Salvo: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 3) Page 5

  Then she’d felt guilty even for thinking such a thing.

  She didn’t like hurting people, even if they deserved the ill treatment. They weren’t the ones who’d have to live with the blemished conscience—she would be.

  As she breathed out one of her marathon-length sighs, she turned her head to better see the dark object sticking out in her periphery atop the pure white of the covers. She brought the object to the side of her face, scowling as the noises at the front of the house intensified. There were so many voices, and she wondered if the entire farm was awake.

  The fabric she plied between her fingers was apparently a shirt, and the scent that had polluted her nostrils struck her on a delay.

  Woods. Coffee. Oil.

  Owen’s.

  “Ugh.”

  The scent wasn’t entirely repugnant, or perhaps not even a little bit. The smell was familiar, but it triggered a visceral sort of loathing, both toward him and herself. She hated him for being so cruel, and hated herself for wishing he’d be kind.

  I’m going daft.

  She’d never wished for Reg to be kind. She’d only wished he’d go away.

  There was no use trying to go back to sleep with all the noise. Even if she plugged her ears, curiosity would hold her in the wakeful realm, and her growling stomach would do the job if nosiness didn’t.

  She patted the nightstand between her bed and Fastida’s until she found the small digital clock. Fastida had programmed the settings so the numbers appeared in red, which Ais could almost always see.

  “Four,” she whispered.

  Going back to sleep truly was pointless. Dawn would arrive soon, and the farm would be filled with even more noises as the inhabitants prepared for their long day of work.

  She set the clock back on the surface and planted her feet on the floor.

  Gripping the shirt, which she planned to return to its neglectful owner, she padded to the door and out into the hall.

  Some of the blurry vision the painkiller caused had cleared with a few hours of sleep, and she was able to walk without gripping the walls, though she did pay extra attention when rounding the corner toward the gathering room so she didn’t stub her toes. Already, she’d suffered three sprains to her smallest toes.

  The voices weren’t in the recessed gathering room, like she’d thought, or even in the kitchen. They were outside and just beyond the front door. She could see figures passing by, and could clearly hear their chatter as she approached.

  “He said fifteen minutes,” Owen said.

  Who?

  “Damn.” Eileen whistled low. Ais caught the shake of her blond ponytail as she stepped outside. “I hope they’re better at entering an atmosphere than Edgar.”

  “Given the circumstances,” Murki’s voice was muffled as if he were far beyond the doorway, “your beau does commendable piloting.”

  Eileen scoffed. “Edgar is not my beau.”

  “I see,” Murki said flatly. “My apologies.”

  Someone snorted, and Ais suspected the noise had come from Courtney. She and Erin regularly teased Eileen about her relationship—or lack of relationship—with Edgar. They made bets with each other about when the two would finally make the pairing official. Ais had a date in mind, though she wouldn’t admit that she did. She didn’t want Eileen to be upset with her for playing along, but it was obvious to Ais that her two friends had chemistry of a certain sort.

  “What are you doing up, girlie?” Eileen draped an arm around Ais’s shoulders and pulled her into the gathering of residents.

  Ais’s quick and dirty count said that almost everyone was there. Courtney with her men Trigrian and Murki were closest. With more squinting, Ais made out Murki carrying their baby Kerry—another person who shouldn’t have been awake.

  Farther down the exterior wall, Erin was leaning onto a couple of stacked fruit crates. Normally, her lover Esteben would have probably been standing behind her, rubbing her back or some other tender gesture, but he was in orbit helping Jekhan engineers reconstruct the communications network. Had Headron been back from his journey, he likely would have been standing intimately close, too.

  Near Erin, Fastida whispered in hushed tones to Amy.

  Ais blinked again and again, trying to bring the taller woman into focus.

  My cousin.

  She’d been unable to digest the revelation of their familial relationship, and didn’t know what to say…or if she should say anything. Jekhan relationships were so complicated, and without the ability to easily read facial expressions, Ais could never tell if she’d made a social blunder.

  Best to keep quiet, maybe.

  She continued her scan of the loiterers.

  Fastida’s mother, Cet, stood near the farmhands, chattering at them in Jekhan in the scolding way she always did. Apparently, the men had been sloppy in pinning their hair—a terrible social gaffe.

  Ais noted Owen, but didn’t let her gaze dwell on him, although she held his shirt in her grip.

  The only person unaccounted for was Herris. The shoemaker never really checked in or out anymore. He’d been on the hunt for his daughter who had gone missing during the Buinet Riots. Whenever he had a new lead or thought of a new place to look, he left, and rarely told anyone which direction he was heading in. She felt badly for the man, and often wished there was some way she could help him.

  Eileen gave Ais’s braid a flick. “You tuning me out, girlie?”

  Ais cringed. “Sorry. Was loud. Why loud?”

  “Oh.” Eileen straightened up a little. “Apparently, we’re expecting guests, and not Salehi and company.”

  Right. Ais nodded. She’d heard that much of Owen’s COM conversation, but she hadn’t caught on that the visitors would be arriving so soon. Then again, she hadn’t been a particularly active listener. The medication had turned her brain into chaff.

