* * *
Rom blinked rapidly. His sight was blurred and his eyes gritty. Hell and back, he felt like he'd spent a month drinking in a frontier bordo bar. He swallowed against a scratchy throat and eased his head from side to side, then flexed his arms. Stiffness, but no pain. No light-headedness, either, which indicated that he'd been weaned off healing drugs and painblockers, meaning he'd most likely recovered. He wasn't alone, however.
He heard a long and languorous snuffle followed by a full-fledged snort. "Jasmine?" he queried in a raspy voice. The woman snored like a Taangori dragon.
Rom propped himself on his elbows to look around, then gave a hoarse chuckle at the sight of Muffin, out cold, slumped in a chair at the foot of his bed. The man's head had tipped back, and his dinner plate-sized hands were splayed, one on each thigh, propping him upright.
Another shuddering snore, then a lusty sigh. Rom settled against the pillow and laced his fingers behind his head. "Muffin, if the sounds coming out of your mouth are any indication of your need, I suggest you hire a pleasure servant as soon as we dock at the Depot."
His bodyguard jerked awake. Instantly alert. Muffin swept his cool gaze around the room. Focusing on Rom, he brightened, breaking into a grin. "B'kah."
Rom snorted. "Some protector."
Muffin's smile spread. He leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in his waistband, drumming eight thick fingers against his massive upper thighs. "Odds were against your being murdered in your bed on your own ship. Besides, you know I feel out of sorts if I miss my midday nap." Rom also knew how quickly Muffin could transform from contented napper to lethal combatant. The giant pushed himself off the chair. "As for the Depot, I'll be employing two pleasure servants there, not one. Three if I can afford it."
Rom inquired mildly, "All at once?"
"One after the other after the other." Impervious to Rom's chuckle. Muffin wedged another pillow under his captain's shoulders to help him sit up. "With all due respect, B'kah, you've kept me away from port too long this time." He poured water into a glass.
After Rom drank his fill from it, Muffin lumbered to the environmental control panel and adjusted the settings to those more suited for a healthy man than a sick one. Once satisfied with the lights and temperature, he related the events leading to Rom's injuries.
In light of Muffin's gory description of his severe concussion, Rom made a cautious but thorough inventory of the rest of his body parts. Everything was still attached and seemed to be functioning properly.
Muffin refilled his glass. "Ever since Zarra returned to duty, all he talks about is how you saved his life."
The water Rom had just swallowed plummeted into his belly like a cold stone.
"Captain B'kah this. Captain B'kah that," Muffin mimicked in a singsong voice. "Like saving a drowning ketta-kitten. You've won yourself an ally for life."
"Redirect the boy's gratitude. If Terz hadn't closed the hatch, he'd be dead now."
"But you—"
"Facts only, please," Rom snapped.
I am no hero.
"How long have I been out?"
Muffin eyed him with something akin to pity. Rom clenched his jaw and turned away. "How long?"
"A standard week. I saw to your personal needs. Jas was with you the rest of the time." Muffin poked his thumb at a nest of pillows piled near Rom's bed. They held an indentation in the shape of a body, revealing that Jas had indeed stayed with him day and night. Like hunting for beads from a broken necklace, Rom retrieved the scattered images remaining from a week of drugged semiconsciousness. What few memories he could salvage formed a fragile strand of tender caresses and caring words—Jas's. His chest squeezed tight. "Where is she?"
"On the bridge," Muffin said casually. "Gann intended to bring the
Quillie
back to light speed this morning, but Terz wanted to inspect the door repairs first. Not the one you dented with your head, B'kah, the other one. He's got four men suited up and outside. Then Jas asked if she could replace the pilot on duty."
"What! She's flying the ship?" Rom sat bolt upright. "Right
now?"
Muffin grinned, and he sagged against the pillows, muttering, "I've got men tethered to the outside of the ship, and an adventure-seeking, cropper-popping mother of two at the controls. A frontier woman, no less. What did I expect after sleeping for a week?" Rom peered around his quarters. There was no adverse pitching or rolling. And nothing was tipped over, as far as he could tell. "I see she had the good sense to keep the ship on the automated flier."
"Actually, she's manually flying."
Rom let out a laugh of pride and surprise. The gentle, nurturing woman who had cared for him for a week was upstairs flying his ship on manual control like a seasoned space veteran. It sparked his longing to see her again. Unfortunately, his body lagged behind his spirits as he struggled to free himself from the blanket. His muscles wobbled from lack of use as he headed into the hygiene shower with a distinctly unsteady gait. As the water hissed on, Muffin moved next to the enclosure and remarked, "I take it you'll be making an appearance on the bridge."
"The moment I'm presentable." Rom aimed the sprayers at his shoulders, arching backward into the water until the kinks eased out of his knotted muscles. "It seems I've been tossed aside for a crate of metal and bolts. Time to size up the competition and see if I stand a chance at winning back the lady's affections."
"As if you ever had them."
The big man was out the door before Rom had the
chance to react.
* * *
After a fruitless search of the main part of the ship, the aft cargo storage areas, the midlevel corridors, and the Bajha arena, Rom paused by the ladder leading to the lower deck. He couldn't fathom why she would be down there, but he sensed, somehow, that she was. His legs protested the strain of climbing down the ladder. It would take some time to bring his strength back to what it had been. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he leaned his back against the gangway and listened to the thumps of the gravity generator and the incessant purring of the air recyclers. They were the sounds of a healthy ship.
