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Foul-mouthed. Mud-encrusted. Stinking.
Lenore’s face burned with embarrassment.
All those things were true, but they weren’t nice to hear. It’s been months since her legs or armpits saw a razor, let alone deodorant. It was called roughing it for a reason, not a luxury weekend at a five-star hotel.
Lenore didn’t flatter herself by thinking they had a moment out in the rainforest, but she thought Baris had been valiant and charming. He carried her like she weighed nothing; it was so far from the truth but did all sorts of things for her lizard brain. But, yeah, now that she could understand his words…
I liked him much better before I knew what he was saying. She’d like to see how he’d fare being stranded in the wilderness on his own.
“You there. Halt. What were you doing in the king’s cabin?” A voice rang down the corridor, followed by pounding footsteps.
Lenore jolted at the question and spun around. First, who said halt with a serious face? Second, the king? Third, that was a rather tall elven woman barreling her way with a grim expression on her face. She wore a steel gray uniform that screamed security.
“I got lost trying to find my cabin,” Lenore said, holding up her hands and accidentally dropping her towel.
The woman gave Lenore a hard stare, like she could make Lenore confess her sins, and for good reason. Four eyes was a lot of eye power to focus on one hapless sucker.
She cocked her head to one side, eyebrows arched.
Lenore’s fingers flexed, resisting the urge to clutch the front of the robe closed. She’d done nothing wrong. She had every right to be there, dripping wet and practically naked. “The doors all look the same—and Baris should lock his doors.”
“It is the king’s ship. Why should he be expected to lock his door in his own ship?”
“Assassins?” Lenore replied, doing that thing where she spoke before she thought. The woman’s expression went from serious to dangerously serious. “Okay, that was a poor choice of words, but if he didn’t want to be disturbed, maybe don’t have the doors woosh open when someone walks by.”
“You did not enter a code?” the woman asked.
“I didn’t touch the door. It just opened, which is why I thought it was my cabin.” Sarah had told Lenore that the ship’s computer recognized the band on her wrist, and the cabin door would open for her alone. No need to worry about keys or locks.
The woman’s posture softened. “The princess coded your band?”
Lenore nodded. “Yes.”
She extended her hand. “She gave you the royal code. Let me input the correct permissions.”
“Oh, well, I’m glad we can all agree it was a big misunderstanding.” Lenore unlatched the band. Then, a nasty thought snuck up on her. “Did Baris call security on me?”
The woman’s lips twitched in what was almost a smile. “His Majesty had concerns.”
“That snitch.”
Baris owed her an apology. A big one.
CHAPTER FIVE
LENORE
One Year and Three Months Ago
“Come on, you piece of junk.” Lenore rebooted the auto-medic. The massive machine took up far too much space in her sickbay and failed to work far too often to justify its existence. Letting it run through a power on-power down cycle a few times usually worked out any gremlins in the computer, but the switch was on the underside of the table. The only way to access it was on her back, so here she was, on her back on the floor, under the very expensive garbage.
Life was weird.
One minute Lenore’s arguing with her ex in the hospital hallway; the next, she’s sucked through a portal onto an alien planet. She went from barely surviving to playing mechanic to a piece of medical equipment light-years more advanced than anything on Earth. How was this even her life?
Lenore had been in the princess’ employ for six months now. As skeptical as she had been about Sarah’s pie-in-the-sky plan of rescuing people and sending them to a modestly-sized palace—Summerhall—to live until they worked out a way to get home, it was real.
Every ludicrous word.
