She missed Ydro-Down. It seemed ridiculous when she had a star-faring ship and a fortune in qubition, but Martika wanted to go home.
Yes, the dead, dangerous moon had its troubles, but it was the place her mothers and the elders had chosen. The place she’d thought would be her life forever. Despite all the time that had passed, some things hadn’t changed.
True, she’d slept through most of the hundreds of turns that would’ve made her a real elder herself, but she was continuing her mothers’ dream of making Ydro-Down a home. They’d always known it would be a struggle, against harsh conditions that did not favor human life, and against their own weaknesses, bodily and mentally. If the struggle was also against people like Ming Waller, who tried to take what others had built… Well, that battle was much older than she was. But she would fight against that too.
She was neither a Q gremlin nor a crystal queen, just a woman searching for a way to live up to her dreams. If only Arjay could see that and believe that she knew her own mind and body.
Or maybe he did know that, and just chose not to share it with her.
But then why the kisses? Why the cruel comments about Jaxim and his casual charm?
“Is something wrong?”
She glanced up from her bowl where she’d been stirring the kale and tomatatoes Arjay had diced and stewed together. Using an actual knife and heat. Her mothers would’ve been impressed.
She stared into the bowl. “This has a lot of textures. And flavors. All at once.”
He peered at the bowl and then at her. “And is that good? Or bad?”
She slammed her utensil down. “You think I don’t even know what I like.”
“How could you when you’ve been buried underground for most of your life?”
She glared at him. “Just because I didn’t have it doesn’t mean I don’t know what I want. A woman can have dreams, Arjay.”
The look he gave her was sort of like what her tongue felt like after encountering kale for the first time—baffled and maybe a little disapproving. “When has anything ever in your life made you believe in dreams?”
She lifted her chin to glare at him. “Dreams are why my mothers chose to join the colony—”
“Gone,” he said harshly. “Your colony is gone.” His voice dropped. “And your mothers too.”
To her horror, her jutting chin trembled at the unexpected attack. “Why are you being so cruel?”
“I’m telling the truth. Because you don’t seem to understand that dreams won’t protect you from the dangers.”
She snarled. “I’m not wormy. I understand perfectly. I’ve lost people I loved too. But just because I lost in the past doesn’t mean I can’t hope for the future.”
He shoved his bowl aside. “It means exactly that. Those loved ones lost are lost forever.”
“But we can love again.” The unfamiliar real food seemed to clog in her throat, choking her voice down to a whisper. “If we want to…”
“I want”—his dark eyes glittered the same as the void she’d seen between the stars—“to see my spouses. I want my child to know me. And I want to go back in time so I can look the other way when my superiors bring in their illegal shipments of weapons, drugs, slaves, and worse. I’ll let them do every awful thing so I can keep my good thing.” He scraped one hand down his face, as if biting out each word had been tougher than the nu-kale.
“No you won’t. You wouldn’t and you didn’t.” She shook her head hard. “I know you, and you would never let their darkness pass you by.”
He slammed his hands on the table, making their half full bowls jump. “You don’t know me at all,” he hissed. “I’ve done the same bad things as them. Worse—because at least they won.”
“No they haven’t,” she insisted. “Because we are still fighting.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” But even as he said it, he pushed to his feet and stalked away.
Trying to wash down the tightness in her throat, she took a long drink from her cup. Arjay had told her it was a restorative, mineral water mixed with other ingredients to counteract the jet lag, microbe exposure, and other imbalances exacerbated by intergalactic travel. A sweet tart flavor tried to hide the bitterness underneath. Yeah, she knew how that felt.
She slammed the empty mug down, matching his mood. “We just need to get this deal done and get home.” She rose and stomped a restless circle counterclockwise around the room. Which had seemed so big compared to what she knew, but now seemed too small with him in it.
“Home,” he scoffed under his breath.
She wheeled to face him. “It was,” she raged. “It could be again. Not just slaves and riches, but families and flowers and futures.”
He stalked toward her. “And at risk and danger always.”
“Everywhere,” she snapped back. “Ydro-Down was never a paradise, but it’s ours to make what we will.” She glared at him. “AlpesPrimus was no paradise neither. Except in your dreams.”
“Nightmare now.”
“Because you won’t wake up and see what’s here now, right in front of you.”
His head snapped around toward her. “Right in front of me? You?” His dark eyes glittered.
“Yes.” She wrapped her arms around herself, the hard edges of her costume digging into her flesh. “I was frozen and buried for so long. I’m awake now. If you stay frozen and buried… That’s your choice. Is that what you want?”
His lashes dropped like the strongest blast doors, hiding the glitter, keeping her out. “What I want…”
Then in a rush, without ever opening his eyes, as if the course between them was set and locked, he closed the distance between them.
Before she could drop the tight set of her arms, his arms were tight around her, his mouth crashing down on hers. The armored wings that Lalabey had created for her had made her feel so free and untouchable, but now they were tight around her body, bound in the titanium of Arjay’s embrace. She felt caught, held, but at the same time, something unfurled inside her. This kiss was hotter than the last, fiercer. Whatever part of him that he’d been holding back last time, he lost it now, unmoored maybe from his time on Ydro-Down just as he’d come apart from his past. She made a sound in the back of her throat, inarticulate and longing. The fury of their fight twisted into a brighter, pure flame.
