God, he hated these assignments. More often than not, no one was a winner, even though the GDA commended their agents for their hard work in the field—work the agents risked their lives for each day.
Odessa moaned and her lips moved. Harley breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t dead. He wouldn’t let her die. He hoped the bullet wound hadn’t penetrated any bones or internal organs. On Romaydia, that would certainly be a first-class ticket to death’s door.
Abby’s face blurred with Odessa’s. Tears ran down his cheeks as he listened once again to the screams of agony in his memory as the flames had eaten away at the old warehouse, eaten away at Abby’s body. The building had collapsed, imploding on itself in a ball of dust and showering red-orange embers. Harley was a walking dead man. As long as he and Abby were together in body and soul in the afterlife, he didn’t care. Paradise would welcome them as a couple.
He reached his chambers, ordered the sliding door to open and hustled into the cramped bedroom area. The room was spartanly furnished with only the necessities of life, and felt more like a jail cell than a temporary home. His heart beat fast. He gently lowered Odessa to the bed, even as he backhanded the tears from his eyes. He wanted to see the damage, to know how badly she was hurt.
He sat on the edge of the bed beside her, his breathing laboured. There was no tell-tale sign of a bullet burn on her light pink T-shirt. Her skin was cool to the touch. His eyebrows knitted together in a frown as he lifted the fabric away from her stomach and rubbed his palm against satiny smooth skin.
She was so perfect. The swell of her breasts teased him invitingly, and her expression was one of blissful peace, an emotion that had eluded him since Abby’s death. He shook his head to freshen his thinking. He couldn’t allow himself to think of Abby when Odessa needed his help. Abby was beyond help. Odessa wasn’t.
He peeled the sweater farther up her stomach, but there was still no sign of blood, let alone a bullet hole. Had the bullet gone clean through her back? It couldn’t have.
She hardly wore any semblance of a bra. The black silk barely covered her breasts, and her nipples were visible through the thin fabric. He felt as if he were being tempted by a djinn who had come out of a bottle wearing next to nothing. Still, he found no sign of injury.
Frustrated, he rolled her over gently to examine her back. The waistband of her black pants rolled down, leaving the cleft of her backside visible. He swallowed hard. And gulped. His groin tightened. His hands, large, tanned and now clammy, looked almost too big for her frail form, although she had already shown she was far from being delicate. He wanted to undress her completely, to inspect every inch of her body. He could hardly breathe.
What if he did unclothe her, when she was awake? Would she watch him with eyes filled with fascination? Would her nipples peak at his slightest touch? Would she make love to him? His cock hardened and began to tent his trousers. She would be completely bare to his heated gaze. His heart beat madly. Her legs would be splayed apart, his rod thrusting into her wet channel… No, she would probably slap him if she knew what he was thinking.
Now, no matter how frantically he searched her upper and lower body, he found nothing to indicate where the bullet had hit.
His thoughts jumbled together. Why wasn’t he able to find the bullet hole’s entrance? Had he wrongly assumed that the bullets the attacker had used had been old-fashioned ones, or had he used some new-fangled weaponry, something more lethal, faster in its end result? Was history repeating itself? Would he watch Odessa die, as he had watched Abby, and be unable to help her?
She appeared to be fully human, but on Romaydia, it was difficult to tell if a being was wholly human or not. For the last thirty years, humans had interbred with other species. Sometimes the resulting children were hardly different from full humans. At other times, the offspring made him cringe.
“Is she dead, Harley?”
The muscles of Harley’s upper arm beneath the sleeve of his leather jacket hardened with anxiety at the sound of the deep, grating voice. Slowly, as if he had been expecting the Murrach to summon him, he turned to face the small screen set in the glass of the tiny dining table.
“I don’t believe so, Murrach Pardua.” Harley knew without a doubt the Murrach didn’t ask after Odessa’s health out of any true concern for her welfare. The realisation angered him, made him feel helpless and vulnerable. The Murrach did nothing that didn’t first benefit his scheming to become the ruler of the universe. He killed without mercy, no matter how close the perceived traitor was to him. Rumour on the station was that the Lord had executed his own brother in a fit of anger when his brother had dared to contradict him over some trivial matter.
