Wager: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 4) Read online

  The guy who’d entered the yard the same time as Escobar had made his way to the other end and was prying the lid off a crate with a rusted crowbar.

  “Friend of yours?” Owen asked.

  The line between Escobar’s thick, dark brows deepened. “Nope. Happened to walk in at the same time, is all. I’ll take a stroll around him on the way out to see what kind of stuff he’s hoarding, though. Always good to know the competition.” He rubbed down the back of his thick, wavy hair and then scratched his neck. A tic of his, Marco had once noticed. Escobar had claimed he had a bit of shrapnel under his skin. Dorro hadn’t been able to find anything beneath, but Marco knew the power of psychosomatic ailments. He probably had a couple or three himself.

  Escobar looked at Owen again. “Did Salehi get back from his trip?”

  “Last time I talked to him, he was nearby. He pinged ahead on the long-distance COM channel this morning and said he should be back in Little Gitano by dinner.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  Marco grunted. “Not as much as he and Eileen hoped. They’ve been scouting those space stations for month trying to get new leads on where the slavers left all those women, and they’ve barely found ten percent of the reported missing.”

  “They bringing any back? Any at all?”

  Owen shook his head. “They only found three. They were at the acclimation center in Buinet. They were about to head this way.”

  “Three women, but any info?”

  “The usual.”

  Escobar nodded and looked toward the guy with the crowbar again. “Which means Salehi will be in investigation mode for a few weeks trying to see if the leads are any good at all, and then he’ll be right back in space. They should pay that guy more.”

  “Is he even being paid?” Marco asked. He shoved the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth and added in a muffle, “’Cause he’s not technically employed anymore.”

  Like Escobar, Salehi had once been employed by the Buinet Police. They worked under close supervision of the former commissioner, Lillian Devin. Lillian was also a member of the Jekhan Alliance rebel group, and she made it her mission in life to undo the dirty deeds of the colonial government, but she hadn’t been able to do that alone. When people like Salehi and Escobar had defected from the armed forces, she’d quietly recruited her to come work for her. For over a decade, they’d waited to act. The McGarry siblings showing up from Earth looking for their missing grandfather, and raising hell in the process, had gotten them moving.

  “He’s getting paid,” Escobar said. “There’s a grant fund some of the Jekhans in Buinet set up for guys like him who are working in hard-to-classify gigs. He’s not getting paid a whole lot, but enough to make staying on the planet a little while longer less inconvenient.”

  “Did he say he wanted to go home to Earth?” Owen asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know if he does or doesn’t. The faster ships we have access to now make the trip to Earth in a couple of weeks. We’re not as cut off as we used to be, and I think folks don’t feel the urge to haul ass the way they used to.”

  “What about you?” Marco asked. “You feeling that urge?”

  “For what? Nothing back there for me. My abuela passed five years ago, and my parents ain’t shit, so might as well stay here and try to do some good, huh? We made things worse for the Jekhans, so we’d best stick around to fix things.” He stood and shoved his hands into his pockets. To Owen, he said, “Tell your sis I’ll swing by later. I hear she’s hoarding coffee. I’ll pay her for a pound of beans.”

  “Yep,” Owen said. “I think Court’s the only person on Jekh right now who has a license to import more than ten pounds at a time. Not even Allan could get one, and he runs the damn general store.”

  Escobar guffawed. “Yeah, trust me, he was pissed about that. I told him that’s what he gets for waiting around to apply. I think he sometimes forgets how bureaucracy works. They’re so used to not having any here. So.” Escobar waggled his eyebrows and pointed to his watch. “Six o’clock okay? I can’t tell what counts for decent hours anymore. Been a bachelor for too long.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out what decent hours are,” Owen said. “My wife has her own ideas of that, but I think she might be a little more hard line about keeping a sleeping schedule than I am.”

  “She’s right, though,” Marco said. “You should try to sleep when Mike sleeps. I caught you sleeping standing up last week. That’s not safe.”

