10. Only One Bed
“I’d prefer if you didn’t take that tone with me, sir,” I challenged Vaughn.
All I could think was, damn, Natalie works fast.
“Lark.” Vaughn ground his teeth. “What. Have. You. Done?”
“It was an accident.” I decided on the spot that playing innocent was the optimal path, given Vaughn’s less-than-enthusiastic response. Although I should have seen that coming, I just hadn’t anticipated that Natalie would change the schedule immediately.
“Talk,” he commanded.
Geez, why did I actually like it when he sounded all serious and moody?
“Natalie caught me in the mess, and I was having a rough morning, and I wasn’t thinking—”
“Wasn’t thinking about what?”
“Well she asked me how things were between us, and I said I hadn’t seen you in days.” I glared at him, silently berating him for ignoring me, and even more than that, for refusing to work with me. “And she said she could fix it and left before I could tell her it was okay.”
Vaughn ran his hands down his face in frustration, slumping into the desk chair on the far side of the room. “You have no idea how fucked we are now,” he grumbled.
“It’s not that bad. I don’t snore or anything…do you?” I lifted a brow.
Vaughn glared at me. “There’s a camera in the corner above the bathroom door.”
“What!?” I spun around, frantically searching, finding a pinprick of black a moment later. Man, I was rusty. I hadn’t considered cameras in the bedrooms, but the ship was so new. “You’ve been watching me!?” I accused Vaughn.
“What!?” he exclaimed. “NO!”
“Then what!?”
“They’re in every room—every space on the ship, for safety. Nobody monitors the feeds unless it’s needed, but the footage is kept.” He shook his head.
“I presume there’s no audio, since you’re speaking freely.” I glanced back up at the camera, unable to prevent a blush from flowing into my cheeks. I’d been walking around the room half naked for days, thinking I had some sort of privacy.
“No, there’s no audio. Thank Christ.” He exhaled. “But we’ll have to operate as if we’re being monitored. Meridian has their hooks in this ship, and I’d be a fool to think they don’t have access to the video feed.”
I didn’t like the idea of being watched on this ship, no matter what time or where I was, even though I had assumed as much in the public areas. “You should have told me.”
Vaughn released an exasperated sigh. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” I offered, knowing he wouldn’t take me up on it.
“Go to bed, Trouble,” he deadpanned before staggering into the bathroom. I had the sense that if the doors were capable of slamming, he would have done so. Unfortunately for him, they were automatic, so his exit was punctuated with a quiet whoosh of the mechanisms.
Well, that hadn’t exactly gone to plan.
I stared at the bathroom door, trying to reassess the situation. I’d gotten what I’d wanted. We were in the same space, and would be for quite some time, and again tomorrow. Vaughn was pissed, but he’d chill out eventually. The question was, what did I want to get out of the situation first?
Vaughn had looked completely beat. I had wanted to put up more of a fight, truth be told, because pushing his buttons was somewhat amusing, but seeing how tired he’d appeared made me feel a little bad about the whole thing.
And obviously I hadn’t known about the stupid camera, which complicated things. But in another respect, maybe if I attempted to seduce Vaughn, he’d be more willing to work with me. I’d had to do worse on past missions, and at least Vaughn was my type.
If I could just get him to share a little bit of information with me, I could show him that I could be an asset. We clearly had our own strengths, and I could easily see why Darren had paired the two of us together on this mission. We needed each other. Surely Vaughn had to see that.
The bathroom door snicked open, revealing a shirtless Vaughn, and all thoughts of reason immediately flew out of my head.
Fuck. The guy was built.
I wasn’t sure if I was looking at his chest or simply a wall of muscle…
both, I supposed. Along his entire left arm was a tattoo sleeve that mimicked scales, and although they were shaded in to appear real, the lines that outlined each one were uniquely curved.
As he paced toward me, I realized they were words that formed each curved line. How fascinating.
Each muscle was neatly carved along his body, and equally covered with a patchwork of different tattoos in various sizes and artwork styles, telling a story all their own. I wanted to map them out and learn what they meant to him.
Each bump and ridge of his body had clearly been earned through hard work in the ship’s gym, or hard labor of some sort. The lines at the edges of his lower torso, leading beneath the hem of his pants, were particularly captivating.
