by Trisha Telep
“Always. My mother despaired, but my granny knew my destiny was in the stars. She had a bit of the ‘sight’, and she argued on my behalf with the family. They listened to the old girl, thank goodness, and let me go. A month after I left Earth, my entire family was killed in an industrial explosion that leveled half the town.”
He stilled, his expression growing very serious.
“I am sorry for your loss,” he said in that deep voice, soft now with true emotion. She gazed into his eyes and met sorrow there. He understood. He’d lost people close to him, too. She knew the look. He’d felt the pain of losing those who made his life whole.
“Thank you.” She dragged her gaze from his and took a sip of the fruity wine. It numbed her throat a bit and dulled the jagged edges of her pain momentarily.
“Our first course is roast waterfowl from Solaris Delta. I believe all the ingredients used by the chef tonight are compatible with your system, but please alert me if you perceive any difficulties. I’ve been surprised by how much alike human and Jit’suku physiology is since I’ve begun my study of your species.”
“Am I the first human you’ve met?”
“Yes,” he answered with some surprise in his voice. “This ship was only completed a few standard months ago. We have only engaged with your folk from afar until today.” He frowned as he cut into the succulent bird with his knife. She was lured in by the delicious aroma of the perfectly cooked meat. It tasted delicious, too. “It worries me that we might have inadvertently engaged with female pilots before now.”
“Is it really that big a deal? I knew what I signed on for when I came out here. Every man and woman in the military knows they could die at any given time. We agreed to the danger when we volunteered to defend our galaxy against your empire’s expansion plans.”
She spoke matter-of-factly. She didn’t see any reason to pussyfoot around the issue, but she also didn’t see any point in getting all worked up. She was a prisoner here, for all that he was treating her like some kind of honored guest.
“Making war on women is not the Jit’suku way. Already the men under my command are speaking of what happened today, worrying that their honor has been stained by what we did to you. It is a very serious matter.”
“Really?” Lisbet’s eyes widened as she regarded him. The man was serious. Wow.
“I would not dissemble. The warrior’s code is very specific and sacrosanct. We do not make war upon females, children, or each other. With so many in the warrior caste, we need these rules to keep peace among ourselves and our various colony worlds.”
“Your people live in a caste system?” She was learning all kinds of things she’d never imagined about her enemy.
“Many males in each generation – usually more than seventy per cent – are born warriors. The rest are skilled craftsmen or artisans. Some have other talents that bring them to their proper caste. As is the case with our women. Is that not the way of human society?”
“The ratio is flipped. Only about thirty per cent of our men go into the military. Usually they’re the biggest and strongest from each world or colony, but not always. Women who want a military career tend to end up in supporting roles – piloting shuttles, doing supply or other organizational roles, simply because we’re smaller and usually can’t fight hand-to-hand the way the men can. Mechanization equals things out, so women are equal with men when it comes to piloting, gunnery, et cetera. But a lot of women don’t seem to go for those kinds of roles anyway. They put us where we are best suited and needed. In my case, that was patrolling the rim until you blew up my ship.” A bit of her bitterness about losing her ship bled through into her words, but she couldn’t regret it. He had to know she was upset about almost dying out there at his hands.
“If I had known you were female, I would never have fired upon you. Even if I had given the order, had my gunner known he was firing on a female pilot, he would have refused, and been within his rights to do so. He was very upset when we discovered your gender.”
“I had no idea you guys were so touchy about women. If my commanders knew this, they’d probably recruit all the women they could to throw at you. I bet that would end the war real fast.”
He frowned, his dark brows lowering as he considered her words. “Which is why I cannot let you go, Lieutenant.” He sat back, ignoring his food while he studied her. “You present a very large problem for me, Lisbet Duncan, and I have no idea what to do about you.”
“Who says you have to do anything? You could just let me go and jump back to your own system, where you belong.”
“Retreat? That is not the Jit’suku way.” His frown deepened.
“It’s either retreat or fire on more women. Can your honor take that chance? I’m not the only female out here. I wasn’t the first, and I certainly won’t be the last.” She challenged him, wanting to zing him a bit, even if her position was precarious at best.
He stared at her for a long time before shaking his head and returning to a more composed state. He lifted his fork and speared another bite of the meat, bringing it to his mouth. She watched him chew, realizing he had the sexiest mouth she’d ever seen on a man. Disconcerting and incongruous as that thought was, she felt her body warm as she watched him. He really was incredibly attractive, even if he was the enemy.
She took her cue from him and returned to her food as well. It was delicious, and she didn’t want to waste a gourmet meal. Not when she’d been living on rations for far too long.
“You said something before about your granny having sight. What did you mean by that?” he asked out of the blue after the silence had stretched.
“My maternal grandmother sometimes had visions of the future. That side of the family descended from a place called Scotland on Earth. My mother was a redhead, which is where I get such fair skin from, even though my hair is darker. As I told you, my granny’s visions convinced my family to let me fly. Little did I know when I left Earth that I’d never see any of them again.”
