His Woodland Maiden

by Michelle M. Pillow

  “Yes. We’ve kissed before,” she admitted.

  Harper’s breasts pressed into him as she tilted her head back to gasp for air. A light moan left her lips.

  “I can’t seem to stay away from you,” she whispered.

  “Then stop trying.” Rick turned her so she was pressed against the door. He kissed her again, deep and long, showing all the passion he felt for her. Their bodies became a frenzy of exploring movements. She kissed his jaw and neck. He massaged a breast through her shirt. Her nipple puckered against his palm. Her leg lifted to rub against his outer thigh, and the heat of her sex teased him through their clothing.

  He needed to be inside her.

  Harper tugged at his shirt. He broke the kiss and let her yank it over his head. He then removed her blood-stained shirt and tossed it aside.

  Rick kneeled before her and slid her pants down her body, revealing the long, athletic lengths of her legs. The hair guarding her sex caused a groan to escape him. He nipped at the front of her thigh while trying to lift her feet from her boots. She ran her hands through his hair, forcing his kisses to move upward.

  Harper’s right leg pulled free, and he lifted her by the back of the knee. Her leg hooked over his shoulder. Rick trailed kisses along her inner thigh toward her sex. The second his lips encircled her clit her hands clutched his shoulders for support. He delighted in her taste. His arousal strained against the binding material of his pants begging to be liberated.

  Rick was confident of his skills as a lover, and he poured everything he had into giving her pleasure. When he felt her start to tremble against his mouth, her hand urging him to stand, he dropped her leg and surged to his feet. His fingers fumbled to release his cock.

  Every movement was mindless. Her fevered breathing and soft moans begged him to hurry. He lifted her by her thighs, pressing her to the door for balance.

  When he entered her, it was unlike anything he’d ever felt. Intense pleasure flooded him with each thrust. He felt her muscles clenching and unclenching against his shaft. He wanted it to last forever, but the moment she tensed, crying out with release, he joined her. His climax hit hard. They stayed pressed together, panting for air.

  “I know this was a mistake, but I don’t care.” Harper inhaled a deep breath and pushed hair away from his face to look into his eyes.

  “How can you call this a mistake?” he countered. “It feels right to me, and I think it feels right to you too. Admit it. There is something between us.”

  He might not remember having sex, but his body remembered her. This is where he wanted to be. There was no logic, no reason he could voice. It just was.

  She smiled, but the look didn’t reach all the way to her concerned eyes. “I’ll admit that it was fun and I definitely want to do it again, but it’s only going to make it harder when I have to leave.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll definitely do it again, soon and often.” Rick grinned as he pushed away from the door. His pants were around his ankles, and he pulled them up before handing his shirt to her to replace the bloody one.

  “I have a job to do. If I get back to it, hopefully my bosses won’t know I veered off track.”

  He’d do anything to erase the sadness from her features. “We’ll help you with that.”

  “I can’t allow that,” she denied.

  “You can’t stop us. When the rest of the crew hears that people are enslaved and being forced to work, they’ll want to stop it.”

  That was what they did. They helped people.

  “You can’t speak for the crew in this matter,” she denied. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I doubt they’ll say no. How about you tell me all about the mission on the way to my quarters?”

  “You were never supposed to get involved, Rick,” she whispered as if afraid that someone, somewhere, would hear the confession. She hugged the shirt to her chest.

  “Too late. I’m already involved. I’m helping whether you ask me to or not, so you might as well ask for it.”

  “You were supposed to believe I was a criminal.” She shook the shirt out and began threading her arms into it. “You need to believe it. You need to forget about me. If I can complete my mission, I might be able to hide what happened on Nozando. I can protect you. All of you. But to do that, I have to finish what I started.”

  When she had his shirt covering her body, he unlocked the door and peeked out into the corridor. He took her hand and pulled, leading her toward his room. Once inside, he shut the door and began removing his boots. He needed to feel her again. He might never get enough of her.

