by Zoe York
Navena watched wide-eyed as Aldric took out the jailer, but she knew better than to let the shock take over her body. As the other man crumpled to the floor, Aldric loosened the twine he’d used to wrap her wrists together and shoved it in his pocket. She sprinted across the room with him and together they emptied the jailer’s pockets. Aldric took the tablet and an access badge, and tossed the standard-issue weapon at her.
“You can use that?”
She nodded. It was a basic blaster. She tested the dial and aimed it at the couch, charring a nice hole in the seat with a single pulse of energy. “Yep.”
“Ready?”
Hell yes. Another nod, and they were off. He strode toward the door purposefully, as if they hadn’t just attacked the office’s inhabitant and left him unconscious on the floor. As if they were the rightful owners of the access badge and hell yes, the door should open for them.
It did.
She breathed a sigh of relief and followed him into the empty corridor. He moved without hesitation, taking them down a maze of hallways until he found a main thoroughfare—full of people.
“Sorry,” he muttered, before pressing her hand that held the blaster hard against the middle of her torso and lifting her bodily in the air, settling her on his shoulder—the blaster conveniently pointing out between their bodies.
Okay. Unconventional, but she could deal— “Ouch!”
She wiggled against him, her ass smarting from the stinging slap he’d just delivered to her flesh.
“You didn’t just spank—”
He let out a whoop and took off on a run across the crowded concourse. Apparently her jail had been attached to what looked like a black market…shopping mall. Weapons and drugs and a million other things that shouldn’t surprise her since she’d just been sold.
To Aldric, at least.
But still—she wasn’t fucking chattel.
There were principles involved, and she was a uniformed member of a recognized military force, and right now her ass was hanging out. She was being paraded around as a prized possession.
“Put. Me. Down,” she hissed, twisting around to whisper her command to Aldric.
He ignored her, instead running into a dark hallway and through a sliding door into the clammy cold of a hangar bay. He set her down next to a small space craft just long enough to press a key code into a panel, then shoved her backward through the airlock door and dragged her across the living space to the cockpit.
“Buckle up,” he ordered.
“What the hell is going on? What about my team?”
“It’s a long story. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Seriously?” He swung around and glared at her. “Right now? When we just tranqed a guy and need to get fucking going?”
“Yeah, why did we need to do that?”
He swore under his breath, something about Earth women and being fucking nosy. She ignored that and just glared right back.
He sighed and set his hands on her shoulders, pressing her into the co-pilot’s chair. “I may have bought you with fraudulent credits.”
“May have?”
“Buckle. Up.”
“Why?”
“More questions?” He shook his head at her. “Fine, don’t.”
“Oh sure, I’ll just strap myself in for a speedy getaway,” she grumbled, but at the first thunder of thrusters rapidly powering up beneath them, she did just that.
He didn’t look at her again as he went through an abbreviated launch sequence, and then they were hurtling toward the stars, and freedom.
Once they were free of the atmosphere and Aldic had laid in a course for the edge of the Hefder solar system at maximum impulse, she tried to start a conversation again. She meant to be civil, but she opened her mouth and…insolence poured out.
“This is your master plan? You’re kidnapping me?”
“Rescuing.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m rescuing you. From a prison planet. You could be more grateful.”
“I was going to escape on my own! And I only think it counts as a rescue if we don’t get shot at.”
“We haven’t been shot at yet.”
“Yet.”
He gave her a look like, yeah, yet, and let’s focus on keeping that the status report. But he didn’t say anything else, just tapped back and forth between two monitoring screens. After a minute he slid her a glance that could only be interpreted as kind of playful. “How were you going to escape, anyway?”
She wasn’t in the mood to be playful, so she answered stiffly. “I hadn’t gotten that far in the plan yet. But I’m certainly capable—”
He sighed. “I have zero doubts about your capabilities, Navena. But I had an opportunity to get you the hell out of there, and I took it.”
“You married me.”
“Don’t worry about that.” A ping sounded from the console and he sat up a little straighter. “We’re going to jump to overdrive sooner than I’d like.”
“Because we’re about to be shot at?”
His jaw flexed as his fingers flew over the controls, getting the second engine ready to take over. An engine that should normally be warmed up a lot slower than he was moving.
But what did she know? Space travel was only her job.
She bit her lip to keep from saying anything, because he was right—getting shot at wasn’t ideal, either—and watched as the man she’d only previously known to be a farmer and local politician deftly prepped them to go a hell of a lot faster, totally calm in the face of impending company.
Hostile company, from the sound of the ominous beeps that were coming faster together.
Just as her pulse hit the seriously concerned point, the space around them flashed white, and they jumped. It was harder to follow a small space ship in overdrive. Not impossible, but Aldric looked like he knew what he was doing as he changed their course. The galactic version of changing lanes with the barest of glances over his shoulder.
