“That’s understandable.”
Silence stretched between them, comfortable despite the circumstances. He could hear the soft whisper of her breath and smell the faint sweetness of her skin beneath the generic scent of the ship’s soap. She’d taken a shower earlier, using the cramped sanitation facility while he’d pretended to be deeply occupied with navigation calculations. The memory of her emerging in the oversized shirt he’d found among the supplies with the hembrushing her thighs and the fabric clinging to curves she hadn’t quite dried made his body tighten again.
Control yourself,he ordered silently.She deserves better than some half-breed smuggler who can’t keep his hands to himself.
“Earlier,” she said softly, “you mentioned a refugee transport. Families fleeing a civil war.”
“I did.”
“You said most of them made it to safety.” She paused, her fingers gently stroking his chest. “What happened to the ones who didn’t?”
He flinched before he could control it. He’d opened that door himself, and given her a glimpse of something he rarely discussed. Now she wanted to see what was on the other side.
“Sickness, mostly,” he said roughly. “The ship was overcrowded and supplies were limited. When disease spread, there wasn’t enough medicine to go around.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago, like I said.”
But she didn’t let it go, this stubborn human female who’d somehow become his responsibility. “How old were you? When you were on that ship?”
He considered lying or deflecting with a joke, doing any of the dozen things he normally did when conversations veered too close to truth. But something in the quiet sincerity in her voice and the genuine desire to know made the usual deflections feel hollow.
“Twelve,” he said. “I was twelve.”
Her breath caught. “That’s so young. What were you doing on a refugee transport at twelve?”
“My mother was sick.” The memory of his mother’s face growing thinner by the day, and her hand growing weaker in his, filled his head. “She’d contracted some kind of wasting disease. There was a hospital on Ferros that might have been able to treat her, but we couldn’t afford passage on a proper ship.”
“So you took the refugee transport.”
“It was the only option.” He stared at the ceiling, watching the lights pulse. “She thought if she could just hold on until we reached Ferros, everything would be all right.”
Her hand stilled against his chest. “What happened?”
“We didn’t make it to Ferros. The disease progressed faster than she’d expected. Or maybe she’d known all along and just didn’t want to tell me.” His jaw tightened. “She died three days before we reached the planet.”
“Oh, Doren.”
The sympathy in her voice should have made him flinch away. Instead, he found himself leaning into her, as if her warmth could chase away the old cold.
“Where was your father during all this?”
The question landed like a blade between his ribs. “My father was on Yangu, living in his comfortable mansion with his legitimate family, counting his credits and pretending I didn’t exist.”
She pushed herself up onto her elbow, looking down at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “He abandoned you?”
“He never really acknowledged me to begin with.” The anger he usually kept buried rose to the surface, bitter and familiar. “My mother was his mistress. She was just a temporary amusement for a wealthy merchant, but he was charming enough.”To her.“And she loved him.”
“A mistress? But then... how did you end up on a refugee transport?”
He laughed, and the sound held no humor. “Because I was a mistake. An inconvenience. My mother was supposed to take care of the ‘problem’ when she discovered she was pregnant, but she refused. He threatened to cut her off if she went through with it, but she was still beautiful and in the end he couldn’t do it.”
“And after she had you?”
“He ignored me, unless he was telling me how unworthy I was.” And he’d spent most of his childhood trying to prove the old bastard wrong. “But then my mother got sick and she was no longer beautiful and he cut us loose without a second thought.”
And broke his mother’s heart in the process.