  As if the conversation hadn’t stopped, he said, “So what’s the directive? To overthrow a government?”

  Rick had no interest in taking down governments unless it meant helping those who were currently being harmed by that same government. If they didn’t help the workers, then a new dictator would just move in and take the old one’s place.

  “Lessen their power,” Harper corrected. “I know what Alexis said she read, but I was planning on doing whatever I could for the workers. It might not have been written in the directive, but I am well aware of their plight. It’s why I was trying to get close to the prince. It’s a delicate situation. We don’t need the Ingeniarian technology, we just need to temper back the power of those who produce it.”

  Rick gave a small nod. “Sounds simple enough. After we…” He gave a seductive glance over her body and winked. “I’ll let the others know we have a new adventure. Maybe we can scavenge some tech while we’re at it. Any of the Ingeniare planets should have plenty of it lying around. We are pirates after all.”

  Harper arched a brow. “I’m sorry. When I said we, I meant my team and me. You and your friends aren’t coming anywhere near this operation.”

  “Like we’d let you have all the fun.” He swept her into his arms and tossed her onto his bed. Being as he had been solo on the ship, the bed wasn’t huge, but it served its purpose. A laugh escaped her at the sudden, playful act. “Now let me tell you about my plan. First, we need to get you out of that shirt. It’s only going to get in the way of my current mission.”

  9

  A pirate crew meeting was definitely a far cry from an official HIA briefing. They gathered in the commons, the brothers Lucien and Viktor making a wide arc around the room to keep away from her. Evidently, by their expressions, they had not forgiven her from escaping on their watch. They did not meet her gaze.

  The captain sat with his men, appearing no more in charge than Dev or Jackson or any of their wives. Rick insisted Alexis was alive, and it was believable, but after all those transmissions, it was difficult to see anything but an expensive toy. Raisa appeared the friendliest of the bunch, smiling and looking like she was on the verge of a thousand questions.

  “So what kind of food did your family eat?” Raisa asked.

  Yep. Questions.

  “Uh, crops,” Harper muttered, vague on purpose.

  “But the dishes you made with the crops?” the woman persisted. “Were there any traditional items? Maybe something you made on holidays?”

  Harper glanced around the crew. They watched her expectantly. Was this some kind of test? What did her childhood diet matter?

  “Mostly nutrient paste from tubes, I guess,” she said at length.

  Raisa’s expression fell a little. “Oh. That doesn’t help.”

  “Are you…hungry?” Harper asked. “Do you need me to show you how to work a food simulator?”

  Raisa made a small noise of surprise before she began to laugh, prompting everyone to join her. Harper frowned. They acted like she’d just told the funniest joke they’d ever heard.

  Rick’s hand slid onto her lower back, his fingers caressing her. The gesture was more possessive than she was used to. He leaned close to her when he explained, “Raisa is an Intergalactic Culinary Specialist. She practically invented all the recipes in a food simulator.”

  “That is hardly true,” Raisa protested. “O
nly like an eighth of them. And I won’t be working for Simulator Corp much longer if I don’t get something in to them soon. They’ll try to take my molecular gastro-spectrometer away.”

  “They can try,” Jackson threatened his wife’s non-present bosses, “but no one threatens my love’s molecular gastro-spectrometer.”

  Was grumpy spaceman being… playful?

  “Here. Here. Sorry.” A woman entered carrying an electronic clipboard. Her hair was pulled back to rest in a mess of brown curls at the nape of her neck. “I thought I saw something on the scanner but it ended up being what looks like part of an old ship floating in the black. I tagged it in the computer, but I doubt it’s worth the time it would take to haul it in anywhere.”

  The woman handed the clipboard to the captain who instantly passed it to Viktor, who began poking at the screen.

