After a few unbearably long minutes, the man looked around him, his shoulders jagged with frustration, then he looked up at Ellie, pointed sharply at her, and barked an order that she interpreted easily as, “Don’t move a muscle.”
And then he hopped back into his car and drove away.
As Ellie got on her tiptoes to see or hear the car again, she realized that he had left her! Left her alone to freeze to death! She slumped down slowly, unable to believe it. Even if he was just leaving to get help, it’d probably be too late. The air couldn’t get too much cooler without it creating serious issues for her. Humans just couldn’t survive sub-zero temperatures for long.
The winds picked up again and she hid her face in her coat. She didn’t hear the car return until she looked up again and saw that it was stopped just a little way from the wing itself, just nine feet below her. The man opened the hood of the car and stood up onto the seat.
He spoke to her, but she shook her head. He then frowned and she heard in her mind, JUST JUMP.
“Jump?” she guffawed. She looked at the distance between them, which suddenly felt like a lot more than nine feet! “Are you crazy?”
SHAL’TA, she heard him order.
She frowned and shook her head. “I can’t,” she shivered.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. She didn’t like this look—her brother used it all the time when he thought she was being stupid. WHISPER IN YOUR MIND, his shal’ta drawled out.
That seemed too simple to be true. She gave him a frustrated look, but then tried it. I don’t want to jump, she thought, but pretended mentally to whisper the words.
DO YOU HAVE BETTER OPTIONS? he condescended.
“I spoke in shal’ta?” she said aloud, amazed. She wanted to do a big ‘whoop’ in celebration, but she was too busy shivering, and the man was still looking at her like she was a dog with her nose stuck in a cup. CAN YOU FLY CLOSER? she said in shal’ta, with slight excitement. THEN I COULD JUST CLIMB IN!
NO. HOW HIGH DO YOU THINK I CAN GO? he replied, and then looked around. WHAT IN THE BLUE GALAXIES ARE YOU DOING UP THERE? he demanded.
I SLIPPED FROM ABOVE, she replied, pointing to the top of the ship. She became defensive as she could feel the slightest bit of heat return to her cheeks because of his stern, stony expression and added, IT’S ICY UP THERE…
She heard him sigh and he simultaneously said in shal’ta, COME ON, JUST HOP DOWN TO ME. He stepped up carefully onto the hood of his car and held his arms wide as if he planned to catch her.
She winced at the idea. YEAH… I DON’T HOP… GOT A ROPE OR SOMETHING? MAYBE I COULD…
NO, was the snappish response. He looked extremely flustered, especially with a vein popping slightly out of his forehead. DO YOU NEED ME TO CLIMB UP THERE AND CARRY YOU DOWN?
She looked down toward the drop off the side and, as vertigo quickly startled her away from the edge again, she said, YOU’D JUST HAVE TO DO THE HOPPING DOWN, THEN, RIGHT?
RIGHT.
She wrung her hands fretfully in front of her, frowning. AND THERE’LL BE NO ONE TO CATCH YOU.
IT’S A DANGEROUS PROPOSITION, TO BE ASSURED.
She got down on her hands and knees again and began to slowly teeter toward the edge of the frosty metal under her. She sighed as she looked at the situation, realizing that the car wasn’t even directly below her. She wouldn’t just be able to jump out; she would have to lunge off the edge to have a chance of making it. Apparently, this man thought humans were akin to flying squirrels.
HOW MUCH EXPERIENCE DO YOU HAVE WITH CATCHING… PEOPLE? she questioned, standing back up onto her feet.
I’LL CATCH YOU, he assured, his shal’ta soft and his expression reassuring and confident.
She bit her lip. God, she hated this, despite the fact that minutes ago she was promising to the powers-that-be that if she could be rescued, she would do anything. Hopefully ‘anything’ wouldn’t be falling to her death. ON THREE, she finally said decisively, giving a firm nod.
He returned the nod and poised to catch her, his arms raised.
