Stowaway (Star Line Express Romance Book 1)

by Alessia Bowman

  At the time, it seemed like things could hardly be any worse. All the plans Minda and I had made together turned to ashes. My brother, Rej, who I’d always admired and looked up to and loved and been unquestioningly loyal to, now my lifelong enemy. And my assets, my future, all tied up in a run-down wreck of a cargo ship.

  But, really, as I see now, that day was a damned picnic.

  That day had no blaring sirens, getting ever louder by the second. That day had no Chorynean schemers or saboteurs. That day had no sexual frustration—it had no sex at all, at least no sex that I was personally involved in.

  And that day, no matter what it didn’t have, yet it had a future. I had a future, a dismal future, but a future. Now Aymee Desryx is telling me that no one on this ship has any future. If I understand her correctly. I’d better check.

  “Are you saying that this ship can’t land anywhere?” Because that’s what I think she’s indicating.

  “Yes,” she says. “It can’t. Not unless the EQSS can be fixed.”

  “Then fix it, damn you,” I say.

  “I can’t!” She’s shouting now, because, what the hell. Whispering in each other’s ears isn’t working out anymore since the sirens are so bloody loud that I can’t even hear myself shouting back at her.

  “You might have thought of that when you were sabotaging it!”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fix it, damn you!”

  “I don’t know if I can!”

  “Is everyone on Choryn like this?” I say.

  “Is everyone on the Big World like this?” she says, poking her fingers into my chest.

  I think we could’ve gone on like that for quite a while, since the Chorynean Terror seemed as worked up, maybe more worked up, than I was, but it wasn’t to be.

  The sirens stop. The silence is a dead weight on my heart. Aymee and I stop shouting at each other. Her poking fingers drop from my chest.

  “Well, lookee here,” says Lieutenant Hyll Draybirge. “If it isn’t the two saboteurs working on doing even more damage to our fine ship.”

  Draybirge knows as well as I do that the Centreale is hardly a fine ship, but I can tell by the dark stare he’s giving me that what he means is that he cannot believe that First Officer Niklas Arca is really the saboteur he suspected me of being.

  Yet here I am, standing in front of the EQSS in obvious partnership with the real, the actual, saboteur. I’ve got to figure out how to clear my name immediately before this gets any worse.

  “Hyll,” I say. “You know me better than this.”

  “Yes,” he says, dismay creeping over his earthling features and turning his ruddy skin even ruddier. “I thought I did.” He looks about the same way I must’ve looked seventeen months and three days ago when I discovered Rej and Minda—except I’m not doing anything wrong.

  I grab the Chorynean by the arm again. In a way it’s too bad that she’s going to have to be the sacrifice here, but she is guilty, and she’s a wanted criminal on Choryn as well. It’s not like she could even hope to get away with any of this.

  “This is who sabotaged the ship,” I say, presenting Aymee Desryx to her de facto judge and jury, because Hyll is not just the security officer on the Centreale, he’s also its dispenser of justice.

  The Centreale is primarily a cargo ship. We have passengers sometimes, but only a few, and the crew is minimal. Because of that we have no formal judicial system here, like some of the big cruisers do, the ones with thousands of crew members and more thousands of passengers.

  So I’m more than aware that my fate—and, yeah, Aymee’s fate too—rests in the Neanderthal earthling’s hands.

  “Nik,” Hyll says, “I never would have suspected this of you.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say. “I didn’t do it. I’m trying to get Desryx here to fix what she’s broken. Can’t you see that?”

  “I see the Centreale’s first officer,” Draybirge says. “And he’s whispering into the ear of his partner in crime.”

  “But—”

  “The partner in crime he took with him out of the escape latch in his quarters in order to evade capture.”

  “But—”

  “Why would you have an escape latch in your quarters, Nik? Why would you need one?”

  “Hyll—”

  “And I see the two saboteurs right here in front of me at the scene of their crime.”

  My heart is sinking by the second, but it plummets to my feet when the damned Chorynean decides to chime in.

