How long had she been asleep? One month? Two? Where was Kaden? Why wasn’t he sitting next to her?
The wall at her back moved, shifted, and an arm flung itself across her hip. Startled, she scrambled away, opening her mouth to scream, only no sound would come out. Fire burned in her throat and she grabbed her neck as tears flooded her eyes. Immediately the person who had been sleeping behind her sat up.
“What’s wrong, honey?” the man said in a deep, urgent voice. “Are you choking?”
The wall turned out to be a man. A shirtless man she didn’t know. Fear coursed through her. Who was he? Why was he in bed with her? When he reached out toward her she reared back, almost falling off the bed.
The man jerked his hand back. “It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She didn’t believe him, of course. She wanted to, since he looked a lot like Kaden, with a heavily muscled chest and arms as thick as tree trunks. But she couldn’t put her trust into him, although she had no doubt he could snap her neck with a flick of his wrist. The image didn’t comfort her.
“I promise I won’t hurt you,” he said and then hesitated for a second. His head tilted to one side as he studied her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
As she nodded, someone else stirred on the man’s other side. Another man leaned forward, looking at her. He was smaller than the dark-haired man, with golden-blond hair and rich blue eyes.
She was in bed with two men?
Something was horribly wrong.
She glanced back and forth between them, racking her brain to see if she knew them, but they didn’t exist anywhere in her memories. She opened her mouth to say something, forgetting that she couldn’t say a word. As she gave a reflex swallow, pain licked inside her throat and tears welled up in her eyes.
Not knowing what else to do, she looked at them helplessly.
This time the blond asked her, “Are you in pain?”
She nodded and then mimicked taking a drink with her hand.
“Ah! On it,” he said as he raced out of the bed and out the door, leaving her with the bigger man.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. There was something in his dark eyes that drew her in, made her heart beat with warmth. After her initial fear had faded, she realized that he didn’t really scare her, which she found odd. As he studied her, she did the same to him, noting that even sleep tossed he was a very handsome man. His hair almost touched his shoulders and matched the deep, chocolate recess of his eyes. She could only imagine what he saw in her, and it made her wonder if he saw the resemblance to her mother.
A second later, the other man walked back in and handed her a glass of water. He stood over her, silent but regarding her in much the same fashion as the dark-haired man. She wanted to ask them who they were, where she was, and what had happened to Kaden, but her throat felt like it’d been rubbed with glass, so talking was impossible. She took a drink of the water and for a second it helped soothe the burn.
Finishing off the glass she handed it back to the blond man. He set it behind him on a table and then resumed looking at her. Now she had two good-looking men staring at her as if she were a bug under a microscope.
Finally, she looked the blond in the eye and mimed that she needed something to write with. His blue eyes widened and he turned away, heading toward a satchel in the corner. He found a journal and a pen and returned, handing them over to her. She wrote out a sentence and turned it toward them.
“Where am I?”
“Outpost Four,” the blond answered.
Her brow crinkled. She’d never heard of Outpost Four. She scribbled again.
“Where is that?”
“Other side of the Cold Lands,” the dark-haired man said.
Her eyes widened in surprise. The Cold Lands? They were light-years away from her home. What was she doing here?
“Who are you? Where is Kaden?”
“My name is Ronan Hark and this is my partner, Noah Kabot.”
She looked over at the blond and he gave her a small smile meant to calm her. None of this made sense. Unless they’d kidnapped her for ransom. But if that was the case, then why were they sleeping with her? And why did they look at her like they’d never seen a girl before?
“As for Kaden,” Ronan continued. “I don’t know who he is. Is he related to you? Your husband maybe?
She shook her head frantically and wrote.
“Not husband. Bodyguard. He was supposed to wake me up when the fighting stopped.”
“Fighting?” Noah asked. He shot a questioning glance at Ronan who just shrugged.
She blinked. Something was wrong. She knew it, could feel it.
“Why am I here?”
“You were in cryo stasis a long time,” Ronan said. “We just woke you up.”
Her heart began to hammer in her chest.
“How long?”
She saw Ronan and Noah glance at each other again and felt her stomach clench painfully. She tapped at the question again, demanding that they answer her.
“Thirty years,” Ronan finally answered. “Thirty-one to be exact.”
The journal fell out of her hands and landed on the bed with a soft plop. Tears welled up in her eyes, easing the slight drying that had been a side effect of the freezing process. Thirty-one years? Thirty-one years?
She shook her head, as if that were enough to deny what he’d said. She picked up the journal again and wrote.
“You lie!”
“No,” Ronan said softly but firmly. “I can show you in any number of ways that it’s been so long since you were placed in cryo sleep. Noah, get the sight interface.”
Noah went back to the bag, reached in and pulled two small devices out. He handed one to Ronan and then walked over to her. When Noah reached out toward her with the device she backed away sharply.
“It’s okay,” Noah replied. “It’s just a sight interface. You slip it over your eyes and then you can see through the eyes of the other person. May I put it on you?”
