Stowaway (Star Line Express Romance Book 1)

by Alessia Bowman

  Oh! Perhaps we’re going to pick up where we left off in his quarters. That’d be fine with me, since I still haven’t had the sex I’d like to have before my return to Choryn and the inevitable and probably fatal punishment I’ll receive there.

  And even though First Officer Niklas Arca is the ship’s saboteur and is certainly a self-adoring Big World boor, he does have a very desirable body. Very. Irresistible, I might say.

  “You don’t have to come with me, my Chorynean prisoner,” says my Big World companion.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t.”

  With that, he undoes his wall lean, turns the torch on what must be its lowest setting, and heads off down the corridor. I follow him for a few moments, then I see that the corridor branches off into a Y and think this is the perfect opportunity to get off on my own.

  If I’m by myself, my thinking will be clearer—no throbbing organs, granite-hard muscles, and sexy grins to distract me—and I’ll be able to separate myself from this guy who was stupid enough to fuck up the very ship he’s an officer on. At least then, when the security guy, Draybirge, finds me, if he finds me, I can claim innocence on the sabotage front. Because if I’m not with the real saboteur, then obviously I’m not his cohort and I have nothing to do with his actions.

  And maybe I can explain why my crimes on Choryn aren’t really crimes and why we don’t have to go back there. Why they can just drop me off at the next port and we’ll part friends.

  Niklas

  “No, you don’t,” I say to the Chorynean sneak. “You’re headed for a disaster.”

  As I turn around, I see that she’s ignoring me and is determined to continue on the path she’s chosen, which path will lead her straight into the engine room and certain ruin. For her. And since I’m suspected of being in on this travesty with her, for me too.

  She starts off sprinting down the left-hand corridor, the direct route to the engine room. She’s really running, and I have to change gears to keep up with her. She is damned fast. Faster than the scoundrel Joston, her fellow Chorynean, in fiction if not in fact.

  But, as fast as the saboteur can run, I catch up to her. Of course. I’m twice her size.

  “Did you really think you could get away from me?” I say. I shine the torch into her eyes, which are currently more green than gray. Her pupils are gigantic. She looks like a character in one of those antique cartoons from Earth.

  She also looks like she’s going to start running again, so I grab her arm.

  “You can’t,” I say, in case she hasn’t noticed.

  “The hell I can’t,” she says, even though I’ve got such a tight grip on her she’d have to chew her own arm off in order to break free. Yet she’s doing her best to squirm out of my grasp.

  This would be enormously entertaining and some seriously fun foreplay if she weren’t the ship’s saboteur, wanted for crimes on Choryn, and just flat-out annoying as all hell.

  I let her squirm for a while, the torch turned on its lowest setting. We’re so deep inside the interior corridors of the ship at this point that it’s unlikely anyone would hear us, or suspect we were here, exactly.

  But I fear that by now Draybirge, who’s got a good head on his Neanderthal—I think that’s what he is, well, anyway, some kind of earthling—shoulders has found the release latch and realizes that we’re probably hiding out somewhere in the hundreds of kilometers of interior corridors.

  It’s the where that’s the problem for him.

  I’ve turned off my comm plate, so no one can find me or tell me anything. This has its advantages, but there are disadvantages too, since I’d like to listen in on what’s happening with the rest of the ship. I’ll turn the plate on for a moment later. Ten seconds is the limit. Stretching it, actually. After that, they can pinpoint your location.

  Can’t have that.

  “What?” I say. I think the Chorynean has been saying something to me, but I’m too busy thinking of how we—that is, I—can get out of this mess that I haven’t heard a word she’s said.

  “I said I think there’s something wrong with the ship’s equatorial stabilization system,” she says, like she would know what the hell that is.

  “Is there, now?” I say while she keeps squirming and I accidentally remember how she was fondling me and I was kneeling between her thighs and how her body sends me straight into an almost unbearable desire the likes of which I never felt even for the betrayer Minda.