  “He’s the saboteur,” she says to Draybirge while she points her free hand at my jaw. “I’m trying to fix this!”

  “The hell you are!”

  “You bastard!”

  “Stop!” Draybirge has to shout over the renewed argument. “You’re both under arrest. The charges have already been read. I’m sure you heard them while we were trying to gain entry to your quarters.”

  Draybirge stares at me again, this time with utter contempt. And when his eyes graze down over my torn shirt, he sneers.

  “But—”

  “But you were so innocent that you couldn’t let me into your quarters, is that it?” he says.

  “Hyll,” I say. “You don’t understand.”

  “Damn right I don’t understand,” he says. “And when the captain finds out . . .”

  He leaves this hanging in the air as his two goons cuff Aymee and me and lead us back to the very cell where I had the Chorynean contained not all that long ago. Before I had the stupidity to move her to my quarters.

  As the cell door slams shut, Draybirge gives me one last glare and says, “You’ll have to answer to the captain yourself, Nik. And I doubt he’ll go easy on you.”

  “You know I’d never do something like this,” I say to Hyll as he and his band of henchmen retreat off down the corridor. I’m shouting, which I know is unnecessary, but I’m furious.

  So furious that I turn around and start shouting at the Chorynean devil who started all this.

  “You did this,” I say. “And you are going to pay.”

  Chapter 13

  Aymee

  I am not going to cry. I am not going to cry. I am not not not going to cry.

  I chant this to myself a few hundred million times while the enraged Big World Terran yells at me and accuses me of (1) being the cause of this, which this probably includes not just being locked up in this very small cell with this large man but also the sabotage that he is responsible for, not to mention the punishment that’s sure to follow, (2) destroying his beloved Centreale, a ship I’d gotten the impression he had no love for at all, and (3) ruining his life, his work, his friendships, and his relationship with his brother.

  His relationship with his brother? What the hell?

  “I don’t even know your brother!” I say back to him, scream back at him, when he takes a breath and reinvigorates himself for his next foray into a brand-new set of accusations and recriminations.

  “Rej was my best friend,” he’s saying now, even though I have no fucking clue who—or what—Rej is.

  “If it weren’t for you,” I say, thinking it’s about time I started counterblaming big-deal Niklas Arca, who’s sabotaged his own ship and doomed us all to a certain and I fear unpleasant death, “I’d still be in hiding and safe.”

  “I should never have taken you to my quarters,” he says. “Never!”

  “I hate you, Lasson Birtak!” I say, thinking—well, not so much thinking as feeling or maybe reacting—that so long as I’m this worked up I might as well take out my anger on its prime source and use the present source as a kind of a convenient target.

  “Lasson Birtak, is it? Is that who you connived with to destroy my entire life?”

  Niklas’s face is bright red, his nostrils are flaring, his yellow-gold eyes are in flames, and, damn me for thinking this, but he looks even sexier than he did just a few hours ago, back when we were naked in his bed.

  Are sex and anger related? Or is their mix just more potent
when a Chorynean and a Big World Terran get together? I wonder about these things as I fire back my response.

  “Lasson Birtak is not who I connived with. I didn’t connive with anyone! I’m innocent! You’re the guilty one.” I shove at his chest again, pushing my palm against the toned muscles beneath his torn-apart shirt.

  And then I guess we simultaneously remember why his shirt isn’t in one piece anymore. It’s because he couldn’t get it off fast enough back in the heyday of our togetherness, when we were just about to have the only sex I’ll ever have.

  I can tell that we are simultaneously remembering this because he’s backed me up against the cell’s rear wall and is pressing his overexcited shaft against me while I press my overstimulated nipples and crotch against him.

  It’s like we never stopped. It’s like we never had to run away from that Draybirge guy, like we were never in the pathetic engine room, like neither one of us knows what both of us actually know—that unless something is done to fix the equatorial stabilizer, the ship and everyone on her, are doomed to an ugly, gruesome death.

