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She shook her head. “I wouldn’t wonder.” She cleared her thickening throat. “How long would you be able to stay?” If more heartache was in her future, she wanted to gird against it now.

He curved his big hand over her cheek, moving his thumb back and forth over her lips. “Does forever frighten you?”

She couldn’t breathe as she shook her head.

“I will stay by your side if you choose to spend the rest of your life with your people. I suspect, though, that over time, many will seek their own lives, and you might feel free to leave with me then. There are other worlds on which to settle, where we could have land and freedom, technology if we wanted . . . or not. And someday, if you were willing, and you wanted me in that way, I would like to make a family with you, a new family. Children, as many as you were willing to bear.”

Jordan bit her lower lip. Her eyes ached with sudden, pent-up emotion. After crying for Boo, she was sure she wouldn’t have a tear left. She’d been wrong.

Hastily he put in, “It would not make the memory of Roberta any less important to us. We would honor her, Jordan. Our children would know her name.”

Our children would know her name
.

A sigh slipped from her. That was it; she was a goner. If she’d wondered before if she was falling in love with him, she didn’t have to wonder anymore. He’d won her heart, fair and square.

“I’m not good with men, you know,” she warned him.

He shrugged. “You never met the right one.”

She sighed again. For a big, brooding, silent type, the guy was good, really good. He had all the right answers. And better yet, he meant every one.

His expression darkened. “But there is the problem with my father. Honor binds me to this ship, but my heart binds me to you.”

“You’re not obligated to me.” It pained her to say it, but it was the truth.

“Obligation.” The way he said the word told her that it embodied a concept with which he struggled. “If it comes from commitment—of the heart, of the spirit—then it is as pure a concept as love and loyalty. But if used as an instrument of compliance . . .” He shook his head. “Such is my relationship with my father, Jordan. When he returned the picture we left behind in the viewing room, the message was clear: He wouldn’t take kindly to me spending time with you.”

“But you are.”

He gave a bitter bark of laughter. “Of course I am. I may be obligated to the man, but I’m not enslaved by him. Yet he appointed himself the architect of my life. My successes are his. As are my failures, unfortunately. He once saw me pursuing a seat in the Grand Forum, a senate seat, and despite my war record, he dreams of it still. Power and prestige, channeled through me to him. Currently he’s busy trying to arrange a marriage. All the front-runners are daughters of powerful politicians.”

“I see.”

Kào’s smile was soft, self-deprecating, and frank. “No, Jordan. You have no worries. Such a union would never happen, even if I hadn’t met you. Glorious ambitions don’t flow in my blood as they do his.”

“Why didn’t he pursue for himself what he wants for you?”

He shook his head and pondered that. “I don’t know.”

“Just the other day you were telling me how much you owed him, how much he means to you.” She lifted her hands. “I don’t want to come between you two.”

“I have much to smooth over with him,” Kào acknowledged. His face reflected his indecision and the pain it brought him.

“Just be sure, Kào, before you leave. Or you’ll come to resent me. You’ll blame me for the divorce from your father. I experienced that with my first husband—his resentment. It was pointless, and it hurt. I won’t go through it again.” Her voice turned husky. “Not with a man I care for as much as you. I don’t want to find out later that you made a mistake, after it’s eaten you alive.”
He’s not Craig; don’t compare the two
. Fighting to compose herself, she turned away,

Kào said nothing as he stood. Silently, he lowered his pants. Jordan knew that he hadn’t reached any decision regarding his father though he threw the pants aside and came back to bed—and to her. With one look in his midnight eyes, she knew that he remained torn between obligation and personal desire, even as he reached for her, drawing her into a kiss.

“Be sure,” she whispered against his mouth.

His kiss told her that he was sure about her. A future together looked full of difficulties, but at least they had now, the present, time stolen from those who didn’t want them to have it.

Seeking completion, Kào rolled her onto her back. She welcomed him with a feverish moan as he thrust inside her. They made love with silent heat, their hands clasped together. When she climaxed, he held her close, reaching his own release soon after with the same soundless intensity.

