Intergalactic Dating Agency ~ Black Hole Brides ~ The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss Page 2

  “Lishelle has her own room.” Trixie paused. “But she would be here in a hot second if I needed her. And so would Rayna.”

  And so would the His Grace, the Duke of Azthronos, came the rest of the unspoken threat. But Nor wasn’t afraid of the duke or anyone else in this pampered house.

  He eyed her. “What are you so scared of?”

  “An alien with his pants unzipped drags me to my room and won’t go away, even though I asked.” Her voice edged upward. “Gee, I dunno. What would be scary about that?”

  He blinked. “You didn’t ask me to go away. You said I can’t come in.”

  “I said…” She tucked her chin. “Okay, fine. Go away.”

  “No.”

  She groaned. “That’s why—”

  “And zippers are for backward primitives,” he informed her. “Zippers don’t exist on sophisticated, highly advanced, mannerly Azthronos. And they certainly shouldn’t be sealing up one’s genitals.”

  With an adorable snap, she said, “Sophisticated manners usually call for sealing up your…pants with something.”

  He smirked. “I didn’t say I was sophisticated or mannerly.”

  She tried to order the door to close, but it beeped a friendly reminder that the way was blocked: by him.

  “You’re not very polite either,” he noted. “Besides trying to slam this door on me”—he scowled at her—“the very first time we spoke back on the Grandy, you disconnected the comm on me. Why?”

  Ending her attempts to override the door controls, she sighed. “Because you were—and are—being provoking, on purpose, for no reason.”

  “No reason?” He leaned a little more through the doorway. “I don’t need a reason to be provoking.”

  “Because you are a pirate.”

  “Was,” he corrected. “Was a pirate. Now I’m the captain of the duchy’s flagship—”

  “So you think you could at least fasten your pants,” she interrupted.

  He refused to reply to that. “—And I made it this far because I never let nippy little mishkeets in house slippers tell me what to do.”

  “You can do whatever you want,” she sniped back. “I just don’t want any part of it.”

  He half closed his eyes. “Even the part in my pants? You keep bringing that up.”

  And to his surprise, what was in his fatigues was up. Just slightly, not enough to be annoying yet, more like intrigued. But that was more than what had been going on when Commander Illya made her request earlier.

  Since deciding to pursue the captaincy, he’d had to let his other pursuits—specifically, the pursuit of attentive female companionship—fall by the wayside. Illya’s offer had amused him, and he’d been more than willing to demonstrate the erotic arts to a vrykoly engineer just for the experience and to break his abstinence streak while the Grandiloquence was undergoing maintenance and resupply. But he’d blamed the ghost-mead for dampening his physical response. As its name implied, the sweetly powerful Azthronos export had a bad habit of summoning old demons.

  “I want nothing from you, Captain,” she said stoutly.

  “My name is Nor,” he murmured.

  Maybe he could blame the drink for what he did next.

  He leaned the rest of the way through the doorway and kissed the little Earther.

  Just lips. No tongue. He kept his grip on the doorway and he kept his eyes open, and so did she, so he watched the dilation of her pupils from an intimate distance.

  For all her nippy little teeth, her lips were…soft, yielding. He’d thought about kissing Illya—vrykoly teeth and all—and he’d thought about kissing the other Earther girl, Lishelle, but he hadn’t even considered this one until just this moment. She held herself utterly still as he eased his mouth over hers with a low rumble of arousal in his throat. His lips were a little sticky from the candy he’d taken from his pocket, and their mouths caught for a heartbeat. The scent of her teased him, something subtle and not sweet at all, enticing him closer to try to figure it out because she was a mystery, and every good pirate knew that the locked box held the worthiest treasure.

  Once again, instinct and impulse had served him well, pointing out this delectably small and innocent Earther—

  Instinct and impulse cleared their throat meaningfully, and he twisted to one side just as the muzzle of a blaster nudged him low in the belly.

  The jolt of blinding yellow energy—a stun blast—zinged past the open tab of his fatigue bottoms, and the incomplete metallic seal sizzled electrically in the near-miss. His half-turgid erection pwanged in the resulting shock.