  Maybe we’re touching each other this way because we both know that the Centreale is an intergalactic graveyard-in-the-making. Might as well have this one last chance at . . .

  The Big World Terran has his hands inside my pants now. Somehow, he undid them, or maybe I undid them . . . I’m too hazily sexed up to remember, or care . . . and now he’s stroking my mound like he knows exactly what he’s doing, and I’m responding like he knows exactly what he’s doing.

  “Niklas,” I say as I melt into a pool of dreamlike pleasure. “Don’t ever stop doing that.”

  The ship lurches a bit just then—here I won’t say that I think the lurches are coming at more regular intervals, which is a terrible sign—and we’re thrown even closer together.

  He’s got one hand around my waist and the other is caressing the folds of my sex in the most gentle, most unbearably exciting manner.

  “Where did you learn how to do such a thing?” I say, sighing as his fingers probe me and I clench my thighs around his hand.

  “The same place you learned to do that,” he says, pushing his cock up into the hand I’ve been stroking and caressing and pulling on him with.

  I guess that means I’m doing this right, even though I have no idea what I’m doing or what I’m supposed to be doing. All I know is that I want these sensations never to end. Because the way I feel now has made me actually glad that I’m locked up in this small cell with Niklas Arca, Big World Terran, the Centreale’s first officer, and my one and only hope to have sex before my life’s over.

  Not that I’d want someone else.

  His fingers find the entrance to my need, which is when I notice that I’m pulsing in the same way that he is.

  Niklas

  Leave it to me to find myself irresistibly attracted to not just a Chorynean, not just a Chorynean wanted criminal—wanted for crimes, in the plural—but to the very being whose nefarious dealings are destroying the Centreale. Assuming that one thing she’s said is accurate, and judging by the way the ship is now lurching on a predictable schedule, I’d have to say it is accurate. Telling the truth about our imminent doom, I mean.

  Because the little knowledge of physics and engineering that I have tells me that the Centreale can’t withstand this for much longer before the strain starts working apart its joinery. Its millennial-old joinery.

  Her hand was made for my cock. I’d like her to work it over for another few hours, but since we might not have another few hours and also since I haven’t had sex in seventeen months and going on four days, I’m not going to spend much time hesitating.

  Although I am going to spend a little time hesitating. The way she’s touching me has my thighs trembling, and I lift her up so we can go over to the cot. I can’t stand for much longer.

  Now her thighs are clamped around my thigh and my cock is struggling to get inside her.

  I lower us both to the cell’s single, narrow cot.

  “Niklas,” she says, her panting breaths making me want to come right now. I sit back, pull off my pants, rip my torn shirt off my back, and get ready to tear off Aymee’s clothing as well, despite her shirt actually being my shirt.

  But what will it matter? We’ll all be dead soon anyway.

  Right now, though, we’re very very very alive. And Aymee, as I see, has undressed herself.

  I work my way between her legs and finally take my hand out of her dripping-wet sex.

  “Niklas!” she says. “Don’t do that!”

  “Wouldn’t you rather have my cock?” I say as I press the head of it against her opening.

  She pulls me toward her and just as I’m about to enter, she says, “You promise this won’t hurt.”

  Then I remember that she said this before, even though I’m hardly in any shape to think, remember, or, frankly, even listen. All I want to do is stare at this oddly beautiful Chorynean, lose myself in her gaze, now grayer than green, pretend that the insane things I’m feeling about her are real, forget that she’s the ship’s saboteur, and, well, get on with it.

  “Aymee,” I say, nuzzling her ear and nipping at the shell-shaped lobe, my cock poised to penetrate her luscious flesh. “I would never hurt you.”

  “Niklas,” she says, sliding herself onto me and inching me farther and farther inside her. “Niklas. Oh. Niklas! This is amazing.”

  I push her cascade of hair off her face and look down at her.

  “Aymee Desryx,” I say as I push myself even farther inside her.

