He wasn’t certain if the glazed look in Odessa’s eyes was faked, or if she was so afraid she was trying to repress her tears.
At the second spoke past the public area, he stopped Odessa. “We go through here,” he said, casting a hand towards the wall.
“There’s nothing there,” she countered, giving what appeared to be a solid wall a suspicious look. “Not unless we’ve suddenly developed the ability to walk through solid obstacles.”
Harley examined the area both for people and aliens, and for surveillance devices of any type. He wasn’t being spied upon. It was safe to go ahead and open the concealed doorway.
Odessa watched. The man was insane if he believed he could get through a wall without any tools. He slid his long fingers along the wall before he stopped and pressed down hard.
Astonishingly, the partition opened inwards. The space was hardly large enough for a muscular man to pass through. He beckoned to her to follow him into the darkness that almost swallowed him. “Don’t worry. You’ll be safer in here than out there.”
She hesitated, having always been afraid of the dark and unseen, treacherous creatures—like spiders and earwigs and poisonous snakes.
“It’s all right,” Harley encouraged her, waving his hand at chest level. “They won’t get you here.”
Odessa stepped through the small door. Silently, it shut behind her. He fumbled in his pocket, fished out a short flashlight and thumbed the switch. A mediocre light illuminated a tunnel barely wide enough for two men to walk side by side. Harley was forced to stoop because of the low ceiling.
She slipped off her helmet due to the rising heat. “Where are we?” she whispered. “It’s awful hot in here.”
“In the underbelly, under the main power station.” Harley took off his helmet and threw it on the floor, where it rolled into a shadow. “That thing made me sweat like a pig.”
His scent was stronger than before—raw male and a pungent aftershave mingled together, teasing and tempting her in a way Roland’s outrageously expensive colognes never had. “In the underbelly? How can a space station have an underbelly?” she murmured, half out of her mind with wanting him, but trying to focus on his words.
“Every habitation humans or aliens live on must have a power source, and also a way of getting to problem areas in the habitation. It’s done in the underbelly of the station.”
“It’s spooky down here,” Odessa said, hugging her arms around her chest.
“Yeah, but it’s not too bad when you’re with someone,” came the gentle reply.
She said nothing. Grateful for his company, she followed him farther into the tunnel for several hundred feet, before he stopped at a pile of goods stashed on the floor.
“I never knew when I would need a hiding place, so I didn’t want to be caught with my pants down,” he said, wiping a hand over his eyes. “Man, it’s too hot.”
Now, there was an image. She could just see him, tanned and throbbing and naked. She was so aroused she could hardly concentrate on her daydream. His rod was stiffening, her clit wetter and wetter with longing, until she finally peeled off her clothes and persuaded him to make love to her. She wrapped her thighs around his and pushed her breasts against his hands. She needed all of him. However, she guided her thoughts back to the high temperature. “I’m not sure Eyani would have found it tolerable even though he liked the warmth.” She missed the friendly little alien.
“The only way this place will cool down is if someone completely shuts the station down. The heat reminds me of Texas.”
Is that where you’re from?”
He nodded, knelt and dug in the pile, retrieved a grey army blanket and spread it on the slippery floor. “All we have to pray for is that no one blows up the place.”
Sounds of metal clanking against metal and distant laughter, made her shiver. “Blow up the place? Why would anyone want to do that?”
“On a space station, you have different kinds of people espousing different causes. Some are in favour, some are against, and many never make an issue, but there are others who take exception to beliefs different from their own and kill indiscriminately. It’s mostly the innocent who die.”
That got her mind away from wanting him. “So much for peace and harmony throughout the galaxy.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale. Pardua wouldn’t hesitate to kill en masse, if he could gain something by doing it. He plays the victim whenever he can. There’s no way to win against a man who claims he’s the injured party.”
Odessa shook her head. “I don’t understand.” She cocked her head to one side, listening to a sound much like that of heartbeats echoing off the wall.
He stopped and faced her. “That’s a normal sound. The station humming, is how I like to think of it. Anyway, it works like this. Say you cry foul, that your purse was snatched by a common thief who’s done it a hundred times before, but everyone knows he needs the money from your purse to feed his ten hungry kids. Do you think you’ll get your money back?”
“I see. Everyone perceives him as a victim, but they would look at me funny if I demanded my money back, knowing his kids were going hungry but I could afford to lose a few dollars.”
Harley grunted in the affirmative, knelt on the blanket and rummaged in the pile of stashed goods until he came up with a container. “Right. So you see, once a man claims he’s a victim, no matter where in the galaxy you are, society is conditioned to feel pity for him.
“How sad.” Odessa wanted to reach out and touch Harley, to console him, but he projected such sudden aloofness that she hesitated. He obviously didn’t want contact. Uncle Peter had projected the same detached demeanour from time to time, but then she’d simply left him alone until he came out of what was a rare mood for him.
“You’re like my Uncle Peter,” she blurted out, sliding her back down the wall and sitting on the floor so she could take the weight off her feet. She pulled off her heels, grateful the leather was no longer pinching against her baby toes. She hated the helmets for restricting her freedom.