The egotistical man’s piercing brown eyes seemed to sear through Harley’s mind. His shoulders were relaxed, but he seemed to release energy even as he sat still. He had spies—human, alien and electronic—everywhere on Romaydia. Harley bet Pardua knew each movement he had made in the last twelve hours, from going to sleep to eating his light breakfast of oranges and cereal.
“Good. She’s my link to Baylon and with her dead, I may not be able to find the scum-sucking leech. How is she faring?” Pardua was dressed simply in unadorned black. He was an unostentatious man, although his living quarters were luxuriously appointed and art, both from Earth and other Galaxian planets, lined the walls.
“She is well enough, Murrach,” Harley lied, keeping his expression bland.
The man, older than Harley by a year, nodded. “Good. When she has gathered her small wits about her, bring her to me. She and I have some matters of importance to discuss.” The man deactivated the screen, which went black and died, much as Harley envisioned the Murrach doing when GDA justice was handed down to him. If only Harley could find the secret as to how the Murrach controlled the population on Romaydia, he might be able to break the link that bound the self-styled Lord to the station’s people, thus making his own task easier.
The room suddenly made Harley feel hemmed in. His chest constricted. He wanted nothing more than to ride his stallion, Rainbow, out on the wide, open fields of a Texan range, to feel the wind rifle through his hair and to feel the searing, punishing heat of the sun on his skin. He sighed, recalling he had promised himself that the assignment with Abby would be his last, but now he had a bone to pick with Baylon. Until he avenged himself for her life, there would be no peace, no riding his favourite horse, no doing any of the things he most enjoyed doing. Baylon owed him. Baylon would pay with his own blood if it took the rest of Harley’s life to accomplish that feat.
Before he turned back to Odessa, he slipped a small towel over the screen in the dining table, despite knowing the Murrach had probably placed more spying devices in the small chamber. For Pardua, trust was a commodity hard to come by.
Chapter Five
Odessa could hear the two men talking as she gained consciousness. She lay still, feigning sleep in the hope of garnering information to help her leave this space station. She heard Harley speak to the man he’d called Lord Pardua. The name meant nothing to her. Why would he want to speak with her?
Well, she’d have a question or two to ask him. The first would be how to get off this station and the second, why did the women think they couldn’t leave except with one of those Sekalians?
Her stomach threatened to spill its meagre contents, but she remained silent. She felt odd, as though she had been hit over the head with a large metal pot. Her ears rang and, even as she lay motionless on the bed, the room seemed to spin in a mad dance. A breeze across her midriff made her wonder in what state of dress she was. A wave of apprehension coursed through her.
The bed sagged, announcing Harley had sat down beside her. What was he intending to do? Violette’s words came back to haunt her. Men only wanted one thing on this station.
To her amusement, she felt Harley’s broad, warm hands slide up towards the bottom edge of her bra. He had big hands, with calluses on his palms and the pads of his fingertips. Wouldn’t she fe
el even better if he touched her breasts, which had begun to ache fiercely? He could do almost anything he wanted. His tanned skin, in contrast to the whiteness of her own, would turn her on and spike up the heat that suddenly whirled around her. If he roamed down the flat of her stomach and into her curly pubic hairs, she would groan, not from pain but from exhilaration. Then he could slip his arm under her ass and push her higher, towards his hot, questing lips. He would kiss her for hours, trailing up and down her warm body, tormenting her, increasing her excitement. When he thrust into her she would cry out and beg for more. But she knew better than to allow him to continue his exploration now that she was fully awake. How long had he been investigating her body for?
She flashed her eyes open and slapped his cheek hard. The sound of her hand connecting with his flesh echoed in the small room. He made a noise—half snarl, half cry of surprise. That would show him for taking advantage of her! She got up and flew towards the door.