  He yelped and jumped back.

  Now that he was no longer blocking the way, the door slid closed with a decisive snick.

  He stared at the panel, his pulse slamming in outrage. Slamming unlike that smooth door which she had closed so quietly in his face. After almost shooting him.

  Did she even know that the blaster had been set to stun? Did she even know what a blaster was? And how had she gotten it? A closed-world refugee was wandering the halls of the ducal estate with a blaster.

  He slapped his palm over the comm next to the door. “You shot me!”

  The estate was too well built to let him yell through the door, and the comm would only let her know she had a message, not deliver it unless she—

  “I shot past you,” she corrected, her voice through the comm sounding smug. “You weren’t in the way anymore.”

  Ah, so she couldn’t resist answering him now that there was a locked door between them.

  “The only reason I wasn’t in the way was because I moved,” he snarled back.

  “Which is what I’d politely asked you to do before.” A puff of her breathing came through the comm link, as if she was standing very close, closer than she’d been during the kiss. “You told me you are a pirate, Captain. What else was I supposed to do?”

  He opened his mouth to fire back—not literally, of course—but nothing came out. What else indeed. It had been a very, very long time since someone had told him to go away. In this very house, actually. It had nearly destroyed him then. He wouldn’t let that happen again.

  After a moment, her tentative voice emerged again. “Uh, Captain? Are you still there?”

  So, she felt confident enough to fire a blaster at him but hadn’t quite mastered the comm vid? It would serve her right if he was gut-shot and bleeding against her door.

  He leaned into the comm, so she might hear his breath too. “There’s not much in this universe that stops me, mishkeet. Certainly not a locked door. But you made your point, at blaster point, and if there’s anything I know well, it’s fear, violence, and dismissal.” He pulled back a half step, hearing too much truth in his words. But then he drew close again. “Oh, and make sure you set the blaster to ambient recharge. That was a needlessly long release. You could’ve dropped me with a quarter of that energy.”

  “Captain Nor, I wasn’t—”

  “Good night, Trixie.” He released the comm and forced himself back from the door.

  A part of him—the Azthronos half or the pirate half?—wanted to stay to see if she’d open the door. Another part refused to let her watch him lurk, since it wasn’t as if he wanted to stay to see if she’d open the door.

  He shook his head hard at his own prevarication. Larfing ghost-mead. He couldn’t wait to get back to the Grandiloquence where he’d finally made a name for himself that could be spoken in polite company.

  Polite like a certain little Earther girl wasn’t.

  The smug, sheltered Azthronos nobles like the duke might not see the trouble they’d witlessly brought into their midst—complacent fools hadn’t identified him, had they?—but he’d be keeping a watchful eye on the blaster-toting Trixie.

  A watchful eye and a wary distance.

  With a quick snap of his fingers, he closed the top tab of his fatigues and walked away, never looking back.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning, Trixie checked the hallway three tim
es before slipping out.

  Not that she thought Nor—the captain—would still be lying in wait, but it never hurt to be careful. Not being careful, not knowing at all times her way out, that was what hurt.

  She still woke up drenched in sweat and whimpering from the nightmares of the times she hadn’t been able to find her way out. And that was before Blackworm had drugged the Black Hole Brides in his glass coffins.

  Just thinking of it made her knees wobble, as if they were trying to turn her back toward the safety of her room where she could dive under the covers and no one would find her.

  But no place in the universe was really safe; she’d figured that out early enough.

  At least Blackworm was locked up tight in some galactic prison, serving a life sentence for kidnapping, interfering with closed-world advancement, and illegal parking of a space station. She wasn’t sure which charge was the worst offense to the interstellar community, but maybe it didn’t matter as long as he never got out. She didn’t necessarily sleep better, but at least she slept.