  “It’s a phase that’ll pass. The kid’ll learn to sleep sooner or later.”

  “Unless he’s a hooligan like I was.” Escobar narrowed his eyes and grinned with a suspicious amount of mirth. That grin was probably why half the women in the province referred to him as “Sergeant Suave.” They were suckers for large-muscled men with accents, apparently. Even Marco’s sister was caught occasionally in Escobar’s spell, and she was an unequivocal lesbian.

  “I was on the streets all night long looking for trouble to get into,” Escobar said, “and would climb back into my bedroom window by five in the morning. My abuela was none the wiser.”

  Grimacing, Owen thumbed his sternum. “Thought I’d gotten rid of that heartburn.”

  “Heh, heh.” Escobar cuffed his arm and started striding toward the exit. “See ya later, maybe. Oh. Hey.” He stopped. Turned. “Would you happen to know if Sera will be around?”

  “Sera?” Marco was stunned to hear the name and his pinched expression probably showed that. The youngest Merridon sister wasn’t the sort of woman people asked after. Unlike Ara, she didn’t put herself out there and try to get to know everyone in town at least by face. And unlike Valen, she didn’t make frequent trips into Little Gitano for supplies or to visit with old friends of their late parents.

  “She’ll probably be there,” Owen said slowly. “Why?”

  “No reason, really.” Escobar spun on his heel and resumed his course to the gate. “Checking in with some of the ladies and seeing how they’re adjusting to being home. I guess I’m just curious.” Escobar threw up a hand in farewell.

  “‘Just curious,’ my ass,” Owen said, reaching for the last of the empty crates they’d brought to haul scraps home in.

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “Hell no, but I’ve got trust issues.”

  “What do you think he really wants with Sera?”

  Owen shrugged and dropped a strip of solar paneling from the flyer into the crate. “Either info or company. This isn’t like Boston. The amount of potential motives isn’t especially multitudinous.”

  He was right about that. People’s priorities in a frontier town tended to be all about survival, followed closely by quality of life, with profit coming in third place. If Marco had to place a wager, he’d guess that Escobar was scouting for a date.

  “Sera, though?” Marco muttered.

  “What?” Owen asked.

  Marco shrugged. “I’m thinking about who would possibly want to bother her. She doesn’t give anyone the time of day.”

  “Yeah, well, Escobar’s a bold motherfucker. If anyone would try to make something happen, he’d be a likely party.”

  “Hmm.” Marco rubbed his chin contemplatively as he moved to the other side of the flyer to help Owen pry up the solar panels.

  Sera Merridon was a beautiful woman. He’d needed weeks to make that discovery. She didn’t look men in the eyes or even raise her head in their presence most of the time. Most of the glimpses he’d had of her had been of her profile at the long dinner table at the farmhouse. For the most part, she limited her conversation to the ladies who clustered at the end and kept most of her attention on her daughter. She kept herself busy during the day doing farm chores with her brother. She may have only had one working arm, but she only needed one for the tasks she was most proficient at. She’d been born there and had lived there until the Merridon parents were killed in an accident.

  She liked her routines and stuck to them. Marco didn’t thin
k she was going to appreciate Escobar disrupting them.

  He tossed a panel into the crate and picked up a pair of pliers to attack the last one.

  I could be wrong.

  The truth was, he didn’t know shit about what women liked or wanted. For all he knew, Escobar was going about things the right way simply by taking his chances, and Marco should probably look to men like him who led by example.

  That was, if he really ever wanted to find a lady to pair off with. Obviously, he’d been trying to do shit in the wrong order. Being a thirty-something-year-old virgin was all well and good from a Catholic kind of standpoint, but from a mammalian one, there were some serious hardships.

  Women thought he was a chore. “Seriously, Marco?” the last one had said when he’d nudged her hand away from his fly.

  They all thought something was wrong with him. Even the ones he’d reached out to via dating websites had only liked the idea of a virgin man in principle. He didn’t have baggage. He wouldn’t have so many bad habits, supposedly.