Holding his palm against his cheek, Harley opted not to chase after her. He had no doubt he would be able to find her without too much trouble if he wanted to. The slap had been wholly unexpected, and now reverberated along his jaw and cheekbone. He puzzled over the fact that she had been shot in the stomach and yet she showed no signs of injury. Common sense told him it wasn’t likely to have a life-threatening injury and yet race away at full speed. It was out of the realm of possibility. Was she a Delorican, a creature that was partly robot and partly alien? But their women weren’t known for such satiny skin and cantankerous behaviour.
Harley raked a hand through his hair. In the early days after Abby died, he had wished he could exchange places with a Delorican, who were known for their lack of emotions. Two years ago, the brains behind the GDA had arrived at the tropical Pacific island Harley had been confined on, purportedly for debriefing.
“I know the pain of losing the only woman you think you’ll ever love is unbearable. Time and space will heal some of that,” Justin Torrance said. He faced the blue-green ocean and the palm trees waving in the breeze. It was a true Paradise, but without Abby, what did natural beauty mean?
Harley said nothing. All he had the energy to do was sit in the folding lawn chair and stare listlessly at the pounding surf.
“I also know,” the old man said, brushing a wisp of hair from the side of his head, “that you want to get back at whoever killed Abby.”
Harley sat straight up. “Have you ever been married, Torrance?”
“Once. Long ago. When I was your age. It didn’t work out, but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss her still.”
Harley pursed his lips. “So what do you know about the perfect woman?”
“Not much,” Torrance admitted in a husky whisper.
“Put me back on the job,” Harley pleaded.
“I can’t do that. Your loss is too fresh and might impair your judgment on your next assignment, when your partner needs you the most.”
Like Abby, Harley thought.
“When your shrink has assured me you’ve dealt with this satisfactorily, I’ll send you on an assignment. But not before that.”
Harley squared his shoulders. “What do you mean by ‘satisfactory’? That might be years.” He’d never get over Abby. She had been his light, the being that had kept him going during the darkest hours. He admitted that sounded as corny as a sappy greeting card, but it was true.
“Just as long as it takes.” Torrance spread out his hands in front of him. “It’s up to you how long that will be.”
Harley grunted. He wasn’t about to tell Torrance he’d kill the son of a bitch who had murdered Abby. He didn’t need the GDA director’s permission for that.
“Don’t ruin your career, Harley. I know what you’re thinking.”
Harley gnawed his lip, frustrated with the man’s unrelenting determination not to let him back on the job.
“You know I lost another agent in the warehouse, not just Abby. I can’t afford to lose more of my finest people.”
“Someone betrayed us. Someone knew we were going to be in the warehouse. Roland Baylon was our informant. He was the only one who knew we would be there that night.”
“That’s only speculation. That particular fact doesn’t make him the guilty party.”
“It’s a lot more than speculation. She knew who the traitor was.” The four-week-old memories resurfaced to torment Harley. A raw emptiness persisted in his gut. He would never forget how the warehouse had exploded, leaving stumps where Abby’s sexy legs had been.
“I’m not saying she didn’t.” Torrance finally directed his wandering gaze to Harley. “All I’m saying is, we have no evidence of who turned on us. It could have been Baylon, or it might not have been.”
“I have proof. Abby told me,” Harley blurted.
“Possibly. Simmer down, son. There’s nothing you can do to bring Abby back.”
Shortly after the older GDA man had departed in the helicopter that had flown him to the island named Lost Paradise, Harley had hatched his plan for revenge. Having a plan had made him feel marginally better.
Now, Odessa strongly reminded him of Abby, but Odessa was more feminine, without the rough edge Abby had cultivated to deal with their tough GDA assignments.
Harley sighed, getting to his feet slowly as if he was three times his age, and sank into a chair at the dining table. If he had carried a videograph of Abby, he would have dug it out of his black carryall and examined her face. Lord, he couldn’t remember exactly what she’d looked like, or how her skin had felt against his searching hand. All he saw was Odessa Grante’s eyes flashing a dazzling blue as her anger flared to life.
