Chapter 11
Keelo
“You’re wet.” I state the obvious, staring at the female standing in the open doorway of the cockpit. She’s removed her boots, displaying small feet, with one, two, three…five toes, each decorated by chipped and peeling nail paint in vibrant red.
Nails not claws.
Soft skin not scales or plated armor.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asks, looking down at her dripping clothes, displaying her blunt teeth in a sign of…
aggression? Not judging by her voice. So maybe the display of teeth means something different to her species than it does to the rest of us.
“I didn’t have spare clothes, so I washed the ones I’m wearing. ”
I eye her puddle of water. She doesn’t have fins or gills to suggest she comes from an ocean planet.
“My name is Halley,” she says into the silence and holds out a hand for…I have no idea. “It’s lovely to meet you both. Officially, I mean.” The skin of her fingertips has wrinkled in protest of being damp for so long. She waits another second and then drops her raised hand back to her side.
Next to her, although not so close as to be dripped on, is Rin, and I glare at the youngling.
“You didn’t think to get her a towel?”
Rin pays my scolding no mind, apparently unbothered. Of course she is. To her, such a comment probably doesn’t even count as scolding when compared to the sum total of ignorant judgement she’s had to suffer through during her short life. Still…a towel would’ve been advisable.
“Akh. Wonderful. Yes…” Eot’s voice is faint as he leans around me, all the better to see our uninvited guest—or “stowaway” as someone less gracious than me might describe her.
“Feeling better?” he asks.
“Much better, thanks.” Another flash of blunt teeth. She smells of our soap, her natural scent partially hidden behind layers of disinfectant.
Eot’s eyes settle on the fabric of her hip-length tunic, clinging tightly to her torso, slightly translucent when wet. She’s not as straight limbed as Arrok females, I notice despite my better judgement. Where Arrok are sharp lines and defined muscles, she’s subtle curves.
So unprotected.
So incredibly vulnerable.
A breeding female, judging by the fullness of her breasts and the softness of her skin. And evidently unmated, for no male, however foolish, would let her leave his sight if she were his.
I clap a hand to the back of Eot’s neck, covering his glands, as his body releases pheromones in a wave of scented air. I swear I can feel them sinking into my palm, and I sway on the spot with the sudden attack, my head swimming, my knees weakening. My cock hardening.
Fek. Lust grips my body, igniting my nerve endings.
“I didn’t mean to.” Eot glances up at me, his eyes widening and his cheeks darkening with a flush, looking, for once in his life, apologetic. “Couldn’t stop myself.”
I’ve never before experienced the full force of Eot’s pheromones. This is…intense. But of course it is.
And combined with the strangely satisfying knowledge that Halley smells of our soap, almost as strongly as if we’d scent marked her ourselves—I purse my lips to keep an involuntary moan from escaping.
What is it about this particular female that has Eot and I losing control?
Never has it been like this before.
Akh! I need to wash my scudding hand, but I don’t dare remove it from Eot’s neck. I cover the back of my own neck too, blocking my scent glands, desperate to disguise my reaction to Halley’s—and Eot’s—nearness. The timing couldn’t be more disastrous.
She isn’t Arrok, I think, listing all the ways this is wrong.
We know next to nothing about her.
And she isn’t going to be staying with us. We’ve enough to worry about—surviving as outlaws, never permanently settling anywhere, living assignment to distant assignment, trying to keep Rin safe and hidden.
Rin, who’s in the room with us still. Who’s much too young to be able to smell our pheromones, for all that they wouldn’t have worked on her anyway.
Eot and I are so new to parenting, and we’ve already made so many mistakes. We can’t risk any new distractions.
Rin is our priority.
We gave up everything to protect her, including our chance to be officially matched with mates of our own. Sacrifices we made willingly and with the understanding that Eot and I would never have biological younglings of our own.
Still…a shameful longing for home spears through me. It’s a traitorous feeling. I shouldn’t miss the people who made Rin’s life a misery. So I push the longing away, ignoring it.
Dismissing it.
Pretending it doesn’t exist.
“How long until we land?” I demand of my other half.