Kào had fallen into a deep sleep. As Jordan caressed his back, combing her fingers through his hair, she couldn’t help thinking that his mind had instinctively sought escape from the burdens he carried, and the decisions he felt he soon had to make. In that respect, she was grateful for her sudden freedom, however unwanted. She was duty-bound
to serve the people of Flight 58, but she was otherwise unattached. For the first time, what she did with her life and whom she chose to be with was up to her. She wanted Kào . . . if he was hers to have.

Kào’s body twitched and he whimpered. His legs swished under the sheets, as if he were trying to run. Then a groan rumbled up from deep in his throat.

He was dreaming. Instinctively she soothed him by rubbing her hand over his chest. His breath hissed furiously. His head rolled from side to side. Then his entire body went rigid, his back arching. The sudden move bounced her head off his shoulder. The muscles in his arms bunched. She rolled away from him.

He let out a harsh, guttural yell, swinging his fists. She barely dodged the flailing arms as she struggled free of the tangled bed sheets. She crouched naked at the far edge of the mattress, her heart in her throat. “Kào! Wake up!”

She could feel the horror radiating off his sweating, convulsing body. It slammed into her in violent waves, making her cringe. A nightmare, a gruesome nightmare; he was reliving against his will an atrocious past that she knew kept its claws buried tenaciously in his psyche.

He’d been like this once before, although not as violently so, that day they’d zapped him with the stun gun on the 747.

He gasped, as if suffocating. His big hands opened and closed, grasping the bed sheets. Jordan half stumbled, half crawled back across the bed. Grabbing his shoulders, she shook him hard. “Kào! It’s Jordan. You’re in your quarters and it’s okay.”
Damn
. In her urgency, she’d spoken English. “Open eyes,” she urged him in Key. “Kào, please. Is okay.”

He cried out, a hissing, hideous bellow of pure anguish. His body convulsed brutally, and he lunged up to a sitting position, his neck tendons corded, his eyes open and wild and unseeing.

She watched helplessly as every muscle in his body went rigid. Then, as if he were released from some horrible bond, he jerked awake.

“By the Seeders. . . .” he breathed, falling backward onto the mattress.

“Kào?”

He lifted a shaking hand to wipe the sweat from his brow. He focused on her, blinking. An expression of startled amazement glowed in his face, a face that only seconds ago had been contorted in mental agony. “I broke free,” he rasped. “I escaped.”

“What? What did you escape?”

“The fence!” A laugh of disbelief shook him, and she wondered fleetingly if he’d gone crazy. “Always in my dreams for my entire life, there’s been the fence. I’m on a horse—I’m a boy again, and we’re trapped. As I grew older, the dream mixed with flashbacks from the war. A bird made of fire.” His throat bobbed and he shook his head. “The fence, it was always there. But just now, I escaped.
Escaped
.”

He choked out another laugh, and she tried to understand the sharp resolve that glowed suddenly in his face. “The horse found a weak spot and kicked apart the timbers. The entire stockade thundered down behind us. I can still hear it, Jordan. I can feel it, crashing all around me.”

His dark eyes glinted with sudden emotion, and she crawled into his arms, snuggling close, breathing his scent, tasting his wet, salty skin. He gripped her to him, and she could hear his heart thumping fiercely in his chest.

“That blasted fence. It symbolized my life! My not having a say in my fate: the destruction of my birth planet Vantaar, the circumstances of my rescue, grateful as I am for the outcome. Then there was the war. And prison.”

And the torture, she thought. The insult done to his body.
The damning, damaging words wrenched from him through drugs and beatings.

But Kào’s thoughts were on none of that now. His left hand closed, grasping the sheets as he had during his nightmare. “It’s a message, Jordan. A sign. I respect Moray, and I honor him as a man and as my father. But I’ll no longer be controlled by him.”

Kào expected Jordan to react to his soul-shaking declaration with joy. Instead, when she tipped her head to look into his eyes, her gaze was anxious and sad.

She was worried. Because she cared for him, he thought. She’d said so to his face. He was a hardened, battle-scarred warrior with a disgraceful past who was more comfortable with weapons of mass destruction than he was with the ways of women, and yet she wanted him, faults and all. He hadn’t felt this lighthearted since the day he left to join the Alliance Space Force at eighteen years of age.

