by Susan Grant
Running, terrified, the ground burning the soles of his shoes; he couldn’t find his mother, his father, couldn’t see, blinded by light that was as hot as fire and seared his eyes, his skin—
A guttural sob yanked Kào from the flashback. Not Jordan’s, but Ben’s.
In the darkness, the man stumbled from the couch. “Sink . . . where’s a sink?”
Trist pushed Ben to the sterilizer basin. He bent over, retching.
Kào strode to the front of the couch where Jordan sat, wan and still. “Well?” he demanded gruffly. “Have you seen enough?”
Her voice was quiet. Controlled. “Yes.”
He exhaled. Thank the Seeders. He wanted no more of this. “Lights. Computer—holo off.”
The walls went dark and the room’s lights came up slowly, like dawn over a battlefield. Ben hunched over the basin, the back of his hand pressed to his open mouth. Trist stood to his left, contemplating him. Was that concern in her cold eyes? Were Talagars capable of compassion? A shocking notion, to say the least, and one he’d have to consider further. But not now.
Jordan sat as still as a corpse. Kào leaned over her, hands on his knees. “Are you still in doubt?” he asked gently. The rings under her eyes were so pronounced that she looked bruised. “Would you like to see further proof? I can show the recording again.” He had to ask the question—if he didn’t eradicate her skepticism, it would continue to sour their relationship like a festering sore.
“No.” Her voice was rough. “Thank you.” Her hands clutched the couch at either side of her hips. She was calm. Too calm. Her eyes were reddened, but he saw no tears.
He went to the food-and-drink dispenser, crouched on his knees to access a special decanter deep within the bowels of the storage chamber. Ah, there was still some Rig’s Burner left in the decanter. The clear blue liquid was vile, bitter, and powerfully alcoholic. The only times he ever bothered with the stuff was to dampen the nightmares that plagued him in the early weeks aboard the ship.
Trist helped distribute four tiny, fingertip-sized glasses of the drink. “Down all of it,” Kào ordered them.
He tossed back the contents of his glass only after he saw the others do the same. His head spun for a moment; then his vision cleared. Following the alcohol’s initial punch was the expected feeling of well-being, faint, false, and temporary.
Ben set his glass on an antique buoyant table of dark synthetic wood. With the fractional added weight of the empty glass, the table whispered the characteristic pulsating hiss of the early years of the technology. After a startled second glance assured him that the table would do him no harm, Ben shoved his fingers through his black hair. “Jordan, we’d better go back now.”
Jordan began to rise and then stopped, balancing her elbows on her thighs. She stared at her feet. Her face contorted in what was obviously an outward sign that she struggled with something. “I have something to say to Kào first. I don’t want to make you stay. Go. I’ll meet you back there.”
Ben appeared reluctant to leave Jordan alone with Kào. “That’s okay. I can stay.”
“You’re tired.”
“Not that tired.”
“Ben, don’t worry.I’ll be fine.”
Ben’s mouth thinned. Unspoken communication passed between the pair, and a hint of red tinted Jordan’s cheeks. “You can tell Natalie not to worry,” she added crisply.
“Trist, escort Mr. Kathwari back to New Earth.” Everyone’s attention jerked to Kào after he issued his curt command. The linguist’s pink-white hand closed over Ben’s upper arm, and the purser regarded the gesture with surprise. But not, Kào noted, with distaste. Trist’s expression, on the other hand, was Talagarian-neutral as she escorted Ben from the viewing room, leaving Kào alone with Jordan.
Comfort, particularly the emotion-rich comfort that females often required, was far from being his strong suit. He felt wholly inadequate to help her, but, blast it all, he was going to try.
Chapter Twenty-one
Jordan pushed herself off the couch and walked back and forth in front of it. Movement in the corner of her vision caught her attention.
The couch . . . it was moving.
No, it was an illusion given by the holo-fabric. The rich, earth-tone cloth wasn’t a single pattern, she saw for the first time, but two, changing from tiny bronze spheres on a dark background to spinning gold-and-brown cubes, depending on her position in relation to it. But none of the modern wonders of Kào’s world could distract her from her embarrassment.
