by Kris Delake
“We’ll take you to a lounge,” the male guard said to the man holding Rikki, “but we’re going to have to fine you.”
“For taking me to a lounge?” He sounded indignant. “Jus’ tell me where to go.”
“I’d love to,” the female guard said.
“No,” the male guard said. “We’ll fine you for the airlocks.”
“Not interested in a damn airlock,” the man said. “Wanna lounge.”
The second male guard shook his head. “I need a new job,” he said softly to the woman.
“Good luck with that,” she said back to him.
“I’ve got your information,” the male guard said to the man holding Rikki. “I’ll be adding 6,000 credits to your account. Two for each airlock you opened.”
“Didn’t open no damn airlock,” the man said.
“We’ll talk about it when you’re sober,” the male guard said.
“Don’t plan to be sober anymore this entire trip. Too damn dull.” The man glared at him. “You said lounge. Where’s the damn lounge?”
“This way,” the guard said and headed off the down the corridor.
The man holding Rikki lurched after him, dragging Rikki along. She tripped again, this time because her toe caught the man’s heel. He was doing that on purpose, but she didn’t argue. She was slightly breathless from the strangeness of it all, and from the way he held her.
The other two guards followed a good distance behind, clearly arguing.
The first guard led them to an actual elevator, in the main section of the ship. Four other passengers stood inside, three women, one man, all older than Rikki, all better dressed. They eyed her as if she lowered their net worth by factors of ten.
The man holding her grinned at them. It was a silly, sloppy grin, and it made him seem harmless. “You goin’ to the lounge too?” he asked.
She realized as he continued to slur his words, all trace of that accent was gone.
The four passengers leaned against the walls and looked away, wanting nothing to do with him.
They got off on the main level, but the guard led Rikki and the man to B Deck and took them to the B Deck-only lounge.
“It’s exclusive,” he said to the man. “Just touch the door with your fist, like you did with the airlocks.”
She stiffened. The man holding her had ID embedded in his hand. They had known who he was from the moment he hit the first airlock.
That was why she stayed below decks. Cheaper. No identification required.
He grinned at the guard and gave him a mock salute. “You need a favor, friend, I’m there for you,” he said, then slapped his palm against the door to the B Deck lounge.
The guard nodded, almost smiling himself. “You won’t say that tomorrow when you look at your accounts.”
“Hell, I got enough. Should tip you, really,” the man said.
“No, you shouldn’t.” The guard was smiling now. “Enjoy your evening, sir.”
The guard stepped back as the door slid open. The man staggered inside, pulling Rikki along. The noise startled her—conversation and music, live music, and a view. The entire wall was clear, showing the exterior of the ship, darkness, pinpoints of light, patterns she didn’t recognize.
Full tables, filled with overdressed passengers, laughing, talking, a few waving drinks. Some people at a roulette wheel to the left, others at a card table to the right, some sitting on couches, leaning against each other, listening to the music.
No one noticed as Rikki and the man holding her entered.
“Thanks,” Rikki said, starting to pull away, but he held her tighter.
“Not yet, babe,” he said as if he had the right to call her “babe.” He pulled her to the bar, slammed his fist on it as if it were an airlock control, and said, “Dos cervezas, por favor,” and the accent was back, thick and wrong. He clearly didn’t speak Spanish either, at least not like a native, so he wasn’t from Earth, not that Earthers were common this far out.
The bartender—a real person, male, wearing a blousy shirt with tight sleeves, matching pants and some kind of decorative apron—poured two amber-colored beers with an expression of distaste. The foam flowed down the side of both glasses.
Rikki fumbled for her credit slip, but the man caught her hand. “On me, sweets,” he said.
Then he grabbed his beer, still holding her, and started for a table, stopping suddenly and nearly spilling.
“You need your drink,” he said with the mock seriousness only the really drunk seemed to have.
He backed up, but didn’t turn around, so she had to move slightly to grab her beer. The glass was cool and wet beneath her fingers, the foam yeasty, like real beer, not the stuff they served below decks.
His grip on her wasn’t as strong, and she knew she could shake him off. But she wasn’t quite ready to now.
She let him lead her to an empty love seat near the clear wall. The material between her and space itself looked thin and unreliable, even though she knew it wasn’t. It made her dizzy, especially when she realized she could see herself reflected against the view.
She did look out of it, hair messed, shirt askew, pants stained along one thigh. Shadows under her eyes, hollow-cheeked, too thin by half, but muscled. Hard to miss the muscles, even with the shirt twisted.
He kept his arm around her shoulder until they reached the love seat. Then he slid his hand up to her clavicle, and shoved hard, so that she either toppled sideways or sat down.
She sat, without spilling a drop. Apparently her shaking had left her long ago.
“Do you always manhandle people you’ve just met?” she asked as he sat beside her.
His smile was different now, slightly feral, revealing a perfect row of teeth. “How do you know we just met?”
Her pulse increased. She studied him again. White-blond, blue-eyed, naturally pale skin, not the pasty stuff that came from living in space. Midthirties, maybe younger, stronger than she was, which was saying something, and—oh, yeah—he knew her name.
“What was all that?” she asked.
