Wager: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 4) Page 5

  “There’s a waiting list.”

  Courtney shrugged. “So let them wait. I did what I did for Trigrian and Murki both because they needed me to, and because I adored both of them. Don’t let guilt steal away the peace you might have.”

  “Peace. Yes. I’m still getting used to peace.” Sera nodded and glanced at the clock.

  They were a little behind for dinner, but not too much. She always factored in a cushion to ensure that when she went to bed, she went to bed feeling complete and not like she’d left things undone.

  “I’ll try to keep my peace,” she said to Courtney when she looked down again. “I fought so long to get it and I don’t believe I’ll be happy with going back to the place I was.”

  That’d been a dark place. Never again did she want to spend her days doing nothing else but reminding herself that she had a child to live for.

  That wasn’t living at all. What she’d been doing was surviving.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jasper squeezed into a spot at the table between Luke and Precious Cipriani, and raised an eyebrow at the chilling look Precious gave him out of the corner of her eye. Like many women at the Beshni farm, Precious was a whiplash-inducing combination of fine-as-hell and frightening. She kind of reminded him of the twentieth-century actress Claudia Cardinale in her prime…but with a more vicious scowl.

  “Shit, what’d I do?” he asked her. “I just got here.”

  “Ignore her,” Luke said, reaching for the pan of lasagna Marco passed to him.

  “Hard to,” Jasper said. “Last lady who looked at me like that ended up shooting my truck tires.”

  “Why?” Erin asked.

  “I didn’t do anything.” Jasper unfurled his napkin onto his lap. “At least, I don’t think I did. All I did was sit down where Courtney told me, and boom—nut-withering stare.”

  Erin shrugged. “Yeah, that seems to be enough.”

  Precious twirled the end of her black braid around her index finger, rolled her eyes, and then turned her attention to dumping sugar into her coffee mug.

  Jasper scooted his chair up to the table edge and counted heads. He lost count at twelve because everyone was moving around too much, and gave up. “You guys know how to pack a kitchen, huh?”

  “The crowd will be thinner once the dining house is fully equipped,” Trigrian said from somewhere at the other end of the table. Jasper couldn’t see him past Salehi, who’d returned from his trip barely ten minutes prior. The guy’s priorities were clear: food first, then other shit.

  “Normally, we eat in shifts,” Trigrian continued, “but the last time Courtney made lasagna, we nearly had a riot on our hands from the farm hands.”

  Jasper chuckled. “A riot? Strong choice of words.”

  Headron—the lover of Erin who wasn’t born a Beshni—grunted and placed a basket of rolls on the table. “Apparently, we’d underestimated our appetites on that night. There wasn’t much left by the time the farm hands made their way to the table.”

  “That’s cold.” Jasper dropped a piping hot square of lasagna on his plate and grinned because the layers were pretty things. He hadn’t visited the farm to eat, but since he was there, he sure as shit wasn’t going to say no. Hot meals were hard to come by for single guys who couldn’t cook worth a damn.

  “Certainly an error we don’t intend to repeat,” Headron said. He lingered behind Erin long enough to drop a kiss atop her head, then retreated to the counter.

  Jasper was fascinated by the way the women with two partners could divide their attention so easily between their lovers. Seemed almost instinctual for them. Whoever needed affection got some. No battles. All things considered, the predicaments didn’t seem like such a bad one for the guys. Then again, the guys were getting a lot of attention from each other, too.

  Jasper had never been into guys, but he couldn’t help but to envy them for their little family units. He gave the shrapnel scar on his neck a scratch and turned his attention back to Erin.

  “Technically, we could be eating at our own house.” Erin rocked side to side with one of her twin sons in her arms. “But if we didn’t get together like this, we might never see each other. We get so busy during the day.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Me and my men are trying to get the bakery profitable, people come and go, using the farm as some kind of spaceship pit shop because Owen’s here and they think he can fix their computer system issues, and Sera has, like, a zillion brilliant ideas for the farm that Trigrian wants to implement all at once.”

