by Elsa Jade
Marisol nodded. But it wasn’t only beside her that she wanted him.
Returning to her own room, she started unpacking. Thomas had filled half of one rolling case with her favorite candies. She’d have to ask Coriolis if there was a way to get a message through the closed-world protections—
A soft chime from the door controls brought her around. Had Lana found something new in her research? Just in time to share a bedtime snack…
She unlocked the door and stared up at Coriolis. As if she’d summoned him by thinking his name and snack in the same breath.
He was so…imposing. How did she keep forgetting that when he left her sight for just awhile? The width of his shoulders blocked out the utilitarian hallway behind him so that her view was just…him. The deep blue robe should’ve seemed flimsy and silly on his big frame, but instead the lack of sleeves and the deep V neckline only emphasized the muscular power of his arms and broad chest, and the delicate fabric clung to his silhouette. The silver threads embossing the lapel in whorls like curling waves and the sparkles of raindrops in his black hair seemed to make his gray eyes brighter.
Oh, he wasn’t a snack. He was the whole damn feast.
Letting out that breath slowly, she kept her stance wide across the doorway. “Are you here to kick me off Tritona already?”
His lips quirked. “Did you hear Damiara yelling halfway across the compound?”
Marisol lifted one eyebrow at him. “No. Was her head underwater at the time?” When he just shook his head, she sighed. “Too bad.”
“You know that wouldn’t stop her. A Tritonesse-ra is almost as strong as a Tritonyri.”
“Just almost,” she mused. “That’s why I want to meet with the Abyssa. Go straight to the top. Or the bottom, I guess. That’s who sent the exodus ship, that’s who’ll know what to do about…” She waved vaguely across her body.
His gaze followed the gesture. “But you don’t need to seek the Abyssa. You already proved you can drink the water on Tritona. The syndrome doesn’t matter here.”
“But when I go back to Earth, I’ll wither again. I want to be healed, not just run away from the problem.”
He was silent a moment. “Back to Earth?” His gray eyes were shuttered, not with the protective membranes but dark behind his half-lowered lashes.
She stared at him uneasily. “I didn’t sign—”
“I know the IDA contract was falsified,” he growled. “But you came all this way anyway.”
“To find a cure here and help Tritona in return,” she reminded him. “I have a life back there.”
In another moment of seething silence, the echo of Damiara’s words and Lana’s came back to her. We know who we are. We can change our stars.
Thanks to her grandmother and the women before her, she’d never had to question who she was or the path she was on. She’d believed Earth was the only place and she had the resources to do whatever she wanted.
Until the Wavercrest syndrome upended everything.
She just wanted her old life back.
Didn’t she?
She hissed out a breath between her teeth. “Why did you come back?”
“Because this is my home, and I’ll keep fighting for it. I couldn’t run away either, no matter how much—”
“I meant why did you come back to my room?”
He clamped his jaw hard, his expression stricken and his eyes completely silver-shielded. He would never have said that out loud, she realized, except he’d misunderstood her.
The anguished tension in him seemed to pull her forward, like a black hole stretching her out of the doorway toward him. “Coriolis—”
“I just wanted to make sure you have all your belongings off the Bathyal,” he said in a brusque tone. “After the attack between our jumps, it’s obvious the Cretarni are willing to do worse than play sly games and steal from us. So I’m returning the ship to guard the skies over Tritona.”
She swallowed hard against the sudden jolt of his words, and the salty tang of the seaweed felt like eels uncurling in her belly. “You’re leaving?” When he drew a breath as if he might reiterate that this was his home, she added, “Leaving the surface, I mean, to patrol?”
His stormy gaze searched hers. “No. I have another squadron ready to go up. Right now, I think I’m needed here.”
The intensity of his stare triggered a low pulse in her blood, a reminder of the need that had rebounded between them…
“I have everything,” she said hastily. “Off the ship. Good to go.” Embarrassed at the chirpy note in her voice, she forced herself to stop talking.
He gazed past her. “And your quarters are all right? The council rep will be staying in similar rooms in this building too, and we want to make the right impression.”
Searching for a diplomatic answer, she said, “I think it strikes a useful balance between a demonstration of good-faith local effort and an indirect appeal for outside aid, should any be forthcoming.” She waved at the room behind her. “The view of the hills behind the port is very nice, but…I noticed the window leaks.”
His lips twitched. “You speak the language of the council very clearly.” The smile faded. “As well as the manner of the Tritonesse.”
She tilted her head. “You think I’m like Damiara? You do seem to know her quite well.” She couldn’t quite keep the snappishness out of her voice, but she tried to hold it to one shark’s tooth worth of bite. Though, really, there was always more than one of those, wasn’t there?
“All the survivors of a spawning season grow up together,” he explained. “I lived with Dami and many others for years, until I was old enough to join the fighting. So I know her as well as you’d know others from your schooling years.”
Huffing out a breath, she turned away. “I hated boarding school. Just another place where everyone was forced to go the same way. Just like a school of fish.”
“Dami would probably agree with you,” he said. “She wanted to fight. And since the oldest Tritonesse are bigger and stronger than any Tritonyri, she might’ve had a point.”
