Royal: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 5) Page 10

  Almost.

  “I… Rajan?” Of course, she remembered Rajan. But not that Rajan. The Rajan she knew had been a skinny boy with spots on his face. The Rajan in front of her was a fully-grown man who’d grown well into his tall frame and angular features. She let out a breath and patted her hair down nervously. “Wow. The last time I saw you, I…”

  “Yes, it was quite long ago,” Restaden said, smiling softly. “Your father wouldn’t tolerate me bringing him to work with me, and I was only able to manage it when he was away.” She leaned in and stage whispered, “Thank you for not telling on me.”

  “Well, of course I’d never tell on you. I’m sure my brother did enough of that.”

  All those times he’d pretended to be on Restaden’s side on private and then behaved as though he didn’t know who’d told their father on her grated at Brenna. When she caught up to him, if she ever did, she was going to punch him in the throat.

  Twice.

  “Mother speaks of you all the time,” Rajan said.

  Brenna blinked dumbly at him. She couldn’t remember ever having heard him speak.

  His voice was low and velvety, an aural caress that seemed to envelop her body and pervade her skin.

  She had to rub the prickles from her arms and force herself to swallow down the lump of nerves in her throat. “I…”

  His grin, though polite, still managed to entice. Or maybe that was just Brenna’s reading of it. He had superb lips. Superior lips, with just the right amount of plumpness, just the right amount of definition. They looked soft, and she wondered how they’d feel.

  She tugged at the collar of her shirt, suddenly hot for some reason.

  Courtney, always observant, swooped in and put an arm around Brenna’s shoulders. “So, breakfast is almost ready. We’re just waiting on Headron to bring the bread. Why don’t we all go in and pour the coffee?”

  The group began to move, but Courtney didn’t, and since she was practically pinning Brenna in place, she couldn’t go anywhere, either.

  Besides Ara, who stood nearby chuckling quietly to herself, the group had retreated.

  Courtney shut the door, put her hands on her hips, and gave Brenna a searching look.

  “What?”

  “Really, Bren?” Courtney swiveled her head around to Ara. “Do I even need to tell you?”

  “No. I know how Jekhans are. What’s happening is obvious to me.”

  “What do you two know that I’m not grasping?” Brenna asked.

  Courtney waggled her eyebrows. “Well, I gotta say, she wasn’t exactly coy about it. She’d been here ten minutes, and she put it out there clear as day.”

  “She strikes me as traditional,” Ara said. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Tell me,” Brenna demanded.

  “Okay.” Courtney leaned against the wall next to the door and clasped her hands over her belly. Pregnant. Again. Courtney hadn’t talked about it, and Brenna hadn’t asked for confirmation. She was waiting to see how long would pass before anyone at the farm said anything. They seemed to be making a game of their silence about Courtney’s third child. “Restaden came here to bring Rajan to you.”

  Brenna scrunched her nose as if nearby fruit had suddenly gone foully overripe. “Say what?”

  “She really is smarter than this most of the time,” Ara said, sighing.

  “Think about it, Brenna,” Courtney said. “She knows you. She knows your character. She knows your personality. If anyone’s equipped to make a decision about whether or not someone is compatible with her son, it’d be her.”

  “But…compatibility doesn’t generally matter to the most traditional of Jekhans. With the shortage of women being what it is—”

  “Yes, with the shortage of women being what it is, why wouldn’t she try to insinuate her son near someone she thinks might actually do a little more than just spread her legs for him?”

  Brenna’s cheeks went hot again. Brenna hadn’t been spreading her legs for anyone ever. “You never hash your words, do you?”

  “With you? No. Why should I? You know me as well as my family, so I’m always going to cut it straight with you.”

  “I just… I mean…”

  “He’s quite attractive,” Ara said equably.

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And he’s the right age,” Courtney added. “Just a couple of years older than you, right? That means he probably won’t be super-duper intense.”

  “Like your men?”

  She shrugged, and mumbled, “They’d have to be intense to put up with me.”

  That may have been the case, but from what Brenna understood, Jekhan men, in general, became less mellow around middle age and after they’d become fathers. There was likely some Tynealean hormone issue in play.

  “Brenna, yes or no,” Ara asked pointedly.

  “Huh?”

  “Yes or no. Are you interested or do you want us to…” She rolled her gaze to the sky and furrowed her brow. “What is that phrase? The football one about interfering?”

  “Running interference,” Courtney said.

  “Ah! Yes.” Ara grinned in discovery. “Would you like us to run interference? If he repulses you—”

  “Dear Lord, he doesn’t repulse me.” She added in a murmur, “Not even a little bit.”

  “So, you’re interested?” Courtney asked.

  Brenna shifted her weight and crammed her hands into the pockets of her baggy pink sweatpants. It should have been a simple yes-or-no, but she truly didn’t know what to say. Instincts were telling her, “Hell yes, grab that man before someone else does,” but her fear said, “He won’t want you once he gets to know you,” and also, “He’s just taking what he can get.”

  Ara squeezed her hand. “You’re thinking too hard. Don’t make this hard.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. A girl doesn’t get told every day that her former housekeeper and nanny is trying to hook her up with her hot son.” Brenna turned to Courtney, who was always a good and quick decision maker. That combination had served her well when she’d been a police officer. “What would you do?”

