Chapter Five

Kameron didn’t dismount so much as he flipped off of her. “You are hurt?”

Amanda gritted her teeth, in too much pain to worry about his feelings. “It’s just a cramp. If you help me up …?”

It took a lot to convince him that she had to stand on one leg to stretch the cramp out. He wanted to carry her in his arms like he generally did.

Luckily it was in her ‘good’ leg and not the broken one.

When she had managed to stretch the cramped muscle out again, she realized she had semen snaking down her leg. Startled, she leaned down to look at it and then met Kameron’s gaze again somewhat accusingly.

Why, she thought, stunned, would he have semen?

He’d said he was a CS.

Actually, even if he’d been a pleasure bot, there wouldn’t have been any reason to simulate an ejaculation to that degree that she could think of. A shudder would have been more than sufficient—or maybe some groaning?

“I … uh … need to clean up.”

His cock, she discovered, was standing at attention again, but he was just going to have to play with the damned thing himself, she thought angrily.

He didn’t offer it to her—which actually surprised her and sort of mollified her, too. He stuffed it back in his pants—which she saw he had never taken off—lifted her against his chest and took her out to the shower again.

Caleb and Trinity arrived from wherever they’d gone just as she finished dressing from her second shower.

They jolted to a halt the moment they entered the cabin as if they’d hit an invisible wall.

Which, she supposed, they had.

Even she could tell the whole damned place wreaked of sex.

Which no one could discount as nothing when Kameron was humming to himself while he cooked—off tune, but clearly an attempt to replicate something he had heard at some time—and turned to beam at them as if he hadn’t tried his damnedest to stomp both of their asses after they’d kissed her.

She glared at them when they glanced her way, somewhat hopefully, she thought, and they decided to sit down and wait for dinner.

Kameron brought her plate to her while Trinity, apparently, looked around for his mug. Spying it with the flowers in it, he pulled them out and tossed them aside and then rinsed the cup and refilled it.

Amanda’s first inclination that that was what he’d done was when he leapt from his chair so fast he turned it over and it clattered to the floor. And then he charged to the door and went out.

She could heard him barfing through the door.

It totally put her off her food.

Kameron stared at the door panel as if he could see through it and finally shrugged and sat to eat his own food.

Trinity stalked back inside shortly and right up behind Kameron. Grabbing a handful of hair, he slammed his head into the table several times, emphasizing each blow with a word. “What … the … fuck … did … you …put …in … my … fucking … mug?”

“Poison flowers,” Caleb said helpfully. “Made him puke, too.”

He might have caught a fist for the comments except Kameron had recovered enough by that time to leap to his feet and punch Kameron hard enough he hit the floor and then bounced up again.

“Amanda does not like that,” Caleb said chidingly.

They both punched him, knocking him through the wall.

“God damn it!” Amanda snarled. “Now where the hell am I supposed to use the damned toilet? If I had a taser and a brig I’d lock the lot of you up!”

They paused and turned to stare at her. After an obvious effort to wrestle their tempers into abeyance, the three of them straightened up the table and chairs and settled to eat.

Still pissed about the toilet—such as it had been—Amanda finally picked up her bowl and struggled to eat. It helped that it was really good. Kameron was a very good cook. “This is really good,” she observed after a few bites. “It would be better hot, I think.”

Kameron got up and took her bowl, dumped what was in it back in the pot, and then stirred it and fixed her another bowl.

Germs.

She supposed they didn’t actually have to worry about germs since they had nanoes—unlike her. But then it occurred to her that if they were safe from germs, she probably didn’t have to worry about them either just because she was swapping body fluids with them.

Relieved, she finished her dinner and lifted the bowl to Kameron.

“Would you like more?”

She shook her head. “I’m stuffed. Your turn. You eat.”

He’d actually dipped from the pot and eaten from the ladle, but she thought the bowl would be more efficient and a lot more comfortable since he wouldn’t have to refill it as often.

If she was going to stay with them, she thought, they needed more stuff. She should have her own bowl and cup at least. “How far is the closest settlement, do you think?”

No one said anything and she finally glanced at them questioningly. “Or trade center,” she added. “We need to get more stuff.”

They looked surprised, doubtful, and then some of their tension eased.

“I am not certain,” Kameron responded after a long moment.

“A hundred miles in a direct line—further with the terrain,” Caleb responded.

Trinity and Kameron both punched him on the shoulder, almost in the same instant—from opposite directions.

Amanda stared at them, waiting for a full scale eruption and finally bit her lip and turned away. “That’s a long way on foot,” she murmured.

“But not with ….”

She glanced around when he broke off and discovered Kameron had his hands around his throat, squeezing, and Caleb’s eyes were bulging. “Kameron!”