“That’s a compliment if I’ve ever heard one.” He opened the container and offered it to her. Inside, there appeared to be small chunks of bright orange and dull yellow dried fruit.
“Dehydrated fruit?”
He nodded, helping himself to a darker chunk, perhaps a fig.
Hardly making a sound, he sat beside her to watch her rub her foot.
“I wish you could get to know him,” she said, homesick again and missing her brothers’ companionship and her uncle’s sure-fire witticisms. “He’s an interesting man, full of life, even though life has knocked him down more times than he cares to admit.” She bit into the yellow fruit she had selected, and was pleasantly surprised to find it tasted like banana.
“Sounds like a man who’s worth getting to know.”
“After Aunt Gem died when I was barely out of diapers, he was really torn up. He would hold me in his lap and cry and cry. I cried along with him, which saddened him even more, before he came up with the idea he could tell me fairytales to cheer me up.” She reached for the container at the same time Harley did.
He motioned for her to continue. “Like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty?”
“He told me his versions, though. The Uncle Peter versions. He got Sleeping Beauty mixed up with Rumplestiltskin, and I didn’t even know until I got into kindergarten and thought to tell the teacher that her story was wrong. When I went home and told Uncle Peter the real version, you know what he said? ‘Well, lass, it ain’t but a tale about a wicked stepmother. No harm, no foul.’ I still remember him saying that. And that was years ago.” This time the dried fruit was tangy and red, like a strawberry.
“He sounds like one cool guy,” Harley said, looking wistful.
“He raised me and my twin brothers by himself. I don’t know how he kept us from tearing each other apart sometimes, but he did.”
“What happened to your parents?” He reached over into the stash and lifted
a bottle of water, and offered the clear plastic to her.
“Water?” she asked, holding out her hand.
Harley raised his eyebrows, “Yeah. I don’t do poison.”
She ignored his statement. She took a few sips and handed the bottle to him, trying to remember what her mother and father had looked like. “They ran off together one night. Told Uncle Peter they would be back after they went to the movies, but they never returned. Uncle Peter called the cops and they searched for them for days. They just up and disappeared into thin air, like they had never been born.”
“Did they ever show up?”
“No. Uncle Peter struggled with his sister’s desertion for a long while, especially since Aunt Gem had just died. He felt as if the whole world had begun to collapse on him.” Odessa smiled through her tears. He handed the water back to her. Their fingertips touched, igniting a flame of desire along her nerve endings. She drank again and surveyed him as he took another sip. A muscle in his right cheek twitched as he recapped the bottle and hid it under the stash.
Odessa went on. “He came to the conclusion he had lost three of his relatives, but he had also gained three—my brothers and me. Later, he admitted we were godsends who’d brought him out of his suicidal thoughts, because if he had done what he’d had half a mind to do, there would have been no one to take care of us.”
“Hard to imagine parents can leave their kids behind like that.” Harley shook his head in disgust. “You’re really lucky to have an uncle like that.”
“Uncle Peter doesn’t talk about it. The few times I asked him about them, he said if they had forgotten about me, then it was best to forget about them too.”
“Wise advice.”
“What about your parents?”
“I don’t remember them at all,” he said, as if she was trying to pull the information from him as painfully as a dentist who didn’t use sedation when trying to pull a rotten tooth.
“Who raised you?” she asked out of curiosity.
“My big brother and his wife did. I was a latecomer, and I guess my parents figured they could do without an additional mouth to feed so they passed me onto my brother.”
“How sad. Mmm,” Odessa murmured, closing her eyes and revelling in being out of her shoes. “That feels so good.”
Harley scooted down and carefully lifted her leg, as if it were delicate crystal.
Odessa immediately blinked her eyes open.
“Relax. Sometimes it feels that much better when someone else is doing the rubbing.”
“Mmm,” she said again, luxuriating in his deft touch. The movements of his hands caused the stifling air to move around her, creating a wispy but humid breeze. “It wouldn’t be hard to convince me to relax right now,” she whispered. His big hands easily took in a larger portion of her foot than she could manage herself. An overwhelming heat in the pit of her belly began to make her wish for more, that he would caress her ankle, then move up to her thigh and inwards to her feminine core. There he would rub her clit and she would shear off into ecstasy.
Harley began to talk to her, amazed he could tell her about his past, something he had never been able to do before except with Abby. “My brother was a pretty neat guy.”
“Was?”
“He died in a hang-gliding accident when I was eighteen. His wife told me I was old enough to get out on my own. I’d been working odd jobs since I was sixteen to help him out. That didn’t count with her, though.”
“Maybe she was afraid of something. Like another man in the house.” He hit a sensitive spot under her big toe.
“Yeah. I suppose you’re right, although I wouldn’t have called it that. I was just a kid trying to get along in the world.”
“Where did you go after your sister-in-law kicked you out?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oops. I didn’t mean to sound so callous.”
He grimaced. “I didn’t take it that way. I joined the police force in Texas. I had always wanted to be a Texas Ranger, but I thought there was plenty of time to work my way around.”
“But you went somewhere else?” she prompted, watching his hands with an expression of longing.
