It would have worked, jumping onto the lower flight, passing Munro—if the man could have kept his footing after dropping nearly three meters onto a metal staircase.
He couldn’t. He yelled and went tumbling down the steps.
No! You idiot
! Raine pelted down the steps, jumping past Munro, who’d fallen over cursing when he made his grab and found only air. This was turning into one pig of a day. First grope a prisoner, then lose him, then finally kill him.
Nice work, Chief.
He swung around the landing and raced down the lower flight. His quarry lay at the bottom of the steps, arms and legs sprawled around like a swatted insect, but moving. Raine first sighed with relief and then gave a shout of annoyance. He was trying to get up. Instincts taking over, Raine jumped the last few steps and slammed the man to the deck, a knee in his back, grabbing for his wrists.
“Get the fuck off me!” The man struggled under him. “I can’t breathe!”
Possibly, but Raine wasn’t ready to give him the benefit of the doubt yet. He pulled the cuffs from his belt and slapped them round one wrist and then the other. Only then did he take his weight off his prisoner, who went on wriggling around, hauling at the cuffs.
“Stop it.” Raine crouched by him, breathing hard. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
“I
am
hurt, you bastard.”
Raine felt a moment of guilt but shook it off. Nobody had forced him to make that stupid jump. And he couldn’t be too badly hurt, because he was fizzing with rage, face flushed and eyes narrow and furious.
“Then keep still. We’ll take you to the infirmary in a second.”
The rest of the squad arrived, going more slowly down the steps than Raine. Sensible if they didn’t want to break their necks. Still, he gave them a look as he stood. A Boss Special, he’d heard them call it.
“Today would be good, people.”
“Saw you had it handled, Boss,” Munro said, grinning, none the worse for his fall on the steps.
“Get him on his feet,” Raine said. A couple of them hauled the prisoner up, and he yelled when he put his feet down. They had to hang on to his arms when he lifted his left foot up, wincing.
“Can’t put any weight on it?” Raine received only a pained shake of the head in reply. “Okay. Sim.”
“Boss?” Sim loomed over him. The stowaway stared with alarm at the man everyone called Big Sim for the obvious reason.
“Carry him.”
“Boss.” Giving the prisoner no time to resist, Sim grabbed him and slung him over one huge shoulder. Though this quelled most people’s resistance once and for all, it seemed to reactivate this man’s anger.
“Hey, put me down, you great big—get your hand off my ass!” Sim ignored the words, hauled on the man’s belt to adjust his hold, and started to carry him up the steps. Raine followed a few steps lower down, which brought him head to head with the prisoner.
He glared at Raine and tried to flip his hair back off his face. Seeing him like this—upside down, flushed bright red, eyes narrowed, hair as tangled as a bird’s nest—the moment in the elevator seemed even more like an instant of madness. The guy was a scarecrow. While they were at the infirmary, Raine should ask the doctor for an eye exam.
* * *
Sim set Kit down on a bed in the infirmary and moved back, but he stayed close enough to quell any trouble. He needn’t have worried; Kit had lost his enthusiasm for making trouble. Between his ankle and bruising, he felt like lying here and sleeping for a week. Maybe he’d wake up in his hiding place and getting caught would all be a dream.
A man started running a scanner over Kit. “I’m Doctor Skerritt,” he said. “Lie still, please. Did you hit your head?”
“No.” Kit didn’t look at the doctor; he looked at Raine, who’d followed them in and stood at the doctor’s shoulder, watchful and wary. At a signal from him, Sim moved farther back and stood by the door.
“The ankle isn’t broken. It’s badly sprained, though.” The doctor injected something to numb the pain, and a nurse started taking Kit’s shoe off. “You won’t be going anywhere for a few days.”
“He won’t be going anywhere except the brig for some time,” Raine said.
What a dick.
They must be too far out to send him home. They could hardly turn around; they had schedules to keep. But would they hand him over to some ship heading to Drexler?
The brig might be preferable, especially if he had Raine watching over him. After the way he’d responded to the kiss, the classic “seduce the guard” tactic would be a shoo-in. When the doctor moved away to tap information into a terminal, Raine stepped closer and reached for Kit’s hand. Entirely on instinct, Kit let Raine take it, wishing Raine’s gloves were gone, wanting skin-to-skin contact with him again.
