by H. E. Trent
“We’ll get the ship off the ground again. I’m sure we will.”
“Hey. I believe you. Anyway,” Jasper said, “if he offers, I’ll take the class. I’ve been on this planet long enough that I should know the language better.”
“Why don’t you, by the way?” Courtney leaned between him and Sera, spooned a portion of some yet-unidentified food item on his plate, and then moved on. With a bit of staring, he figured out that the lumps covered in a light gravy were beef.
Erin followed right after her with a steaming scoop of rice.
“Stroganoff?” he asked.
“Yep. Talked to Granddad this morning. He’d had stroganoff for dinner, so of course, me and Court decided that we should defrost five pounds of beef and have it here, too.”
“Give your granddad my regards the next time you talk to him. I miss working with him.” Jasper was using every ounce of willpower he had not to grab his fork and start cramming food into his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he had stroganoff, but it had likely been during basic training. His abuela hadn’t been much for foods with gravies. “And I never learned Jekhani because the work I did for Lil didn’t require much interfacing with the native population. Salehi did most of that.”
“I’ll teach you if you want to learn the language,” Sera said. Trigrian had spooned green beans onto her plate and was about to move on. She pulled him back and pointed to the vegetables. “If there are more, give them to me. I’m rather fond of them.”
“As if I’d refuse you food that you grew.” Her brother gave her another serving and then moved on.
Jasper hooked a brow upward. “You grew ’em?”
Her grin was bashful as she fidgeted her napkin on her lap. “They were new for the season. I didn’t know what to expect with them, but Trigrian didn’t have time to coddle them, so he asked if I would research growing them and to find a plot. I underestimated how much each bush would yield. I planted far too many, but fortunately, Elken is a good help here and has learned to pick them off the vines.”
“There might even be enough to can,” Courtney said, and then, standing next to Murki, who’d at some point sneaked to the table with Trigrian’s son, furrowed her brow. “Who even am I?”
“I keep asking you that,” Erin said. “When did my hard-ass big sister turn into a homesteader?”
Courtney scoffed. “Look who’s talking, Miss I-Can-Increase-Egg-Yields-With-a-New-Feed-Mix.”
Erin gave her a long blink. “Well, I did, didn’t I? Headron needed those eggs for Terran bread.”
Marco chuckled and reached across the table for the bread baskets. He held one out to Sera—Jekhan rolls of dishe grain—and the other toward Jasper.
Jasper grabbed two, feeling guilty about his greediness, but there was a lot of bread. More than enough for everyone in the kitchen and the ones who were due to join them soon, too.
“Do you want me to?” Sera asked him. She held her roll in her left hand and picked at it with her right. She wasn’t quite turning her left hand over all the way to keep the crumbs off her lap, and he made a mental note to help her pay attention to that when she was doing her exercises.
“Want you to what?”
“Teach you Jekhani. I’m not a teacher, but I could probably get you conversational faster than Edgar. After all, you’ll see me frequently.”
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm.” She brought her cup to her lips and sipped. Marco was looking on with an expression of neutral curiosity, his gaze moving from Sera to Jasper.
“I assumed you’d be more present, going forward,” she said.
“Why’s that?” Marco was back. She didn’t need Jasper’s company.
“Would you like some carrots?” Sera set her cup on the table and reached past Marco to get the serving dish Headron had abandoned.
“Uh. Sure. Pile ’em on.”
She gave him a heaping spoonful, and the same for Marco.
He passed the bowl from her over to Murki, who served himself, spooned the vegetable onto the plates of Courtney, Erin, Trigrian, and Headron, and then carried the bowl to the kids’ table.
Marco draped his arm over the back of Sera’s chair and leaned in. “Found something interesting last week. I think you’d like to see it. We can take a walk after dinner.”
“What’d you find?” Jasper asked.