“It won’t be easy,” she warned him.

“Jordan, my Jordan. Just because the heavens spoke to me in the form of a dream doesn’t mean I’ll lurch into this unprepared. I have a plan.”

“Be sure,” she whispered.

Wasn’t he? Never had he gone against his father before. In small ways, yes, but never like this.

But he’d made his decision. He was going to be the man Jordan needed—he was going to be
his own
man—starting now.

“Moray told me that my war records are about to come under review,” he told her. “That means there’s a chance I will be cleared.”

“Kào,” she breathed. “That would be wonderful.”

“I don’t want it for me,” he argued. “I want it for him, for Moray. I want his name to shine again as it deserves. But why must I be on this ship to assist in the process? I can communicate with Headquarters from anywhere.”

“Even the Rim?”

“Yes. Even the Rim.”

“That’s wonderful! It’s perfect!” She laughed joyfully.

He loved hearing the sound, one so rare. He vowed that someday he’d hear her laugh daily.

Smiling, she cuddled next to him. As he absently smoothed his hand over the warm, silky curves of her bare back, he considered the mechanics of his plan. Moray didn’t like surprises; he liked to think he had control of a situation. It was obvious that Kào would have to proceed as if his father were the most volatile explosive on the market.

His attention returned to Jordan. Her breathing had lengthened and deepened, and she hadn’t said anything in a long while. Kào smiled. Instead of rousing her, he was afraid his gentle massage had done quite the opposite. Two nights in a row of little sleep had caught up to her.

He lifted the long hair that clung damply to the nape of her neck, breathing in her scent that was mixed now with his. “Jordan,” he whispered in her ear. “Are you awake?”

He saw her smile into the pillow. “No.”

His teeth found her tender earlobe and tugged. “Then this is a dream.”

“Mm. I like this dream.” Her rounded buttocks brushed
against his swelling member. The jolt of heat made his loins ache with wanting her.

Groaning, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck, where tiny white hairs made a downy fringe under her hairline, and kissed her. Tiny bumps pebbled her skin. “You don’t wish me to wake you?”

“No,” she said on a sigh. “I want to see how this dream ends.”

He chuckled low and deep and raised her appealing little rump to his belly. He’d longed to bury himself inside her while holding her this way. “So do I.” He tilted his hips and—

His wake-up chime beeped shrilly from where it sat on a thick clear table carved to look like glacial ice. He swore under his breath.

Jordan reacted to his curse and the alarm. Flying off the bed, she threw him off balance as she yanked the bed sheet from under his knees and took it with her on a mad dash across the bedchamber. Just before she disappeared through the closest door, she whirled around, her blue eyes wide as she clutched the sheet to her breasts. “You answer the door. I’ll hide in the bathroom.”

The hatch swished closed behind her.

When he gathered his wits, he began to laugh. “Off,” he said to silence the alarm. Still chuckling, he launched himself off the bed and walked to the door through which Jordan had fled. He slipped inside the small compartment and closed the door behind him. In the dim light, Jordan’s sheet-wrapped form was hardly visible among the folded towels, blankets, and sheets.

“This is a closet,” she said in Key. She hadn’t brought her translator.

“Yes, it is.”

“I thought it was the bathroom.”

He fought a smile. Like a heat-seeking missile, he honed
in on her. He grabbed hold of the bed sheet and tugged. It was nice to discover that his targeting abilities had not deteriorated over the years, particularly with such a tempting objective.

She let the sheet fall away from her body. Her pale curves glowed in the dusky light. He knew how warm and supple her skin would be under his palms. He knew how she’d taste. And where she’d be silky smooth—and slippery and wet. For him. His loins ached powerfully. But the darkness must have hidden the naked hunger in his eyes.

“Who was at the door?” she asked.

“No one.”

“I heard the chime and thought it was your father, coming to drag me to security for defying the lockdown.”

“My father! It was my wake-up chime.”

She made what sounded like an Earth swear word. Then she laughed. “I feel like idiot!”

“No.” He slid his hands behind her waist and laced his fingers at the small of her back. “You feel incredible.”