With a deep breath, she said out loud, “One… Two…” and launched herself off the wing. In the next second she felt herself crashing into him hard enough to cause him to step back one treacherous foot. She screamed as they teetered on the edge, but he steadied himself within a second, sighing with relief.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COUNT? he demanded wearily, feeling the need to catch his breath.
She realized then that her count, which she didn’t even complete, had been in English. I PANICKED, she replied, feeling very small.
He pursed his lips and then put her down so that her feet were on the hood. Taking her arm tightly in his grasp, he guided her painstakingly carefully into the car. He only let go of her when she was safe in the passenger seat.
She looked around as he was climbing in, checking out this new vehicle. Yep—it was a car. It looked a little different than the ones on Earth even from the inside, and there were lots of buttons in front of her, none of which she understood yet. She reached out and stroked the metallic shine of the dashboard and marveled at how smooth it felt.
Her hand was caught by his warm grasp, which was firm and had her snapping her attention toward him. “You have some explaining to do, young lady,” he warned her, dropping her hand so that it fell into her lap.
Apparently he also spoke English. She was beginning to wonder how many Swarii had spent time chained to humans at some point in their lives…
He reached over and began to strap her safely into her seat with the seatbelt over her head, which had a design that she felt would fit better on a roller coaster than a car. There was a heater, though, and the man made sure that, after a few adjustments, it was blowing right onto her.
Now she was free to study him without shivering so much. He didn’t kind of look like Graham in a general way, like she had thought before. She realized that she was looking at an older version of Graham—a spitting image except for the deeper lines on his face and the gray hair starting on his temples and giving the rest a mere salt-and-pepper look. She guessed that he was in his fifties, nowhere near what she’d call ‘elderly.’ In fact, he was muscular, which she could see though the fabric of his shirt and opened jacket. He was handsome in the same way as Graham; same eyes, same broad shoulders, same aristocratic nose. “You’re Graham’s father,” she stated after a few moments.
His eyes looked toward her only momentarily as the car lurched forward and they rode and descended slowly toward the ground. “Admiral Jack Masterson,” he finally admitted, his tone rough. “And you’d better say you’re Mary.”
She didn’t know why she’d better say that, and she more so didn’t know how he knew Mary’s name. “I’m Ellie,” she replied, trying to thaw her hands, which still felt stiff from the cold. She could feel him staring at her now with a surprised glance. She remembered now that Graham had said that he had sent a report on his mission to Swaraan. The admiral must have read it, and it must have been more of a thorough report than she had previously imagined.
“Eleanor,” he said her name aloud as if she couldn’t have been serious.
“Yes,” she replied with a nod, satisfied that he knew her name as well.
YOU’RE ELEANOR? he asked, now in shal’ta, his tone disbelieving.
She laughed when she turned toward him and saw his face twisted with doubt. “Yes. Well, Ellie. I go by Ellie.”
“Graham’s mate?” he verified. He was now appearing to her like a man who was hoping that she was joking, and she felt slightly defensive. Annoyed, too, since she didn’t want to be distracted from the short car ride, which was fascinating her. She had finally realized why he had to drive away at first. Apparently, the cars took a surprisingly long while to descend and ascend. “How high can these hover?” she asked curiously.
He didn’t answer her simple question. Instead, he asked her, “How long were you out on the wing?”
“Forever,” she replied promptly. H
e turned and raised an eyebrow, so she added, “Well, that’s what it felt like. Probably just three of the longest hours of my life. So… Thanks.” She gave him a smile, one that she hoped looked suitably friendly and thankful yet chastised, and then said, after a silence that lasted two seconds too long, “So, what else was in Graham’s report besides my name?”
“I’m more concerned by what he omitted,” he retorted brusquely. “Because he certainly didn’t explain how mind-bogglingly stupid and foolish you are.”
She opened her mouth, was about to argue with him, but then she closed it. She wasn’t exactly standing on solid ground as of yet. She wasn’t going to explain much of what she was doing up there, and at this point she was hoping he wouldn’t ask, since there was no way that this man was going to let her provide a full explanation, believe her, and still let her go inside and test out her device to see if it even worked.