Marco narrowed his eyes and toyed with a wisp of hair that had escaped Sera’s hair bun. “I don’t know how to explain it. You’ll just have to see it.”
“Do you know what it is?” Jasper asked Sera.
“He won’t give me any hints.” She peered down the table both ways and then, grinning, picked up her fork. Apparently, the meal had started.
Jasper picked up his fork as well, and didn’t bother looking to see what he was scooping up. He didn’t care. He already knew whatever hit his tongue would be delicious.
“I know this property like the back of my hand, but I can’t guess what Marco would find interesting here.” Removing the restraint of her sling, she set her left hand on Marco’s thigh and slowly flexed her fingers.
Touching him was obviously, to her, worth the pain. Jasper wanted that kind of connection—for there to be no contest between what the heart wanted and what the body could easily do. He’d changed so much since landing on that rock. He used to care only about getting his rocks off. But that was what animals did. People wanted to belong to each other. If they made each other feel pleasure, then that was nice, too.
“He won’t even hint at how far away the place is,” she said.
Marco shoveled beef into his mouth and shrugged. “Like I said. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. I want to see your face when you realize where I’m taking you. I’ll say this, though.” He spooned more food into his mouth and waggled his eyebrows at them both. “The faster you eat, the faster you can squelch your curiosity.”
“Aren’t you curious, Jasper?” Sera asked.
He grimaced and carefully speared a few beans onto his fork while he gathered his thoughts. Curious enough to be their third wheel? Not really, but he suspected that that would be the only opportunity he would get to spend time with Sera. He didn’t have the luxury of pickiness. He poised his food in front of his lips and risked a glance at her.
She was smiling hopefully at him, all the while fondling a wrinkle in Marco’s jeans.
She wanted him to go, and Jasper wanted to go anywhere with her, so he nodded and smiled back.
“Is this the kind of curiosity that could make a guy need a full-body cast?” Jasper asked. “As you can see, I’m a quarter of the way there already. I was hoping to get rid of some of this hardware in the next couple of weeks.”
“I wouldn’t take Sera anywhere that adventurous this time of day,” Marco said.
“Hmm.” Sera mixed her beef into her rice and clucked her tongue. “I wonder—”
“Don’t wonder,” Jasper said, doing the same with the food on his plate. “Eat, so we can go. The ghost of my abuela is muttering in my head about idiotas doing reckless shit, but I guess that’s how I ended up on Jekh. Might as well make the most of it, right?”
“I plan to,” Marco said quietly. “Might as well live big, right?”
Jasper laughed. “I gotta admit, this wasn’t what I had in mind when I went into the service.”
Sera picked up a string bean and, taking a dainty bite of the end, gave Jasper a sultry sideways look that made his balls give an answering shudder.
Then her tongue peeked out of the corner of her mouth, pink and enticing, and so obviously meant to be seen.
He glanced around at the others at the table. No one was paying them any attention. They were all preoccupied with their own conversations. Of farming, and children, and the Tyneali, and wager pools.
And then she slipped her hand beneath the table and around the arm of his wheelchair. Her fingers walked playfully up his thigh and the tips circled beneath the crown of his cock.
His body clen
ched like he was bracing for a shot, thigh muscles tight, feet ready to spring to action—not that his hip would let him.
She gave his dick a little pat, giggled, and resumed her eating.
Marco, having seen all, apparently, rolled his eyes and shoved food into his mouth.
Jasper had no idea what to make of anything.
He’d probably needed to adjust his idea of what living big meant, and he got a sneaking suspicion that someone was about to show him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jasper’s jaw was nearly scraping the ground with awe when Marco finally put on the brakes of the wheelchair and stood at the side, hands on hips, laughing.
They were at the end of the world. The illusion of being on the edge, anyway. A field of stars stretched across the expanse in front of them on the mountaintop, and down below, the pitch black of the forests between rich Jekhan farmland and the distant ocean.