“Kào,” she said. She turned her hands palms up. Kào sought eye contact with her and waited for her to speak, giving her his tacit respect, but making no move to push her into conversation.
“I stayed because I wanted to apologize in private,” she said in English, forcing him to use his translator. But with the words she was about to say, she couldn’t afford the message to be garbled. “About Earth. About your father. We—I hadn’t seen proof about the comet. Maybe someone got the facts wrong. Maybe there were survivors left—one or a billion—we didn’t know. That’s what I started to think. I couldn’t let it go. I know you told me otherwise, but deep down I wanted you to be wrong. I wanted my daughter, my family, to be alive.” Agony bubbled up inside her. She held it back somehow. Her voice shredded to a whisper. “A mistake gave me hope. Even a lie would have given me the chance to go home.”
But that chance had been taken—stolen, as was her daughter’s life and billions of others’ in a travesty of cosmic justice she’d never hope to understand as long as she lived or as hard as she prayed.
She threw down her translator and switched from English to halting Key. English was done. Finished. She had no need for the language anymore. “But instead I insulted your father. I insulted you.”
“Jordan, you didn’t know. And I responded harshly, a defensive reaction, and I was wrong in doing so. For that, you have my apology. I am sorry.”
“Too many ‘sorries,’ ” she rasped. Her chest ached. She was tired of saying “sorry,” of hearing “sorry,” of being “sorry.” She sat heavily on the couch and with an even heavier sigh fell backward, letting herself drown in the plush cushions of a piece of furniture that by some miracle didn’t float. She scrubbed her fingers through her corkscrew curls. Her hair was wild, falling over her face, half hiding the big, quiet man standing in front of her, so achingly sincere in his awkward and obvious desire to comfort her.
She shrugged off the white windbreaker and unfastened the jumpsuit to her waist, reaching inside to the T-shirt under it. The photo she withdrew from the pocket over her right breast felt cool against the pads of her fingers. It was a picture of Roberta dressed in a bright yellow and blue soccer uniform. She’d so loved playing soccer. When her mother had to miss a game due to work, her grandparents and Uncle John were always there to cheer her on, as they were on the day the photo was taken. A giant smile revealed Boo’s missing front teeth. Accentuating her heart-shaped face were her long, tight curls, gelled heavily so they’d stay scraped back into a ponytail wrapped in a sparkly blue scrunchie. Jordan dragged her fingertip across the face she could no longer kiss, the hair she could no longer tousle. There’d be no more laughter to hear, either, or whining, or runny noses to wipe, or fears of the dark to soothe. Jordan’s throat closed.
“Your child?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Kào swallowed thickly. “May I see?”
She extended her arm, the photo held between two fingers. He took the picture, studying it for long moments. His dark eyes lifted, fraught with longing, wonder, and a thousand emotions she couldn’t name. “She looks just like you.”
Misery welled up inside her. “She was part of me,” she whispered. “My heart breaks a little more every day I think of her. I feel indescribable guilt because I couldn’t and didn’t protect her on that day.” She turned her hands over. “I promised her I’d come home. I promised . . .” Her hands shook. Then a guttural cry tore from the depths of her.
Certainly, her heart was too battered to keep beating. Yet somehow it did. Distantly, she was amazed by that fact: that she’d come out the other side alive.
Through a haze of emotional exhaustion, she heard a deep voice murmuring to her, tender, loving words in an alien, exotic language that had become mournfully familiar. A hand stroked her hair, and strong arms held her. “Kào,” she rasped. Her eyes were too puffy to open fully. Blindly she reached for him. Her fingers bumped into warm, soft lips, a bristly chin. With a fistful of silky hair, she pulled him down to her. “Need you,” she whispered.