  “Not that many,” came a quiet retort from a woman Edgar couldn’t see.

  Sera?

  He realized then that he’d never heard her speak. She hadn’t said hello when he’d entered the room or even looked his way, either.

  That was fine. Her spurning had given him a chance to get a good look at her. She was prettier than in her pictures. The pictures didn’t do her coloring justice or capture the glint of intelligence in her dark violet eyes.

  “Perhaps one good idea,” she said in the same quiet tone. “The rest are middling, at best.”

  “You’re too modest,” Erin said.

  “She is,” Trigrian said. “I tend to be hyper-focused on getting the farm’s output back to the levels of when our parents were alive, but Sera keeps me innovating. We don’t want to be stagnant here. Our future success is dependent on being aggressive planters of crops that no one else is growing.”

  “Like wheat?” Jasper held up a roll and leaned forward to look down the table from Trigrian to Sera.

  Sera was staring down at her plate. He would have killed for even a second of eye contact, if only to be sure she saw him.

  “Exactly that,” Trigrian said.

  Jasper dropped the roll onto his plate, planning to sop up sauce remnants with it later. “I’m surprised Salehi hasn’t gained twenty pounds since moving here.”

  “Who said I didn’t?” Salehi asked through a mouthful of food. “I’m wearing all black and have a full beard. I’m disguising my fluff.”

  “What fluff?” Courtney asked. “You’re one of the fittest people around here.”

  “Think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “Then that should make me more marketable, yes?”

  Courtney sighed. “God, what’s with the pity party? Are you and Eileen on the outs again?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Bullshit,” Jasper said on a phony cough. “Everyone in Little Gitano knows about the cat-and-mouse game you’re playing with your co-pilot.”

  Lil had put Salehi and Eileen together for a couple of missions during the Buinet Riots, and they’d clicked. On the surface, they didn’t have much in common. He was second-generation American whose family ran a little Middle Eastern restaurant. Like Jasper, he’d gone into the service because his family couldn’t afford to send him to college. Eileen’s family had lived in Texas for longer than she could trace back, and even after having taken a shuttle attendant gig for the better part of the last decade, she still considered herself a cowgirl. Their backgrounds weren’t at all similar, but they were the same kind of people.

  They understood each other.

  That was obvious to everyone, except maybe them.

  “Seriously,” Courtney said. “You two need to cool it with the will-they, won’t-they crap. Move in together, already, and can the pretenses.”

  “I would if I could.”

  That statement seemed to be very interesting to the kitchen’s entire adult complement, which was at least a dozen people. They all, including Jasper, leaned to look in Salehi’s direction.

  Salehi chewed. Swallowed. Blinked. “What?”

  “So, you’re saying Eileen is the holdout?” Amy asked. Amy Mauren was Eileen’s best friend, and frequent codependent.

  “Since she’s not here at the moment,” Salehi said, “I’ll say that yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. She won’t even have a conversation about our not
-relationship.”

  “I wonder why that is,” Amy said. “Maybe you should go ahead and ask her to marry you and see what happens.”

  “She’d probably go catalectic,” Courtney said.

  “When’s she due back from her errand, anyway?” Erin asked. “She was in long enough to kiss the kids, and then scooted right back out with Herris.”

  Salehi let out a breath. “Tomorrow, I believe. She doesn’t keep me apprised of her comings and goings unless I ask, and why should I have to ask?”

  Approximately half of the men at the table groaned.

  “What?”

  “Seriously, man?” Jasper asked.

  “Do better,” Owen said.

  “I knew Eileen pretty well back in Buinet,” Jasper said. “She’s a tough chick. She and Amy had been a couple of the few Terran women on the planet, so everyone in town knew them on sight.”