  “You must be the untrustworthy queenpin who stowed away on our ship and brought the threat of the Ingeniarians on us that I’ve heard so much about.” Green eyes met Harper’s. “I’m Violette Craven Stephans en Dehauberkelsain en Thoraxian en Yyrtolzx Devekin.”

  It was clear which man Violette had paired herself to with that Bevlon surname.

  “You must be the woman who isn’t qualified to be flying Rick’s ship,” Harper quipped.

  “Call me Violette.” The woman winked.

  “Harper,” Harper answered. She instantly liked the woman. Though playful in tone, she carried herself like she’d been through some kind of agency fight training.

  “Wait, Rick’s ship?” Lucien laughed. “Sam might have something to say about that.”

  “Who’s Sam?” Harper looked around the group, pretty sure she’d picked up on everyone’s names.

  “Princess Samantha was our captain before she decided to stay on Qurilixen. This is her ship,” Dev stated, before instantly changing the subject. “Am I correct in believing that the Ingeniarian threat has been stopped by the disarming of the tracker?”

  “So far,” Violette said. “I had to divert some of the resources from other parts of the ship to give us enough power to scan on all frequencies for the time being.”

  “What did you turn off?” Viktor asked, concerned.

  “VR.” Violette leaned over to kiss her husband’s cheek. “Sorry, Dev. You’ll have to find another way to train.”

  “But I was in the process of loading a new program,” Viktor said.

  “Then that explains why it was drawing so much power,” Violette answered. “You’ll just have to do it again later.”

  “Did you pick up new programs at the conference?” Jackson asked.

  Viktor smiled. “Maybe.”

  “What kind?” Raisa asked. “More combat scenarios?”

  “Sure,” Viktor said.

  “If we could talk about the current threat,” Dev inserted.

  “Good idea,” Lochlann seconded. “Alexis discovered something about our new friend.”

  All eyes turned to Harper. While watching the banter between the crew, she’d enjoyed having the attention off her. Now it was back, reminding her she was an outsider. Normally that fact didn’t bother her. For some reason, here, standing beside Rick and his crew, it did.

  “Do you want to tell them?” Alexis asked.

  Harper didn’t speak.

  “All right.” Alexis stood from where she leaned against her husband’s chair. “Harper is an HIA agent, and she needs our help to free a planet.”

  Any remains of a jovial mood faded.

  “I didn’t ask for help,” Harper said.

  “A whole planet?” Lucien clarified, as they ignored her statement.

  “It’s home to a factory of roughly five hundred workers,” Alexis said. “And maybe around thirty or forty guards.”

  Rick dropped his hand from her back. “The workers at the Ingeniare Three factory are being forced to labor against their will. Some are criminals, but many are those who dared to defy the Ingeniarian government.”

  “So not a whole planet, just a factory?” Lucien asked.

  “The factory is pretty much all there is on the planet,” Harper stated.

  “All right.” Lucien sat back in his chair and nodded.

  “It’s part of the Ingeniare Trio,” Alexis explained. “The original planet, Ingeniare One, where the population lives, shouldn’t cause a problem. Ingeniare Two is where the factory headquarters are located and where they keep their laboratories. We might have an issue with them because they closely monitor the Ingeniare Three and regular transports between planets.”

  “If we can get that transport schedule, we can try to time our plan accordingly,” Dev said.

  “And I’ll need anything you can get about the security systems,” Jackson added.

  “I’ll work on that,” Alexis acknowledged.

  “We might be able to jam communications between the second and third planets,” Lucien said with a glance at Viktor.

  Viktor nodded. “We could rig something to mimic space noise like we did when we were trying to pass through,” he glanced at Harper, “places undetected.”

  “We can put out a signal with my father’s Federation code if it comes to it,” Violette said. “If they check it, we’ll be screwed, but that might buy us some time if we’re found.”

  “What about the HIA?” Jackson asked. “Will they offer support?”