Raine swiped his Link’s scanner along Kit’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, stepping back and speaking into the comms. “Warner, I’m sending our guest’s fingerprints through. Run them through the police data from Drexler, please.”
“Jerk!” Kit shoved his hand under the sheet on the bed, flushing and cursing himself for a fool.
Did you think he wanted to hold your hand, idiot?
Raine didn’t react to the insult. He wore a closed and guarded expression. No wonder, since he’d revealed too much already in the elevator. Too late to mend it. Kit smiled to himself.
I know you now, Raine 3rdM. I know what you want.
“Hello, Chief. You certainly livened up a dull afternoon on the bridge.”
“Captain.” Raine snapped to attention as a woman came in. Short and in her fifties, with hair cropped like most spacers, she wore the crew uniform somewhat more casually than Raine. Raine relaxed his stance a second after going into it, but he stayed tense, and Kit decided he must be fighting the urge to salute.
“Good work catching him.”
She wouldn’t be saying that if she’d seen what happened in the elevator.
“Ms. Warner coordinated the pursuit,” Raine said.
“Excellent. Pass on my appreciation.” She turned to Kit. “I’m Captain Victoria Dryden. I’m in command of this freighter.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.” His casual greeting produced a smile from her and a frown from Raine. “What’s your name?”
“Kit.” They had his prints; they’d have his name any second. No point in staying anonymous. Anyway, he needed a different approach with her. She was the captain, but she was also a middle-aged woman. She might even have kids not far from Kit’s age. “Please don’t send me back.” He wouldn’t survive in prison.
“We’ll get to that. How did he get hurt?”
“He fell down some stairs.” Raine grimaced. “I know how that sounds, ma’am.”
“Quite,” she said. “Did you fall down some stairs, Kit?”
He could stir up trouble for Raine, accuse him of brutality, he supposed. But what would it achieve? “Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then. How did you spot him, Mr. Raine?”
“I saw him in a stores container on the monitors. As you see, he’s wearing a uniform of the ore plant admin people. That fooled me at first. But I saw him again, and I got suspicious.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t recognize him, and it appeared to me he was walking around checking things but not doing any actual work.”
“Ah, and you knew the ship already had a full complement of people who walk around checking things and don’t do any work.”
Kit chuckled. Oh, yeah, this lady knew about the world of business.
“Be quiet,” Raine ordered him.
“Calm down,” Dryden said. “It was a joke. Laughing at the captain’s jokes is not only permitted but in fact encouraged.”
“Oh. Yes, of course, ma’am, very funny.”
She caught Kit’s eye, and he thought he saw her give a tiny eye-roll. He gave her a smile in response.
We’re all pals. You wouldn’t send poor little Kit back to a horrible fate, would you?
“Christopher Miller.” Kit’s head snapped around at the sound of his full name. Raine looked up from his Link, and there was a kind of sadness in his eyes. Disappointment. He turned to Dryden. “He was in custody on Drexler awaiting trial for theft from the company he worked for. He escaped.”
“I was framed.”
Raine ignored the protest. “No previous criminal record. No record of violence. Just a thief.”
“I’m not a thief.”
The disappointed look again, and this time it made Kit furious. Raine didn’t know the facts—didn’t
want
to know the facts—but he stood there passing judgment anyway. He tried to sit up, but the pain of his bruises and leg made him flop back down.
“Thank you.” Dryden’s voice was cooler and more serious than a moment ago. “Okay, what to do with him? The usual procedure is to put a stowaway to work until we can put him off the ship.”
“I wouldn’t recommend letting him roam loose, ma’am. He could be a saboteur or spy from a rival company.”
“I don’t think any of our commercial rivals have declared war on Colonial Freight yet. Anyway, if they wanted to spy on us or sabotage us, they’d get a regular crewperson onto the roster. It makes no sense to put a stowaway on board who’ll probably be locked up when he’s found.” She turned to Kit. “Are you prepared to work, Mr. Miller? Work hard?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And follow all the rules and restrictions we’ll have to place on you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m not here to make trouble, I swear. Things…ended up this way. Nothing I ever planned.”
She turned back to Raine. “Then I’d rather have him earning his keep than sitting idle in the brig. I believe the galley is short one junior steward’s assistant this trip.”