  She’s opened up for me and she is so wet and inviting that I forget this crazy lie she’s been trying to foist on me—that she’s never done it before—because no one this adept at what she’s been doing to me has never done this before.

  I thrust all the way in.

  My back is arched and my head is thrown back in sheer pleasure, but I look down when I hear her voice calling me back from the brink.

  “That . . . wasn’t . . . so . . . bad,” she’s saying, a gasp between each word. “You’re huge,” she says with a lot of surprise and maybe even shock thrown in there. And also pleasure.

  “You’re tight,” I say, because she is. Nothing and no one has ever felt this good, although I stop before I tell her that. I haven’t completely forgotten who this female is.

  “Go slow,” she says, and I slow down, realizing that I was starting to pump so hard and fast that it would all be over too quickly.

  But, for Aymee, at least, the first orgasm is over quickly, because I feel her quivering and twitching beneath me and then she’s bucking and crying out and even though I’m on top, she’s fucking me.

  “Niklas!” she says, crying out. “I! Yes! You!”

  And when I see her startled, amazed, thrilled, satisfied, blissful expression, my hips explode into a wild rhythm, moving in and out of Aymee like we’ve done this a thousand times and like we’ve never done this and like the end of existence is near and like we’re the very beginning of existence itself.

  “Do it!” she says, back in the game, over her initial come, and meeting me, thrust for thrust.

  Chapter 14

  Aymee

  No one told me that this could be or would be this exciting and satisfying. The tensions, the build-up, the out-and-out desire, the ecstatic release . . . and then having it all build back up again.

  Niklas and I are touching each other everywhere and sweating into each other and pushing into each other. I’ve never been in a more beautiful jail cell. The beginning, the end, the Centreale’s latest lurching hurl—none of it matters. All that matters is this, right here. Me, the most-wanted criminal on Choryn, and Niklas Arca, the saboteur of his own ship.

  Yet we fit together and move together and pleasure together perfectly.

  I look up into Niklas Arca’s gorgeous face, which is streaked with sweat and covered in rough stubble, and his yellow-gold eyes have turned into flaming orbs. His blond hair has come loose from the tie-back and
is framing his face, making him look less like a Big World Terran and more like a fantasy artwork I saw once in a traveling museum show back on Choryn.

  Back then I hadn’t thought that creatures that idealized, that sensual, could exist, and I hadn’t known that anything at all like the way I’m feeling, like what I’m experiencing, did exist. You can’t be prepared for something like this.

  At least, I couldn’t. I wasn’t. I’m not.

  Our tempo speeds up. Something has accumulated inside both of us, and I sense his accumulation even more than my own. I grab on to the tight muscles on his arms and hang on, feeling my own disintegration as it nears.

  “Aymee!” he says as his eyes close then open again. He pushes deep, deep inside me, and I wonder why anyone ever said this would hurt. Only at first, and only just that slight bit. The rest has been bliss itself.

  I’m just about to say something, although it was hardly a word, when I’m overtaken by an unstoppable quaking that shakes me loose from anything so ordinary as words.

  Then I hear a deep growl coming from Arca’s chest, and then he’s yelling into the pillow beside my head, tamping down the huge sound I imagine he’d make if we weren’t locked up in a cell together but were instead somewhere else entirely. Like maybe on one of the romantic resort moons in the Limar System.

  His big body finally collapses onto mine, and I put my arms around his broad back and hold him, hoping he’ll never move away.

  Hoping that being wanted for crimes I never committed and would never commit is just a bad dream I’m having. And I’ll wake up and see that this—being together with Niklas Arca—is the truth and that Lasson, the crimes, the sabotage, that all of that is just the residue of a nightmare.

  Niklas puts his arm around my waist and turns us over onto our sides.

  “I can’t lie on top of you forever,” he says, his eyes a glowing yellow topaz now.

  “You could,” I say. I wish he had. But he is still inside me. I put my hand on the base of his shaft and a thrill rushes through me even though I was sure I was done. That I couldn’t possibly come again, even though I seem to be, although it’s a smaller, lower-level come.