Royal: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 5) Read online

  Huh.

  “Shove them in,” he whispered.

  “Hmm?” Luke took a half step closer to the shower and bussed his lips across Alex’s wet shoulder.

  “Your fingers,” Alex said on a rasp, bearing down on Luke’s questing hand and curling his toes against the cold tile floor. “Shove them into me. Fast and hard. Don’t hold back.”

  Luke chuckled low and moved his mouth up his neck. He kissed beneath Alex’s ear and passed his thumb over the head of Alex’s cock. “Right now?”

  “Do it.”

  “Like this?” He forced his fingers in as far as they could go and with a force that had Alex’s shoulders bouncing off the wall.

  “Fuck,” Alex moaned.

  “You really do like attention, don’t you?” Luke tightened his grip around Alex’s cock and began tugging it in long, slow pulls as he worked the fingers of his other hand out of Alex’s ass.

  “Not generally.”

  “I think you do. You like having people look at you.” He added another finger to Alex’s rim and shoved the three in all the way.

  Alex groaned and pounded the wall. It hurt so good, and there was an extra edge added to the pleasure that came from knowing they were on the brink of being caught in the act, and that this time, it was by design.

  Come fucking see it, bitch. See who he’s touching like this.

  Luke continued to tug at Alex’s front and fuck his hole with his fingers all the while setting his teeth into the flesh of Alex’s neck. He bit down hard, and Alex swore.

  “Fuck. Like that. Do that.”

  “Yeah?” Luke licked where he’d bitten, and did the same a few inches away.

  “Yes. I like that.”

  He let Alex take over the handling of his cock and devoted his energy to scoring his shoulders and back. Alex’s ass, when he got on his knees in his jeans there in the shower.

  With every nip of his teeth into Alex’s flesh, he soothed the sting with a lick and rewarded Alex with a tap of fingers against his prostate.

  “God.” Alex’s eyes rolled back into his head as he rocked his hips faster, thrusting into his straining grip.

  He came into his fist with a shout, and Luke rocked his fingers out of Alex’s ass.

  “Unbelievable. Are you kidding me?” he heard Autumn murmur.

  Luke gave him a slap across his wet ass and pulled himself to standing with the grip rail. “You’re a bad influence, Duke.”

  “You don’t need any influence. You were probably born bad.” Alex closed the shower door right as Luke began peeling off his wet jeans. The last thing he needed was more temptation.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Alex heard Autumn murmur. Evidently, Luke had stepped back out into the main ship space, sans pants.

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Luke didn’t sound especially bashful. Alex was glad he didn’t. He was having deliciously evil fun at Autumn’s expense. “We were bad for doing that.”

  She groaned. “This situation is…nonsensical. There’s nothing normal about it.”

  Alex turned off the water and called out, “Yes, I imagine it went from normal to anything but the moment you blackmailed Luke.”

  “And here we go again.”

  “I’m simply picking up where we left off, just like Luke said we should.” Alex wrapped a towel around his hips and grabbed another to scrub his hair with before stepping out into the greater ship. If he’d been thinking further ahead, he would have taken a change of clothes into the bathroom with him, but he’d been too distracted by the wretch.

  She pointed her stare at the ceiling and sucked her teeth as he stepped out.

  He rolled his eyes.

  Luke, manning the small kitchenette and opening a box of spaghetti, shook his head. He’d found a pair of dry jeans to put on and a flannel shirt. “I’m certain there’s some resolution we can come to that will minimize pain and suffering all around. Maybe it would help if we all stated what our end goals are here.”

  “Why don’t you start?” Autumn pulled her legs under her bottom and twined her fingers atop her lap. “After all, you brought me to Jekh.”

  Shrugging, Luke broke the noodles into the boiling water. “I just wanted what everyone else had. Everyone close to me was pairing off, and I’m not a fan of being the third wheel.” He grimaced. “Fourth wheel, in some instances. My motives weren’t at all nefarious.”

  “Oh?” Alex wiped the residual water off his face and tossed the loose towel into the bathroom. “Not nefarious?”

  “Okay. Okay.” Luke put up his hands in defeat. “Maybe a little retaliatory, but I wouldn’t say nefarious.”

  “So you weren’t trying to hurt me, just annoy me?”

  “If we’re being perfectly honest, at that point, I didn’t care either way.”

  “Ah. I see.” Alex folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the counter’s edge. He was crowding Luke. The counter wasn’t all that wide, but he wanted to be seen.

  “You weren’t offering me very much, Duke.” Luke ripped open a packet of sauce with his teeth—the teeth that had just marked all over Alex’s skin.

  Alex was the one who had to look away, or he was going to get hard again, and he didn’t think Autumn was going to let him manhandle her off the ship so he could fuck Luke.

  “I see,” Autumn murmured. “Apparently, I stepped into a situation where at the very most, I was going to be a distraction from who you really wanted. Do you even like women?”

  Luke’s snort escalated into an outright laugh as he squeezed the sauce into a pan.

  “I don’t understand why that’s funny,” she said.