She’d never heard of such a thing and didn’t know if she believed or trusted him. She watched as Ronan slipped his device over his eyes, held in place by the grip around his ears. Noah waited for her and when she glanced at him, she gave one nod.
Noah put the gadget around her head, hooking on her ears, and she felt it latch onto her skin. It wasn’t painful but it wasn’t budging anytime soon. As the clear screen filtered over her sight, she immediately saw herself.
She jerked back, surprised. The image was so sharp and clear it was as if she was staring in a mirror, only this replica of herself was in 3D. Alivia raised her hand and touched her nose and the sensations were definitely odd, as she not only felt the touch but saw herself doing it. This was more than a mirror trick. It actually felt like she’d been transported into another body and now watched herself.
She gestured for Noah to remove it and a second later she was writing.
“That’s amazing! When did this get invented?”
Ronan reached up to take his off. “About twenty years ago there was a breakthrough in the field of neurological sciences. We’ve since had a bevy of gadgets like those invented.”
“My favorite is this,” Noah eagerly said as he turned his head and folded his ear down. A thin rectangular microchip was on the outside of his skin. “It’s a neural com link that vibrates the cochlea in the ear, which triggers nerve signals to the brain. Every person’s chip has an identification number to call another person. It’s a lot more efficient than those calling bands that you probably used.”
They were telling the truth. Alivia felt it in her bones. Somehow, she’d been lost all those years ago and the reality hit her right between the eyes. Her mother…her nannies…they could all be dead! A sob welled up from her chest, made all the more frustrating because she couldn’t yell out her emotions. Her vocal cords were too inflamed for speech. Tears welled up in her eyes and poured over her cheeks as Ronan took hold of her hands, giving her somet
hing to hold onto as the storm of denial washed over her.
But it was more than that, more than disbelief. She wasn’t supposed to be frozen for so long. Kaden had said a year at most, had assured her that she needed to go into hiding to be protected until the fight for the crown had ended. But instead she’d been forgotten, abandoned. Why would Kaden have left her? Unless…oh no. Unless something had happened to him. Something bad. She bowed her head under the strain of her grief.
Ronan must have interpreted correctly or seen her sadness because he reached up with a hand and cupped her head to bring her forehead against his.
“I’m so sorry for you to hear this but it’s true,” he whispered. “Noah and I are salvagers. We found your ship crashed upon a moon in the Cold Lands. We took your cryo coffin and brought you here, to a friend who knew how to wake you up.”
Just then she felt Noah’s hand running along her back, up and down in soothing circles. He wasn’t as large as Ronan but his presence was just as comforting. She should be pushing them away. She should be preaching about propriety and how it wasn’t right to take such liberties. But their touch was comforting. Strange how men she’d never met before could soothe her troubled soul.
When the wave of emotions had passed she felt tired and drained. Odd since all she’d done for the last thirty years was sleep. She pulled away from Ronan to pick up the journal.
“Is my family dead?”
Ronan sighed and it wasn’t a comforting sigh. “I don’t know, honey. But we’ll find out. All right? I promise you, we’ll find out.”
“What’s your name?” Noah asked.
She looked at him and wrote.
“Alivia.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” he told her. “Why don’t you rest a bit? It’s still dark outside. Later today we can have Valin look you over as we do some research on your family. Okay?”
She nodded. She bit her lip and glanced between the two men. Then she quickly wrote something and held it up, blushing a little.
“I have to use the facility.”
“Oh!” Noah said. He pointed to the doorway. “It’s this way.”
When she went to take a step her legs buckled, but before she could move, Ronan swept her up in his arms. She flung her arms around his neck to help hold on. She was now eye level with him and as she stared into his dark eyes something flared to life deep inside and her heart began to race.
She’d never been this close to a man before. Well, she’d grown up around Kaden, but she never really thought of him as a man. To her he’d always been just Kaden. He had never made her feel the sensations that Ronan’s embrace made her feel. Being held in his arms made everything inside her tingle to life, swirling together until it settled into a sweet ache between her thighs.
Since she couldn’t seem to look away from him, she didn’t even realize they were at the bathroom until he’d gently set her down.
“I’ll wait here,” he told her, his voice slightly husky.
She nodded and went inside. After she closed the door she took a moment to compose herself, taking a deep breath to calm her racing heart. What was happening to her? She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and placed her hands against the heat in her cheeks. She hurried to do her business and when she stepped back into the hallway Ronan scooped her back into his strong arms. Everywhere he touched little jolts of electricity shot through her body. He carried her back to the bed and laid her carefully down.
Noah pulled the comforter over her.
“Ronan and I are watching over you, Alivia. You’ve got nothing to fear.”
Maybe it was the gentleness in Noah’s tone. Maybe it was how Ronan reminded her so much of Kaden’s strength and protectiveness. When Noah helped her lay down she didn’t fight. When Ronan pulled the fluffy comforter over her she didn’t flinch. Instead, she closed her eyes and relaxed.