  Marco would have killed for a few bad habits.

  He wasn’t going to tell people anymore and would do anything he could going forward to rid himself of the condition. He still cared about his mortal soul a great deal, but he’d become increasingly more practical in the past few years.

  He was on Jekh. New rules applied. Although unlike with Jekhan men who needed female partners to keep their hormones regulated, Marco wouldn’t be in any dire straits if he abstained. He’d simply be left out in the dust and ignored by the women who’d potentially give him the time of day because they’d think something was wrong with him.

  There wasn’t anything wrong. He’d wanted to wait because that was what he’d been taught, and he’d somehow ended up on a planet where marriage wasn’t actually a thing, and he’d probably die before he had a woman’s comfort.

  That didn’t sound right to him.

  He gave the panel a hard yank and smiled with satisfaction at the loud creak it made as it detached from the vehicle.

  Something opened up in him then—a sort of calm that came from revelation or permission to do something long-denied. Permission to accept the imperfections of human nature and to connect in the way animals did.

  Marco didn’t know if he’d be happier in the end, but he was certainly happier standing in that salvage yard, and he was going to take that as a good omen. Happiness had been a hard prospect for him for a very long time. He never would have thought that the way forward would be made clearer by his abdication of piety.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sera Merridon was always first to the dinner table, and the proclivity wasn’t because she was always so eager to eat, but because such was her routine. Her brother’s woman, Courtney, always tried to get food ready by six, but her plans were often laid to waste by the unpredictability of the people around her, or of simple farm chaos.

  Sera tried to help in the small ways she could because she depended on schedules and on things happening at about the same time everyday. After having endured more than a decade of being yanked from one pimp to the next and hoping each night simply to wake the next morning, familiar things kept her sane.

  She set the last of the plates onto the table and waited for her daughter, Elken, to set out the utensils.

  Courtney glanced over her shoulder while pulling a pan of some kind of bubbling casserole out of the oven. “You’re too good for these people,” she said with a chuckle. “Before you came, they were used to getting their plates from a pile and serving themselves buffet-style.”

  “I like the order. Less crowding this way.”

  “Mmm. How’d you sleep last night?” Courtney bumped the oven door closed with the side of her leg and turned down the burner beneath a large pot on the stove. “Did the melatonin my mother sent help? She didn’t know if the supplement would do any good for people with hybrid physiology, but Dorro thought it couldn’t hurt.”

  Sera put the hand of her good arm on her hip and waited for Elken to decide which color napkins to pull out of the crate on the serving rack. Sera could never guess the child’s preferences because she was three, and three-year-olds were apparently fickle little creatures.

  She picked the blue ones.

  Hmm.

  “I slept quite well, actually. Thank you.” Sera looked to Courtney, who had an eyebrow cocked in that human-like way Sera was still trying to adapt to seeing. She’d been stunned to learn that her brother had a human woman, but she’d gotten over the shock somewhere between the Hemero-Dinin space station and Jekh. Courtney’s brother Owen, accompanied by the Cipriani brothers Marco and Luke, as well as other Terran men like Edgar Salehi, had rescued Sera and other Jekhan prostitutes from the station. They’d gone out specifically looking for women like them to take them home. The women had long since hoped for rescue and couldn’t believe their fortune.

  Some still probably thought they were dreaming, but truly, they were home.

  Even if home looked a lot different than it once did.

  Trusting human men was a difficult prospect after having endured more than a decade of abuse from the ones who’d held her and her sisters captive—the ones who’d raped them and left them for dead, on more than one occasion—but she tried to be neutral about the ones she didn’t know well until she had a reason to behave otherwise.

  And Courtney…well, she was the mother of Sera’s only nephew, and Sera loved that child. She couldn’t hate his mother because of what she was. She would have to hate Elken, too.