  “How are ya feeling?” Eileen asked.

  Ais shrugged. “Medicine, leaving.”

  “Want more?” Courtney asked.

  Ais gave her head a hard shake and pointed to her eyes. “Makes poor.”

  “Yeah. The drug’s probably doing weird stuff to your blood pressure. If you’d like to try some plain-old Tylenol or something, let me know. Acetaminophen won’t take the pain away the same way Doc’s juice does, but at least it’ll dull the edge.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you excited about getting your eyes fixed?” Eileen asked. “Dorro said he could fix some of the deformity.”

  Grimacing, Ais turned her hands over. “Excited? No. Scared, but ready.”

  The doctor hadn’t made her any promises, but if he could undo the defects, Ais could be normal. Or as normal as could be expected for a Tyneali hybrid raised in a laboratory, anyway.

  She was staring at her bare toes wriggling in front of her gown’s hem when a shadow blocked them out.

  She needn’t have looked up. Even though he’d bathed and washed off most of the previous day’s exertion, she recognized the scent of the man who owned that shadow. She was holding his shirt.

  He wriggled the garment out from her grip. “I thought I told you to do something,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes, not that he could see them with her looking down the way she was.

  She wasn’t going to confine herself to a single room for any stretch of time at his bidding. In spite of what he might have believed, she wasn’t some pet in need of crating or training.

  “Go inside,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Owen,” Courtney said impatiently. “We’re all standing here. You think she’s going to get lost with all of us standing around?”

  “This is a discussion between her and me.”

  “Yeah, says you to the sister who’s a little quicker on the uptake than you like giving credit for. You have a habit of treating grown-ass women like kids sometimes, and I’m just making sure that’s not what you’re doing.”

  Ais believed he was, but didn’t say so
aloud. Getting in the middle of a McGarry argument was rarely a productive use of time. The only person who was any good at intervening was Mr. McGarry, and he was in Buinet “rallying the troops,” as Courtney tended to say. Ais had grown fond of the older man. Although he shared a name with his grandson, they weren’t really so similar. Mr. McGarry actually had a sense of humor, and he cared about her opinions.

  The breeze notched up and a chill pummeled through Ais’s thin nightclothes. She rubbed her arms and, with one last glance at the pre-dawn sky, turned on her heels. She simply wasn’t made of strong enough stuff.

  “I go,” she told Eileen. “Warm inside.”

  She didn’t want Owen to think he’d won, but she didn’t want to argue with him in front of everyone. He would dominate the discussion, and she really would look like a little fool.

  Carefully, she made her way around the circular gathering space and then traveled down the hallway without incident.

  By the time she made her way back to her bedroom door, the shadow had caught up to her.

  She sighed and didn’t even bother closing the door on him.

  He said nothing as she climbed into bed and burrowed beneath the covers once more. He didn’t even say anything when he looked down at her and pressed his hands to the edge of the bed.

  Her vision was clear enough that she could make out the angry set of his features and, for the first time, the pale blue of his eyes. Blue wasn’t a color she could see well, but perhaps the light in the room was just right to allow her to see the contrast. Only for a moment, though. The blue bled into the white and the white into the pale tan of his skin, and he was a blur once more.

  She was frustrated at being unable to clearly see her antagonist, but she refused to be angry with herself anymore for the things her body couldn’t do.

  His exhalation came out hard and sharp as he gripped her wrists and, startled by the sudden touch, she seized beneath him.

  He leaned onto the bed with his knee, raised one arm up and behind Ais’s head, and then the other.

  “What doing?” She tried to tug her arms away from him, but he was too strong.

  He dropped her wrists and into her ear, whispered, “Trying to see how much rope I need.”

  “You joke.”

  “I guess you’ll find out.”

  “Fastida room, too.” He couldn’t tie Ais up and leave her there to be discovered. That would be unreasonable, even for a man like him, she hoped.

  “You know who else has a bed with posts?” he asked.

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Me. And guess what?”

  She wasn’t so sure she wanted to. He was, by far, too unpredictable for her to even begin to guess. Still, the whispered, “What?” slipped through her lips.

  “My door locks.”

  Locks… Locked in.

  She shook her head harder. “No. Would not.”

  “Oh, I would, just to moderate my frustration. With the Ciprianis here, folks are going to have to move around, anyway, so that everyone has a bed. I have no problem with giving up mine so I can keep you tied to it, and you can give up this bed for Precious.”

  “Precious?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Being so close, the heat of his breath sparked warmth in her that traveled down her face to her core. Minutes ago when they’d been outside, she would have welcomed that warmth, but in the room, the heat frightened her—or the cause, rather. He shouldn’t have made her hot inside, but the opposite.

  “Precious is a lady who knows how to get herself out of trouble,” Owen said.

  Unlike me?

  “She and Fastida will get along just fine.”

  “And me?”

  “And you’ll stay out of trouble if you can’t move.”

  “No.” Her intention had been to sit up, but he’d grabbed her wrists again, and had pinned them at either side of her head.

  He pulled in a breath and then bent, whispering, “I’m going to go greet my friends, and you’re going to stay here and behave. Go back to sleep. Rest your eyes, right?”