  “Honestly?” Courtney twined a long lock of her curly hair around her index finger and shrugged. “In this case, I’d say yes unless I had a good reason to say no. Do you have a good reason to say no?”

  Brenna had plenty of reasons to say no, but Courtney wouldn’t have thought any of them were good ones. Brenna wasn’t all that sure they were good, either, so she shook her head.

  “So, yes,” Ara said.

  “Yes, I…think so. I…have no idea what I’m doing. I mean, is that weird? I make money helping people find their matches, but when it comes to my own love life, I’m a hopeless case.”

  “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes,” Courtney said. “Remember that saying?”

  “I do.”

  “So it follows that the matchmaker can’t make her own match.”

  “I…guess I’m going to do this.”

  Apparently, she was going to have a man.

  A fine one.

  “I hope I don’t make a fool of myself.”

  “You’ll be okay,” Ara said cheerfully. “Besides, I suspect his mother will move things along so quickly that neither of you will have a chance to get cold feet.”

  “Huh?”

  Ara grinned. “You’re on Jekh. Surely, you’ve learned by now how crafty our women can be when they’re truly motivated.”

  “Buckle up,” Courtney said. “I think you’re about to go on a hell of a ride.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Luke set his ship down later that evening, Autumn decided she’d had enough of spaceships for the foreseeable future, and that it would take an act of God to get her into another one anytime soon.

  Her body couldn’t make out what the time of day was, and even when she looked at a clock, what her eyes saw didn’t align perfectly with what she felt. She wanted to confine herself to a bed for as many days as possible to attem
pt to reset her body clock before anyone asked anything of her. She would be hard-pressed to even remember her name, if asked.

  Cree, on the other hand, was beside herself with excitement. She bounced on her bunk, grinning as she stared into her compact mirror. Smearing on a bit of berry lip-gloss, she said, “I wonder if this is what going off to college will feel like.”

  “At the rate you’re going, are you really so certain you’ll make it to college?” Autumn asked in a voice she hoped wouldn’t carry to the front of the ship.

  “Huh.” Cree capped the gloss and slid the tube into her purse. “Good point. Who needs college when you can escape to outer space, right?”

  “No escaping happening here. You’re going home, Cree.”

  Cree rolled her eyes and stood. She walked to the window, just past the kitchenette, making Autumn have to lean forward to see her.

  Unwilling to invite another uncomfortable conversation, Autumn had done all she could to keep herself out of Luke’s sight. She didn’t want to talk to him until she had some answers about Cree and why she was there. The answers she gave weren’t necessarily going to be the truth. They’d be the ones that would be least likely to get Cree in trouble.

  “What’s out that window?” she asked her sister.

  “Miles and miles of farmland, as far as the eye can see.”

  “This is one of the largest family-owned farms in the region,” Luke said drolly from the front of the ship. “It was established many generations ago by the Merridon family, and over time it grew to the size you see now. Several Merridons still live here, but the one in charge goes by Beshni now.”

  “She must be super organized.”

  “He,” Luke corrected.

  Cree furrowed her brow, and Autumn imagined she was doing the same.

  She put her hand to her forehead and smoothed out the tension. She was going to end up with a face full of wrinkles before she turned thirty and probably wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing about them on Jekh.

  She grimaced.

  Hopefully I’ll still be here.

  “Trigrian was the eldest Merridon child. He inherited the farm,” Luke said. “He took his partner’s surname, so it’s the Beshni farm now.”

  “Oh.” Cree’s brow smoothed. “And how does Trigrian feel about the farm’s name change.”

  “Let’s just say that Trigrian is the kind of man who thinks he’s blessed to still have a farm, regardless of what it’s called.”

  That was definitely logic Autumn could get behind.

  The time for Q and A had passed. They couldn’t sit on that ship avoiding each other forever. Letting out a long, ragged exhalation, Autumn pushed herself to her feet and grabbed the strap of her bag.

  Luke was already waiting at the door beside Cree, and was undoing the lock sequence. He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Little bit of a walk to the farmhouse from here. Just consider the trek an opportunity to stretch your legs and get the blood moving back through them.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  Cree put her nose to the glass of the door. “Is that Alex Hauge parked over there?”

  Luke grunted and slapped what must have been the door’s open button. A hissing sound escaped from within and the door began to retract into a hidden compartment. “Did I forget to mention that he lives here sometimes?”

  Cree’s jaw dropped. “What other famous people do you know?”

  Autumn grabbed her little sister by the elbow and escorted her off the ship before the child could get too wound up.

  She was still trying to get used to that smell. At first, she’d thought the cloying scent like dirt after a rain was the smell of the musty depot. But then she’d smelled it again in the desert. The same one pervaded the farm country. Apparently, it was a Jekh smell.

  She rubbed her nose to distract her sinuses from the sneeze they desperately wanted, and scanned around her.

  A sea of green in all directions, save for the gray barn they were parked near and a couple of lower structures dotted here and there. She didn’t know what all the crops were. They could have been Terran things like soybeans and barley, and she probably wouldn’t have recognized them. She’d spent far too much of her life in the city.

