Hauk had feared as much. “You are far more appropriate and I am convinced she has her eye on you.”
It was just as well that the banter had improved their humor because when they got over to the damaged ship to have a look at the progress of repairs they discovered the news was not particularly good.
They had managed to repair the ship well enough that it could limp along on its own steam without the need to tow it, but it was going to have to be landed before it could be fully restored and in a place where they would have access to the tools and materials needed. That meant limping all the way back to the Hirachi home world, Ach.
That also meant running the risk of having to fight another battle, or more than that, before they could get the king safely home.
On the other hand, the alternative was not something anyone was happy about.
They could take the two able ships and get the young king to safety while the damaged ship was manned by a skeleton crew and left to its own devices until they could settle the king and return.
No one liked that possibility, but they finally decided there was really no contest. The little king had been through enough already. They had to get him to a place of safety as quickly as was possible.
They took volunteers to stay behind and then prepared the able ships for the jumps they would have to take to get home.
* * * *
Emma didn’t know what was more amazing—looking down at an alien world, knowing it was inhabited by intelligent life—or the swiftness of the trip.
It seemed like it should have taken a lot more time.
Granted, it was really hard to keep up with the time—the day, the time of day—week or month. It had been difficult from the start to work by her body’s schedule/rhythm. After the capture by the Sheloni she’d lost even that much of a sense of passing time because she’d been knocked out and had no way to know for how long any of those episodes lasted.
And once they were rescued/escaped the slavers, she had had to rely on the ship’s clocks with no way of knowing if they were even close to the time she’d known before.
But in sleeping/eating cycles, certainly not that many had passed since the capture of the Sheloni ship and the decision to head straight to the Hirachi home world of Ach.
Little more than a week after the horribly embarrassing and potentially life altering event with Gaelen and his sister, they were already within sight of their destination.
And she still had no idea if this was going to be the end of her time with Nye.
She supposed it would have been easier if she’d known one way or another, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask even if she’d known who would have the answers for her.
She didn’t know who had assigned Princess Valee the task to start with, if it was someone that was traveling with them or someone from their home world.
She certainly wasn’t going to ask Valee. It made her very uneasy that Valee was so damned cheerful afterwards. She felt like the woman wouldn’t be so happy if she wasn’t convinced she’d destroyed lives—or at least hers. No doubt she didn’t think it would bother poor little Nye because he was ‘just a baby’.
But she didn’t know that it was certainty that made Valee so damned cheerful or just hopefulness.
She thought she would soon, though, and it tied her belly into fearful knots.
Gaelen had been distant since the fiasco.
Not that she blamed him, but so, too, had Kadin and Hauk and she didn’t understand why they would give her a wide berth.
Unless it was just her imagination and they’d been busy?
Or because they didn’t want to take a chance that Princess Bitch would screw them over, too?
She decided that supposition had to be wrong. After all, they were both high ranking people, at least as high as Valee, she thought.
But maybe it was because they knew she’d slept with Gaelen?
Not that they’d actually slept, but that sounded so much better than fucked—or screwed like rabbits.
Sigh.
She would’ve felt better if they’d actually gotten to finish.
In the first place, she wouldn’t have been left hanging. In the second, it just didn’t look as bad to be laying with somebody—even naked, sweaty, and panting for breath—as it did to catch them in the act. There was no denying it then. They might have had plausible deniability if they hadn’t been caught doing it.
The problem was, she had no idea what constituted ‘moral’ with these people.
Or even how much that mattered.
She did know that humans had a tendency to get very up tight and moral for a while and then loose and wild. And that the hymen had been valued for untold centuries as the epitome of virtue—if a female had one—and not having one automatically meant you were so sorry you were hardly worth killing.
Was their society comparable to anything humans had ever had, though?
Well, Valee wasn’t gleeful for nothing, she reminded herself.
Clearlyshethought it meant very bad things for Emma.
It made it worse that the baby had been especially clingy since the incident and screamed whenever Valee tried to take him. Valee blamed that on her, but she thought it was the bitch that had traumatized the baby with the tirade she’d enacted.
As ifshehad been taken by surprise! When it was as clear as bell that she’d found exactly what she’d expected to find.
It teased at the back of Emma’s mind that it had been a total setup, but she just couldn’t believe Gaelen would do such a thing. She couldn’t think of any motive he’d have for doing it quite aside from the fact that it didn’t fit the personality she believed she knew.
And then there was