  “No.”

  “Yes. When breakfast is ready, I’ll come get you. After breakfast…”

  She was shaking her head hard, and apparently he didn’t like that, because he pressed her cheeks between his hands and held her face still.

  His palms were rough against her skin, and his touch should have made her recoil, but he held her in an odd sort of thrall. When the Tyneali males in the lab touched her face with their cold, smooth hands, she’d held her breath and waited for them to go away. They touched her only to inspect her. She was an experiment. Owen touched her like she was a person…granted, one he didn’t particularly like, but his touch thrilled her, anyway. Perhaps because he was unobtainable. She had no hope of tantalizing the enigmatic Owen McGarry.

  “After breakfast,” he whispered through clenched teeth, “we’ll move you into the hunter’s cottage, and no one will care, because they’ll all know there’s no trouble for you to get into there. No giant pool of water for you to fall into, no stairs for you to tumble down.”

  “And you lock.”

  “That’s right, I’ll lock you in like Rapunzel.”

  “Don’t understand.”

  “Good. Then you won’t try to plan a similar escape.”

  “Hate you.”

  He sighed and passed his hands down her face to her neck, then let them rest on her shoulders. He was pinning her more than feeling her.

  The last time she’d been pinned in such a way, she’d flailed and screamed, and Reg had slapped her hard.

  She didn’t feel any compulsion to fight Owen, though. He wasn’t trying to get inside her—just annoy her. Owen thought she was a child. He didn’t want her for the same things Reg had.

  “I’m glad you hate me,” he said. “That way, you’ll think about my disapproval before you commit to doing something that’ll get you killed.”

  “How outside get killed? Just waiting.” She’d only gone outside to see what the noise was. He had to know that.

  “One thing leads to another, right?” He moved away from the bed. “One moment, you’re outside waiting for a spaceship to land. The next, you’re trotting off on some adventure you got a wild hair for, and everyone else is too distracted to realize you need an escort.”

  “No escort.”

  “Not gonna argue with you. After you get your eyes fixed, if they’re even fixable, you do whatever the hell you want. Until then…”

  He didn’t finish his warning, but he didn’t really need to. She caught the gist.

  He closed the door before he could catch her crying.

  What else was she supposed to do, having never learned any other coping mechanisms but to cry? Reg had hurt her in many ways, but never once had he made her cry.

  ___

  Breakfast was usually served no later than seven, and as the hour crept closer to ten and Owen didn’t arrive, Ais pondered taking matters into her own hands. The window over Fastida’s bed was just large enough for a woman of Ais’s size to wriggle through, and there were extra food stores in the barn. She imagined gorging herself and returning to her room in the manner in which she’d left, triumphantly grinning at herself. She figured that would serve Owen right for treating her like some kind of caged pet that he could neglect on a whim.

  Right as she began to give serious thought to putting on her cloak and going, Owen let himself in. “Let’s go.”

  She huffed at his silhouette in the doorway.

  From where she sat on the bed, she couldn’t guess his mood or expression. She imagined, though, that he wore some sour glower no decent person deserved being the recipient of.

  Ignore.

  She folded her fingers atop her lap and closed her eyes.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  “Ears good. Eyes bad.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  The laughter of unfamiliar voices coalesced and thundered from the front of the hous
e. His friends, perhaps. She’d been trying to extricate each voice from the others and imagining what the owners of those sounds must have looked like. One was deep and bombastic. She attached that voice to a mental image of a tall, broad man. One voice was dry and mellow. She pictured a voluptuous woman with perfect breasts and a tiny waist, like she’d seen in so many old Earth Western movies. Another voice was low and threaded through with mirth, and she pictured bright eyes, and wide grin, and ginger hair, for some reason. She was almost never right, but the guessing was fun, anyway.

  “Ais—”

  “Heard you. No yell.”

  “I didn’t yell.”

  “Loud, still.”

  He shifted his weight.

  She stood, ready to join the crowd, not only to fill her belly, but to assuage her curiosity about the newcomers as well.

  Owen strode into the room with what she made out to be a bag.

  “What for?”

  “I was going to let you do the packing, but we’ll be out faster if I do the work.” He pulled open the first of the nightstand drawers. “What in here is yours?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me what’s yours so I can pack for you.”

  “I—” What is he going on about? She scowled at him, doubting he’d care so much, but making the expression certainly improved her mood substantially.

  “Never mind. I’ll just grab whatever’s familiar, and Fastida can pluck out the rest later.” He rummaged quickly through the drawers, grabbed her cloak and spare dress from their respective pegs, and then swept some things from the vanity counter into the sack.

  He tugged her skirt up, and she slapped at his hands. “What do?”

  “Chill out. I’m just checking to see if you’re wearing shoes.”

  “I wear,” she said indignantly. She was always put together as much as she could be when people had to look at her. That meant tidy hair and covered feet.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  He sighed, took her by the arm, and manhandled her down the bright hallway and toward the din of voices.

  She angled toward the noise, but as they approached the gathering space, he pulled her in the opposite direction. The room was empty as they passed through and then out the open front door.