If the device did work, then she’d have a little more wiggle room to explain that she wasn’t quite as stupid as she looked.
“You weren’t going to make it out there another twenty minutes,” he was lecturing her. “The temperature is dropping rapidly as this station orbits away from the sun. You had no gear on.”
She slouched her shoulders forward, counting the seconds before he parked the car and she could go inside and test her antenna setup. She didn’t speak any further, but his lecturing didn’t seem to require, or even desire, a response from her. When he finally stopped the car, she tried to make short work of letting herself out of her seatbelt and getting away from him, her anticipation of going inside beginning to make her nervous now that she remembered that she had drugged the man designated to babysit her and Mary.
The seatbelt, however, wasn’t having it. She groaned in frustration and tried to push the safety harness over her head, but it didn’t work. Long before she could get herself free, Jack had gotten out of his seat, walked all the way around the car, opened her door, and easily pulled her harness free. As soon as it was off of her, however, he dragged her out of the car by her arm and marched her up the spaceship’s ramp. He demanded she type in the ship’s entry code as he stood there with his arms crossed and his expression severe enough that it unsettled her sufficiently. It took her several tries with the key code to get the door open, and when it did, he grabbed her by the scruff of her coat and jerked her into the warmer air of the ship.
Mary immediately scurried into the entrance room, squeaking, “Ellie! Thank God you’re back! I was getting worried! Right after you left, Fie—” She stopped as soon as her eyes landed on Jack, at which point she noticeably paled.
“Meet my father-in-law,” Ellie grumbled, looking up at Jack with peevish annoyance.
“Where’s everyone?” Jack demanded, finally letting Ellie go as he stepped toward Mary.
“Out,” Ellie replied tersely. Jack turned around and looked affronted by either what she said or, perhaps, the fact that the response sounded a little snotty. Ellie regretted immediately that it came out that way. She swallowed and began to babble, “They went to sell the ship before the rendezvous…”
“And they left you alone?” he charged, incredulous.
She looked back at him as if he’d turned into a bear. “Where’s Fie?” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, hoping he wouldn’t hear now that she was now leaning nervously toward Mary, who seemed to have turned to stone as soon as she’d seen Jack.
Mary gulped. “It turns out that I might have overdosed him. He’s… indisposed at the moment. He does have a much healthier pulse now, though.”
“Fuck!” Ellie slapped her palm against her forehead. Could nothing go right today? Was she cursed?
“Young lady,” the admiral scolded, pulling his shoulders back, quite clearly both suspicious of her and tired of getting only pieces of information.
She took a deep breath, and then a wobbly, hopeful smile curled on her lips as she tried to think of a story that Jack would buy. But to Mary, she chirped nervously, “This is not a good day for me.”
That was an understatement. Admiral Masterson, she quickly discovered to her displeasure, was apparently a living lie detector. Every time Ellie tried to veer off the truth even the slightest bit, Jack veered her back on the track of truth and personal destruction. Her story did not go over well, because all he seemed to hear was that she’d drugged Fie into a deep unconsciousness so that she could make modifications to the ship’s communications system… modifications that Graham did not approve, didn’t want her working on, which she’d designed behind his back and risked her safety to attempt.
Afterward, the admiral surprised her. Or, more accurately, the fact that corner time was also apparently something that the Swarii did surprised her. Yet the admiral apparently saw no difference between her and a small child, and so she spent a couple of hours sitting on a stool, slouching miserably, as she looked at the corner of the living area with Jack sitting next to Fie to ‘keep his eye on her’ while waiting for Fie to wake up.
When Fie had finally woken up, he didn’t wake up well. He was extremely disoriented and could barely make it to a sink where he spent an absurdly long time throwing up.
As Jack and Mary both tried to help Fie down the hall to a bed he could lie down on, Ellie found herself alone in the room. Without hesitation, she jumped off the stool and flew toward the helm where she could hook the outside hardware with the inside communication system.