  “It’s funny because I knew that would happen,” Luke said. “You assume that just because I’m attracted to a particular man that I wouldn’t also have an interest in women. I’m not exactly in the shadows about who and what I am, Autumn. It’s just that people around me tend to be.” Luke bumped Alex with his hip and then scraped all the packaging he’d opened into the trash receptacle. “If you’d been paying attention, you would have noticed that my listing said women or men.”

  The fast furrowing of her brow hinted to Alex that Luke had hit the proverbial nail on the head. “You didn’t look,” he said, incredulous.

  She grimaced. “I mean, I didn’t think to. Also, I had my mother trawl the database to see who was on offer and she exported all the pertinent data to a spreadsheet for me. I would have had my assistant do it, but I didn’t trust that she wouldn’t leak information back to my father. My mother is a fashion designer, not a techie, but I didn’t have anyone else to help me. It was either Mom or Cree.” Autumn shrugged. “Maybe Mom didn’t think data from that column was useful.”

  “Arguably,” Luke said, bending and opening the small refrigerator compartment, “it’s not useful unless you’re weirded out by the idea that a man has touched someone else’s dick before.” He looked up at her.

  On a delay, her eyes widened and she said, “Oh,” and shook her head. “No. I’m not bothered by that.”

  Then what?

  Luke didn’t ask that, though. He rooted around in the refrigerator, whistling to himself for so long that Alex got frustrated and nudged him with the side of his leg. “What are you looking for?”

  “You got meat in here? That sauce is going to leave something to be desired.”

  “Might be some dried beef left in that cabinet beside it.”

  “Awesome.” Luke gave the bottom of Alex’s towel a playful tug and moved his search to the nearby storage compartment.

  “So, what was your end goal in coming here?” Alex asked Autumn. Questioning her seemed pointless. They all already know what she wanted, but he wanted her to enter the statement into evidence. He wanted her to hang herself with her own lies.

  “That’s complicated,” she murmured. She spun her thumbs around each other and rolled her gaze to the ceiling.

  “How?”

  “I won’t lie and say I didn’t have some business motives in mind,
but in truth, I really wanted to get away.”

  “Away from what?” Alex asked.

  She made a dismissive flick of her hand when he turned to face her.

  “You’ve gotta give him some words,” Luke said.

  “Look. I don’t want to tell a sob story. I don’t think you want to hear it, anyway.”

  Alex sure didn’t. He grabbed a pair of boxer briefs from his trunk and stepped into the bathroom to pull them on.

  “Long and short of it is I needed to get as far away as possible in order to be something for myself instead of what I was being groomed to be.”

  “Which was what?” Alex called out.

  She must have made some gesture, because Luke said, “Words, Autumn.”

  Alex piled all the used towels into the hamper, turned on the fan to dissipate some of the steam in the room, and stepped back out.

  Autumn’s gaze flicked his way and fell, lingering briefly below his waist before she looked away, red-cheeked.

  Good to know she can feel shame.

  He found pants and put them on, wondering what else she could be shamed into.

  Hmm.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back onto his forearms, looking from her, to Luke, then back.

  She was pointedly staring at the ceiling again.

  The ceiling wasn’t going to rescue her from what he had in store. He was going to send her crying all the way back to Earth with her tail between her legs, and then he could get to work figuring out how to keep Luke from trying to pull the same stunt again.

  Alex just needed a little time to warm his parents up to the idea that he’d forsaken all of the women with princess ambitions for a man who couldn’t give a shit about aristocracy and status.

  Luke was the fresh air the family needed—a man of action who meant what he said and went to unbelievable extents to take care of the people he loved.

  Alex wanted to take care of him, too, but first, he’d need to scrounge up some courage and confront his parents. They had to stand up for him and defend him.

  If they didn’t, he didn’t know where he’d be.

  Alex didn’t know what he’d become if he was no longer royal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Luke stepped in between Alex’s spread legs and gave him a scolding look.

  Thumbing the waistband of his briefs, Alex blinked. “What?”

  Luke leaned in and whispered against his ear, “You’re being a brat.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He played with one of Luke’s shirt buttons. “Go finish dinner. I’m starving.”

  “Apparently, I haven’t adequately put you in your place yet.”

  “Where is my place? In front of you with my pants down?”

  Luke closed his eyes and breathed through the heat undulating through his body and coalescing in his core. Yeah, he would have liked that—pulling Alex against him in the dark, parting his cheeks, and slipping into his ass ever so slowly.

  Wasn’t going to happen, though—not with Autumn there pretending not to watch.

  “Behave yourself,” Luke growled.

  “Or what?” Alex murmured.

  “Or trust me to figure something out that you won’t like.”

  “Well, we’ll see, then.”

  Sighing, Luke stepped away and casually adjusted his pants as he walked back to the stove. “You were saying, Autumn?”

  “Um. I…don’t know what I was saying.” Her cheeks were fire engine red. “I lost the thread of the conversation.”

  Luke could certainly see how that could happen. Between Alex’s brazen semi-nudity and Autumn’s slow-coming confession, Luke was hardly able to keep pace, either. “You said you came to Jekh because you wanted to do your own thing.”

  “Oh. Well, yes.” Brow creasing, she dragged her fingertips along the windowsill. Back and forth several times, not saying anything.