It was the most awe-inspiring panorama Jasper had ever taken in, and he’d seen fantastic images of many worlds unknown to Terrans. He had plenty of views to compare that one to.
“What do you think?” Marco asked.
Jasper expelled a breath through his mouth, speechless. Dragging his hand down his face, he gathered his thoughts. Tried again. “This place…is amazing. Put up a fence around that and sign back on the trail that says ‘Scenic Overlook’ and the Beshnis could probably make a few bucks doing tours up here.”
“We used to come here often,” Sera said. Her back was to them. She stood a few feet ahead, staring out into the distance. “Trigrian and I. There was a time when I was younger. Perhaps around six or seven.” She glanced over her shoulder at them. “Not so young as Elken. I was upset, I suppose, for feeling outside.”
“What do you mean by outside?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s normal. After all, the Jekhan custom is for each home to have two fathers. Perhaps our ages at the time were simply ripe for oversensitivity. I thought that Ara and Valen were excluding me. I felt different from them. Unwanted, especially after our sister died from a congenital defect in childhood. Her death made the gap between us feel larger. There’s an eleven-year span between Trigrian and I.”
“You felt unwanted?” Marco furrowed his brow. “Why?”
Again, she shrugged. “Like I said—childish sensitivity. They looked so much like their father, and they were the closest siblings in age. They had their own little clique, or so I thought. I was the youngest of the five of us, and I didn’t look like my sisters. I looked like my brother.”
“Most ladies in town would think that’s a good thing,” Jasper said.
Of course, the ladies were too discreet to say anything to Trigrian directly. No one wanted to offend Courtney, but Jasper still managed to hear the whispers and all the sighs.
Sera laughed. “Yes, I suppose so. If anyone should steal my thunder, as you Terrans might say, it may as well be him. When I was feeling blue, he’d quit his farm chores for a while and bring me here. Sometimes we’d sit and he’d let me ramble incessantly about childish things that I needed to get out of my head and into the air, and sometimes we’d bring something to do. I’d have a book to read and perhaps he’d have a seed catalogue Father had asked him to pore over. Of course, as years went on, I believed less that my sisters wanted to isolate me at all. That was the way the attachments were at the time, and of course they took care of me when…” She smoothed a hand down the side of her dress and dropped her head.
“Yeah,” Marco said, rubbing her left arm. She’d left her sling back at the house. “Yeah, we know what happened. They love you. They dote on you the same way they dote on Elken. Kids have a hard time matching perceptions with reality. Trust me, I was the weird middle kid. I know what it feels like to be the outsider.”
“And I was the only kid,” Jasper said.
They turned to look at him and for once, he didn’t care if there was pity in their gazes. Pity was better than no empathy at all. Pity was better than people not caring, and he was long overdue to have some people care.
“At least, the only one in my abuela’s house,” he continued. “There were other kids. Somewhere. Older. I don’t know what happened to them. They didn’t ask about me when I had no one left, and I didn’t go looking for them. The isolation is tough, but you muddle through to better things, you know?”
“Yes. I know.” Sera moved slowly around to the back of his chair and draped her arms over his shoulders.
In a reflex, he took her left hand into his right and rubbed her palm. He hated that she hurt. Hated what had been done to her, and vowed to slay dragons if necessary to ensure justice was done.
“Does that feel bad?” he asked. “When I touch you there?”
“I…wouldn’t ask for it,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, sliding her other hand up to his neck. She rubbed his beard in long, tender strokes, so near his mouth. The temptation to kiss her wrist was high, but he resisted. He needed to be patient, and figure out what this thing was they were doing. He needed to know what he was allowed to do.
“But don’t stop,” she whispered. “I’m getting used to feeling things again, whether they be pleasure or pain.”
“I think you had way too many years of pain, cariño.”
“I’m certain circumstances will change for the better soon.”
“Oh?”