She felt the two men get comfortable on the bed and thought how strange it felt having two other bodies next to her. It took her a long time to fall back to sleep. She kept thinking of her nannies, of the life she had in Marvala. Were they gone? Had her mother spent thirty-one years searching for her daughter? And what had forced Kaden to abandon her in the Cold Lands?
And with her disappearance, what had happened to the kingdom?
Chapter Six
Damn it! Where’d they go?
The pilot narrowed his eyes as he studied his sensor grid. He should have been able to follow them without detection, since he had dampened his engine signature. But they suddenly disappeared off his radar and now he was left trying to determine where the hell they went.
He knew they had her cryo chamber but where would they take it? Would they try to awaken her? It wasn’t like there was a medic center anywhere nearby. It was the Cold Lands for fuck’s sake!
He tried to think where there would be the medical supplies needed to undertake the defreezing process. Hell, he spent the past thirty-one years in and out of this fuck-all of the universe and knew there wasn’t one damn place that could bring a person out of cryo stasis.
He swiveled his chair around to check his computer, banging his knee into the console as he turned.
“Fuck!” he swore, rubbing the spot. The cockpit hadn’t been designed with his large body specifications in mind so everything was a bit cramped.
If there weren’t any medical facilities around then the next best thing would be to find where the supplies could be bought. As he trolled through the information about the Cold Lands, something caught his attention. There was a trading post on the other side, on Outpost Four.
He quickly brought up the schematics on the other ship’s power signature and performed several trajectory equations. A large majority of them concluded that the ship had been headed to Outpost Four. A person could find anything at a trading post, including all the medical equipment needed.
Of course, it was a four-day trip, so he set the autopilot on and leaned back as far as the cramped space allowed. All hell would break loose if Alivia was brought back to Marvala. If he couldn’t stop the stupid fuckers from bringing her out of cryo stasis then he’d best grow a pair of steel balls and do what he had to do to make sure she never stepped foot back into her old home.
* * * *
Days later he landed his small space cruiser near the trading post and checked in with the air traffic controllers. The place was bigger than he thought it would be. Unless luck was on his side, it would take him a couple of days to figure out if his hunch was right or if he was following nothing.
If she wasn’t on Outpost Four then he failed, and he hated failing on missions.
He decided to start with the medic tents. He had a scan of her and showed it to the people he questioned, explaining she had a bad heart and probably just bought or traded for a crash cart and other heart-related items. Each time he got a no he would stare the person in the eye to make sure they weren’t lying. He’d been told a time or two that his stare was lethal, and he used it to terrify people into telling the truth.
Several hours later, he wandered into another medical supply tent and held up the picture.
“Excuse me,” he asked the woman in charge. “I’m trying to see if this woman has been in here recently. She has a heart condition and might have purchased several pieces of equipment, including a heart-lung machine and a crash cart.”
“Has she done something wrong?” the woman asked.
The man felt his heart speed up a little. “No. Her family hasn’t heard from her and they’re worried. I’m a friend and offered to track her down, just to make sure she hasn’t collapsed yet.”
“I see,” the woman said. “I haven’t seen that woman but Pops came a couple of days ago negotiating those things for a client. You can ask him and see if she was the one.”
Satisfaction coursed though his veins. Holy fucking yes! Something was finally going his way.
But he maintained his composure, not betraying his relief. “I appreciate it.”
“Pops sells material on the other side of the post,” she told him. “Second row, next to the last stall. He’s an old man that walks stooped over. Kind of crotchety.”
“Thank you for the information,” the man said as he held out several coins. The woman took them with a smile.
He made his way quickly to the other side of the post. It was like traversing a damn city. By the time he’d gotten to Pops’s stall, the sun was starting to set and the old man was closing up.
“Excuse me,” the man called out, pulling aside the covering to step inside the stall.
Pops waved him away. “I’m closed for now so come back tomorrow. Gotta get me something to eat.”
“I’m not here to purchase anything. I heard you negotiated for some medical equipment, and I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
He saw the old man’s guard go up.
“Don’t know what ‘cha talking about.”
The man held out gold coins. “Would this jog your memory?”
Pops eyed the money and licked his lips. “They be friends of mine.”
The man pulled out more.
Before he could blink Pops had swiped the coins from his palms. “You’ll be looking for Dr. Valin Dennington’s place. Two days’ journey through the jungle, near the Jag Wild Crater.”
“You said they,” the man prompted.
“Two men by the names of John and Jim.”
“Did they say why they needed the medical equipment?”
Pops shrugged. “Waking someone up from a cryo chamber.”
The man’s expression didn’t change as he nodded to the old man. “Thank you, and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Pops questioned, not able to pull his gaze away from counting the coins.
“I can’t have anyone knowing about this,” he said. It took a second for Pops to understand and when it sank in, he glanced up. The man saw fear in his old eyes right before he fired his blaster.
Sleeping Beauty (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 4
