Wager: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 4)

by H. E. Trent

  “That’s only because Headron moved all the flour for the bakery to his house.” Courtney waggled her eyebrows. “Before then, there was certainly more flour.”

  Headron slipped into a chair to the right of Erin and took the baby, ostensibly so she could eat. Esteben had the other, but he’d apparently mastered eating one-handed.

  Sixteen years on Jekh, and Jasper still hadn’t gotten used to seeing men so hands-on with their babies. Might have been different if his own father had been more openly affection, but he’d been a master at passing the buck, just like his mother. Half the time, he didn’t know what “normal” family relationships were supposed to be like. Maybe the folks on Jekh got things right.

  Felt right to him, anyway.

  “Precious said something about opening a coffeehouse in Little Gitano,” Headron said.

  “Yup,” Precious said. “I did say that, but the idea was Fastida’s. She thought that between Headron’s pastries, and Court’s coffee and chocolate haul, we could make a killing.”

  “We?” Murki blinked indolently at her.

  “Okay.” Precious shrugged. “Well, someone. I’m in and out too much going between here and Earth and fetching Court’s coffee and Parmesan cheese. I’d be a silent partner.”

  Court sighed. “Right, sweetheart. Silent.”

  “I’m capable.”

  Luke snorted.

  “Aw, screw all of ya. Anyway, Fastida likes keeping busy. She’d probably like to run the shop. We’d have to teach her how.”

  “And who’d work with her,” Marco asked, “since you’re going to be so busy fetching Court’s Parmesan?”

  “I think it’s a lovely idea,” Sera said.

  A chill shot through Jasper’s veins and his body went still with anticipation.

  Keep talking, honey.

  Her voice was one of those quiet, modulated purrs that some radio newsreaders had. It wasn’t a bold voice, but people stopped talking when they heard her speak. He sure as shit didn’t want to talk. He wanted to stare at her face and watch her lips move, preferably with those long legs of hers straddling his lap.

  He raked his hand over his face and swallowed his scoff. He was turning into a fucking dog. Sixteen years on the planet, and he’d never been that. Before, he hadn’t understood why men kept putting their money in Kent’s pockets for the tiniest chance a lady would tell them yes. Loneliness plus admiration equaled desperation.

  Fortunately, she wasn’t looking at him and what had to be his obvious discomfiture. She seemed to be looking right through him at Precious.

  “Would you work there?” Precious asked her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. With my arm being so useless, I’d make a poor server and wouldn’t be able to manipulate the machines very well. Ara might be suited for the job, though.” She tipped her head toward her middle sister, who gave Precious a wave. “Ara likes to socialize. I think the work would be good for her, and will help her improve her English.”

  Ara rolled her eyes, and then said something to Sera in Jekhani that made Sera’s brow furrow. Sera turned toward Precious again. “She said she knows of a place.”

  “Where?” Trigrian asked. He yelped then yanked his thumb free of his kid’s mouth and frowned down at the wounded digit.

  “Is…between,” Ara said in a husky, broken statement. She held her hands up, palms facing each other, and positioned about six inches apart. Raising the left hand a bit, she said, “library.” Then, raising the right hand, she said, “weaver shop.” Then she put her hands together. “Between.” She shrugged. “English no good. Didn’t study like…” She pointed her thumbs toward her sisters.

  “You didn’t need to study,” the other sister, Valen, said. “You were the prettiest. We all assumed you’d be the first to find a trio.”

  She was beautiful, but Jasper wouldn’t have necessarily said she was the prettiest. They were pretty in different ways, depending on what a guy wanted. He could see Ara on at home on the back of some bastard’s motorcycle. Her prettiness had an edge. Valen was the classically pretty prim and smart girl from high school that every boy’s ma wanted him to end up with, but she was too serious for romance.

  But Sera was a natural beauty. Her prettiness wasn’t easy to define in the same way a person would have found explaining why they liked the look of a rose. With her skin freckled by the sun, she looked like she belonged outside around things that grew, and not indoors where lovely things were kept locked away.