I gulped, wondering what it would be like to trace each one with my finger…
or perhaps my tongue. Despite him being exactly my type, I’d never dated or been with someone who had a physique like his.
I think part of what led to such attraction was the idea of being with someone who was physically larger than me.
At five feet, ten inches, I was tall for a woman, and it made it that much more challenging to find men who were at least my height, although I preferred them taller. And Vaughn…was much taller…much larger. In fact, when I was near him, he made me feel downright petite; I relished the thought.
“Did nobody ever teach you it’s rude to stare?”
I snapped my jaw closed. I hadn’t meant to ogle him. “I figured you’d at least wear a shirt to bed, since we have to share now.”
“Thanks to you,” he grumbled.
“So where are you with the mission?” I asked, scooting back into the nook the bed was nestled against.
Vaughn glared at me, silently saying, fuck off, I’m not sharing any intel with you.
“Fine, then let’s talk about how you’re overtaxing the engines and you wiped all of Sully’s coding optimizations when he left, even though they were most certainly illegal anyway.” I stared up at him petulantly.
“We’ve got deadlines to meet that are out of my control, and Sully found a way to make them work.
If you’re half as good of an engineer as you claim to be, it shouldn’t be a problem for you to jerry-rig the systems, as needed, to keep propulsion at the required levels.
” He folded his arms over his chest as if to challenge me for a rebuttal.
It wasn’t that he was wrong. I was that good, but I didn’t like his tone. And I didn’t like sacrificing the life of his ship parts to avoid temporary shutdowns of somewhat essential life support systems.
“Is that why you ignore my calls on the comm?” I mirrored his posture, also folding my arms over my chest, jeering at him for good measure.
He raised a brow at my mimicry. “I ignore your calls because I don’t have time for whatever annoying complaints I know you’ll unleash upon me.”
I felt my jaw clench. I was ready to spew a slew of curses at him, but then I realized that was exactly what he wanted. He was trying to portray me as some inexperienced, irrational, and emotional woman, and I wouldn’t give him the opportunity.
“You should know if your chief engineer is calling you, it’s for good reason.”
“Then what were you calling about?”
I could feel my face go red. Because I had been calling to complain. Because I had been calling to annoy him. Because I had no argument to properly combat him.
“I hate you,” I spat instead.
He merely smirked in response.
“You’re running this ship into the ground. You’ll need a new engine in less than two years, which will increase your debt by a shit ton of credits,” I growled in a warning. “I can circumvent any system I want. I can get us to Vesta in half the time, but at what fucking cost, Vaughn?”
His bravado faltered slightly.
“I’m trying to help you, dickhead. But fine. You don’t want my help. I got it. I’ll take care of everything on my own, just like you wanted. Just like I’m used to.” I dramatically flopped over in the bed, pulling the covers over my head and facing the wall.
How was it that every time I came in hoping to discover a way to work with this doofus, he found a new way to annoy me?
Sure, it was my fault Natalie had switched the schedule around, but if he’d given me the time of day before, or allowed her to put us on the same schedule in the first place, like she’d wanted, because of our supposed relationship, none of this would have happened.
It was simple to blame Vaughn for everything that was going wrong. I could easily make an argument for why I’d had a hard time getting to know the crew outside of Natalie, who had adopted me more than I had interrogated her.
There had to be a path forward where we could work together, but I couldn’t see it just yet.
He needed to meet me in the middle a little, even if that middle was mostly on his side.
Surely he could see we couldn’t do this alone.
I needed his access and insight, and he needed my ability to see people for who they were without being clouded by his relationships with them, as their captain.
I felt the mattress compress next to me, and I pulled the covers over me more snugly.
I didn’t have any concerns that Vaughn would try something, but it pissed me off that this would have been an opportune time for us to share what we’d learned since taking off almost a week ago, and he was squandering it.
Peeking over the covers, I found Vaughn was still shirtless and had his back leaning against the wall that doubled as a headboard, his long, thick, muscular legs stretched out before him, one ankle casually crossed over the other as he scrolled on his comm, ignoring me completely.
“Go to bed,” he growled while his eyes remained on the screen in front of him.
“Fuck you,” I hissed, diving under the covers again, trying not to smile as I heard him chuckle softly next to me.