Navena had a flash of wanting to see him behind the wheel of a hovercraft. He’d be magnificent in a race, she just knew it. He’d always been commanding in a quiet, understated way. Not with her, not until today. But with the farmhands and even her troops, back when they’d worked together to rebuild relations between Earth and Midgard.
Had it only two years since they’d first met? He’d become an easy part of her life, a stable friendship in the lonely life of a frontier soldier.
And she’d never had a clue that he was capable of a daring rescue and impersonating an outlaw.
She glanced around the cockpit. Maybe he actually was an outlaw.
But there were more pressing questions, ones that couldn’t wait. Eventually she’d get to the bottom of what made this man tick. Right now, though, she needed to know why he was the one who came for her.
“We’re not being followed?” If they were, she’d bite her tongue and keep her questions to herself.
“Not at the moment, anyway.” He didn’t look her way, but he didn’t sound annoyed.
“Can I ask…”
He flicked his eyes to the side. He looked every inch a leather-wrapped bad ass, but his gaze was soft. “Anything.”
“You said nobody was coming to rescue me.”
“Yeah. There was a…mix-up of sorts. Your team was retrieved a week ago.”
Shock ricocheted through her body. “What?”
“It was a—”
“Mix up?” She stopped herself before kicking the panel in front of her, but just barely. “Yeah. You said that. I’m struggling to understand how. But I get that’s not your problem.”
His face tightened.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She swivelled in her chair. “So…if there was some confusion about me…you finding me cleared that up, right? Are we rendezvousing with a FedNat transport?”
His nostrils flared and she thought he might actually growl at her, but when he spoke
, his voice was quiet. “First step, I think, is to find you something else to wear.”
A blush threatened to crawl up her neck and she beat it back with a healthy dose of self-shame. She was a seasoned soldier. Plus she stank. It really didn’t matter if she was a bit bare in front of Aldric. They were both professionals. But she wouldn’t turn down the offer of fresh clothes. “Something clean would be good, yeah. Thanks.”
“I have a water tank, too. You’ll need to have an ozone shower, but there’s enough real water to wash your face.”
She gave him a small smile. “All the luxuries. My goodness.”
“It’s going to be okay, Navena.”
“I know.” She huffed a laugh. “My government might be bloated and occasionally run into a snafu, but they’ll make this right for you. I’m sure you’ll be compensated for this rescue.”
Like a credit-lender’s vault, Aldric shut down, his shoulders going tight and his attention snapping back to the job of piloting—which, at overdrive, was entirely unnecessary.
She sat silently, waiting for him to tell her where the bathroom was, or something, but either she’d said the wrong thing or he didn’t know the right response, because there was no more conversing.
Instead, he twisted away from her and grabbed a small data plug, jammed it into the computer, then roughly attached it to a silver cylinder she recognized as a sub-space signalling device, similar to the one she’d activated for Navena.
“Shove that out a port,” he said curtly, passing it across to her.
“Where—” She cut herself off. She knew the layout of a Star Speedster and was just asking to be a pest. “Got it.”
She stood up and her rescuer/husband froze, his gaze tripping over her bare legs—as if he hadn’t seen a woman in a while.
Rolling her eyes, she stomped out of the cockpit.
She never thought she’d get married—had no desire to share a life with someone. Joint decisions about a single meal pained her, so forever having to take someone else into consideration sounded like a terrible idea.
But if she were to get married, she wouldn’t have thought it would be as a purchased bride, for one thing. Being bought by a Viking, for another, was yet another layer of mind-fuckery. Everything she knew about her best friend’s marriage and adopted culture told her they took their wedding vows seriously.
At least they hadn’t exchanged any. Being read a bunch of alien gibberish hardly counted.
She had zero reason for feeling guilty about Aldric putting his neck out like that for her. Maybe for the fact that he had to come rescue her when he might rather be…
She slowed to a stop outside the airlock. What did Aldric do, anyway?
“Envoy stuff, most of the time.”
“That’s vague.”
Vague indeed.
What did you think he does, professional sword-fighting? She rolled her eyes at herself. No, he’d been Reinn’s second for the length of her first diplomatic mission to Midgard. He’d coordinated details with visiting officials from Earth and negotiated appropriate compromises when the inevitable conflicts arose.
But on her subsequent escorts back and forth between Earth and Midgard, she’d only seen him at the farm, far from the political daily grind.
It didn’t matter.
Although it was all she could think about now. Aldric the Mysterious.
Shaking her head, she climbed into the airlock and fed the signalling device, now activated, into the drop chute.
Closing the hatch on the chute, she climbed out of the airlock and secured the door before pressing the button to drop the device into the dark quiet of space.
She didn’t want to go back to the cockpit just yet. She wasn’t ready for more hostility, on either of their parts, and now that the offer of a shower and clean clothes had been made, she was desperate to scrub the prison filth off of her skin.
It wasn’t a big ship, so finding the showers didn’t take long. One side of the ship had a private cabin. The other, where she’d just been, had storage, the airlock, and the engine room behind that. In between was a galley kitchen and general living space, as much as a small spacecraft allowed. The cockpit at the fore and washrooms at the aft completed the space.