The galley. That’s what they called a kitchen on a ship, wasn’t it? “Junior steward’s assistant” probably fell somewhere behind the ship’s cat in the hierarchy on board, but it had to be better than sitting in a cell for however long it took before they kicked him off the ship.
“It involves plenty of scrubbing and elbow grease, Mr. Miller,” Dryden said. “Something I don’t expect to hear a word of complaint about.”
“You won’t. Thank you, Captain.” He glanced at Raine, who was scowling at him.
“Where’s he going to sleep?” Raine asked.
“I thought the bunk room the men of your squad sleep in,” Dryden said. Raine stared.
“Ma’am?”
“Where better to keep an eye on him?”
“But…” Raine stopped, regarding Kit with narrowed eyes, clearly unhappy with this arrangement. Kit grinned, hoping to make him even less happy.
“Yes, Captain. But I think there’s something else we can do to keep an eye on him.”
Chapter Three
Kit’s hair. Raine couldn’t stop thinking about it. He lay in his bunk every night and relived the moment when he’d whipped the cap off Kit’s head and his hair fell down. Remembered Kit standing braced against the wall, legs apart, a pose both tense and inviting. Thought of running his hands over Kit as he searched him. The legs. The hips. The butt. God, the butt.
But the hair had tipped Raine into the moment of madness he’d given in to when Kit turned around in his arms. Imagining Kit’s hand instead, he touched his already hard cock. What if Kit hadn’t escaped from him in the elevator? Had instead fallen to his knees, unzipped Raine’s pants…
Which was insane. He’d never been turned on by the idea of having sex where he might be caught in the act. Nevertheless, the thought of it made him moan softly and stroke himself more firmly, desire mounting.
Kit started sucking his cock, looking up at Raine with eyes like grass after a storm. So good, and not enough. He pulled Kit to the floor to lavish kisses on his lean body. They weren’t in the elevator; they were in the desert, both naked now, in deepest night. The blue-white light of the primary moon bathed them, turning Kit’s pale skin softly pearlescent. Raine’s dream come true after so many long lonely nights out there with no company but the strange life that buzzed and clicked in the darkness as it struggled to make it to dawn. He’d grown up with tales of ghosts and demons out in the deep desert. Could there be angels too? An angel had come out of the darkness to lie at his side.
Not at his side but under him, long slender limbs wrapped around Raine, head back, hair spread on the sand. Raine kissed Kit’s elegant neck, feeling the pounding pulse under his lips, the heat of Kit’s marble-smooth skin, tasting the salt of sweat. He thrust into Kit, making him cry out and arch up like a cat, eyes wild, frantic, clinging to Raine’s shoulders as he begged for more more more.
Coming together. Kit screaming with pleasure while Raine’s mind shattered into fragments of starlight. Together. Raine holding Kit’s trembling, recovering body, their chests heaving.
Raine sighed as his mind reassembled itself, and he was back, lying on his bunk, sweaty, sticky, and alone. God, this was a mess. He rose and got in his shower. Kit was expected to leave the infirmary tomorrow, and Raine would have to deal with him, so he couldn’t keep thinking about him this way. Every night his thoughts started in the elevator and ended up in places Raine could never go with Kit. Never.
He turned the shower to cold.
* * *
Five days after the team captured Kit, Sim and Knox brought him into Raine’s office. The doctor had passed him fit to leave the infirmary and start work. Raine hadn’t worried about how to keep an eye on him so far, since he could barely walk, but now he was mobile again, they had to institute some security.
“Dismissed,” Raine said to the other two. “Leave the door open.” Best not to be alone with him after what happened in the elevator. Kit didn’t look as if he wanted to kiss Raine today, though. He regarded him with a glowering expression.
“Sit down.” Raine’s natural inclination would be to leave him standing, but he’d seen Kit limping as he came in. Kit subjected the chair to a scowl, as if it had said something insulting about his mother, and then sat.
“We found your hiding place,” Raine said. “Cleared it out.”
“Shame, I’d just got it nice.”
“We didn’t find much in the way of personal belongings.”
“I didn’t have time to check a bag before I stowed away.”
Raine ignored the smart-aleck answers and opened a desk drawer. He took out the bundle of cash they’d found in the hiding place and put it on the desk. Kit froze. “Is this the money you stole?”