His calming hands soothed her arms, her back, her neck and hair. Warm breath teased her skin as his mouth found all the tender hollows of her face. The rhythm of his breathing picked up, matching hers. Then their lips met, and her quiet hiccups melted into soft, sipping kisses.
She didn’t resist when he rolled her onto her back. What she needed from him, he seemed to need from her. The kiss deepened. Their passion was pent-up and frenzied. Her fingers closed greedily around his thick wrist and guided his hand under her unfastened jumpsuit to where her T-shirt clung damply to her breasts.
His thumb grazed over her hardened nipple. The feel of his cool hand was a shock to her overheated skin. She shivered as she burned for him, disparate sensations that dizzied her. Her whimper brought her breast a gentle squeeze and a circling of his thumb over its exquisitely sensitive tip. Thick, liquid heat pooled in her lower abdomen. His fingers found her other breast, plucking the tip gently, coaxing it to a tight peak. Then his weight shifted, and his mouth, hot and wet, suckled her. She arched her back, her mouth falling open in a soundless moan.
Before long, he came back for more kissing. Neither of them could get enough of that, it seemed. His mouth covered hers, hard and demanding, but his strong fingers were somehow gentle as they skimmed over her taut, sensitive breasts. The embrace heated. His male scent filled her nostrils. He grew almost forceful in his need, before his touch gentled abruptly, as if he’d fought and won a battle to restrain a much more powerful urge.
But she wanted that power. She wanted all he could give. “Kào,” she pleaded, her voice hoarse. “I need you.” To take her pain and push it to the farthest recesses of her mind, where it could no longer stop her from feeling, from living. “Now,” she whispered, lifting her eyes to the striking dark depths of his.
He fitted himself between her thighs. Rigid, aroused, he rested himself against her. “Do you know what you’re asking, Jordan?”
Her laugh was husky, hungry, and sorrowful, all at the same time. “I hope so.”
His warm hand rested for a brief moment against her cheek. “Then we share the same desire,” he said gruffly. His gaze was so steeped in carnal promise that it made her toes curl. It brought reality crashing down all around her.
“Kào, pregnancy—I am not safe . . .” How to say in Key that she wasn’t protected?
“The shower mist keeps the crew infertile.”
Her revolted expression was reflected in his eyes, dark and searching. “We are protected, Jordan. That’s what you wanted to know.” He bent his head and tasted her lips with each word. “The method—is it so important?”
“No,” she breathed. It was proof she was in a foreign place with far different customs: enforced sterilization, as if they were animals. It was an impersonal, manipulative way to guarantee birth control. But she couldn’t argue with its efficiency.
Kào’s hands curved around her jaw, holding her steady, demanding her full attention with a deep and hungry kiss. Only when she was rendered breathless did he leave her.
Crossing his arms, he pulled his blue shirt over his head. The lack of body fat on his upper body sculpted every muscle, every tendon, every vein, making his scars that much more noticeable. He wadded the shirt, tossed it aside. Well-toned stomach muscles flexed below a broad chest lightly and evenly coated with dark brown hair. But ribs showed under that golden skin. Evidence of a body starved, she thought, a body that was still healing, still gaining its strength.
Slowly it sank in, in vivid detail—the abuse his body had endured from the Talagars. Thin scars that looked like marks from a whip disfigured his left shoulder and most likely his back, too. Indentations over his right breast looked as if they were made with a sunburst-shaped cookie cutter pressed into his skin repeatedly.
To her, he was beautiful. The evidence of his suffering made him even more so. It proved how much he’d endured. Getting on with his life was a triumph all its own, yet he was willing to give so much of himself to her. She lifted her upper body off the floor and kissed the horrible brand on the side of his neck. The skin felt puckered under her lips. But she lingered there, her lips caressing the evidence of his ultimate humiliation.
She heard a harsh exhalation. “Ah, Jordan . . .” His mouth slanted over hers in a fierce kiss, forcing her backward onto the plush, carpeted floor.