He let go. “He was choking.”

“On your hands around his neck!” Amanda snapped.

His face darkened, but he didn’t look at her. “Before that.”

“He was preventing it from going down,” Trinity said helpfully.

“What kind of first aid were you programmed with?” Amanda demanded sarcastically and then muttered, “Don’t answer that! I guess I’m luckier to be alive than I thought.”

“First aid for humans is not the same,” Trinity added, stretching his lie a little further.

Because, of course, it was a lie.

Dismissing it, she grunted and worked until she managed to shift to her side with her back to them and took out the journal she’d been given as a going away present by one of her friends as a ‘joke’ gift. Low, low, lowest tech, it was paper and pencil—which were virtually non-existent now—on Earth—even though, once upon a time, they were supposedly widely used.

Had they but known it, the Beauterre she’d seen so far leaned toward virtually non-existent technology with ‘ancient—basic’ like the paper pad and pencil being the norm not the exception.

Because she wasn’t believing for a minute that the guys would be living as they were if anything really good was available. Clearly, they enjoyed the creature comforts as much as anybody else.

Or maybe they had known and the pad and pencil were a hint of things to come?

Or guessed?

Whatever the case, she was delighted when she found it in her survival duffle. It was something to occupy herself with.

Not that she wasn’t used to having to find entertainment when she’d spent so much time in space, but there was usually power available and that opened up a lot of possibilities for entertainment that she didn’t have access to now—power or gadgets.

Not that her mind didn’t keep her busy with thoughts—so busy she often had trouble sleeping. But she’d discovered that writing the words down made it easier to bring order and bringing order to her mind helped to understand her emotions and also to empty it of things that were bothering her and keeping her awake.

Should she congratulate herself, she wondered sardonically, that she’d made it through almost three weeks before she’d broken down and had sex with one of the guys?

Well, two and a half Earth weeks. She thought it might actually be three Beauterre weeks since they had different orbits.

Not that it mattered.

What mattered was that she had succumbed to nature instead of sticking with logic/her brains.

And the thing that made her the most uneasy was that sperm.

Because she’d decided to remove her birth control device before she left Earth since she knew it was a rough new colony she was going to and was worried she wouldn’t have access to the same level of medical care.

Stupid.

She hadn’t been thinking logically any of the time, she finally acknowledged.

She’d been thinking with her hormones—which were screaming that it was time to make a baby while she could still count on having ‘peak of freshness’ healthy ovum.

She’d been trying to push herself toward the jumping off spot even though she’d known just removing her device wasn’t getting her any closer any faster.

Unfortunately, buying a baby and having it implanted wasn’t possible.

She had the money.

She just wasn’t allowed to get pregnant while captaining the ship—upon pain of fines and forfeiture of the money she’d been told she was going to earn—to say nothing of the land that was to be hers.

In other words, she couldn’t afford it. If she’d had the credits to thumb her nose at them she would have.

She’d been prepared to play ‘Russian roulette’ though—except she’d planned to get her land and establish a homestead and then look around for likely candidates when she could afford to be pregnant.

In her current situation, that was a definite no.

She might have to escape. She still couldn’t dismiss that.

And she was handicapped enough as it was.

Was there actually any possibility, at all, though, that the cyborgs could impregnate her?

She supposed that depended upon whether they were cybernetically enhanced humans or cyborgs enhanced with human biology. If they were just ‘dressed up’ robots, it seemed unlikely they could reproduce—but then why would they have seminal fluid? At all?

She finally decided she could just dismiss that and stop worrying about it. It had just thrown her for a loop to discover the seminal fluid when she hadn’t expected it.

So, setting aside the likelihood of getting preg at a very bad time, would it be better to try to make them happy? Or better to keep her distance? As much as that was possible, at any rate.

She honestly thought friendly would be best—even if that included really friendly. The fact that she wanted sex herself was beside the point.

It had certainly mellowed Kameron out. Or at least had seemed to until the others had provoked him.

Of course, to be fair, she could see Trinity’s point.

And to be completely honest with herself, she couldn’t know just from having sex with Kameron if it was going to turn out to be a good thing or bad. She might have already screwed up majorly by screwing Kameron. Doing all three might create more of a headache rather than less. Leaving Trinity and Caleb out and screwing Kameron right under their noses could be a recipe for an even worse disaster.

Ok, so it was probably too late to behave as if she was a responsible adult of reasonable intelligence.

But she felt like she’d landed in the middle of a disaster just waiting to explode and that it would have, sooner or later, whatever she did or didn’t do.

She stopped scribbling and read back over the rambling dialogue she’d had with herself and decided she just needed to sleep on it and see if it made any more sense after a night’s rest.