“Akh…almost there. Initiating landing protocol.” And with another long look at Halley, Eot returns his attention to his task.
“Almost where?” she asks, stepping closer to his co-pilot’s chair so that she can more clearly see the many screens across the back half of his workstation. “How fast can this ship fly? Are we back at your home planet?”
“Fek no.” Eot’s answer is a curse, immediate and brutal. “No scudding way are we going back there.”
With a gasp, Rin rushes from the cockpit.
“Now look what you’ve done,” I scold, a stubborn part of me wishing I could hide in my room, as Rin is hiding in hers. It would be so much easier to pretend all of this wasn’t happening.
“I shouldn’t have—fek!” Eot winces, glancing over his shoulder as the door automatically closes behind her. “I can’t seem able to concentrate today,” he adds, this time with a glance toward Halley.
“I wonder why.” Experimentally, I remove my hand from the back of his neck. There’s no fresh excretion of pheromones, and his flushed cheeks drain of color with worry for our adopted youngling.
Halley glances between us, obviously sensing tension. She opens her mouth, but before she can start asking any more questions about things which are none of her business and which I don’t wish to discuss, I press the flyer into her hand. “That’s where we’re going.”
“This doesn’t mean anything to me.” She flips the flyer over, glancing at the blank underside, and then hands it back. “What does it say?”
“Akh…” This close it’s impossible not to notice exactly how small she is, the top of her head barely reaching halfway up my chest. I could so easily wrap my arms around her. Which has me imagining how my fingers would sink into the flesh of her arms, her thighs, her hips.
Eot elbows me, his attention resolutely fixed on prepping the landing sequence.
I blink. What had I been saying? Something about…that’s right: the flyer. “It’s an advertisement for a job assignment. Help wanted,” I say, reading the two largest words scrawled across the top of the page and pointing to them as I do so.
“Oh cool. What sort of job?”
“You’re cold?” Surprise has me inadvertently looking down at her again. The cabin is biotemperature controlled. Nobody should be cold.
“What? Oh, no. Cool is a saying. It means I’m interested in what you’re saying.”
“That would be a first,” mumbles Eot.
I ignore him. I’ve had a lot of practice—although it’s considerably harder than usual today, with a stiff cock and heat prickling my skin.
I also can’t seem able to ignore Halley. The many-colored lights illuminating the ship’s console dance over her skin, illuminating the subtle red undertones of her cheeks. A fresh wave of longing assaults me, and I’ve got to clamp my mouth shut on the inappropriate moan building in my throat.
Has she any understanding of the impact of her physical presence? Undoubtedly. Even though Eot and I couldn’t have been less subtle if we’d stuck signs to our chests that read we want to fuck you.
I resolutely redirect my attention to her face, studying the strange frames she wears. They rest across the bridge of her nose and loop over the tops of her rounded ears. Screens, displaying data only she can see? Cameras, recording Eot, Rin, and me? For what purpose?
Nothing about her quite adds up.
The fact that she can understand us means she has an internal translator. However, she isn’t speaking the Common Tongue, the language all intergalactic species know. Nor can she read it.
Being able to understand her might have posed more of a problem if not for the automatic update the market security system pushed to our translators when it cleared our ship for landing.
I hadn’t thought twice about it; such practice is common when arriving on a planet for the first time.
Her language, otherwise unfamiliar, must have been among the updates.
Still…something isn’t right. An unmated breeding female living on a planet where she’s the only one of her species. Did she come here by her own choice? Or was she forced here?
Abduction and slavery are forbidden under the laws of the Interplanetary Guild, but I highly doubt a planet this far distant is patrolled by the guild.
Scudding outer rim worlds.
We came here to escape our problems. Not to acquire more.
“You’re acting kind of strange.” She leans a fraction closer, watching me with concern. “Did you hit your head during the fight? Do you think he’s concussed?”
She asks that last question of Eot, wrinkles marring her brow as she frowns. Then she touches the back of her hand to my forehead.
I flinch back, hit the console behind me, and almost fall over. Why’d she do that?
Eot laughs, but there’s tension in his voice where there usually isn’t as he continues to keep the majority of his attention firmly fixed on landing. And not on Halley.