  Although last night, thinking of the captain had interfered more than usual with her anxious slumber. That kiss…

  She scowled to herself as she stomped in her slippers down the hall, the skirts of her bronze-hued Thorkon day gown swishing angrily around her ankles. That kiss was wrong. Sweet as caramel, heady as booze, and oh-so wrong. She’d told him to go away and he’d ignored her request. There were plenty of jerk guys on Earth, and for all the advancements on Azthronos, apparently there were jerk alien guys too. It bothered her.

  Almost as much as her response bothered her.

  Not the shooting part—that had been justified. But the fact she’d hesitated even a second before shooting at him. Why had she waited?

  Just because it had been so long since she’d been kissed? And it was a sweet kiss. Just a brush of his mouth over hers, really. As big as he was, looming over her, the touch had been gentle, questing, only hintingly flavored with the ghost-mead he’d been drinking and whatever that caramel-flavored candy had been. Something deep inside her had perked up, roused by the promise contained in that kiss.

  Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The kiss was wrong and wanting more of it was even wronger.

  She stomped all the way to breakfast.

  The estate seemed to her like the elegant all-inclusive cruises she’d read about in the backs of magazines during her breaks at the nail salon. Everyone dressed nice, everything was taken care of, and the food was really good whenever she wanted it. She wasn’t sure how long cruises lasted, and she definitely didn’t know when this dream would end, but she’d take advantage of it while she could.

  Lishelle was already seated at one end of the long table in the sunlit dining room, reading something from a dat-pad. Her black curls, which she usually wore in tight knots, were teased out into a fuller style that emphasized the bold edges of her cheekbones. The filtered Azthronos sun that shone through the protective energy shield over the estate brought out a touch of gold on her dark skin which was enhanced by the bright geometric pattern on her Thorkon day gown. The sleeveless cut showed off the strong curves of her shoulders. She looked gorgeous—and badass.

  Trixie scowled to herself. If Nor had tried to kiss Lishelle without her enthusiastic consent, he’d have lost his lips.

  Or, if he’d been good enough, maybe Lishelle would’ve taken the pirate captain to her bed…

  As if she sensed Trixie’s stare, the other woman looked up. The flash of her smile was quick and easy, and she patted the seat next to her.

  Trixie nodded back and gestured to the side table where glass-domed serving trays waited then walked over to grab a plate.

  When the estate had been overflowing with people attending the Black Hole Ball—to celebrate the Brides’ rescue, or so they said, but really she suspected they just liked to party—the room had been packed at every meal. But most of the guests and gawkers had gone home, wherever that was, and only the ducal family and the estate staff plus a few visitors remained. There were maybe a dozen people at the table, sitting in twos and threes, but they’d left a space around Lishelle.

  Partly, Trixie suspected, that was because of Lishelle’s projected badassness, but probably also because she and Trixie were closed-world refugees, former abductees, and Black Hole Brides. She filled her plate with the strange alien foods she’d tried and decided she liked, and then oohed when she saw a more familiar dish. She ladled up a small portion, just in case it was actually, like, alien snails or something.

  She slipped into the chair beside Lishelle and bowed her head for a moment before peeking up. “Is this…?”

  “Buttermilk biscuits and country gravy.” The Southern twang in Lishelle’s voice deepened when she said it, and she nodded until Trixie took a bite and moaned with pleasure. “Gave Cook the recipe last night, and I tell you, she nailed it. She asked me for some other Earther dishes.” She grinned fiendishly. “I’m trying to find a Thorkon version of greens next. Any requests?”

  Trixie shook her head as she tucked into the biscuit. “Whatever’s good with me.”

  Lishelle watched her then sat back with a disapproving grunt.

  “What?” Trixie was coming to recognize that look. “I said whatever.”

  “You did. And I’ve been thinking.”

  Yeah, that was exactly what Trixie had suspected from that narrow, dark-eyed stare. “Thinking what?”

  “We’ve been here long enough to want more than whatever.”

  Trixie squinted. “I’m not sure…”

  “Aaaaand that right there’s the problem.”

  Redirecting her focus to breakfast, Trixie stabbed her spork—Thorkons had a more elegant word for their all-purpose eating utensil, but basically it was a spork—into the biscuit with maybe more force than was absolutely necessary. “No problems here,” she said defensively. “I talked to Doctor Boshil, and I’m fine.”