She worked fast, knowing that at any minute Jack was going to stomp into the room and give her hell. If she couldn’t do this, it was possible that it would take quite a long while before she got another opportunity to prove herself to Graham. It was more urgent than ever in any case, because unless this worked, Graham was going to murder her for leaving the ship and then having a near-death experience.
After making quick work out of the communications board, she jumped into Graham’s command chair, plugged in Thorton’s bulky controller’s headphones, and started to manipulate the controls in front of her. “Come on, baby!” she muttered. “Come on!” She began to turn the antenna’s controlling knob left and right, desperately trying to listen in for the right conversation.
With a heart flutter, she realized that she’d found it. She was listening directly into a Frian signal; it was clear as a bell. And if she had one Frian signal, that hopefully meant that she had intercepted probably hundreds with her new antenna system, or at least had the potential to do so.
She smiled widely and sat back, relieved.
Her relief was short-lived. Five seconds after her panic had vanished, her headphones were ripped off of her head and she was yanked by her upper arm off of her seat and, after only catching a glimpse of the visage of a very, very angry man, he had put his leg up on the chair and she was hoisted up until she was bent completely over his thigh, her feet kicking in the air.
“No, no, no!” She wind-milled her arms wildly about, but Jack was already slapping his hand across the entirety of her pantied bottom; her skirt was so short that it was practically out of the way already. His spanks were coming in so fast, and so hard, that she gasped and cried out obscenities before she could even gain the faculties to beg, “Wait, wait, wait! I can explain!”
She realized that, from his point of view, the situation looked pretty bad. What it probably looked like was that, after all the rule-breaking and blatant disregard for safety, that she had run off at the first opportunity and disobeyed yet another order. He was spanking her, at least, like that was what he had perceived.
As soon as she made a high-pitched squeal, he dropped her back onto her feet, spun her around, and stuck a finger in her face while he scolded her with a few short words in Swarii. She didn’t need a translation; she imagined ‘Bad girl!’ sounded similar in every language. He then took her hand tightly in his own and began to pull her back toward the lounge as she grabbed at her hot, stingy flesh with her other hand.
Then, remembering suddenly what she was about, she dug her heels into the flo
or and grabbed the command chair with her free hand. As it was bolted to the floor, the chair stopped Jack in his tracks. WAIT! WAIT! she was finally able to shal’ta. She knew it sounded as desperate as she felt. PLEASE!
With a dark glare, he threatened, GIRL, I CAN MAKE SURE THAT BY THE TIME YOU CAN SIT DOWN AGAIN, YOU WON’T REMEMBER HOW IT’S DONE.
She pulled out her best weapon: puppy eyes. Her desperation made them easy to make, and she felt like her showing him a little subservience and pathetic-ness would soften him up. The tactic used to curl Jazeel’s scaly toes with pleasure. PLEASE LET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING? she asked, then added, SIR?
Her puppy eyes didn’t fail this time, either. He finally let go of her hand with an angry huff. WHAT?
Ellie immediately grabbed the headphones on the chair and then carefully presented them to him, excitedly standing on her toes, impatient to get him to understand.
He didn’t look very happy to accept the headphones from her hands. He sounded frustrated and confused as he grumbled, WHAT? ARE YOU MAKING CALLS WITH THIS OR SOMETHING? But he put them over his ears and then stood there, listening to the headphones while glaring at her suspiciously.
His brow suddenly crinkled, and she had trouble from standing on tiptoe with pride. She watched as the expressions on his face changed from anger to confusion, then to intensity, then doubt, then amazement, then back to intensity once again. These emotions weren’t fleeting, and she watched him react with great amusement for quite a long time. It was five minutes later before he very slowly pulled the headphones off of his head.
After looking at her blankly for a long moment, his stern, darkest look settled on his face, much to her shock. WAS THAT WHAT I THINK IT WAS? the admiral asked her very crisply.
His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Page 24