  Elken’s father was human, although amongst the worst possible sort. If Sera were lucky, the man had been shot out of the sky along with other rapists in his ship, and Elken would never have to encounter him. Sera didn’t know which human man Elken’s father was. She’d been raped too many times in that period four years ago, but he was human. Dorro had done tests on Elken. She was approximately one-quarter Tyneali and three quarters human. He had a friend trying to do a DNA match to discover who Elken’s sire had been, not because Sera had any particular desire to contact him, but because Trigrian planned to sue him for everything he had.

  Or perhaps his partner Murki did. She wasn’t quite sure who had come up with the idea. It seemed a decidedly Murki thing to do. The Beshnis weren’t the sort who’d let insults go unpunished, and when Beshnis had in their minds to do things, people got out of the way and let them.

  Elken dropped the first of the napkins onto a place setting.

  “Such a good helper,” Sera murmured.

  Elken beamed.

  “What were you thinking about?” Courtney asked. “You were wearing a really pensive expression a moment ago.”

  Sera gave a dismissive flick of her hand, not wanting to worry her. Courtney had enough to fret about already. Sera hated to admit it, but Courtney ran the farm far better than Sera’s mother ever had, and Courtney had never even lived on a farm before fleeing Buinet. She simply had the right personality for delegating. Sera’s mother had always been too gentle to ask for anything.

  “This…suing thing,” Sera said. “I suppose I don’t completely understand the point. Trigrian didn’t explain the conventions well, but he said we had to finish what we started.”

  “Ah.” Courtney draped a dishtowel over her shoulder and, smiling, watched Elken track back to the rack for more napkins. She’d been giggling all day at Elken’s dress. Her mother had sent the garment from Earth, and the stretchy fabric was printed with a pattern of something called “side-eye smileys.” Courtney had said she’d explain the old Terran reference to her as soon as she had a moment to turn on her computer.

  “The idea was one that was floated around in the transitional government. Some of the Terrans who hung around suggested that people needed to be punished for their bad behavior, and in Terran ways to discourage them from attempting the same schemes again. There are people on Earth who are going to do everything they can to enforce the decisions that are made here.”

  “I have to ask,” Sera said
. “Was it Murki’s doing?”

  Courtney smiled in a troublemaking way that suggested that, yes, the suggestion had been Murki’s.

  “Ah.”

  “What Unc Murk do?” Elken asked.

  “Looking out for me, is all,” Sera said. She smoothed her daughter’s hair back from her little face and took the napkins from her.

  “Is he much the same as he was when he was younger?” Courtney asked. “I don’t know how much you remember about him. He and Trigrian moved out on their own when you were still pretty young, right?”

  “Yes. Quite.”

  After her parents had died, the Beshni family had gathered up the Merridon children and took them to Buinet to live with them. Murki had connected with her brother Trigrian and they became lovers, and moved out on their own. She’d always thought they suited each other. Murki was aggressive and driven—as all the Beshni men were—and Trigrian was more laidback. They balanced each other well. Sera didn’t think Trigrian could have done better, and Murki obviously loved her brother.

  Sera let out a breath and placed napkins beside plates. “I don’t want to make trouble, but if Murki thinks suing is a good idea, I trust him.”

  “They’ll be doing something called a blind suit,” Courtney said. “The guy will never know which Jekhan party brought the case against him. Only the judge hearing the case will know all the details. That should diminish the amount of potential retribution from him and dillweeds like him.”

  “That makes me feel better. I worried about that.”

  “Murki wouldn’t do anything to put you at risk. Pompous butt that he may be at times, he does try to minimize the amount of unnecessary attention this farm and the people who live here get. Besides, I doubt you’ll be the only one suing the guy. You probably won’t be able to squeeze much out of him, but if you do, that’s cash you’ll have for the future.”

  “Money for Elken.”

  Elken was ignoring the conversation—and her task of assisting in setting the table. Courtney’s daughter, Kerry, had tottered into the kitchen with her father Murki on her heels, and Elken couldn’t avoid little ones…or rather littler ones. She was typically Jekhan in that way.