“We hold such gifts of clairvoyance in great esteem,” he said in a very serious tone. His dark gaze pinned her. “They say sometimes it runs in families.”
She squirmed in her seat a bit, knowing what her grandmother had predicted for her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to admit it, but perhaps her gran’s predictions would help her with this compelling man somehow.
“Gran said . . .” She had to clear her throat before she revealed a secret she’d never told another soul. “Gran knew her gift would pass to my daughter. It would skip two generations, but be extra strong in my child. She said my girl would be an oracle the likes of which hadn’t been seen in our family for hundreds of years.”
“You have a child?” He seemed shocked.
“Not yet.” Lisbet had to smile. “I’ve never known Gran to be wrong, but I wasn’t sure I’d make it there for a while today. Somehow, though, according to my granny’s prediction, I’m going to have a daughter who will be strongly gifted. She saw me having other children too, but she couldn’t tell me more about them, only the girl who will carry her name.”
“I find this fascinating. If we’d had a seer in my family, perhaps I could have avoided—” He stopped abruptly, as if realizing he was speaking aloud. The pain in his eyes made her reach out to him.
“What happened to your family, Captain?”
Four
“It is not fit dinner conversation.” He tried to change the subject, but she was having none of it.
“I just told you something I’ve never told another soul. And I saw the understanding in your eyes when I told you how I’d lost my entire family. Something similar happened to you, didn’t it?”
He regarded her for a long moment. “Are you sure you’re not the gifted one in your family?” She noted the instant he let down his guard. His shoulders lost their tension and his expression changed.
“I am the end of the Fedroval line because no Jit’suku woman will have me. And rightly so. I was not meant to be liege of the Hou
se. I was a younger son, meant to serve in the Zenai priesthood. I was away from home when the unthinkable happened – my brothers were murdered by a rival, who has since paid for breaking the warrior’s code. But the damage was done. I had to take over as liege and give up my intended path as a warrior priest. I had not been groomed for the position the way my older brothers were. I made mistakes. One was allowing all the younger females to go on a trip alone, without my protection. I failed to keep them safe, and they died. The wives and children of my dead brothers. The next generation of House Fedroval, gone in an instant.”
“Were they murdered as well?” Lisbet kept her voice to a whisper, shocked at the awfulness of the story.
“It is still unclear. There was an investigation, of course, but the mechanical failure of their ship could have been accidental. There wasn’t enough recovered to reach a conclusion of sabotage, though I strongly believe some of the rival family who escaped punishment for the deaths of my brothers came back to finish the job.”
“Did you go after them?”
“I tried, but without evidence, I cannot make war on another of my kind. Being dishonorable myself will not negate their dishonorable behavior. No, this despicable act – whether accidental or on purpose – has well and truly ended a noble House.”
“But surely you can marry and have children of your own to carry on the line?”
“Because I failed to protect my House adequately, no women of quality or honor would be willing to submit to the nij’ta. If my true mate is out there, she will not allow me to find her.”
“Wait a minute.” Lisbet was confused. “What is a nij’ta?”
He looked surprised by her question as he moved the plates around, making room for a second set of dishes. He paused as he was lifting the dome off some sort of gel.
“The nij’ta is the ritual kiss. It is how we identify our perfect mate. Don’t you have something similar?”
“You can find your life mate through a kiss?” Lisbet couldn’t quite believe what he was saying, yet he seemed perfectly truthful.
“Of course. How do your males go about finding their perfect mate?”
“With a lot of trial and error,” she admitted with a sigh. “We date.” At his puzzled look, she went on. “We see each other socially, and the relationship progresses to more intimate levels if both parties are agreeable. After a time, the male can ask the female to marry him—”
“Marry?”
“It means to legalize the relationship – joining them in the eyes of the law, and of any religion either or both might follow.”
“We call that ‘mating’.”
She nodded.
“And then they stay together forever.” He stated it as fact rather than as a question, surprising her again.
“Not always. That would be the ideal, but a lot of times people grow apart, which is why they invented divorce.”
“Divorce?” He looked even more puzzled, and pronounced the word carefully, as if it were totally unfamiliar to him.
“When two married people are legally divided – and no longer married,” she explained.
“No longer mated?” He sounded scandalized. “There is no divorce among my kind. We mate for life.”
“Really? No divorce? Never?” It didn’t seem possible to her.
“The nij’ta does not lie. A man must kiss a lot of women before he finds the one that makes his blood sing. I will never have that opportunity now and it is one of my deepest regrets. I would have liked to have a wife and children.”
“I really don’t understand why you can’t just ask a woman to marry you. Maybe she won’t be of noble birth, but judging by this ship, you’re loaded. There are a lot of women who would marry you for your money, I’m sure. And you’re not bad looking.” She added the last bit out of sheer devilry. The man was handsome as sin. If he weren’t her enemy, she’d seriously think about jumping his bones just to see if his lovemaking lived up to the advertisement.