  Luke was trying to understand her thought processes, and he’d noticed that the longer they were acquainted, her responses became slower. He didn’t know if that was because she was trying to come up with better lies or if she was uncomfortable with the truth. He was pleased with the fact that she trusted him enough to consider telling him the truth, though.

  “I mean, you’d think someone my age would have an easier time with setting out on her own.” The crease between her brows deepened. “But I had to get off the planet to really be able to make anything for myself. I didn’t want to be attached to my father’s company anymore, and I didn’t want him taking credit for my work.”

  “So, you did come here to make money.” Alex accused.

  Her shoulders fell and she stopped tracing the window seam. “Of course profit is a consideration. There’s a huge untapped market here that could make a very nice livelihood for the people who get in early. That’s just smart business, and a certain amount of risk is necessary to get ahead of the pack.” She looked up at Luke. “Calculated risk, though. I try to be as careful as I can because opportunity doesn’t grant me leeway to come in with a haphazard scheme or with no plan at all. When there’s no system in place, someone has to set the standards, and I liked that I could have a shot at shaping what they’ll be. I know my last name is a detriment, but I thought I could shed people’s perceptions of me by going a different way here. Even if it costs me more upfront, I want to be the pacesetter here.”

  “And what does being the pacesetter look like to you?” Alex asked in a grumble. “Hmm?”

  She huffed and rubbed her eyes. They had bags under them, and Luke wondered if she actually slept. Every time he’d woken up on the ship during the trip down, she’d been awake.

  “If you’re asking if I’m going to throw up some slums with a beautiful gate out front, then no.” She reached into her bag and pulled her tablet onto her lap and tapped the screen. “I’ve done the research. I’ve pulled all the archival images of Jekhan architecture. I’ve studied the blueprints and have even found some references to Tyneali construction so I could understand why buildings here are constructed the way they are. I’m not going to try to replicate what housing on Earth looks like. I guarantee you, that’s what every asshole with the right permits on this planet is going to try to do. They’re going to do the same as they always have.” She cut Alex a sour look. “Without respect to the local conditions and customs.”

  Alex raised a brow at her.

  How he could always project such hostility with a single lift of an eyebrow always stunned Luke. He walked over and massaged the brow until Alex dropped it. “Behave,” he warned.

  “That’d be easier if she’d stop talking.”

  Luke gave his shoulder a pluck. “Relax.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “I’m aggressive sometimes,” she said, shrugging. “I admit that, but I also admit that sometimes, I have to be that way simply so that I don’t get suffocated under the weight of other people’s actions. I’m trying to keep my head above water in spite of the fact that I’ve got a lot of people and things trying to drag me down to where I don’t want to be.”

  “Next, she’s going to tell us she has morals, Luke.”

  “So what if I do?” She thrust the tablet at Luke. “Am I supposed to be immune to the difference between right and wrong? Believe me or not, what my mother thinks about me is far more important to me than what my father does, and I’d do anything not to make her feel ashamed. She raised me better than you seem to think.”

  “And yet your reputation says otherwise.”

  “Have you ever stopped to consider that reputations are often like gossip? There may be the tiniest kernel of truth buried deep down, but so many layers of hearsay and speculation get piled on top and after a while, no one but the person at the center knows what’s real.” Her smile was listless and fleeting. “You don’t know what it’s like to have your little sister bring you news of the newest rumor and have to worry that maybe at some point, she’ll start believing them.”

  Damn.

>   Luke had never considered that. Cree seemed to be utterly devoted to her sister. The thought of losing Cree’s faith had to be a source of constant anxiety.

  Shaking her head, Autumn stood and scraped her hands against her sides as if she’d touched something revolting and needed to get the poison off her before it seeped in.

  He knew that feeling of dirtiness. He’d experienced it far too many times in the FBI, and during every single instance, he’d wondered which side he was on.

  Patting the end of her ponytail, she paced behind the captain’s seat.

  Luke looked down the tablet, not knowing what he should do with it. What he knew about construction could probably fill a thimble.

  “I hate feeling that I sacrificed being nice. I had to throw my elbows around to maintain some dignity, that now I’m untrustworthy,” she said.

  “Your actions make you untrustworthy,” Alex said. “You should listen to your feelings.”

  Groaning, Luke moved back to the stove, wondering if he should just lock the two of them into the ship and let them have it out without his interference. That was usually what he did whenever Precious and Marco started bickering. Usually, they worked out their differences on their own and without any bloodshed, but they were family. They had a vested interested in each other. Alex and Autumn didn’t have that.

  “All I want is a chance to separate myself from what my father has done and to do my own thing here,” she said. “I can do good things here.”

  “And what would that have meant for Luke down the line?”

  Interested in that answer, Luke looked over his shoulder at her.

  She’d stopped pacing. Her brow was still furrowed, though, and she stared at the floor moving her lips silently.

  Testing the words?

  For a minute, she didn’t say anything.

  Except for the bubbling of the sauce and the boiling of water on the stove, the only noise in the vessel was their breathing. Alex’s steady and rhythmic. Hers nervous and a bit too fast. Luke’s somewhere in the middle.