Intrigued, Marisol glanced back at him. “And no one listened to her?”
“She wasn’t that big or strong yet. And by then, all the oldest Tritonesse were in the deepest trenches, staying away from the toxic waste seeping off the land. Dami might’ve won the argument eventually, but now that the Cretarni are gone, she won’t have to.”
“Oh, I think she’s still fighting,” Marisol muttered. “Just for something else now.”
“Roofless pavilions for land as well as sea.” Obviously done with the discussion of the domineering Tritonesse-ra, he segued smoothly, “Shall I take a look at the window for you? I have a way with water.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. She’d been raised by a wise woman who knew the ways of difficult, powerful men and made a fortune around them. Her grandmother had taught her how to be perfect and self-sufficient and accomplished, and until the Wavercrest syndrome, she’d excelled and never taken a wrong step.
She stepped back. “Come in.”
Chapter 9
Stepping into her sparse quarters, he kept his gaze averted for a moment while he checked the datpad at his wrist. He authorized the Bathyal’s departure and waited until he had confirmation that they were safely away.
With no one to challenge him, he could admit to himself that he’d known the ship was ready to go. Maybe he’d just sought Marisol’s confirmation because his whole life had been taking orders from the Tritonesse.
No, in the privacy of his own mind at least, he should admit the truth. He just wanted to see her again, the two of them, without her friend or his people watching and judging. They’d only had a moment for themselves, suspended in the basin pool on the Bathyal, but he found himself treasuring those minutes almost more than the precious specimens recovered from Tritona’s lost past. Did it make him a traitor to think so?
He’d told his young fighters, fear was not cowardice, exhaustion was not weaknes
s, sorrow was not defeat—not unless they let it win. They wouldn’t, just as they wouldn’t let the Cretarni poison their home.
Just as he would not let this unexpected need for his would’ve-been bride distract him from what Tritona needed. He’d been willing to take a mate he didn’t know for the good of his world, so shouldn’t he be willing to give her up for the same?
With no distractions left, he glanced around the small quarters. Marisol had hung two small tapestries on opposite sides of the sitting space. Both were abstract, one a swirl of bright, hot hues, the other cool and more muted. It wasn’t until he glanced between them a few times that he realized they were upside down mirror images of each other, the pattern and flows reversed but distinctly matched. If he hadn’t been a water dweller, where direction was more mutable and the wavelength of his vision widened slightly into the ultraviolet and infrared, he might not have noticed. They were lovely, it left him restless, much like—
He glanced around. “Marisol?”
“The broken window is in here,” she called. “In the bedroom.”
Silently, he sighed. Of course it was.
Summoning all his strength and self-control as he did before launching into battle, he strode into the even smaller room.
The quarters here had been intended for space port staff, not for guests or Tritonesse. But it was the best they could do. It had a narrow bunk centered under a wider window looking out to the mountains which, despite not being underwater, he had to admit were pretty enough in the hazy gray light of the fading day.
“See, look,” Marisol said.
Framed against that silvery glow, the spindrift waterfall of her hair made his fingertips ache with the memory of their stolen moments together. She’d shed her long coat at some point, leaving her in the soft outline of long sleeves and long pants in the same faintly shimmery, nacreous hue as the inside of a shell. He suspected that the folds had fit her better before the symptoms of her Tritona heritage had almost killed her. Could he blame her for wanting to find a cure and then forget?
“It’s not actually broken,” she continued. “It’s just popped out of place, I think.”
He knew how that felt.
Edging around the other side of the bunk across from her, he kept his focus on the window. Rain pattered softly on the pane, and thin rivulets trickled down both sides to pool on the plastcrete floor.
“Lana’s window has a crack,” she told him. “But it’s not leaking. At least not yet.”
A cool draught whispered against his fingertips as he traced the seal. “We bombed this port for days. The Cretarni had superior air power, and we needed to end their sorties, but it was really intended as a distraction. I led a small strike force to destroy an inland depot where the soilers manufactured chemical weapons to exterminate us once and for all. Maelstrom and I were the only survivors of that raid.”
She was quiet for a long moment, although he felt the weight of her stare. “On Earth, some types of war are considered too heinous, even against a hated enemy.”
“On Tritona too,” said. “They were desperate. Which I suppose is a testament to Tritonyri prowess in battle.”
He knew he hadn’t kept the bitterness out of his voice when she reached across the weeping pane to touch his hand where he was tracing the displaced pane.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine how painful that was—is—for you.”
He looked at her hand and then over at her. “Maybe it wasn’t so different from what you were going through,” he mused. “What the Cretarni were doing to our waters was making the water almost as toxic to us as it was to you.”
She squeezed his fingers before pulling away. “And now we’re both healing.”
And once they did, she and Tritona, she wanted to go home. As this was his home, he understood, yet still an unreasonable jolt of despair made his tone sharper than he intended. “Push on the edge there. No, harder.” He bit back on the exhortation to push as if she was pushing away this chance on a new world. “The pane is just popped out from the pressure. If you push—”
The transparent plasteel snapped into place with a sharp crack. She let out a startled gasp and tipped, unbalanced, toward the bunk, almost falling into bed…
From the other side, he caught her arm and held her upright. She blinked at him, her dark eyes startled and wary.
