Chapter Eight
“Look … I apologize for the things I said yesterday,” Belle said after glancing at Connor a couple of times when he fell into step with her when she got up to leave.
“I’m really sorry. I know you have no control over the way other people behave and I said some ugly things when I know it isn’t your fault.
I don’t have any control over other people either, though, and you might as well have painted a damned target on my back parking me right in front of Marcy Maniac!
As much as I appreciate you … trying to watch out for me, I guess, I’d really, really like it a lot better it if you just didn’t attract attention to me.
“If you’ll just leave me alone, I swear I’ll do my best to avoid her and not cause you any more problems.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. A muscle in his jaw flexed--as if he was grinding his teeth. But he didn’t say anything.
And he stayed right where he was--beside her as she left the tent.
And followed her--or rather led her--to her job assignment when they left the commissary.
Thankfully he abandoned her to her own devices after he’d made a ‘statement’ to Marcy. She felt Marcy’s laser gaze burning into the middle of back all day long.
She decided to skip supper--not because she had no appetite, but because she had a really bad feeling that Marcy would be laying in wait for her when she finished and headed back to her hab.
Connor waylaid her and walked her to the commissary.
She didn’t know whether to be unnerved, alarmed, or glad.
She was hungry and she really hadn’t been looking forward to skipping supper.
It didn’t actually get her off the hook, though. She still had to worry about Marcy jumping her before she could get back to the hab.
And then she didn’t have to because Connor walked her back to the hab.
She had to worry about one of the women that was sharing the hab with her putting a knife in her back while she was trying to sleep.
Graveyard humor.
She hoped.
She was pretty sure none of the women sharing the hab with her was psychotic enough to try to knock her off. Not as convinced as she would’ve liked to have been, but they did regular psyche evals, so ….
They were not happy, though. And she wasn’t able to go to sleep until they finally wound down from bitching about some people getting special attention. They must be fucking him to get that kind of special attention. They must think they had golden pussy or something like that.
She hadn’t even known any of them were that smitten with him.
Because Marcy had riveted her attention.
Maybe, she thought, just before she finally succumbed to exhaustion, there was a valid reason why Connor was so unapproachable?
It had never occurred to her before that it must be really difficult for a guy that had to beat women off--especially when they wanted to fork one now and then and couldn’t get away with being a total asshole.
And the fork-ees were determined to attach themselves like sucker fish the minute he did yield to the need to clean his pipes.
She’d only ever seen the mating dance from the viewpoint of the hunted--female.
She would’ve felt a lot worse for him if he’d just quit throwing her out as a target for their venom.
But nooo! Clearly he’d decided to make her his pet project.
Wallowing on people publicly was frowned upon--not completely forbidden but discouraged by peer pressure--staring, heckling, snide comments and that sort of thing.
But she got the distinct impression that he wanted to.
Either that or he didn’t think she could walk without assistance, because he steered her around by one arm if he got close enough to coil one of his plate sized hands around her upper arm.
For days after the alien man had inspired him to kiss her very publicly and throw her to the wolf pack.
Of course, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that she would have found herself in the middle of the blender anyway even if it had just been the alien man--Ryne--who’d decided to display his intentions so publicly.
It might even have been uglier.
She doubted it, but it was possible.
Because, in general, the worst case scenario was only the worst until it was put in the shade by the next worst.
As it stood, Connor’s display completely overshadowed the barbarian’s kiss. People hardly even talked about that over her head and behind her back and in front of her face … except when they ran out of material discussing Connor’s behavior.
Or when he looked at them with narrowed eyed threat of mayhem.
He was scary. No doubt about it!
She just wasn’t certain which of the two--males--was scarier.
In their own, completely different ways, she decided, it was actually pretty even.
Thankfully, Ryne and Torr returned with Roque and Terran and their woman, Noely, almost a week later--just about the time the gossip was running out of steam--that time driving a wagon sort of thing being pulled by the ugliest monster any of them had ever seen.
It was so alarming, in point of fact, that nobody even noticed the food piled on the wagon just at first.
Because they were focused on the monster and the dozen warriors that dropped out of the sky when the cart stopped at the gates.
Thankfully, apparently, they had been informed that nobody was allowed inside the gates with weapons. They didn’t posture threateningly or bellow. They handed their weapons over very docilely and looked around the colony with interest while they waited for the beast to pull the cart inside.
Connor and his men immediately approached the cart and looked everything over carefully--to be sure it wasn’t a Trojan horse carrying hidden warriors and/or weapons.
They relaxed when they saw that it was just produce--alien and completely unrecognizable--but food. Fresh from the garden.
“We brought food as a gift we hope will promote friendship,” Noely announced to Connor in a voice just loud enough to be heard by people standing close by--not as if she was actually announcing it for everyone’s benefit.
Belle was willing to give her the benefit of doubt.
She might have been a party of one and nobody cared, but she liked what she’d seen and heard from Noely.
She seemed sweet.
It was a pretty grand gesture. She was thrilled and she had no clue of what any of it was or would taste like--beyond fresh grown. She got the sense that everyone was pretty happily impressed--a little guarded, but with less tension.
Connor ushered them toward the commissary as he had before--since they still didn’t actually have a building of any kind large enough to accommodate a large group other than the food tent.
Belle started looking for Ryne as soon as the alien group began to file inside.
She thought he might have been looking for her, too.
He looked straight at her, at any rate, and the hard look in his expression seemed to soften. It wasn’t really a smile … but it seemed an acknowledgement.
And then Connor stepped between them.
It actually took her a couple of moments to register that someone was blocking her view.
Then Connor’s face came into focus.
She gaped at him for a moment and then took off in a blind panic.