“Just me saving your ass,” he said.
“I don’t need saving,” she said softly.
“Oh, honey, yes you do.” He sipped the beer, made a satisfied sound and leaned back on the love seat.
“Well,” she said and set her glass down, resisting the urge to wipe her soggy hand on her pants. “Let me thank you for the beer and the grand adventure, but—”
“No,” he said, catching her arm. “You’re not leaving.”
“Why?”
“Because the entire crew of this ship thinks we’re here to drink, so we’re going to drink. We’re going to get roaring drunk. We’re going to dance and laugh, and come close to screwing right here in the lounge. Someone’ll tell us to go to our room, which we’ll do, and then we’ll look mighty sick when we come out twenty-four hours later. Hungover and queasy because we forgot to take something before we decided to get drunk. Might help if you can puke on cue. Can you puke on cue?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked.
“Just hoping,” he said and sipped his beer again. “So drink up, milady. It’s gonna be a long night.”
Chapter 2
Long night. No kidding. Really long night. Long and strange.
She’d never been in this ship’s first-class lounge before. The glasses seemed like the real thing, but she didn’t know how there could be glass on a space cruiser, even a high-end one. The beer was exceptionally tasty, and the clothes—she’d kill for clothes like that.
Well, she wouldn’t really. She didn’t just randomly kill. She killed for work. It was a job, for heaven’s sake, but still. She’d love to dress like everyone else, the high-end stuff, natural fibers, glittery jewels worth more than the cost of her crappy room on this ship—hell, worth more than the cost of his expensive suite, if indeed, he really did have a suite and not just someone’s stolen identification chip embedded under his skin.
His lovely, lo
vely skin. Men shouldn’t have skin like that, smooth and pale and perfect. And if they did have skin like that, then it should blush when his mood changed and show every single emotion. And she wasn’t seeing emotions.
When she was looking, that is. She gawked like a tourist at the view—pinpoints of light, sure, but really, stars that she couldn’t see from her crappy room; windows showing just how black space really was and just how much energy this ship was using because it positively glowed, and reflected in the windows, and sent notice out to other ships—if there were other ships nearby, which she doubted—that this stupid cruiser, whose pretentious name she always forgot was right here, right now, heading somewhere special with the beautiful people on board.
Beautiful people like this man, this handsome, handsome man. Too handsome for her. She’d never been near a man this attractive before. She always shied away because they were highly visible. Women and gay men noticed them—she noticed them, and if she noticed them, then she wasn’t safe around them.
She wasn’t safe around him.
He hadn’t even told her his name, not that she’d asked, and it bothered her that he knew hers. But she didn’t ask him about that either, because he kept giving her these little signals—Drink. Drink more. More!—and she tried. But she wasn’t a drinker, even though her head was spinning, which she wanted to blame on his nearness, not on the alcohol content of that beer that he kept encouraging the stupid bartender to bring her.
She could hear herself laughing, really laughing, because everything he said was funny or it seemed funny or maybe it seemed funny among the beautiful people with the pinpoints of light and the blackness of space behind him.
Somewhere—fifteen minutes in? Twenty? Two hours?—he ordered food and told her to eat some. Burgers. Real meat. Real potatoes, fried up. Real bread. Real. Wow. And the smell of it all made her queasy.
Or maybe she already was queasy, because she was a little dizzy too, and dizzy came with queasy, right? She wasn’t sure.
“Eat something,” he said, sounding normal, sounding not drunk, that damn elusive accent back. “It’ll help the queasy.”
How did he know about the queasy? Was she green? Oh, she hoped she wasn’t green. That would go so well with her mousy brown hair (dyed rich chestnut for this job, she had to remember, she had almost forgotten how she looked—with the special-ordered bright green eye tint as well, hiding her baby browns, the only thing unusual about her). So the green would match her eyes, a thought that made her giggle and made him frown.
“Eat,” he said again, and she was going to ask him about that accent, but he took a fried potato and she watched his long fingers caress the food, and she thought about those fingers on her—how they had been on her, and even though he had held her tightly, he hadn’t hurt her, he had actually felt good. That kiss had felt good. It had tasted good—
“I mean it,” he said. “Eat.”
So she did. And he was right; it settled the queasy. She was just hungry after all. But she still felt weird and slightly out of control and wow, she wanted to take him to bed. She hadn’t felt like this in a long, long time, unable to think about anything except him. Naked. Inside her. And—
This was why she didn’t drink on the job. She was on the job. Really she was.
The thought sent a chill through her and didn’t make her sober, but made her pretend to be sober, or try to be sober or wish she was sober. His gaze changed a little, a slight frown formed on his forehead, and before she could stop him, he reached out, grabbed her hand, and pulled her onto the dance floor with the beautiful people.
She didn’t have a gown. She had stained pants and a twisted shirt and a knife on her hip for God’s sake—or did he take the knife? She wasn’t sure. She patted it, realized the shirt was over it, and he cupped her hand as if he knew what she was doing, then he pulled her close.
