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“I never take a woman unless she wants to be taken.”
“Your ship says otherwise.”
“She’s wrong about me. And so are you.”
“You want to prove that?”
The door ground open behind us, and Monica poked her head inside.
“Oh, thank fuck. I found you.” She clocked the distance between us and stopped dead in the doorway, her grin turning feral. “Or maybe you didn’t want to be found. Interrupted something, have I?”
Chapter 5
Cass
“Let’s give them space.” Doc had appeared behind Monica a second later. She froze, then grabbed Monica’s sleeve without looking away from us, and pressed her lips together, her eyes full of mischief.
Tambi was next to peer in, and her eyebrow told me she’d clocked everything as Rennick stepped away, looking vaguely sheepish but still angry I’d called him out on his continuing alpha bullshit.
I moved past them into the corridor. “We were working on something.”
“What?” Doc fell in beside me. “What were you two working up to? I mean, it looked hot. You were planning on taking pictures and sharing them, weren’t you? You know how dry my spell has been. I need something for my pleasure bank.”
“Yeah, we need all the filthy details.” Monica took my other side, unbothered by subtlety, or even about keeping her damn voice down. “Were you checking out the ship’s systems, or his?”
“Cass wasn’t interested in Rennick’s system. She wanted his—”
“Enough!” I glanced over my shoulder. Rennick looked tired. This alien had been running on a month of lousy sleep, with no crew support, and he didn’t need hassle from a sex-starved, horny crew.
But what the hell was that back there? The freaky resin stuff and Rennick getting so up close and personal.
I stopped and made myself face him. I’d fucked up, but I wasn’t a monster. “When was the last time you slept somewhere that wasn’t a chair?”
His gaze met mine, surprise flashing across his face. “It’s been a while. The ship doesn’t make it easy to rest.”
I dug a key out of my jacket. I kept a room at Salt and Static, so when I pulled an all-nighter, I could crash somewhere cozy instead of staggering home half-conscious and ending up dead in a ditch.
“Eat, then sleep. The bar near our yard has rooms. Mine is top of the stairs, last door on the right. The place is yours till you’re upright again.” I held out the key until he took it. “Touch nothing in there. Especially not my weapons.”
“You have weapons in your room?”
“I have several. A woman needs to be prepared for all obstacles.”
Behind me, Monica sounded like she’d swallowed a peanut that went down the wrong hole. It would be my fist if she kept ragging on us.
The fastest way to end this nightmare humiliation of being caught with my pants almost down was to stop participating. “Go, Rennick. Before I change my mind and let you pass out and leave your fine ass on the floor.”
He pocketed the key, looked back once from the end of the corridor, and then he was gone.
Tambi tracked him with the look she probably reserved for suspects walking out of an interview room, before facing us.
“Now that the eye candy has gone, let’s find out what’s wrong with this jacked-up honey of a ship. That motherfucker has been lying to us, and we need to know if those lies will get us killed. You know your roles. Execute them, and we meet in the galley in eight hours to refuel and share knowledge.”
“Work, snacks, and a debrief. That’s my kind of fun night.” Monica raised a hand, and Doc high-fived her.
Tambi would turn the galley into an incident room, creating a list of the weird stuff we’d already seen. She’d spent a whole other career unpicking the shit other people caused, and she moved the same way now, decisive, and usually three questions ahead of the answer she’d just heard.
Monica took every access panel between the mess hall and the bridge and would splice them into a single loop, salvage cable doing a job the ship’s sensors should have handled, feeding eight readings into one screen. She’d read the layout and walk the ship room by room, identifying problems to repair.