  As if his mind had called to hers, she looked down the table at him, meeting his gaze briefly, before fixing her attention on her daughter’s plate. As she cut Elken’s lasagna, Ara rolled her eyes again. “If had to do over…”

  “You’d what?” Marco asked.

  “Study harder. Know more about…” She rolled her hand in a well, you know sort of fashion. “How things work.”

  “What were you doing when you should have been studying?”

  “Exploring.”

  “She’d disappear for hours at a time,” Trigrian said. “Of course, we always knew she’d turn up, but my parents didn’t know what to do with her. They couldn’t get her to care about the books.”

  “Where the heck were you?” Court asked Ara.

  Ara studied her nails. Obviously, that motion of false distractedness was universal from one planet to the next. “Go into woods. No echo there. Sing, sometimes. Also, yell.”

  Yelling, Jasper understood. “What do you like to sing?” he asked.

  Ara leaned forward and peered at him as if she’d forgotten he—the intruder and interloper—was there. He didn’t think she was going to answer, but that was okay. He wasn’t really welcome in the conversation, but he’d been curious.

  “Embarrassing,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

  She shook her head and pointed to herself. “No. Songs are, or how I sing them. Don’t know if I sing them right. Earth songs. Found music but don’t know if I read notes right.”

  “Ah,” Murki said, leaning back. “The Terran style of musical notation is different from the Jekhan one.”

  “I’m stunned anyone can read any of the notes at all,” Jasper said. “We had compulsory music classes in school when I was a kid. I did fine at algebra and calculus, but reading music notes may as well have been reading Greek. I could never wrap my brain around it fast enough. As a matter of fact, I got kicked out of the mixed chorus.” He chuckled and forked some lasagna into his mouth. Courtney really knew how to put a pasta dish together. He was so in love with what was on his plate, he was giving serious consideration to sending her a hand-written thank-you note.

  “Your grandma must have been mortified,” Salehi said.

  “Hell yeah, she was mortified. She was afraid to go to church the next Sunday after she found out. ‘Mijo,’” he said, doing his best impersonation of his tiny abuela. “‘Don’t say nothin’ to nobody about the chorus. You the only one they don’t keep.” He shrugged. “They found out anyway. I grew up in one of those tiny New Mexican towns where nobody could keep a secret, and even if they were capable of doing so, they told the secrets anyway because there was nothing else to do but gossip.”

  “Why would anyone have cared?” Salehi asked.

  “You kiddin’ me? Oh, man, everyone’s kid did mixed chorus for at least a year, even if they couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. As long as they could tell the instructor what the notes were, they got to stay. I was the first one in like five years to get booted. The shame, man, the shame.”

  Salehi snorted. “Can you even sing?”

  “Hell yeah, I can sing.”

  “Whatever, man.”

  “F’real. I got an angel voice to go with this angel face.” He spread on his broadest grin and smoothed down his beard. He was getting used to the beard. He’d never really had a chance to grow one out, but they were something of a trend amongst Terran men in the area.

  Erin giggled. “You’re a mess. W
hat happened at church after people found out?”

  He shrugged. “You know. The usual stuff. Bunch of old ladies giving me side-eye looks and whispering when they thought my abuela wasn’t looking. I thought she was actually going to hold her tongue, but then some pea brain muttered my name and ‘estupido’ in the same sentence. My abuela beaned her with her purse.”

  “Oh man,” Owen said, barely able to catch his breath from laughter. “Not one of those old lady purses filled with inedible hard candies and dried-up ink pens with no caps.”

  “Exactly that kind. Nobody called Abuela’s boy stupid, you know? Just ’cause I can’t make heads or tails of printed music doesn’t mean I’m dumb.”

  Owen couldn’t stop laughing.

  Sighing, Ais poked him with her elbow.

  “I can’t help laughing,” Owen said. “That sounds like some shit Mimi would do.”