That sandalwood smell and something decidedly him. His body was hard and muscled, stronger than he looked, and he pressed against her, moving with the music, and she realized with surprise that he was as aroused as she was. She pushed against him, rubbing a little, and damn if she didn’t get a blush or a flush or something, just a bit of blood under that pale skin in his cheeks, making his blue eyes so bright that they seemed as powerful as the lights on the outside of the ship.
She could just eat him up, and this—this was why she never drank. Not on the job, not off the job. She hated this out-of-control feeling. Or she usually did. Right now, she was swimming in it, in the want and the lust and the desire for him.
Whatever the hell his name was.
She couldn’t sleep with a man if she didn’t know his name. She’d made that a rule after a disastrous night when she’d slept with a guy she’d been assigned to kill, and that, that had been one of the worst moments of her entire life, when she looked at him and realized—
This man, this nameless handsome man, slipped his hand down her back and into the top of her pants, his fingers just playing with the firm flesh near her hip. She wanted to shift, to move his hand downward.
He pulled her closer and she remembered she had no idea who he was and she couldn’t take it, so she whispered that in his ear, his right ear, and he swayed with her, his hand dipped down, cupping her bottom, and as it did, his mouth moved over hers.
He tasted of beer and burgers and something so good, something she had to have, something she’d been missing her whole life. She pressed against him, wanting more, and he wanted more, she could feel it against her thighs, hard and urgent, and she slipped her hands against his flat stomach with just a trace of hair, erotic, that’s what the hair was, and she couldn’t breathe.
He was kissing her so hard she couldn’t breathe, or maybe she was kissing him that hard. It didn’t matter because she didn’t want to breathe, not ever again, not when she could lose herself in him—
God, that thought stopped her. Like ice water.
She didn’t know him. She had no idea what his name was, but he knew her, and he didn’t mind that she had killed someone, the only person she was assigned to kill on this trip, thank you very much, so she wouldn’t have to kill him, but what about the future? Or what if he was after her? She couldn’t trust anyone. That was her training. Do not trust. Do not let your guard down. Do. Not…
She tried to pull away, but he brought one hand up and placed it on the back of her head. “Not so fast,” he whispered in his not-drunk voice. “Information has a price. You buy it, one kiss at a time.”
Then he kissed her again, and she didn’t fight—she really didn’t want to fight, if she told herself the truth. He was a good kisser, the best she’d ever kissed on the job or off, and she decided it wouldn’t be a hardship to back him against the wall, peel off his clothes and take him right here in the lounge, the exclusive lounge, here on B Deck.
But, part of her brain told her—the rational, always-in-control part—that she really was drunk or at least tipsy (hell, no, drunk) and the desire to screw him brainless probably came from the alcohol. Still, he was handsome, he tasted good, he smelled good, and he was as aroused as she was, so she reached inside his shirt, and he said,
“Room. Need to go to the room.”
And the voice sounded drunk again. He’d been sober before, telling her—what? Something about information. He put his hand around her again, only this time reached inside her shirt, and tweaked her nipple and it felt damn good, and someone said something about leaving and he said they were and could they have one for the road? And the bartender gave them an amber bottle.
They staggered out into the corridor—and she really was staggering this time—and the door closed, the air cooler, smelling fresher, and she felt—oh, still dizzy, but she didn’t care—and he took her hand, pulling her along, much better this way, she thought, not being forced to move with him, but moving because she wanted to, through all the corridors down to the end of the hall and big double doors that opened as he approached into one of the largest suites she’d ever seen
. The living room alone was four times the size of her room.
The doors closed, he held up a hand, and took out something—some kind of zap-it that disrupted audio—and set it down, and then said something about names.
She didn’t give a good goddamn about names, and said so, muttered “Bed,” and he laughed, taking her up a curving flight of stairs (Stairs! On a ship!) into a room with a bed the size of her first apartment, and she was the one who pulled him onto it, she was the one who tore off his clothes, and then she stopped.
He was beautiful, truly beautiful, with rippled muscles down his chest, gorgeous legs with strong muscles of a kind men didn’t have in space, the kind they got when they exercised in gravity, muscles tapering into firm ankles, and great feet, and she was only looking at his feet because his penis pointed at her, ready, waiting, slightly moist at the tip.
She took it in her hand, and he moaned and arched into her, which made her blink in surprise—why had she thought he was in control of his arousal?—and then he grabbed her shirt and ripped it off her. One movement. One quick movement, and her breasts bounced free.
His hands cupped them, his mouth drank from them. Foreplay. When was the last time a man had attempted foreplay? And she didn’t even care about it.
With one hand, she unzipped her pants, but she couldn’t slip out of them, not with one hand, and he didn’t seem to care, he was still cupping her breasts and drinking them, worshipping them, so she shoved him backward against the bed (big, soft, wow again), and then she moved down, so that his mouth couldn’t reach her any longer.
Her mouth found him. He tasted as good here as he had tasted when they kissed, maybe better, and she sucked, trying to get more of him, and that was when his hands cupped her face, tugging just a little, trying to move her away, because he was getting harder, and she knew he was going to come if she kept doing this and she didn’t care.
But he did or his brain did or something did, because even as he arched into her mouth, his fingers kept pleading stop, let’s slow down, he didn’t stop, and she didn’t want to slow down.