Unaware of his presence, Jas was cross-legged on the floor across from the hatch to the generator room, vigorously sketching something on the pad of paper in her lap. The sight of her, so serious, so absorbed in her artwork while sitting in the middle of the floor of a cold
and impersonal hunk of trillidium, kindled something inside him, something fundamentally warm and needed, and not unlike the yearning he experienced upon recalling his childhood. The zippers of her baggy black coverall and her silver bracelets glinted in the meager overhead light. Each time she leaned over her drawing, her long, unbound hair spilled forward like a veil. Only when she flipped it back behind her shoulders did she allow him a glimpse of her profile—a soft, expressive mouth nestled perfectly between a strong, straight nose and that stubborn chin. Her face was a study in contrasts, like everything else he'd discovered about her so far.
Carefully he crouched in front of her, and she dropped her pencil. With her flushed cheeks, darkened eyes, and lips parted in astonishment, she resembled a woman who had been interrupted in the middle of lovemaking. The imagined sight of her beneath him, their bodies intimately joined, conjured a dull, hot throb in his groin. He tried his damnedest to ignore it, and scooped up the pencil rolling across the floor. "What, may I ask, lures you to the coldest, darkest part of the ship?"
"You." Her smile was infused with warmth and welcome, and her eyes held none of the wariness of the days before his injury. "Muffin told me the drugs would wear off today, but I didn't expect you to be up so soon. I want to show you something, but I need a few more minutes." Her Basic had become remarkably smooth and colloquial. "Do you mind?" she asked. "I'm almost finished."
She searched through a pouch, chose another stubby, soft-pointed pencil, and went back to work with an intensity that awed him. Her left hand whisked over the page, two fingers hugging the pencil, while the others were engaged in making shadows and smudges.
This was passion in its purest form, he thought. Not patently rehearsed, as he'd suspected of the skilled palace courtesans of his pre-Balkanor days, or modified to suit a partner, as one expected from a pleasure servant. No, this passion arose from her soul, and it humbled him.
Jas's hand slowed, then ceased moving. She scrutinized her work, then him, massaging the small of her back. "You look better," she said. "How do you feel?"
"Like the morning after a long night of over-indulgence. Only without the benefit of having had a good time."
She laughed. "If anyone deserves a good time, it's you. You dove through that hatch without a thought to your own safety. It's all the crew's been talking about." Her face glowed with unmistakable admiration.
He recoiled, and a rush of dismal memories plowed into him—his father's fury the day he discovered that his only remaining son couldn't sire a child, his mother's anguished weeping, and the feel of his sister's frantic embrace moments before the doors were slammed behind him upon his expulsion from the palace—the only such episode in eleven thousand years.
He'd failed his family, his people. He was not a man deserving of such esteem.
"Makes me wish I had the paints I left at home," she went on. "Not that I have the skill to truly capture what happened." Almost shyly, she placed the pad in his lap. "A rather inadequate representation of the single greatest act of bravery and selflessness I have ever witnessed."
Rom's mouth went dry. It was an illustration of two men joined in a life-or-death struggle. One man,
sprawled on his stomach, had a face that looked like his—Great Mother, it
was
him. He was gripping Zarra's hand as if he refused to let go, the strain evident in the sinewy muscles rippling the skin of his forearm. His teeth were bared, his eyes dark with pain and purpose. Whirling debris framed the entire scene, one that held all the emotion and drama of life.
Except that it depicted a lie.
"You do exquisite work." He set the portrait on the floor. His weariness had returned, and he settled onto the floor, his legs stretched out in front of him as he supported his weight with his hands. His pulse battered his temples, threatening to turn the pressure there into pain. "However, a more accurate representation would show me releasing him." She cocked her head, as if she wasn't certain she'd heard him right. "I let go of Zarra's hand," he clarified.
"But you held him for those critical seconds. It delayed his slide across the generator room floor. That gave Terz the chance shut the hatch. The only reason he's alive is because you held him as long as you did."
"Don't make me into a hero."
You left him; you should have stayed.
"I let the boy go."
"Irrelevant."
"Unforgivable," he answered.
Jas stared in disbelief as one end of Rom's mouth tipped into a smirk. Gone was the man she'd begun to know. In his place was the cocky smuggler, a man who smiled while his eyes held an unknowable grief. "This isn't a simple case of modesty, is it?" she asked. Shaking, her heart racing, she crouched next to him. "You're a hero, Rom. And no matter how hard you try to convince me otherwise, that's how I see you. And that's how your men see you. Why don't
you
see it, too?"
A tiny scar above his upper lip stretched as he drew his mouth into a tight line. "Almost twenty standard years ago, I fought in a war—the first true conflict in eleven thousand years. My younger brother joined me ... without my father's permission. But he was a good fighter, a superb pilot, and so I let him come. Balkanor was the crucial battle, one we planned for a full year. It was a full-scale invasion, the culmination of much courage and hard work." Quietly, he finished, "We won the war that day. But I lost Lijhan."
Her heart twisted. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "But he followed you into battle because he wanted to. He was a soldier. Soldiers die."
"You don't understand! His ship took damage during the space battle. He survived the crash, but he was trapped inside. I chose to go on, intending to return for him. But—Great Mother—his starfighter exploded. I should have freed him while I had the chance! I shouldn't have left him alone—"
"You're a warrior, Rom. You did what you had to do."
His gaze went cold. "I had a choice, Jas. I made the wrong one." He pushed himself to his feet. "Now, if you're quite through with your inquiries—"
"I'm not."
Surprise flickered over his handsome features, and he lifted one brow. Folding his arms over his chest, he drummed his fingers against his biceps in an agitated rhythm. But she refused to let him intimidate her; she knew what it was like to feel desolate inside and not