  “Oh, she totally would swing a purse at someone,” Court said, “and she’d aim right for the face. Mimi doesn’t mess around.”

  “I love your grandma,” Luke said. “She introduced me to the magic of ham hocks and neck bones.”

  Sera made a face.

  “Southern stuff,” Jasper said, taking another shot at some back-and-forth conversation. Come on, honey. “They use them for flavoring.”

  “What is a…hock?”

  “I guess it’s kinda like a piece of shin, right?” Owen said.

  “I don’t care what part of the animal the hock is,” Court said. “All that matters is that they’re yummy, and—” She turned to Precious. “Bring me ham hocks, and I mean good ones. The guy near here who has pigs doesn’t preserve the meat the same way folks back on Earth do.”

  Whistling a jaunty space shanty, Precious pulled a small tablet computer out of her flannel shirt’s pocket and worked her thumbs over the screen. “I think I’m permitted to carry a full meat allotment for the next trip. You’ve gotta tell me where to get it from and how much.”

  Courtney cringed. “I’ll have to do some math. Feeding the family is one thing, but more often than not, I’m feeding the whole farm. How the hell should I know how many ham hocks I might need? For all I know, Jekhans don’t like salty pork.”

  “I love salty pork,” Sera said. “Like the ham you had at that holiday.”

  “Christmas?”

  Sera snapped her fingers and the barest grin quirked her lips up as she nodded. “Yes. Christmas. I took some slices to bed with me in my pocket. I didn’t feel guilty for long, because they didn’t last long.” She sighed. “I’d like to retrain my brain that I don’t need to hide food for later anymore.”

  “I still do sometimes,” Ais said softly. “Owen catches me.”

  Owen didn’t say anything. Staring down at his food, he speared a cucumber slice onto his fork and dragged the tines through a puddle of dressing on his plate. He looked uncomfortable with the topic—like he’d never planned to bring it up as long as she didn’t.

  Jasper knew what that was like. Toward the end when his abuela was sick, neither of them wanted to talk about the inevitable. Their conversations were filled with code words made up on the fly and gentle pivots from one dangerous subject to the next. When she’d said, “Maybe you should come visit an old lady,” he’d known she didn’t have long left.

  “When I realize what I’m doing, I get so angry with myself,” Ais said. “I say, I’ve been here long enough. I know no one here is going to starve me, but giving up the habit is difficult.”

  Jasper had to set down his fork before he bent the handle any more out of shape. He didn’t understand how people could do such shitty things to each other, and especially not with profit being the end goal. Those women weren’t commodities. They were sentient beings with feelings and opinions who people cared about. If the men who’d harmed them or women like them ever got close enough for him to kill, he would, and he wouldn’t feel guilty about doing the job, either.

  Marco bumped his arm with his elbow. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You stopped eating. You don’t want that?” Marco pointed to his lasagna, and there was an earnest plea in his expression.

  Jasper had one mind to let him have the food, but he was fucking hungry. Smiling, he picked up his fork. “You’re out of luck this time. That’s going into my belly.”

  “You’ll have to make the pans bigger next time, Courtney,” Sera said.

  Again, Jasper looked toward her, and realized she hadn’t issued an open invitation, but was simply speaking in generalities—the next time Courtney made lasagna, not the next time Jasper visited.

  He didn’t know when that would be, but he hoped soon. It’d been too long since he’d gotten to break bread with a loud, boisterous family. He never got to be a part of things anymore, and he craved the company and the noise.

  The desire to be part of a group was strong, but he always wanted individual attention, too.

  He watched Sera pad over to the counter where her daughter was reaching for some fruit. So broken, and yet so graceful. She wore her arm in a sling against her body like an accessory rather than a handicap and kept her spine straight and proud. Her daughter likely didn’t think there was anything wrong with her mother. She probably didn’t see her as broken because she didn’t behave like she was.

  The longer he stayed on Jekh, the more he saw that strength sometimes wrapped itself up in unexpected packages.

  Tread carefully, man.

