Heat suffused her abdomen.
She bolted to her feet, ignoring his proffered hand.
The knowing smile grew on his face.
Jayleia swallowed a curse. She’d avoided his touch for her own peace of mind, and thereby handed him yet another weapon to wield against her. She had no business being affected by him at all.
She turned on her heel and strode out of the cockpit into the medi-bay.
He followed. Crossing his arms, he leaned against the door frame. His eyes followed every move she made.
She turned her back on him. Gathering medical supplies from the dull green cabinets lining the gray walls, she listened to her pulse thundering in her ears.
The game of hiztap and tezwoul in the cockpit had provided behavioral confirmation that Damen’s species, the Autken, had long ago evolved from a clawed and fanged predator. Their exact history remained unknown. Legend suggested the race had fled a planet orbiting a dying sun.
Over the generations, hybridization had produced the modern version of the species, a rough-and-tumble, violent people with a love for sniffing out mineral deposits on some of the most forsaken asteroids and planets in the known systems. The Autken had founded Silver City and the mining guild, but over the years, citizens from worlds scattered across space had found the station’s frontier, anything-goes way of life to their liking.
At last count, the Autken members in the United Mining and Ore Processing Guild were outnumbered nearly two to one by other species. Not that it mattered to guild politics. None of the other races represented in the guild had yet managed to form enough of a coalition to wrest power from the Autken guild mistress, Kannoi, and her council.
Predatory mannerisms remained ingrained in the species. Those who joined the UMOPG learned and adopted them, or they didn’t survive.
Jayleia turning her back on Damen in the midst of a battle of wills was either a display of trust or a deadly insult. Either way, she’d told Damen she didn’t count him a threat. Which was a lie. Why was he hunting her? Hadn’t he already captured her? If he wanted to know where her father was, why not just ask?
“You need information,” he said.
The dangerous, velvet quality of his voice had vanished. He spoke once more with the musical cant of a Claughwyth speaker using a non-tonal language like Tagrethian.
Momentary truce for the good of the mission?
“Yes. Was anyone other than my dad accused or arrested?” she asked.
She heard him shift.
“You think this move against your father might be a major power grab?”
“I won’t know until . . .”
“Until you have a list of who was arrested,” he mused, his tone all business.
“And a report about what’s happened to anyone who was picked up in the sweep. If that’s what this was,” she said. “Source that from our governments, the UMOPG, and the Citizen’s Rights Uprising.”
“The CRU?”
“Sensationalist though they may be, my parents believe they have access to information the rest of us don’t.” Concern sliced through her and she turned to him. “My mother. Has she been contacted?”
Damen frowned. “We’ll find out.”
“I trust her people will protect her,” she said. “If I can speak to her, she may be able to provide insight I lack.”
Damen’s gaze weighed heavy and his smile felt like it could cut. “Why are you cooperating?”
She rubbed her forehead. “You saved my friends and you aren’t currently using them as leverage against me. Isn’t that reason enough?”
She couldn’t begin to interpret the wordless sound he offered in answer. Acknowledgment? Sympathy? An exhortation to prepare for siege?
“Where is your father?” he asked, the smooth, velvet quality in his voice again.
Siege. And her, with so few remaining resources.
“I don’t know,” she replied, schooling her voice to mimic the hint of danger in his. “Beyond that, be careful how you pursue your prey, Major. I bite. Right now, that’ll get you infected.”
He whispered a curse.
She paused in her search among the medical supplies to look at him.
The muscles in his jaw flexed. He met her gaze.
“Your father has identified the traitors internal to Tagreth Federated,” he gritted. “He may have been trying to neutralize them when someone made him.”
“I’d come to that conclusion,” she said. “That he’d gotten too close.”
Damen crossed the bay in a single stride, closed gentle hands around her wrists, and drew her around to face him.
Electricity flashed across her senses.
She heard him draw a ragged-sounding breath and stared at him, transfixed by the serious light in his eyes.
