t cartel, they weren’t Syndicorp, and even though Qaiyaan was an admitted pirate, his history made him more vigilante than villain. Best face the truth right now, come what may. “They’re part of the Syndicorp medical testing I was telling Qaiyaan about. I was in cryo to keep them stable for space travel.”
Qaiyaan’s voice cut through the darkness behind her closed lids. “You said your brother was the test subject.”
She slit one eye to look at him. "I told you we both were."
Qaiyaan crossed his arms, seeming to fill the small room with his presence. His concentration on her was an almost physical thing. “You most definitely did not.”
“I said we were both at the test lab,” she said weakly. Qaiyaan’d agreed to help her find her brother, and she repaid him with a lie. Waves of disappointment radiated off him, clawing at her to soothe him, to reassure him. This big alien was not one to be coddled, though. This man was the epitome of masculinity. Her sensitivity to his mood had to be some sort of girly hormonal response. Some biological drive she’d never experienced before.
From somewhere near the door, a gruff voice said, “She probably works for Syndicorp.”