“Yeah. I wanted more adventure than I was getting, patrolling the streets day after day.”
“You’d think there would be plenty of adventure in a job like that.”
Her bare foot was so small and delicate. He didn’t want to talk, but to make love, to pleasure her, to give her a sense of protection. How could he do that if he didn’t feel safe himself? He resisted the urge to circle his hands around the circumference of her ankle. Her eyes had gone dreamy, a misty blue. Her lips fell apart slightly. He had to get his mind off raw sex and back to finding a way to get them off the station, to safety.
“It was predictable adventure of sorts,” he continued with difficulty. He felt as if a fur-ball had lodged deep in his throat. “I’d go out in the morning and chase the bad guys, who ultimately surrendered. End of story.”
“And then you turned to drug dealing?” she asked.
He swallowed hard, unable to get angry with her. She had planted her index finger in her mouth and was lightly sucking on it. The motion was sexy, with the naivety of a child in a woman’s body, or a woman unconsciously luring a man. His body tightened and his pants felt tight as his cock swelled with desire. He wouldn’t mind touching her everywhere along her body, but he had to get away from this kind of thinking, which usually led to trouble. He concluded her action was meant to drive him past the brink of insanity. He allowed for her comment. She didn’t know that he was Pardua’s man for only one reason.
“I don’t deal drugs,” he said calmly, his voice much too hoarse for his liking.
She shrugged. “If you say so. If you don’t, then why do you work for Pardua?” She inclined her head, noticed his eyes narrowed to slits of anger. She slipped her finger from her mouth, wondering how on earth the digit had got there. She yearned for more of Harley’s touch, yearned for his big hands stroking her bare, sensitised flesh, teasing and kissing her in erotic places.
“I only appear to work for him.”
Her head shot up in a query. “You said you were going to turn me in to him. Why didn’t you?”
“It’s not in my best interests.”
Her back stiffened. “That’s good. Are you a double agent then?” She frowned, uncomfortable with the idea that this man could be an agent for both Pardua and perhaps the government of Earth.
“I’m not a double agent in the way you perceive it,” he muttered. “I came to exact justice, to catch Pardua in the act of exchanging Gr’iis with people who came here from Earth. Nobody knew how vast his operation was. It was only after I got here and insinuated myself into his organisation that I saw he had to be shut down, had to be prevented from killing more people of all races.”
She sighed. Her eyes blurred with tears. “Is that drug similar to what killed Eyani’s people?”
“It’s the same thing, but more potent now. Once the drug is introduced into the general population, it creates a dependency that goes deeper than the person taking the drug. Children can develop the drug dependency in the womb and so far, it’s impossible to treat the compulsion, both for those who take it and those who are born addicted to it. And in some cases, there are those populations who can’t handle the drug in their system at all. Like the Ashtaris.”
Revolted, she said, “That’s mass extermination.”
Harley nodded, placing his hand on his upper thigh. Odessa gazed upon his strong hand and his muscular thigh and wet her lips. He could easily tweak her nipples and she would simply lie back and allow him to do with her what he wanted. With an effort, she looked away. Her clit pulsed. The man was scandalously sexy. It should be a crime to allow such a man to be alone with a woman who craved his body so badly.
“That’s exactly it. Mass populations can be wiped out in a matter of years. It’s all part of Pardua’s plan to rule the known galaxy. If he exterminates some of the people, t
hen there won’t be much opposition when he marches his armies in to take control of what’s left.”
“Not to mention the people who are on this drug won’t be able to fight back, because they won’t have the strength, and they will want more of the drug and all their time will be consumed with getting it.”
Harley’s eyes widened. Was he surprised by her perception? “That’s right.”
“I don’t understand one thing, though. If the people Pardua rules are all addicted to this drug and they’re dying off, who will he rule over?”
Harley sucked in a long breath. “That’s something we don’t know just yet. We figure he’s delving into genetic manipulation.”
“What’s that?” Despite her uncle’s protests, she had dropped out of high school, finding the curriculum uninspiring. She’d known she had a gift with children, and that had been enough for her—she hadn’t wanted to be a rocket scientist.
“It’s when one particular gene is altered to make it stronger than it previously was. It’s much like the cancer gene was twenty years ago. Cancer rages through the body, but with genetic manipulation and testing before birth, the gene can be eradicated. Thus, no cancer later in life.”
“I see.” Odessa’s attention wandered back to the hand straddling his thigh. Strong, broad fingers which could make love to her. She would delight in the sight of them against her skin and in his mere touch. She took a deep breath and let the air out slowly, unable to concentrate on genetic manipulation or whatever Pardua was trying to accomplish, even though her life might depend on the knowledge.
Her action did nothing to calm her unsteady nerves. Mentally, she shook herself to attempt to clear her thoughts and leant forward, her face mere inches from Harley’s rugged jaw. She sensed her lips trembling with need. “Kiss me,” she whispered, keeping her gaze on his eyes.
He blinked several times before he bent towards her and brushed a stray strand of hair from her cheek. “I want to make love to you,” he said, so softly she barely heard him.
Whispers in the Dawn Page 13