  She hadn’t given anyone else the time of day. If he were her, she’d refuse him, too, but he was still going to try.

  Sera Merridon deserved to have a man who saw her for what she was, and Jasper was more convinced than ever that man was him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Geisht.”

  At the muttered word, which Marco was pretty sure was a Jekhan oath, he stopped walking, then backtracked to the barn door.

  He’d been heading toward The Tin Can, the docked spaceship where he and Luke slept. The Beshni house was one of the larger residences in the area, but the layout had been designed with multigenerational families in mind—not a way station for the bold and reckless. They were running out of beds, so he, Luke, and Salehi slept in the cargo ship parked near the barn.

  He’d slept in worse.

  At the barn doorway, he narrowed his eyes and waited for his pupils to adjust to the dim light. “Hello?”

  There came a rustling noise from the general vicinity of the chicken coops.

  “Hello?” he repeated.

  Everyone on the farm was cautious of trespassers and always moved about with danger in mind, but the farm sensors were pretty good. Owen had tweaked them so expertly that not even a cat could cross the perimeter without the computer logging the motion. They didn’t get alerted unless the breaches were larger than a Border collie, however.

  Marco’s portable wrist computer and communicator—his COM—hadn’t pealed the distinctive chirp to indicate an intruder, so whoever was swearing in the barn was a resident.

  “I’m coming in,” he said.

  “No need.” That harried voice was Sera’s. “I’m coming out.”

  “You sure?” He stopped in the doorway. She didn’t seem to like people getting too close, so he wouldn’t. “Sounded like you needed some help.”

  “I…dropped an egg. I wanted it for Elken’s breakfast. She gets up so early.”

  “None left in the house?”

  “No, I think Courtney used the last of them in the ricotta.”

  “Ricotta,” he said.

  “Hmm?” She emerged from around the coop, wiping her hand on the dark blue of her dress. The color was severe, and the cut even a bit Puritanical, but somehow still flattering on her. He didn’t know how Jekhan women always managed to exude such sex appeal while wearing so many layers. Maybe it was the hint of skin peeking above the square neckline or the way the lightweight fabric danced around their legs in gentle breezes, revealing an infrequent hint at the shapes of thighs and calves
.

  Fastida’s mother, Cet, who unlike her daughter still dressed in the traditional style, had explained that they didn’t dress for modesty, but to protect their sensitive skin from the elements. The wind was often ferocious.

  “You said ree-cott-a. The emphasis is on the second syllable.” He shrugged. “Trust the Italian.”

  “Ah.” She slipped her hand into her pocket and turned a shy gaze toward him. “Italian?”

  “Yeah, I guess that doesn’t mean a whole lot when you’re on another planet. Italy is a country in a place called the Mediterranean. Beautiful weather and right on the sea.”

  “Ah. I’ve never seen one.”

  “What, an ocean?”

  She nodded slowly and her gaze tracked to a spot just over his shoulder. He glanced in that direction. Nothing in particular there.

  “Trigrian has, but us girls, we never got to the beach. Too far for my parents. They were always so busy trying to grow the farm.” She raised her good shoulder and let it fall. “They had big plans.”

  “Oh. My family has only been in America for a couple of generations. Not long enough for us to shake off the Italian identities, I guess.”

  “We do that here as well.”

  “Do what?”

  “We…” She pressed her lips together and shifted her weight gently so that her skirt twirled around her ankles. For a few seconds, she swayed, creases deepening between her brows. She was always so careful with her words.

  “We were…planted here,” she said, “I suppose you’d say. Our people didn’t originate in the places where the Tyneali put them, but they tended not to move once they were settled. We have local identities, not just Jekhan ones.”

  “So, someone from Little Gitano would be a foreigner to someone from Buinet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “If you ever come to understand our tongue, listen to the differences in Trigrian’s and Murki’s vocabulary choices when they speak in Jekhani. Although they understand each other perfectly well, some words are far less common in one dialect versus another. I believe Little Gitano’s has more of your Earth words.”