  Actually, Amy wasn’t Terran. She was a Jekhan politician’s daughter who’d survived the occupation by passing as purely human. If Eileen had suspected anything during the years they’d worked together as shuttle attendants, she never spoke up. “I know Eileen ain’t gonna let Salehi give her any shit, and maybe she thinks that’s what he’s serving up.”

  “Probably,” Salehi murmured.

  At least the guy was self-aware.

  “She and Fastida went with Herris to explore a lead that had been waiting in her messages about his missing daughter.” Erin shook her head solemnly. “That guy has been looking for his little girl for going on two years now. I can’t say I blame him. I would never give up on looking for one of my boys, but I worry about what’ll become of him if he doesn’t find her. He’s a shell of a man right now. I can’t imagine how he could possibly decline further.”

  “I guess they didn’t find her yet,” Marco said. “They would have called already.”

  “Yes, they would have,” Precious said.

  Jasper looked her way and she was cutting him another nasty glare. “Damn. You gonna tell me what I did to earn the stinkface?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You’re in her seat.”

  “Whose seat?”

  “Fastida’s.”

  “She’s not even here,” Marco snapped. “He’s welcome to the chair.”

  Jasper put his hands up in an I-come-in-peace gesture and looked from one sibling to the other. The last thing he wanted was to start a family squabble at the table, and he hadn’t even had a chance to fill his belly yet. “It’s not a sacred chair, is it?”

  “No,” Marco said. “Precious is being Precious. Fastida probably thinks Precious is a good girlfriend, but the rest of us think she’s annoying.”

  “Shove it, Marco,” Precious said.

  “Up yours too, bitch.”

  “Young ears around you, assholes.” Luke put the heels of his hands against his eyes and rubbed. “There are kids in the room.”

  “But you just said asshole,” Precious argued. “How’s that better?”

  “I’ll clean up my language when you two do. Apparently you two can’t have a disagreement without resorting to rated R language.”

  “Rated R language was the Cipriani family language the last time I checked,” Erin said.

  “Gotta have some vices, right?” Marco asked.

  “Amen to that,” Jasper muttered. He picked up his fork and sliced off a delectable corner of pasta.

  Get in my damn belly right now.

  “What are your vices, Jasper?” someone from down the table asked. He needed a moment to work out who the voice belonged to. Most people called him Escobar. The fact the lady had said his first name helped him determine who’d asked.

  Ais—Owen’s wife. She was the one with the Tynealean accent. No one else had that. He committed that tidbit to memory.

  “Well, lately my vices are steaks and fried eggs. Used to be coffee, but since I have to go around begging for that, I think I’m starting to get weaned.”

  Courtney laughed. “I’ll send you home with a baggie of coffee. I won’t even charge you, though I may beg a favor from you later.”

  “Fair.”

  “So, how’s work been going?” Salehi asked him.

  “Not bad. Peacekeeping is steady and stable work, and I like that. I could do without the roommates, though. Tevo ain’t so bad, but man, those other guys could make a pig wish for a breath of fresh air.”

  Feminine giggling abounded from the end of the table. He smiled, but didn’t look. He wanted to think that was Black Velvet laughing at his corny-ass joke.

  “What’s the issue?” Salehi asked. “Affordability or inventory? When I was looking around here for something, I couldn’t find anything. That’s how I ended up living in a parked spaceship on the farm.”

  “Still inventory. There’s supposed to be some rental construction going up in Little Gitano. I don’t know when. Information is sketchy, so I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a lease.”

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” Trigrian said, furrowing his brow.

  “They haven’t broken ground yet,” Amy said, “but the paperwork’s been filed and approved. “The developer is a young company on Earth we don’t know much about. Our investigators said the company is clean, though, and that they’ve promised to build to suit the look and culture of the community.”

  “Why outsiders?” Sera asked.

  Jasper leaned his forearms onto the table’s edge and tried to see her. Of course, she’d chosen that moment to sit back in her chair, and all he could see of her was her hand daintily holding her fork.