And rightly so. He couldn’t stop the hard flush of his armored scales rising. As if they were at war.
And that wasn’t the only part of him rising.
“Be careful,” he murmured. “You wouldn’t want to hurt yourself when you’re only here to find your fix and leave.”
The wide startle of her eyes narrowed as if she understood that hint of threat in his voice. He didn’t mean it, but… She wasn’t entirely wrong. How could he want something so much that he’d never noticed missing before?
With a deliberate twist of her wrist, she extricated herself from his grip. He hadn’t even realized he was still holding her. It took more strength than walking over desert mountains to make his fingers open.
She let out a slow breath. “Thank you for fixing the window,” she said. “I appreciate not drowning in my bed.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” he murmured.
Under the soft folds of fabric, her breasts rose as she caught her breath. “Let me?” She queried in a velvety, dangerous voice. The voice of a Tritonesse.
“Wouldn’t let you drown,” he clarified. “At least not in a way you’d mind.”
She straightened, lifting her chin in that imperious way of hers, though it didn’t make her taller than him. “And what way would that be? Commander, are you seducing me?”
Despite all the reminders of the damage and death around him, he felt himself smile, a wicked little grin. “Would you mind that?”
“I invited you in to make me less wet”—she gestured at the now tight window—“not…” Her dusky cheeks brightened with a half-hidden flush of blood.
The bed between them might as well have been a bottomless chasm—that was how much he longed to dive in, to descend to the deepest core…
Instead, he hauled himself up straight, desperately searching for the discipline that had defined him for so long. “Then if you have everything you need, I should go.”
He tried to take a long step back, but the sleeping quarters here were even tighter than the bathing room on the Bathyal. The thump of his heels against the wall as he retreated made her lips curve.
“You know I don’t have everything,” she murmured. “On Earth, yes. But not here.”
“And what are you missing, Miss Wavercrest? I rise to serve.”
In the shadowlight of the dying day, her dark eyes glinted. “Do you?”
Cardinal directions might be more complicated in an environment where up and down only sometimes mattered, but even a battle-weary Tritonyri who’d never had a chance to risk the mating storms knew which way was up when a female smirked like this.
His blood ignited, instantly consuming every nerve ending and all his willpower as if the desire kindled between them on the Bathyal had been smoldering this whole time, deepening and widening like an oil slick of need awaiting only this simple spark, this glance of shared desire, like alkali metals in water, that even a deluge of common sense couldn’t extinguish. The delay and distraction of arriving on Tritona surrounded by every painful memory of his fights, his failures, and the precarious future, had done nothing to blunt his need. If anything, it had whetted his hunger, his longing for the simplicity the Intergalactic Dating Agency had seemed to promise—lonely beings matched by circumstance and willingness to come together against the vastness of the impassive universe to strike this small, glimmering light in that darkness with—more than pleasure, a promise of what might be.
The vicious crosscurrents of wanting so much and knowing so little pinned him in place until his heart was thundering with the need to take her, as if she was the precious oxygen that even Tritonyri ne
eded to live. Was this how it felt to drown?
And as he foundered, thinking he might die right there, she reached out a hand to save him. She unfurled one arm across the narrow bunk—and thanked the First Waters and the Last Tide it was so narrow, because he could not have reached back, not to save himself or even his world. But she had the reach to reach him, her fingertips brushing the front of his mantle.
The clasp above his heart—just the one to indicate a Tritonyri’s readiness to shed the trappings of civilization to return to their warrior ways in an instant—yielded to her touch. The mantle parted at her touch, splitting down his chest to reveal his battle skin, and he was finally able to suck down the breath he’d been missing every moment that they’d been apart.
How could he need her like this, so much, when they scarcely knew each other? When the match promised by the IDA had been a lie? A part of him fought the desire, the part that had been resigned to death in the war, that had been able to charge into battle uncaring. That part feared this bond more than the lonely dark.
He shuddered at her slow caress, his skinshine flaring and guttering with the competing impulses of his hunger and fear.
“I think,” she murmured, “that whatever I’ve been missing here is not something you can find for me right now.” A note of regret gentled her voice as she grasped the clasp and tugged it towards its match on the other side.
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, halting her. She glanced up at him, her lips gently parted. The gleam in her dark eyes was a homing beacon he might follow into the fathomless deeps, to find his way… Or maybe it was a hungry lure that would finally be the end of him.
And either way, he found he could not resist.
“I want this too,” he rasped, “more than I can say since I don’t have the words even with a universal translator. I never thought I’d have this chance, or I would’ve studied more poetry, mined some sort of rare mineral to match your eyes. I would’ve manscaped according to the suggestions in the Intergalactic Dating Agency handbook, except now I don’t know if that was real or fake”—he waited while she snorted out a laugh—“if I’d believed, I would’ve made myself ready for you. I would descend past the death zone to serve you.”