Besides, her fingers were cramping.

And between dinner and the calisthenics with Kameron, she was tired—not weak tired like she’d been from the time she’d been rescued, but in the sense that she felt like she’d worked out.

She wasn’t sure she’d had enough heart palpitations to constitute a work out, but she still felt like she’d had one—relaxed, tired in a good way.

* * * *

Kameron felt many things before, during, and after his time with Amanda that he had not experienced before. Mostly they were positive things, things that made him feel good.

The exception was a sense of possessiveness that he had not felt before and that, or the rage it evoked, made him feel ill.

He had not felt that before, had not felt as if Trinity and Caleb were trying to take something that was his and his alone, and he did not like it.

They were soldiers. They worked as a team, and they shared such resources as were available.

There was only one Amanda.

All of them wanted her and that made her a resource that must be shared—or the team was no longer a team.

He knew that. He felt it deep down.

And he still found himself struggling—with demons.

When they had finished eating, he moved the chairs and turned the table up so that he could remove the top from the base and he used that to patch the hole he and Trinity had put into the wall with Caleb. It was not a work of art, but it would work until he could repair the wall properly.

When he had finished, he went out and stared up at the sky for a while.

Much of the time he was there—most of it—he simply replayed what had occurred between him and Amanda over and over—partly because he relished the memory and partly because he had been so wrapped up in what he was feeling that he had begun to get the uneasy feeling that he had performed poorly.

Had Amanda’s anger been because of the wall, he wondered? As his had, at first, because Trinity had slammed his head into the table?

He thought that was enough provocation in both situations, but was that all?

Had Amanda been angry before that?

Because it seemed to him that she had been in a very great hurry for him to get off when he had been in no hurry at all. He had wanted to linger to enjoy feeling her body against his a little longer—especially the part where her body had fisted around his.

He had, in fact, enjoyed it so much that he had thought about doing it again as soon as it was done.

Should she not have felt that, too?

It seemed to him that she should have. If she did not, then he thought it was very likely that she had not enjoyed it as much as he had.

A touch of relief flickered through him when it occurred to him that that was most of the source of his anger.

It was with himself for not performing correctly or distinguishing himself with any particular merit when he had prided himself on carrying out any task in a superior manner. He wanted to show her he could do better. Now that he had grasped the mechanics of it, he was certain that he could do far better.

And he feared that Trinity or Caleb might perform better and be preferred over him.

It was not that he did not want them to touch her at all. He simply did not want them to until he had proven to her that he was worthy of her. He wanted a clear field to establish his place.

Unfortunately, he had no argument for that that was the least bit reasonable.

Unless he decided to spill his guts and inform them that he had done a piss poor job of it, and he rather thought he would prefer to be shot in the head.

He was still wrestling with the wildly swinging emotions from his experience when Trinity and Caleb came out.

“That was a nasty fucking trick,” Trinity growled.

Kameron turned to look at him in surprise, struggling to recall what he was talking about.

“Poisoning my mug?” Trinity prompted.

Kameron shrugged. “I did not want Amanda to touch them and she said to put them in water.”

“Why did you not use your own mug, gods damn it?”

Kameron stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Because they were poison.”

“That makes sense,” Caleb said. “It does not follow that he meant to poison you just because he did not want to poison himself … again. I think we should avoid that particular plant in future.”

Both of them turned to glare at him as it occurred to them that Caleb was the one who’d suggested flowers in the first place. “She was not pleased with the gift?” he asked uneasily.

Kameron considered it. “She seemed pleased,” he said finally, reluctantly. “Then she told me to put them in water to keep them fresh.”

“See! She was pleased. And then you fucked her so obviously I was correct.”

Kameron punched him … just because he disliked the look of satisfaction on his face.

“I do not believe he knows more about it than either of us,” Trinity growled. “Do you think she allowed you to fuck her because you brought flowers? Poison flowers?”

Kameron frowned. Truthfully, he had not seen any logic in the suggestion when Caleb had made it. He understood that the gift gave them pleasure. And he could see that the flowers were things of beauty and that could give pleasure. But he could not see how him giving them were sufficient enticement to convince Amanda to sex him when she had shown no interest in doing so before that he was aware of. Beyond that, he had told her that she could not touch the flowers since they were toxic. He had thought himself that that was a great detraction and had been inclined to throw them away. The only reason he had not was because he could not locate anything else that he might gift her with.

He shrugged. “I cannot say for certain … but I am not convinced that was the reason.” Unfortunately, he could not think of any reason to explain it at all—because he was far too focused on what he wanted at the time. He was certain she had not said no, but he found that was not especially comforting.

Mayhap, he thought, he had given such a poor impression that she would not give him another chance to show her that he could do better?