  “Well, we didn’t want to let any outsiders in to do the work,” Amy said, “but the sad truth is that even accounting for space travel time, they could get housing up much more efficiently and cheaply, and we’re bursting at the seams with all the refugees here. We can’t afford to wait.”

  “Oh. I see,” Sera said quietly.

  “I know bringing in Earth-based companies isn’t ideal, but with Erin’s help, we came up with a list of regulations as long as my forearm to hold them to. Their supply ships are due here within the next couple of months.”

  “I should have gone to the last meeting, I suppose. I would have known about that.”

  “You can’t be everywhere at once,” Trigrian said.

  “Damn right about that,” Jasper said. “Don’t feel bad.”

  No response from the Merridon corner.

  Jasper stabbed his fork into his pasta and gave his head a minute shake. Obviously, his usual conversational tactics weren’t going to pass muster. He could have usually already had a lady telling him her life, but Sera wasn’t going to volunteer a damn thing.

  “Looking to build something?” Marco asked him.

  Jasper grunted. “I guess that’s an option. I’ve been saving my money and looking around for places I might want to put a little house. I haven’t decided yet if I want to be right in town, or if I want to go off the grid a little.”

  “I could sell you a parcel here if you decide you want to be closer to the mountain,” Trigrian said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Mm-hmm. Murk and I have sold several to people we know and trust. We like the idea of dotting the property with people whose motives we understand.”

  “Well, shit, give me a figure and we’ll see if the number is one I can digest.”

  Assuming he didn’t spend any more money on wager pools, he might even be able to save a bit more aggressively.

  Even thinking about the money he’d spent made him put his elbows on the table and sneak a covert look toward the end.

  The Merridon sisters were caught up in their own private conversation, chatting quietly in Jekhani with their heads together.

  Jasper had been on Jekh for more than a decade, but his Jekhani skills were still about as good as his Klingon. Salehi probably knew what they were saying. Part of his job when they’d been working with Lil had been to keep an ear open for information from potentially hostile Jekhans. There never were any, though. Je
khans as a race weren’t especially belligerent. That was probably how they’d managed to get themselves invaded in the first place.

  As he forked more lasagna into his mouth he studied the Merridon sister in the middle. The contrasts in the trio were more notable when they sat so close together. Her elder sisters had warmer coloring. Sera was more like Trigrian—her undertones were cool blues rather than golden, giving her skin a more robust tinge, and her eye color was more in the realm of violet whereas her sisters’ irises were maroonish.

  Two and two, he thought, chewing and swallowing.

  He was pretty sure he could guess how the father splits went even without having seen what any of the senior Merridons had looked like. He could certainly understand why men who played the wagers kept trying to court them. They were beautiful women, but more than that, they were interesting to look at.

  More interesting the longer he stared.

  If Marco hadn’t turned to him, Jasper might have kept staring and probably would have probably had a night filled with fantasies that would never come true.

  Torture.

  “You got any contacts in Buinet looking to offload any old vehicles?” Marco asked him.

  Jasper leaned back in his chair and turned his attention to salad and lasagna. The bachelor meals he’d be having for awhile were going to suck in comparison. “Working vehicles or junkers you can salvage for parts?”

  “Parts,” Owen said. “Frankenstein-ing new flyers together is cheaper than us trying to retrofit the old ones to accommodate new drivers. Ideally, we’d like to get to a point where every household in or near Little Gitano has a functioning hover-flyer. So many fell out of service during the occupation.”

  “How many have you and Marco fixed?”

  “Five in our spare time. Some of those piles of junk were bound for the mechanical graveyard long before the Terrans arrived, and there’s not much we can do for those except pick them apart and give the owners a bag of coffee for the privilege.”

  “And to think, you laughed at me when I had you get me that bulk importing permit form,” Courtney said, and her gaze was locked squarely on Amy.

  Amy shrugged. “You’ve got to think of things from my perspective. The poundage those permits covered is a far larger quantity of coffee than any household would store. You have more coffee here than you have flour.”