  “HIA doesn’t care about the factory workers. They want to derail the Ingeniarians’ power,” Alexis said with a sidelong glance in her direction. “They’re infiltrating the royal family and the laboratories.”

  “That isn’t true,” Harper defended, feeling as if she was under attack. “If it were as easy as walking into a room and flipping a switch, I would have taken care of it by now. You’re talking about a very powerful ruling family whose scientists literally invented half of the biotechnology currently used, hundreds of monitored workers, security systems, bionic guards, the list is endless. If we can strike a blow to the family’s power, we can stem the flow of their production. No production, they won’t need to gather more workers. From there we can focus on the other problem. I don’t know where a pleasure droid model got her information about this secret mission, but just because it’s not in the mission file doesn’t mean it isn’t a concern. And you need to be careful. If they find out you’re tapping into a private database, they will come after you.”

  “I’m not—” Alexis began. Lochlann touched her arm to stop her. She patted his hand. “It’s fine. The fate of five hundred workers is more important than any secrets I may have.”

  “My wife isn’t a droid,” Lochlann said, giving Alexis a small smile as if making the statement proved his support of her decision.

  “Pleasure Droid Corporation used me as a base model for the Alexis droid. It’s easier to imprint the programs off of a live subject,” she said.

  “I already told her,” Rick admitted.

  “I meant base model. I’ve never heard of a woman volunteering to be used in such a way,” Harper said.

  “It wasn’t a volunteer position.” Alexis took a deep breath. “What happened, happened. It’s not important. What is important are the results. They filled me with uploads, and I was attached to the Pleasure Droid Corporation’s mainframe by remote access.”

  “That’s disconcerting, but I don’t know how that explains how you know of the HIA files.” Harper studied each of them in turn. Maybe her first impression of them had been hasty. She’d taken them for petty criminals.

  Alexis rubbed her temple.

  “Millions of files,” Lochlann said. “Alexis is a living computer database. She knows practically everything—navigation, ship schematics, biomedicine, scientific studies, cultures, and customs. More than any human brain was supposed to carry.”

  Harper’s eyes widened. She could imagine the type of experimentation that would be done to make such a thing possible.

  “Pleasure droids collect information about their owners, and when they’re recharging, they submit
reports. Pleasure Droid Corp is not just about making people happy and sex robots. For centuries people have known that the most valuable thing in the universes isn’t technology. It’s information. The powerful need it. The greedy sell it and use it. And they get it all for the low price of a little physical pleasure.” Alexis’ eyes continued to change color. Really it was the ultimate disguise. No one would think about a pleasure droid walking around. They were laughed off as jokes.

  “So someone who knows about my mission has a droid?” Harper asked, almost angry that some commanders need for sexual release resulted in her mission being compromised.

  “We severed my attachment to the mainframe, but when I touched the side stitch power source, the surge it caused reactivated that connection. I was thinking of the Ingeniarian tech and that thought process brought me to a tiny wormhole into the HIA database, and to your mission. When I stopped touching it, the connection severed but not before I’d downloaded more information. I’ve been sorting through it.”

  Alexis risked much admitting what she’d done. One hint to Harper’s bosses that the pirates had accessed confidential files and the entire crew would be blown out of space.

  Harper noticed something strange as they spoke. Not one of them questioned if they should help. They all automatically assumed that they would.

  Relying on her judgment and gut instinct, Harper decided to trust them. There was no point in lying about her mission since it sounded like they could find out everything on their own, anyway.

  She studied Alexis. “Did you see all of it? What it’s like on Ingeniare Three?”

  By the woman’s expression, Harper instantly knew she had read the information packets attached to the files.

  “What?” Dev prompted.

  “The working conditions are tightly packed, dark, and the hours long. We saw the trackers firsthand. They bus them to work, they bus them home to sleep,” Alexis said. “The exposure to the machines leaves them vulnerable to diseases. If they become sick too often where trips to the medical booth are slowing down production, they’re disposed of and replaced like a bad part.”