“Help me find your father and let’s finish what he started,” he urged, his fingers resting on her pulse points.
The sensation of her blood pounding through her veins in response seemed to soothe him. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned closer. “We could end this war with the Chekydran.”
Longing wound around her heart. She could so easily be seduced by his offer to make her part of his team. Because of him? Or because of the goal?
Or was she victim of a masterful interrogation?
She shook her head.
Damen released her.
Instantly, she missed the contact of his skin on hers.
“Would Tagreth Federated still be Tagreth Federated? Or would it end up consumed by the Claugh nib Dovvyth Empire?” she whispered.
“Does it matter?” Damen asked. “We’re losing, Jayleia. The Chekydran are grinding down our defenses. We lose more ground every day. If our kind are wiped from known space, what difference will our allegiances make?”
She closed her eyes at the pain that cut through her chest. Gods. How could her father have dropped his mess into her lap and disappeared? She had to find him. If only so she could kill him herself.
“I’m sorry,” Damen murmured. He sounded sincere.
She opened her eyes.
Concern lined his forehead.
“You’ve had a hell of a day,” he said, stepping back.
His understatement surprised a smile from her. “I won’t break. And I appreciate your honesty as well as the straightforward interrogation.”
The tension in his face eased.
“Someone once suggested that when I wanted to know something, I ought to simply ask,” he said, his tone challenging her to identify the quote.
Surprised to hear her best friend’s words coming from him, she lifted an eyebrow. “Ari’s tolerance for games ends at the edge of the dueling floor grid.”
“And you?” he asked, his voice a caress that brought blood to the surface of her skin. A gleam of enjoyment showed in his eyes at her blush. “What games do you enjoy?”
“Ones to which I understand the rules,” she gasped, fighting the urge to cover her burning cheeks.
“Some of the best games have no rules,” he countered.
Jay’s heart thumped hard at the innuendo. She could think of no response, and that appeared to please him. At a loss, she returned to hunting for medical supplies.
From the sound of his footsteps, she gathered that Damen returned to the doorway.
“When you last spoke to your father,” he finally said, “did he give any indication that anything was wrong?”
Jayleia hesitated. She closed her hand on a regeneration unit and then faced him. “Not per se. It was what he didn’t include in his last message.”
Damen frowned. “Explain.”
“He encodes his communications to me with content of no interest to anyone but me.”
“Such as?”
“Lania’s second baby is a girl,” she said, as she dumped the medications and gear on the diagnostic table.
Damen made a distressed sound in the back of his throat before gesturing at her right side. “Is your arm supposed to be that size?”
She started and glanced down. Uttering a laugh, she rounded the diagnostic bed and handed him a bottle of spray medication. “The antihistamine will help. Press this button. Cover all the bites.”
“Lania’s second baby is a girl,” Damen repeated, raising his eyebrows. “Was it supposed to mean anything?”
“Only that my cousin’s child was a girl. Or do you mean something beyond my dad encoding a message that inane simply to force me to practice decryption? He’s my father. He has never explained himself to me,” she groused.
A faint smile lightened his features, the first she’d seen unclouded by ulterior motive. That she knew the difference so readily jolted her.
He nodded and sprayed medication over the swelling, blood-crusted wound.
It felt like acid. She flinched and squeezed her eyes shut, gritting her teeth to keep from swearing.
“Why didn’t you have me numb this first?” he rasped, anger in his voice. “Where is it?”
“I took pain medication when I came aboard,” she retorted, opening watering eyes. “Put regen in place, directly atop the wound. The discomfort will diminish . . .”
Damen slapped the antihistamine down on the table. Pinning her with a pointed glare, he found the anesthetic spray and coated her arm.
Jayleia slumped in relief.
Damen caught her, brushed the collection of medical supplies to one side, and then lifted her to sit on the table, pressing his way between her knees so that her thighs bracketed his hips. He smoothed the hair from her face.