“That is not how things are done among my people. By my prior negligence, I have proven to be careless with those I am responsible for. No woman of reasonable station would have me. I could father children on a mistress who might come to me out of pity, or for the things I could buy for her, but those children could not carry on my line legally. And mating cannot happen without the positive results of the nij’ta. I am in an unwinnable situation, which is why I commissioned this ship and set out on the warrior’s path.”
“So who’s running things at home while you’re here? I assume your family still has interests that pay for all of this.” She gestured to the luxurious suite. She knew she was being nosey in the extreme, but she was learning a lot about the aliens in general, and this devastatingly handsome man in particular.
“The dowager. My mother. She heads the family. I am merely the liege now that my brothers are gone. I thought I’d be a priest. I’d given up the idea of a wife and children of my own, but now I want them more than anything in the world, and they are denied me. All I have left is my mission, and your presence has brought that into question, too. The Lady of Chaos has touched my world repeatedly, and altered my path in ways I could never anticipate.”
“I won’t pretend to understand how your society works, but I do feel for you, Captain. Losing your family is not an easy thing.” She made a move to cover his hand with hers, but checked it. Maybe he didn’t want her reaching out to him. They were enemies, after all.
But he saw her slight motion and tilted his head, reaching out to take her hand in his.
“We have both suffered a loss that nobody should ever have to suffer. It changed the course of both our lives. I am amazed to find I have so much in common with someone I thought of as the enemy until now.”
She liked the rich tone of his voice as it dipped to compassionate, almost intimate, levels.
“Me too, Captain,” she agreed softly.
“You might as well call me Val,” he replied in that same intimate tone.
“I’m Lisbet, but my friends call me Liz.”
He reached out with his spoon, not letting go of her hand, and scooped up a small bite of the gel substance in the dish before her. He held the spoon up to her lips and smiled encouragingly. His dark gaze smoldered as she parted her lips and allowed him to feed her the small dollop.
Flavor burst around her mouth in a display of bright notes that made her lips tingle. She swallowed, enjoying the cool sensation of the sweet confection as it slid down her throat.
“That’s delicious,” she admitted with a grin.
“I thought you’d like it.” His answering smile lit a fire in her belly that had nothing to do with dessert – or at least not the edible kind. She’d like to make a dessert of him. She’d lick him like an ice-cream cone.
The look in his eyes seemed like he might be agreeable to that. Before she knew what she was doing, Lisbet leaned toward him. Was he leaning in toward her too?
His eyes grew closer until the dark gold of his gaze was all she could see. Then his lips touched hers and time stood still.
Breathing became optional as his mouth covered hers. His arms wrapped around her shoulders and dragged her out of her chair and into his lap. By slow degrees, he deepened the kiss.
His tongue bathed her mouth in his taste, his mastery. Her body squirmed against his, not trying to get away, but wanting to be closer. Her clothes were in the way. As were his.
She wanted nothing more than to feel his skin on hers, his hard muscled body against her softer skin, his hardness mastering her responses.
But it was not meant to be.
An urgent noise from the comm panel broke them apart. Her senses were fuzzy with desire and, for a moment, she didn’t know exactly where she was. In those stolen moments, Val had ceased to be the captain or her enemy. He was simply a man.
An entirely too attractive – some might say devastating – man.
Val stood, straightening his jacket as if he were uncomfortable, and went to the door. H
e left as if all the hounds of hell were on his heels.
Five
The captain disappeared and did not return that night. Nor did she see him all the next day. Her meals were served in silence and taken away just as quietly by a warrior who looked at her with curiosity but made no overtures toward her whatsoever. Neither friendly nor hostile, he merely brought the trays and took them away at regular intervals.
The food continued to be of gourmet quality, which surprised her. She’d understood being served the good stuff when she ate with the captain, but on her own, she expected rations. Instead, she continued to be treated as some kind of weird mix between prisoner and honored guest. She was locked in her quarters, but she had some limited access to the computer for entertainment and learning. No communications to speak of, but she was able to occupy her time discovering more about the Jit’suku culture.
Of particular interest was the concept of the nij’ta. It seemed so foreign to her, but the Jit’suku actually mated based on a single kiss. Some of the romantic fiction she’d been able to access from the computer was built around the idea of a mating based on a single kiss – even if the kiss was considered totally inappropriate socially, it had to be accepted by the respective families because true mates could not legally be kept apart. A Jit version of Romeo and Juliet – with a much happier ending, because nobody could deny a true mating in Jit’suku society.
It was kind of amazing. Humans really had no clue about these strange, oddly noble people.
Nor did the Jit’suku seem to have any real understanding about humanity.
So many misconceptions on both sides. It saddened her to think that countless numbers had died based on incomplete or misunderstood information. One thing was clear, though – the Jit’suku were a race of conquerors who had expanded to the farthest reaches of their own galaxy and beyond. Even had they fully understood humanity, chances are the war would still have been waged because they needed more room for their growing population, and the Milky Way was the next logical place for them to go. Humans didn’t like being invaded, and Jits didn’t respect those who operated on diplomacy alone.