  “I think there might be,” she says as the ship sways a bit. Not as bad as the previous lurching, but no fun either. And not how the Centreale usually performs.

  “Now I’m almost certain there is,” she says as she holds onto the wall for support.

  “Why’s that?” I say.

  “It’s how everything’s moving,” she says.

  “I mean, how the hell would you know?” This ought to stop the little liar. Even though she’s had a lifetime of practice lying, there on Choryn, the World of Lies and Liars, this particular lie is unimpressive.

  “Because I’m an engineer, you gigantic Terran fool!” she says, screaming at me. “And an expert at unaided hypercalculation!”

  “They have engineers on Choryn?” I say.

  “Did you think we were all scheming, lying, thieving, criminal no-goods?” she says. “You know, not everyone on Choryn could possibly be so bad, because who would be their victims?”

  “Lesser criminals,” I say. “Ones whose expertise in unaided hypercalculation hasn’t driven them to commit high crimes.”

  “I haven’t committed any high crimes!” says Aymee Desryx, wanted Chorynean and ship’s saboteur. No wonder she knows what’s wrong with the ship—she’s the one responsible for it!

  “The Chorynean Guard just likes sending out intergalactic bulletins about you, is that it?”

  “Yes!” she says. “That’s it.”

  She’s still squirming and I’m still holding on to her. She’s staring up at me and now those seventeen months and three days of no sex are starting to get the better of me.

  “I should’ve taken Elna up on her offer,” I say, more to myself than to Aymee.

  “Why’s that?” she says, and she stops squirming for a moment, but I don’t let go.

  Chapter 11

  Aymee

  “Because then I wouldn’t be in this, this—this situation with you,” First Officer Arca says. He’s holding on to my upper arm like it’s a life raft and if he lets go he’ll lose all the atmosphere and gravity the raft’s giving him.

  “Because then you would have never been discovered as the ship’s saboteur?” I say. “Because no one would suspect good old Niklas Arca except that you got involved with a Chorynean stowaway? And now they know about the release point in your quarters. The kind of thing only a saboteur would have.”

  “Look here, Aymee Desryx, you’re the ship’s saboteur. That much is clear. It’s what I’m going to do about it, how I’m going to set things right, and how I’m going to clear my name—those are the problems.”

  His face looks grim, and I wish he’d go back to the sly smile. I preferred it. This current look is bordering on scary.

  “Sure,” I say. “You can say anything you want to me, a stowaway. A Chorynean stowaway. How’s the hand? Got the rash yet?”

  He says nothing, just seethes a little. His mouth is a tight line and I’m beginning to despise him.

  “Oh,” I say. “I forgot. Your entire body is involved now. You could have an incurable infection everywhere. Not just one hand, but both hands, and your mouth, your chest, your thighs. Your cock.” I point at his crotch to make my point, but it’s lost on him.

  “I never should have taken you back to my quarters,” he says. “And I never should have had you in my bed. Never.”

  “I never should have taken your shirt off,” I say.

  “You never should have had it to begin with,” he says. He’s still gripping my upper arm in his big, strong hand.

  “The ship’s equatorial stabi
lization system, you say?” He glares at me for all he’s worth, which is about one half of a Chorynean parg, a currency no longer in use and totally valueless.

  “I do say.” I try folding my arms over my chest, but his grasp on my upper arm is so tight that I can’t do it without bringing his hand into contact with a part of my body he seems to have some kind of magical power over. So I don’t.

  “Fine,” he says. “You want to go to the engine room, which you obviously know where it is since you were already there once. Which is why you went down this corridor.”

  “I did not!” I say. I have no idea where the hell we are. And the only places I’ve been on this ship are the hot box, the WC, the cell, and First Officer Saboteur’s quarters.

  “I believe you,” he says, his voice absolutely bathed in sarcastic oil. “Let’s go.”

  “Go?”

  “To the engine room,” he says. “If it’s the equatorial stabilizer that’s broken and you’re really an engineer, then I assume you can fix it.”