Goosebumps trickled along his forearm. He groaned in dismay. She had overheard the Murrach’s conversation with him. Or had she? She had given no sign she was awake when he had sat on the bed and began his examination. He knew a bullet wound when he saw one, but he had seen nothing on her. Yet she had specifically told him she had been hit.
He sighed and clasped his hands together before he unclasped them again and ran his fingers along the hard wood of the chair’s arm. What exactly had happened? Was her passing out a ruse to get into his quarters? No matter how innocent she’d appeared, he’d sensed a strength about her that hadn’t registered during his first impression of her.
He pressed his lips together, then sighed. She was getting to him in a bad way, with her beauty and his lack of sex for months and months. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers. Good heavens, he wanted her…but if he couldn't have her in this moment, there were ways to take care of matters. He lay down against the seat and pulled his hardening cock from his pants. The tip was moist with pre-cum. Gently at first, he began to pump the shaft, starting at the root. Up and down with rhythmic movements. Then harder and harder. His breathing almost stopped, and he forced himself to gasp for air, but his hand didn’t stop. Faster and faster.
How his thoughts whirled around in his head. From Odessa’s beauty to her bared thighs to her inviting glances. She was shy, yet not so shy that she couldn’t make love to him. He was sure of that. The notion turned him on. The seconds passed as his muscles tightened with yearning. When his orgasm came, his ideas shattered and he settled down, spent, his mind eased of its torture. Wondering about her had turned him inside out. He refastened his clothes, raked his fingers through his hair…and now it was time for business. Wasn’t it?
His indecisiveness ended as he rose and slapped the ‘speak’ button on the screen on the dining table. He refused to lift the towel and allow prying eyes into his quarters. He hated to seek information this way, but how else would he find out if anyone knew what Odessa was doing on the space station?
“Ralph,” he said, without showing emotion. “Find out if Roland Baylon’s ship has been located yet and what his destination is.”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied with a hint of rebellion.
Harley nodded and shut off the speaker. If the Murrach were listening in, he wouldn’t think anything was
amiss if Harley was searching for the woman. Minor things went wrong all the time on Romaydia. Harley hazarded a guess that the end result was still the same, in Pardua’s opinion. As long as the miscreant was caught, there would be no harm, no foul. Harley had been given several bonuses in the last year and had personally been congratulated but the end of the mission was still in the future.
He wanted Odessa to tell him where Baylon was, and not only bring down Baylon, but Pardua as well. All the pieces of the complicated puzzle weren’t yet in place. Pardua wasn’t a man who made many missteps. When he did, his underlings paid the price with their lives. Those were the men who usually spilled the goods on their Lord. However, dead men didn’t volunteer information.
Perplexed and agitated, Harley ran his hands over the sides of his head. He was alone here on the station, the only good guy among thousands and thousands who routinely trafficked drugs or stolen merchandise or pimped. He felt dirty and cheapened in his quest for revenge. Isolation wasn’t a bad part of his life, since he didn’t want to associate with non-criminals—that type of action alone would raise Pardua’s suspicions and Harley might be dead within the hour.
The minutes ticked by. Harley paced back and forth across the confines of his room. Twenty steps one way, twenty back. He counted them before he got bored, fell to his hands and knees and began exercising with a vengeance. One hundred push-ups. Two hundred. The exertion often relieved the stress of waiting. Sometimes it didn’t.
The speaker rang. Harley was at the table before it could ring again. Uncovering the screen, he barked, “Yeah?”
“Here’s the info you requested,” Ralph replied in a voice that lacked inflection. Obviously, he was on auto-pilot. “The Drifter was logged in as leaving the station at 1100 hours. The captain of the spaceship left alone, but did not log a destination. According to the monitoring sensors, there were two persons aboard the ship when it arrived this morning at 0800 hours.” He glanced down, scanning a printout he was reading from.
Whispers in the Dawn Page 4