The mood between them intensified. His increasing ardor magnified her own wildness, and she reveled in their out-of-control passion, losing herself in the pleasure. Urgency made her fingers clumsy as she unfastened the upper closure on his pants and wrenched the waistband down his thighs. Her hands were all over his body, impatient, demanding. This wasn’t like her, not like her at all. All thoughts of propriety had fallen away, and desire, raw and carnal, annihilated her qualms. She wanted him; she wanted more. And he did, too.
He forced her arms up and over her head. Deftly he removed her jumpsuit and, underneath, her T-shirt and jeans. She didn’t want to think about where he’d learned to get a girl out of her uniform so quickly, and so well. But the feel of his cool fingers sliding between her bare thighs sent her spinning into a place where the doubts couldn’t reach.
His breath was hot against her ear as he slipped a finger inside her, a sensual invasion that set every nerve ending in her body on fire. Kào knew a woman’s body, and knew it well. With little trial and error, he found where she was the most sensitive. Wet from her excitement, his fingertip glided through her soft folds and uncovered her tiny, sensitive nub. She gasped, her hips jerking. “Not yet,” she whispered harshly. “Not without you.” She pushed hard on his shoulders, rolling him onto his back.
He pulled her with him, and she landed astride his hips. Gripping him with one hand, she rose up on her knees and took him inside her. The penetration was instantaneous and deep. Her thighs trembled as he filled her completely.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Gulped air. Her desire for him was nearly as overpowering as her grief had been. She knew without a doubt that the second he moved inside her, she’d lose any hold she had on rational thought. With one innocent shift of her hips, Kào’s breath caught. He clutched her thighs, holding her still. Inside her, his shaft gave a sharp spasm, and a soft groan escaped his locked jaw.
He was teetering on the edge, as she was.
At last, he gained control, incredible control.
Lifting her hips, she rocked against him, slowly at first, moaning as she moved faster. He encouraged her, his hands hard on her hips. Unreservedly he allowed her to take her pleasure, asking nothing of her and giving all, his face taut with the enjoyment she was grateful she could somehow bring him. She rode him hard, her head tossed back, her hair tangled and wild, whipping around her shoulders and over his chest. She’d never felt anything like it, this frantic hunger. She needed him to fill the void, to assuage her grief, to make her believe he’d be there and would catch her if she fell. And he did—God, how he did.
Her inner muscles clamped arou
nd him, and she cried out, poised on the exquisite threshold of pleasure-pain. She imagined that her heart stopped in that fraction of a second before she came apart, clutching at him, clawing at him, not knowing how to direct the wild passion exploding inside her.
Distantly, she heard him groan. He pulled her down to his chest as he thrust into her. His powerful body went rigid; his mouth opened against her damp and tousled hair. Then his hands convulsed over her shoulders, all gentleness forgotten as he exploded deep inside her in a prolonged, white-hot rush of heat.
His body went slack, but his arms curled around her and she sagged, boneless, across his sweating body.
They must have dozed, for when awareness returned, Jordan saw that they were sprawled on the carpeted floor. They lay side by side, she with one tired, aching thigh hooked over his legs, Kào with his fingers tangled in her hair.
Guilt pushed at the edges of her mind. Roberta. Her daughter was dead. How could she justify making love with wild abandon? Using joy to blot out the sorrow? Even if temporary, it seemed an insult to Boo’s memory. Maybe others felt this way after the loss of a child. Maybe over time the guilt would fade, just as she imagined her grief would become easier to bear.
Look to the future and not the past.
Try.
Drained emotionally and physically, she kept her eyes closed and floated in semi-aroused bliss. Kào woke, smoothing his hands over her body. Sighing, she snuggled into his warmth. His hand slid down her thigh. He found where she still ached in the wake of their violently passionate lovemaking, and her body gave an involuntary start.
“You’re sore, Jordan,” he stated worriedly.
She lowered her head to his chest. “It was worth it.”
A darkly amused, male chuckle rumbled beneath her ear. Speaking Key was getting easier with each passing hour. Spicy banter was still a ways off, but at least Kào understood her jokes.