“This is what you want,” he growled, halfway between a question and a demand.
“I want…” she whispered back.
His harsh exhalation was tinged with the flavor of the restorative, heavy with minerals and a hint of salt as if he held a stone in his mouth. But as he deepened the kiss, she caught the real flavor of him underneath. His mouth was a magnet locked on hers, and his restless hands on her back traced urgent fractals through the thin, shining fabric of her cloak, with the same intensity as plotting a jump across the galaxy.
When they’d gone through the wormholes, she’d seen death, but she’d seen this too, or something like it, as tough and wild and shining and improbable as wings of rock crystal.
“I want this,” she whispered. “I want you.”
He groaned. “You don’t know—”
Even as his words push her away, his grip tightened, straining the cloak across her shoulders. But in the tiny space that opened between them, she managed to extricate herself from the entrapping fabric. She twined her arms around his neck, lacing her fingers into the scant hold of his short dark hair.
When his eyes widened, she murmured, “I know. I watched the guards’ signal at night, remember? The one you used to seduce them.”
“That’s not the same thing as this at all,” he started.
“And I know because I watched you too.” She pulled his head down for an open-mouthed kiss.
This time, the flavor of him was a singular note of aroused male. Maybe she didn’t have the real-world experience he did, but this she knew: she wanted him with the same frantic urgency as she’d faced the rock fall outside her frozen casket. She wanted him like she wanted to breathe.
She slipped her hand down his body, finding the weak spots in his clothes and the secret places that made him quiver. With those delicate touches she held him willing prisoner—more than willing, eager, if his urgent breaths were any sign.
When she flayed opened his clothing, baring him from sternum to sac, he took a sharp breath and grasped her wrists in trembling fingers. “Tick,” he rasped. “Lady Martika…”
He held her wrists but he wasn’t pushing her away. Instead, he wasn’t letting her leave.
“Not a wormy lost child, not a pretend crystal queen,” she whispered. “For you, Tika. Only for you.”
At some point during the kiss, he’d backed her up to the wall, and her spine vibrated. Either from the excitement seething through her veins or some hidden underground energy source, she wasn’t sure and didn’t care. The power coursing through her now wasn’t at all hidden or underground; he was right in front of her, his bare chest heaving just beyond her nose. She inhaled the scent of him, another medley of mineral and salt but maddening instead of restorative. She dipped her head forward to brush her lips across the throbbing pulse at his neck.
“You taste like stone,” she murmured. “Burning stone…”
Grasping both her wrists in one hand, he hauled her up against him. “We don’t have time for this. We’re waiting to make a deal.”
“We have this moment,” she argued. “All we have are moments.”
With his free hand, he cupped her jaw and tilted her head up to meet his stare. “How can you still…reach out? You spent all that time unconscious, trapped, buried, hiding, but given half a chance—less, with only a nano chance, you jump. How?”
She tried to understand the strain in his voice. “The gravity on Ydro-Down was always a little light, don’t you think? Makes jumping easier.”
His gaze never wavered but he seemed to hold his breath. Then it burst from him on a hoarse laugh. “The gravity, yeah. Good thing we were always underground.”
“We still are.” She gazed at him. “We can’t go far. Just a moment…”
When he lowered his head again, he moved so slow she was sure the universe was going backward. But the thrill in her blood told her time still spun onward. Just moments, so she had to make the most of them.
The armored points of her cloak kept him at too much of a distance, and she shed it impatiently, letting the shining threads fall back to her elbows. As she revealed the tight-fitting gown beneath, Arjay made a sound she used to hear echo in the darkness when she was alone, such hunger and wanting.
But they weren’t alone now. Not in this moment.
She pushed away from the wall, guiding him backward with hands and mouth and her own hungry little noises. In the second private room, the biggest lounge had enough space for two bodies…
As they sprawled across it in a tangle of limbs and half-discarded clothing, his mouth was voracious on hers, stealing her breath, his grasp demanding and commanding, stripping her of the gown and any lingering reservations she might’ve held.
But for all he took away, he gave too, exhaling into her, sharing his very breath, every touch amplifying sensation until she was spiraling.
She’d thought she needed him like air, but more than once she’d had to hold her breath while forcing through an unexpected wash of vapors in the tunnels. Arjay made her need this even more. She couldn’t escape the waves of sensation, so hot and dark she imagined herself some creature of the deepest deeps. No, a being of the infinite space between stars…
His touch was the same, simultaneously deep and all-encompassing. In all her turns of scavenging, she’d never expected to find something like this—touching and touched in every molecule and yet nothing she could steal, insubstantial as the light between stars and ferocious as the fall into wormhole spacetime.
Somewhere out on the dark side of Nintung, people were angling for her treasure, but she had everything she wanted right here.
Her fingers tightened on his shoulders as he kissed a constellation across her skin, tracing a path between each breath with his fingertips and tongue until she was writhing against him, panting desperately. The metallic threads of the cloak, spread on the lounge under them, prickled at her skin in counterpoint to his gentle-rough caresses, and every nerve ending seemed to spark with the contrast, threatening a conflagration that she knew would change her forever.
As if he sensed her flare of uncertainty, he straight-armed himself over her, staring down. “Tika?” His eyes were even darker than usual against the heightened color of his face.
“Rio.”