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He guided Wingless in next to her ship, internally flipping out. He was tingling with excitement and despair all at once. When he called on her, his voice sounded strange.
“Hello?” Her reply was thick with sleep.
“Hi, Lucca.”
You stayed.You stayed. Why did you stay?
“Caligher,” she said, shifting a sheet over her body and making it sound like grey static. “Did you find them?”
“Them?”
“Um… the humans.”
“No, I did not.”
“Oh…”
She chewed on that answer, then finally exhaled. The sound of her body shifting under covers was so intensely comfortable that for a mindless instant, Caligher stopped hurting.
Everything stilled.
He stopped needing to move, just to sit there and savor it—this uncanny sense of what thingsmighthave been like.
He knew he was fucked. He knew what this was. Caligher wanted to be with Lucca and he was going to try—no matter how poor a match he would be. He would steal whatever joy he could get out of this short-lived relationship.
He waited until sleep took her before making his way down to the complex, mind alight with the future.
CHAPTER3
LUCCA
Engines hummed in a crescendo of sound, tearing Lucca from sleep in the most jarring way conceivable. It was six in the fucking morning and she could just tell that Caligher was awake—too awake.
The detritus of dreams littered her mind. In the dead of midnight, she’d conjured up a different version of Caligher. Not so friendly. She dreamed of him breaking onto her ship, peeling down her sheets, voice dripping with equal parts lust and disdain.
“Oh, Lucca, you are going to pay for lying to me.”
So… that was going to be a thing.
She had the vague impression that Caligher had been flirting with her. Even Morwong had hinted at the idea once or twice, putting her on alert. Was Caligher dragging her around with ulterior motives?
She wasn’t revolted by the idea, but she had the sense that Caligher was a touch too pure for some of her darker fantasies.
That, and he hated humans.
“Lucca.”
Whatever moroseness he’d carried when he’d unceremoniously dumped her there was gone. His cheerfulness exuded through the sound system. “I’ve got a direction on a pirate. I’m ready to go when you are.”
Wait.
They hadn’t agreed to go romping through space, had they? She didn’t recall any such plans.
Had he just decided again??
“I’msleeping,” she said.
She buried her face in search of those fleeting dreams. And he started laughing—a warm, pleasant, inviting sound that warmed her to the bones. If only…