Jayleia choked on her breath at the hormones assaulting her system. The heat of him against her legs scorched her, scattering her ability to form rational thought.
“No more stoicism,” he commanded. “I do not like causing you pain.”
Intimating that he could and would? Jayleia stared into his face and swallowed hard. Why didn’t the implied threat scare her?
He smoothed all hint of feeling from his face and brushed his fingertips against her cheekbone.
She flushed at the tingle following the path of his touch. No. His threat didn’t frighten her. Her response to him did. She had to refocus him. Pain was easier to bear than whatever he was doing to her.
“Y-you don’t wish to be accused of torture?” she asked.
“Pain is a poor motivator,” he murmured. “Pleasure is far more effective.”
Jayleia laughed to quash the liquid fire rushing through her veins.
He raised his eyebrows.
“I’m dehydrated, exhausted, hungry, and waiting to see whether or not I’ll develop a grotesque infection,” she said.
Not to mention that he’d somehow seen or sensed her body’s response to his touch and turned it into a weapon he skillfully wielded against her. She wished knowing that rational fact made it easier to resist.
“Your options for making good your innuendo are limitless. I don’t know where to beg you to begin,” she said.
His full lips quirked into a tempting smile and humor sparked in the depths of his eyes. “Let’s get you healed up. Hold the begging in reserve for a better time and place.”
“You’re attempting to manipulate me.”
His smile deepened as he leaned into her to pick up the regeneration unit to affix to her injured arm.
She held her breath as the move slammed her senses.
“Is it working?”
Refusing to retreat, she met his eye and challenged, “Ask your questions and see.” Her voice sounded damnably husky to her ears.
He shook his head, and activated the device he’d strapped into place, the first glimmer of trouble in his eyes. “I don’t want to interrogate you.”
She barely caught back her snort of derision in time.
But you’ve been having so much fun doing it.
The thought continued unbidden.
Maybe I have, too.
“What do you want?”
Her question seemed to startle him. He stared, unmoving.
“This war over,” he finally said, his voice muted. “The people I care about, you, Dr. Idylle, Raj, and Pietre, safe. If anything in your father’s last communication can help . . .”
She blinked. He cared? “My father didn’t encode his last message. First time ever.”
Damen had to have known that she and her father had played cipher games. Most kids did, assigning numbers to letters and leaving one another secret messages. Few children had a father who could teach them the real thing, much less who demanded they stay practiced at deciphering anything thrown at them.
Her father had handed her more and more complicated ciphers as she’d grown. Until his last message, when he’d handed her silence.
“Until now, I couldn’t make anything of the lack.”
He stepped back, frowning. “Now?”
She shook her head. “At what point does no message become a message? How am I supposed to decipher something that wasn’t there?”
“It wasn’t a prearranged signal?”
“Not that I knew.” Even she heard the frustration in her tone.
He rubbed the back of his neck, his look contemplative, his tone easygoing and full of just-trying-to-help goodwill. “Yet, it sounds like you and your dad are close.”
“Come right out and tell me you don’t believe I don’t know where my father is.”
He met her glare with a lazy smile and hooded eyes.
Jayleia struggled to quash the heat flooding her belly.
“Major Sindrivik!” V’kyrri bellowed from the cockpit.
Damen and Jayleia both jumped. They seemed to realize at the same moment that there’d been no proximity alarm. It wasn’t a ship approaching with all guns firing. They traded a baffled glance.
“Are you going to feed your guest or go on badgering her while she’s wounded and weary?” V’kyrri demanded.
Jayleia chuckled.
“Can’t you at least pretend you aren’t eavesdropping?” Damen hollered back, irritation mingling with guilt in his tone.
“On this tiny boat?” V’k retorted. “I’d have to be breathing vacuum.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Damen grumbled.
Grinning, Jayleia slid off the diagnostic table.
He shot her a warning look. “Was I unclear about your penchant for stoicism?”