  Oh hell. I probably could fix it but I’ve never had to fix one. Yet if it would shut the Centreale’s first officer up—and if it would clear my name at least from the role of this crap cargo ship’s saboteur—then I’ll do it.

  “Lead the way,” I say.

  “Hah,” he says. “You already know where it is. Go right ahead.”

  So, even though I have no idea where the engine room is, I start back in the direction I was running, except now I’m strolling. Because it’s hard to run when a great big male has his hand on your upper arm.

  “Let go,” I say, shrugging in an attempt to loosen his hold.

  “Later,” he says, tightening his grasp.

  As much as I enjoy having him touch me, I really wish he’d let go. It’s hampering my freedom.

  Oh. Wait. I have no freedom.

  I pick up speed and he easily keeps up with me.

  While we’re racing toward the engine room—I assume we’re going in the right direction because the Big World Terran hasn’t stopped us from proceeding on our current course—my brain scrambles to remember everything it knows about equatorial stabilization systems. Very little, as it turns out, but maybe just enough to be helpful. Maybe. Possibly.

  “Arca,” I say as we hurry down the endless corridor, “how the hell did you end up on such a seventy-fifth-rate ship?”

  “That’s rich,” he says, “coming from a stowaway. How did you end up on this ship?”

  “I had no choice,” I say. “It was either this or . . .”

  “Or the Chorynean Guard’s execution squad?”

  “Something like that,” I say, then realize that I’m just giving him fuel. “Nothing like that,” I say. “I’m totally, completely innocent.”

  “Right,” he says with even more sarcasm than I thought the saboteur was capable of.

  That’s when we reach a portal with a complex set of latches.

  “Go right ahead,” First Officer Arca says. “Open it. You must know how.”

  Niklas

  “I’ve never used this portal,” the stowaway says.

  “Really,” I say. “Then how did you get into the engine room before?”

  “I . . . I . . . It was—”

  “Aymee Desryx,” I say. “We do not have time for this.”

  Although, while I’m saying this I’m thinking that there’s a trysting place not all that far from where we currently are, a trysting place that not everyone on the ship knows about, and that what I’d really like to do right now—assuming Draybirge and his minions weren’t after my ass for a crime I didn’t commit and assuming Aymee Desryx were still her desirable self while also being someone who wasn’t a stowaway and a master criminal—is take Aymee there and finish what we started back in my quarters.

  Which is probably the reason why I haven’t been able to let go of her arm. I like feeling her inside my hand.

  “Well? I’m waiting.”

  The Chorynean just shakes her head and I remember the smattering of stars on her left shoulder, which memory is useless to me right now.

  “I’ve never used this portal,” she says yet again, so I let go of her arm and enter the sequences that open the armed release latch at the engine room’s emergency entrance.

  The defiant stowaway/saboteur has her arms crossed over her chest, over my shirt, and she’s staring at me with a giant smirk on her face as I enter the codes that will get us into the engine room.

  “Stop smirking,” I say. I hate smirkers.

  “And you’re not the saboteur,” she says, smirking even harder.

  I code in the final sequence and the portal opens—silently, since this is the emergency access and it’s designed to be as unnoticeable as possible. Even though the Centreale is an antique and furthermore a piece of junk, there are some few parts of it that were well designed or redesigned. This is one of those few.

  The room’s lit up, so I turn off my torch and shove it into my back pocket. Aymee is leaning into the engine room and the look on her face is a cross between extreme amazement and abject horror.

  “Hard to be back at the scene of the crime?” I say in my quietest voice even though I don’t see anyone at all in the vicinity.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says just as quietly and with a slight gasp added in there. “Never.”

  “Except for when you were in here to do your worst,” I say directly into her ear, which I have to bend down to reach, and which I have to not take a bite of even though that’s what I’d like to do.

  She whips her head around and grabs my shoulders. “I’ve never been in here,” she says. “Never ever ever.”