On every surface, she could sense Aldric.
This was his ship, she knew it in her bones.
Why did the Viking have a spacecraft meant to race between stars?
Chapter Five
Aldric watched Navena’s digital footprint moving around his ship. The red light that came on when the airlock door opened. The automated alert that flickered in the corner of his screen, telling him something had been placed in the drop chute. The red light again, followed by another alert that the chute had released something into space.
Then a long stretch of nothing, where his imagination tormented him with a pulsing, repeating image of Navena unfolding herself from the co-pilot’s chair, her golden brown legs bare from her toes to the tops of her thighs. The very top.
Shadows were all that had kept him from visually molesting his new wife. Shadows and the barest scrap of self-control, because she hadn’t asked to be wrapped up like the sweetest of treats.
Another alert flashed on his screen. She’d turned on the water. It was a precious resource in space, so he’d installed a precise digital meter in the tank. She poured barely a cup of water.
Use as much as you want, he wanted to holler back to her. Instead he scrunched low in his seat and stared at the dark light that indicated when the ozone shower would come on.
Apparently, his cockpit equipped him nicely to be a creepy stalker.
Once she was in the shower, he told the computer he was stepping out of the cockpit, and went to his cabin. Ashleigh had packed a bag for Navena, so he grabbed that and carried it to the back of the ship.
Clearing his throat, he leaned against the wall that separated the shower from the common space. There was no door, so she’d be able to hear him over the quiet hiss of the ozone spray.
“I have a bag of clothing for you here,” he said as he passed it around the corner. “From Ashleigh.”
Her fingers slid over his and took the handles. “Thank you.”
“I’ll find you some food.” He stalked away before she could answer again.
What did you think would happen? You’d sweep her off her feet and she’d finally see you as the man of her dreams?
His back tightened up as he pulled stew and potatoes out of the freezer. There were only a few real meals tucked in there, but after what Navena had just been through, she deserved good, hot food in her belly after weeks of nothing but prison rations—and who knows if she even got her fair share of those.
She also deserve a pause on unnecessary quarrelling.
He set the food in the reheater and headed back to the cockpit. His ship was small and nimble, and hard to find in the slipstream. But head in one direction long enough and your path would be figured out. He needed to jump to another route. Head in a direction where nobody would look for them.
You want time with her. He shook that off. It was true, but it wasn’t entirely selfish. He was being safe. Practical.
No.
He was dancing precariously close to the kidnapping line she’d accused him of already crossing. This was a dangerous game that could easily blow up in his face.
He didn’t think twice about grabbing a star chart that would head in the opposite direction of either planet they might call home.
For better or worse, they needed some time alone.
The Navena Johnson that stared back at her from the small mirror in the stark, windowless bathroom—only a boy would have a stupidly small mirror, she thought absently—was a frightening sight.
Maybe the small mirror made sense. Space travel, Viking-style, was rough and basic, and her hair had not survived the ozone shower well.
At least she had clean clothes to put on. Her best friend had given her a few pairs of standard-issue FedNat tank tops and sh
orts, and she pulled a cotton t-shirt and linen pants on over the familiar base layer. Ashleigh had even included socks and a pair of leather boots. Wicked.
Once dressed, she found Aldric in the common room.
“Hi,” she said quietly.
He looked up from the counter where he’d set out two bowls full of stew and potatoes.
She let out a small gasp. She couldn’t help it—her mouth was watering.
So were her eyes.
Stupid eyes.
She swiped at them with the heel of her hand. “That’s real food,” she whispered. “It smells amazing.”
He held out his hand, a small smile twisting the corners of his mouth. “I’m just the delivery mule. Dinner is courtesy of your best friend, who is very worried about you.”
“The sub-space signal was for them?”
He nodded. “A code that Reinn will be looking for and understand.”
Her mind was still reeling, but her stomach had baser needs to satisfy. A loud growl from her mid-section had him laughing and pushing her gently toward the small table set up in the middle of the common space. “Sit. I’ll bring the food.”
As soon as the spoon and bowl were in front of her, she dug in, barely aware of Aldric on the other side of the table.
She needed to pace herself so she didn’t get a stomach ache, but with each spoonful, she negotiated with herself. Just one more bite.
When she finally put down her spoon and looked up, Aldric was laughing at her, but his eyes were friendly.
“I haven’t eaten well in weeks,” she muttered. He knew that. She didn’t need to make an excuse, but there was something about him that unnerved her. Something new and strange and nebulous. She didn’t like it.
She didn’t hate it, either. It just felt weird—she’d never been so self-conscious and aware of someone else’s warm attention.
“I wasn’t laughing at that,” he said, catching his lower lip between his teeth as he flicked his gaze to her hair. “Your braids went kind of crazy in the shower.”
She winced. “Yeah, I was only able to get half of them undone. And you know the ozone mist, it gets into every nook and cranny.”