“I could almost guarantee they will,” Marco said. He had his back turned to them, but there was no doubt he was paying attention. He was giving them the illusion of privacy. The shit was awkward for both of them. Jasper didn’t doubt that.
They’d have to figure something out, because he couldn’t abandon his stakes, and that had nothing to do with the wager he’d made. He had emotional stakes, too.
Sera hooked her chin over Jasper’s shoulder and, sighing, pressed the warm side of her face against his. “This is a perversion, probably, but I don’t care.”
“Perversion how? If it’s that, it’s the sweetest one I’ve ever witnessed.” He turned his head leftward and risked kissing the woman. He skimmed his lips along her jaw and at her gasp pulled his head back, but she turned into him, using her stronger right arm to hold his face where she wanted. To find his lips, and then his tongue, with her own.
Had he been anywhere else—any other planet, maybe—he would have compelled her to stand back. Marco was there and aware, even if he wasn’t watching. But they were on a planet where there weren’t enough people, and people had to share a lot of things, including each other.
Sera’s kiss was tender, and exploratory, and Jasper let her lead the dance. He committed to memory the gentle flicks of her tongue and her quiet gasps and moans when she touched soft things. Her grunts when her teeth clicked against his.
“I want to get on your lap,” she whispered against his mouth.
“Shit, please do.”
“Your hip, Jasper,” Marco said, turning.
Apparently, Sera’s whisper had carried. He lifted a brow, his gaze flitting to Sera’s hands working open the buttons of Jasper’s shirt. “I didn’t think you wanted to fall apart again so soon.”
“Might be worth the risk. Dorro’s doing surgery on my hip again next week, anyway. Thinks he can get me up to a hundred percent within a month.”
Marco grinned gravely and shook his head. “As hard as she is to resist, I wouldn’t.”
“So, this is all my fault?” Sera pressed her hands down Jasper’s chest and caught his nipples with her thumbs.
He hissed.
She harrumphed.
“You did say perversion,” Jasper said.
“Not really a perversion,” Marco said through his chuckles. “Jekhan women aren’t traditionally instigators.”
“If I didn’t instigate,” she said, pulling her fingertips across the top of Jasper’s sweatpants’ waistband, “nothing would ever happen.”
Bum hip or not, his pelvis rolled forward, his cock strained upward, toward her close-but-so-far fing
ers. He wanted to be gripped, wanted release by someone’s touch that wasn’t his own.
Wanted to be noticed by the woman he’d been coming to love from afar.
Beautiful, strong Sera who cared too much about people. Sweet, hardworking Sera, who his abuela wouldn’t have slammed the phone down on when she called like she did for the “basura.”
“What do you want to happen?” he asked. He needed to hear it. Needed to be sure of where they were going. He wanted Marco to hear it and state his objections once and for all.
“Maybe I’m selfish,” she said. Her fingers dipped behind the elastic and her tongue found the lobe of his ear.
Jesus.
“Selfish how?” he asked.
“I don’t care if the two of you aren’t sleeping together. I want to wake up between the two of you. I never want to have another morning when I wake and there’s no one there and I’m afraid to open my eyes to learn what new terror is in store.”
“Ah, you’re safe here.” He swallowed and took a deep breath as her fingernails scratched over his pubes and his cock pulsed with urgency. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
We, because he’d share that responsibility if he got to have her. He wasn’t so macho to think that on a planet like Jekh, the proposition was a one-man job.
He looked to Marco for confirmation, and the other man nodded.
“I believe that, Jasper,” she said. “Really, I do.”
Her fingertips against his cock head were barely whispers of touch—as if she wasn’t entirely sure of what she was grazing, but liked the feel, anyway.
“But I can’t help that terror in the morning when I first come to. It lives in me, dwells in my dreams and lingers until I shake off the sleep. I want assurances. I want… I want to know that I’m pinned in and that anyone who’d hurt me would have to—”
“Go through us first,” Marco finished for her.
“Is that selfish of me?”