  Just then the ship does a combination lurch-slide and another siren goes off.

  “Damn it!” I say.

  “Does this mean they’ve found us?” Aymee says, the amazement wiped out underneath an expression of entirely new horror.

  “It means we don’t have much time,” I say. “To fix what you fucked with.”

  “But—” Then she stops. “Where is it?”

  Our faces are so close together that it’s too bad we’re wasting these intimate moments on arguing and scheming when instead, under vastly different circumstances, we could be doing much more pleasant things.

  “Where is what?” I say.

  “The EQSS,” she says.

  She’s still acting like she’s not the one responsible for this travesty, the sly Chorynean, like the rest of her kind.

  But since time is obviously running down—the sirens are louder now and I turn on my comm plate for a few seconds only to hear both my name and hers, and the tone they were said in was hardly friendly—I take her over to the equatorial stabilizer array, which is quite close to the emergency portal we just used.

  “Fix it,” I say, pushing back her silky, sable hair to more effectively whisper into her ear. “Right now.”

  Chapter 12

  Aymee

  This is the EQSS? I think. I can’t dare say this out loud, not just because I’d never be heard over the loud-as-fuck sirens but because it’d make me laugh, and I think laughing isn’t called for in this horrid situation I’ve gotten myself into.

  If only Lasson had whispered in my ear like Niklas is doing, I’d still be on Choryn, I would never have stowed away on the Centreale, I wouldn’t be a wanted criminal, I’d be with my proper Chorynean match, and, best of all, I wouldn’t have to figure out how to fix something so pathetically antiquated that no engineering course I ever took included such an object or would have included such an object.

  I turn to Niklas. “I’m not sure how this works,” I say into his ear. Then I remember that he knows how it works, since he’s the one that broke it.

  “Show me,” I say.

  “You’re the engineer,” he says. “Fix it. Now.”

  He plants me in front of the array and the urge to laugh just won’t die down, so I start laughing.

  “Amused, you damned menace?” says First Officer Sarcasm.
He says it right into my ear, which sends inappropriate chills throughout my entire body. Parts of me I wasn’t aware of two days ago are tingling with . . . something. Anticipation? Need? Excitement? Fear? Lust?

  I pull his head down and whisper into his ear now. Over the blaring, obnoxious sirens. The crew of this ship must be going mad with the incessant, horrendous noise.

  “Niklas,” I say, feeling an intimacy that’s at odds with the situation we’re in, “this equatorial stabilization system is older than even the ship is. No one uses anything like this anymore. Or has done for millennia.”

  “Figures,” he says. “This whole place is a disaster.”

  “I’m not sure I can fix it,” I say.

  “Because you broke it so efficiently that there’s no fix for it?” he says.

  “Because you broke it so efficiently that there’s no fix for it!” I say, although the real reason I’m not sure I can fix it is that the more I scrutinize it, the less I recognize. The equipment is not just antique, but the main configurations have been sort of customized to something the likes of which I’ve never before encountered.

  Whether this was done to accommodate the fact that this ship carries mostly cargo, whose mass and weight are nothing like those of passengers, for example, or whether this was done for some other reason, I can’t guess.

  But the more I look into it, the more convinced I am that someone wants the Centreale’s equatorial stabilizer irretrievably broken.

  “Do you have a suicide wish?” I say to Arca.

  “What the hell?” he says.

  “Because whoever did this”—I gesture at the EQSS array—“doesn’t want the Centreale to reach its destination—or any destination.”

  Niklas

  Today just keeps getting better and better. A day of such bad happenings that its companion day, seventeen months and three days ago, is starting to seem almost idyllic in comparison.

  On that day, I merely found out that my beloved Minda was actually in love with my brother, Rej. On that day, I gave up certain inherited rights by abandoning the Big World, throwing all my assets at this pathetic Centreale, and ending all my hopes for a brilliant future by becoming first officer on a fucking cargo ship.