  Sighing, she started moving Cree in the obvious direction—toward what must have been the farmhouse.

  When it became apparent from the lack of crunching of boots on the path behind her that Luke wasn’t following, she looked back. Luke stood near Alex Hauge’s ship with his hands stuffed into his pockets talking to Hauge and two other men. One, she’d seen at the depot in Buinet. The other was a Jekhan man.

  That’s Trigrian, perhaps?

  “Hold on.” Autumn stopped her sister, and waited for someone to catch up and tell them what to do.

  Luke saw fit to keep them waiting for a few minutes.

  He sauntered over with his thumbs hooked into his belt loops, expression blasé and unapologetic.

  Autumn tapped her toes in her shoes with impatience. She hated having people waste her time. The fact that he’d done it so casually didn’t bode well for their future together.

  “We’re probably on-time for dinner,” he said. “Wouldn’t hurt to walk slow so our hosts can pretend they’re ready for us.”

  Autumn squeezed her lips together and held her tongue long enough to ensure that she could control her tone. “And…where will I be staying? At the farmhouse, or somewhere else? If it’s fine with you, I’d like to rest a bit and freshen up before dinner.”

  His cheek twitched. A subtle tic, but Autumn stared down businessmen every day. She knew faces, and Luke was hiding some sort of emotion. She didn’t know him well enough to discern which yet. If he really had been an FBI agent, she might never figure it out.

  “I think Brenna arranged for you to have a room in Little Gitano,” he said. “There’s a small lodge there, and it’d probably be less of a shock to your system than staying here at first. This place can get pretty noisy during certain parts of the day.”

  “Where do you sleep?” Cree asked him.

  He crooked his thumb in the general direction of the barn. “The Tin Can is parked behind it. My room is in there.”

  He must have saw something curious on her face, because he chuckled and gestured toward the path.

  They got moving again.

  “The Tin Can is a cargo ship that’s more or less out of commission. Living there is temporary for me right now. The Tin Can is kinda like the farm’s YMCA—a place for some of the single guys to stay until they find themselves in relationships. My brother moved out a few months ago. He lives on the backside of the property now. Built a house and lives there with his lady and his lady’s other dude.”

  “He’s in a trio, then?”

  “Yeah, but not of the Jekhan sort. More of a harem for Sera and not really a true ménage. Marco and Jasper are just friends.”

  “Ah.”

  That had been a line item on the questionnaire she’d filled out for the database—whether or not she’d be comfortable in a trio. Autumn couldn’t remember if she’d said “Depends” or “Yes.” She couldn’t remember where her head was that day. She’d waited so long to fill out the form after getting preliminary approval to immigrate, and the day she’d finally done it, she’d had a huge blowout with her father at work. He’d shamed her about some project detail he’d taken heat for, but she hadn’t had anything to do with that project. He’d just been looking for someone to blame and she was convenient.

  Everyone believed him.

  “What are Jekhan houses like?” Cree asked, jarring Autumn from her thoughts.

  Good thing, because Autumn was curious to know the answer, too. She hadn’t been able to glean much from their brief stay-over in the desert. The lodging had seemed like any other communal dwelling she’d spent time in on Earth. She needed to do more on-the-ground research so she could decide which features to incorporate into her building designs, and which to scrap. She needed
to understand why Jekhans built their homes the way they did. Were their decisions all about function, or mostly about style?

  Her focus had always been on creatively combining the two aspects. She didn’t see the point of beautiful houses that people couldn’t live in comfortably.

  The device on Luke’s wrist chirped. He gave it two taps, and said, “Yeah?”

  “Um, Luke?” came the female voice from the other end.

  “What’s up, Court?”

  “You’re off the ship.”

  “I am.”

  “Good. Um…listen, things are a little hectic here right now. We got some surprise visitors this morning. We’re usually pretty good at accommodating stragglers, but I’m not ashamed to tell you that we’re brewing a perfect storm here.”

  Court.

  Autumn snapped her fingers at her side and tried to remember that name and why it was important. There were so many names.

  Luke’s brow furrowed with concern. “What happened?”

  “We just got behind today. It was a market day, and a school day for some of the kids. The chickens weren’t cooperating. We had a delay in getting dairy from the neighbors. We didn’t get dinner started until about an hour ago. We’re feeding the kids now to get them out from underfoot, but it’s going to be a while until we’re ready to set the table.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You sure?” the woman asked.

  Alex walked around them and lifted Luke’s wrist. “Courtney, this is Alex. I’m sorry for the trouble. Oreva is usually better at telling me his plans.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. On any other day, we’d be able to deal with the swell of guests, but we’re just messy today.”

  Alex looked past Luke at Autumn, and she quickly found something more important to look at—her feet.

  She’d seen enough, though. He’d grown a bit of facial hair since the first time she saw him, and realized that she’d never seen a picture of him where he was unshaven. She wasn’t quite sure which look she liked better. He was a intriguing blend of pretty and handsome she’d never seen in real life before. It was as if he’d been sculpted to perfection instead of having been born like any other mere mortal.