  “Oh, I know how to fool people too, baby girl.” Lishelle gave her an arch glance. “But we never talk about our lives before this, not even you and me and Rayna.”

  Trixie pushed her plate away. “Because our lives before don’t matter anymore, do they?”

  “Exactly,” Lishelle said triumphantly. “We have the whole universe ahead of us now, literally. We need to think bigger.”

  Bigger than what? Trixie stared at the mashed remains of her biscuit. She didn’t talk about her past because she was embarrassed by it, and whatever Lishelle’s reasons were for keeping quiet, probably her secret thoughts were similar. Happy people were always thrilled to talk about how happy they were.

  Still, she was cautiously interested. Bigger than what didn’t matter anymore. But… “Bigger like what?”

  Lishelle tapped the dat-pad. “Since Rayna and her sugar duke are away touring the kingdom, I’ve been doing some reading about Earth’s place in the universe. They call us closed-worlders, but basically they take whatever they want.” She scowled. “Like, where have I seen that before? Seems like they’re not so advanced as they’d have us believe.”

  Remembering how Nor had kissed… That had not been advanced or high tech or alien at all.

  Lishelle was still talking and Trixie forced herself to focus.

  “…So before Rayna gets back, I think we need to decide what it is we want to do next,” Lishelle finished.

  Couldn’t they just stay here? The estate was basically a fortress, a beautiful fortress, yeah, but the defenses were obvious and fearsome. And now they had biscuits and gravy.

  Plus, the Black Hole Brides (ugh) owned the space station on the edge of Azthronos territory, a resource they were rebuilding into an investment plan for their futures. So they had to be close by—but not too close, obviously, what with the nearby singularity being the nightmare-inducing hellhole of their abduction, not to mention a sucking void of death.

  Even as she dithered, Trixie knew Lishelle was right. They had to look forward, not back.

  “So what are you going to do?” Sh
e helped herself to the pixberry tea from one of the beautiful decorative pots dotted along the table.

  It was Lishelle’s turn to sit back awkwardly, her fingertips drumming on the dat-pad. “I’m still reading.”

  Lishelle had been reading a lot, but Trixie just nodded, not inclined to tease. She knew how easy it was to want to do something more…and yet not be sure what that would look like, exactly.

  It was as easy to hide in a book as in a bedroom.

  “I’ll think about it,” she promised. Luckily, Rayna’s tour of the Azthronos system was going to take awhile, so they didn’t have to make any decisions right away. In the meantime, maybe she’d help Lishelle find some Earth recipes for Cook—

  The dat-pad under Lishelle’s palm chimed a soft alert, and she glanced down at it with a frown. “I have a couple searches running, so let’s see…” She scanned the surface.

  And the rich, dark tone of her skin blanched ashen.

  “No.” She jolted to her feet, jostling the big table hard enough that her delicate coffee cup tipped. The other diners swiveled to stare at her.

  Trixie reached for the other woman’s hand. “Shel, what’s wrong?” The quiver of the fingers twined in hers made her heart shiver too.

  Lishelle’s shock-widened gaze was fixed on the dat-pad, but no answer emerged from her parted lips.

  Trixie tugged the pad toward her, spinning it around to read through the wash of spilled coffee. Down the table, one of the other diners who’d been perusing his own dat-pad gasped aloud and exclaimed to his companions, who all looked at Lishelle and Trixie again.

  “He escaped,” Lishelle said in a strangled whisper.

  Trixie didn’t need a universal translator to understand her friend or the aliens across the breakfast table or the incomprehensible gibberish on the dat-pad.

  Blackworm, the monster who’d taken them from Earth and held them captive on the edge of a black hole, was loose.

  Chapter 4

  Something about the silent energies that formed the protective dome over the estate added an edge to the sunlight that filtered into the dining room, a sharpness that seemed to cut Trixie off from the rest of this alien world. As if from a vast distance—say, the distance from Earth to Azthronos—she watched her own reactions dispassionately.