It took her a little bit to find something to do to ‘look busy’--because she couldn’t gather her wits. Fortunately, she found something to occupy herself with until the group disappeared into the commissary.
Then she hit adrenaline drain and felt really weak and faint in the absence.
She didn’t think she’d missed her quarters on the ship quite as much before.
Not that she hadn’t suffered over the lack of any-damned-where for solitude, but that was mostly because she was used to being alone and it was peaceful and the noise around her cut up her peace, made it nearly impossible to focus inwardly.
And, actually, that was the main reason she missed her hab--because she had a really hard time sorting her thoughts and creating order when there was too much external activity and sounds interfering with her focus and also because she absolutely hated being watched, constantly monitored, and having people speculating about what she was thinking.
Or what the emotions were that she gave away.
It sounded paranoid, but wasn’t--because they thought she was too stupid to figure it out and kept a running commentary going that featured her--as if she was a lab rat they were studying ….
Then again, she thought judiciously, she might have been screwed anyway.
Everything inside of her was fluttering so madly it was creating absolute chaos, making it impossible to pin down the why of it.
Well, she’d definitely felt a little thrill go through her at the thought that Ryne had been looking for her and that he’d sort of smiled as if he was glad to see her.
Well, not really smiled, but … almost smiled at her.
She thought.
And that definitely thrilled her to pieces.
Because he was just an awesome creation of nature.
Actually scared the fuck out of her, too, but the thrill was definitely there.
She didn’t really know how she felt about the discovery that Connor was looking right back at her as if he thought she was staring at him.
Until she calmed down enough to realize there’d been hostility radiating from him--in waves.
Maybe he’d been looking at someone else, she wondered uneasily?
Just because it seemed like he was staring a hole in her, it didn’t necessarily follow that he was. She wasn’t standing by herself. There’d been other people around her.
Actually, she thought, feeling a modicum of relief, there’d been somebody sort of standing in front of her--not totally blocking her from view because she’d been able to see Ryne, but partly.
She didn’t have any clue of who it was--didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman--but that didn’t mean that Connor didn’t.
That was probably it, she decided--no reason for Connor to be pissed off with her. She hadn’t gone near the alien man or vice versa. And she couldn’t believe he would know she’d been looking at him anyway. He couldn’t have seen her that well.
And, good god!
Like she wasn’t allowed to look now?
It was none of Connor’s damned business if she looked or who she looked at, damn it!
She sure as hell didn’t find that possessive attitude any more welcome from him than she’d liked it when her other matches acted like she belonged to them.
She thought that was mostly, maybe, the fault of the colony administrators in all fairness.
Nobody that she’d noticed seemed to see the seed exchange as anything but breeding--as if they were lower animals instead of intelligent, thinking beings.
The bastards were so laser focused on making sure they didn’t ‘contaminate’ their gene pool or over populate, they paid almost no attention to the human factors--hormones and or emotions--apparently considered that irrelevant.
Well, they certainly noticed hormonal typhoons as each generation matured to that stage of development.
They guarded the females to make sure only the males on their list were allowed to knock them down and drag them around like cavemen--even before their birth control was removed so that they could breed when allowed to.
And that was the only two criteria they focused on--the acceptable partners and the timing in relation to optimizing the colony efforts.
Otherwise, they were free to choose, to experiment as they liked--because they were free.
The girls weren’t supposed to refuse, however--so they weren’t actually free.
She shook those thoughts off because they evoked a wave of nausea and she didn’t want to think about it, following the other workers she’d been standing with as they returned to the area where the public garden had been started.
They were told only a short while later that everyone would have a half day off to celebrate a treaty agreement with the natives.
Belle couldn’t decide whether she was excited about the idea because she was thrilled that she might see the natives again or excited because it unnerved her to realize there would likely be a good bit more traffic between the natives and the Earth village.
It was a good thing, though, she told herself, if it meant peaceful relations with their neighbors, regardless of what it meant on a personal level.
It unnerved her, however, to think it might allow more opportunities for Ryne to pursue a mating if he truly was interested in that.
She was actually pretty convinced he was interested in sex, at least, and that unnerved her even though it also intrigued her just a little. It seemed that that would have to complicate her life even more than what she was going through because of Connor, though.
Of course, as badly as she hated to admit it, she really didn’t fit in anyway.
She never had. She never had really understood why she didn’t, but it was hard to ignore the fact that people didn’t just ignore her existence.
Way too many actively disliked her for no reason that she could figure out and or disapproved of her--as if she was alien herself.
And she doubted they could disapprove of her breathing any more than they already did.
But it would be something new for them to disapprove of.
It forced her to consider something she’d been avoiding--whether it would be a huge loss to her if she was to take a dive off of the deep end and go off with aliens when she barely knew them.
The answer, of course, was that that would be insane--purely irrational.
They would never take her back if they got rid of her and she could be in a really bad place--with aliens who actually didn’t want her and wouldn’t let her hang around them, and cut off from her own people by their disapproval of her life choice.
And worse if she got pregnant by one of them instead of producing a fresh generation Earth-human colonist when that was required--because they’d sailed away from Earth with just barely what they needed for a healthy gene pool.
Because it was all they could do to manage the group they’d gathered up.
She had never agreed to that stipulation, of course. It was her grandparents that had--first gen. colonists--but everybody alive now was tied to the same contract.
And, of course, that made her acknowledge that at least a tiny part of why it had occurred to her that she might want to go with Ryne was because she really wanted to escape so that she didn’t have to choose a partner among her fellow colonists.
She didn’t actually have to, though, she reminded herself. There was an option. She could still fulfill her obligation without having to do anything scary.
And she didn’t doubt that would settle things very quietly and nicely and all of her troubles would vanish.