She leaned up on her toes. “She’d have wanted me to be happy.”
At that exact second, a voice spoke from behind her. “Drop the knife.”
Whatever she’d been about to do, she’d never find out.
46
Peace was the side perk
FUCKING FINALLY. Tor sighed around the gag.
It was the damned Premier. Three of his men angled rezals at everyone in the room.
Klym’s eyes kept darting back and forth between everyone as if she expected at any moment that one of them would attack.
She had a look on her face he’d seen hundreds of times, the look people got when they’d accepted a horrible fate, like a life sentence on Insuractius, only to get sudden hope of a reprieve.
Her lower lip shook, and he wanted to kiss it, or touch it, anything. But the damned gag and cuffs made him useless.
She lowered the knife slowly from her father’s neck, blood pooling along her hand, and stepped away. She made a keening sound.
His face ashen, Merona backed away to stand by his guards, who’d lowered their weapons instantly.
Shoulders heaving, Tor dropped to his knees in front of her. And even then, she was so much shorter than him that her lips were at his eye level.
They trembled.
His explosive heart beat too loud to hear much of anything, everything else just faded away.
She stared down at her shaking hands. The knife clattered to the floor.
He garbled behind the gag, but she didn’t understand, so he crouched low and butted the back of the gag against her palm.
She jumped at the contact, but slowly her fingers threaded along his scalp, still shaky, but there. Touching him. Finally.
Moving on his knees, digging his shoulder into her ribcage, he backed her up so she leaned against the wall.
Whatever was going on at the doorway, he could vaguely see through his peripheral vision, the Premier’s personal security detail had removed all weapons. Agammo with all his sausage curls was there, his little mouth popping open and closed.
Tor didn’t care about any of them. He closed his eyes and dropped his face against the silky gray fabric of the dress right between her breasts and sucked in a breath of Klym, drew her deep into his lungs like having her there would keep her there, safe and his. Levidicus fruit, smooth silk, and warm skin. Vinyassa, he’d missed her. Her fingertips moved, and he shuddered as the latch at the base of his neck snapped open and the straps that held the ball-gag in place lowered.
She pulled the ball from his mouth.
He wiped his mouth on his shoulder. There were probably a hundred things he could say, and even more that he should say, but only one stuck in his craw. And it was a big one. “You were going to fucking Bond with another man?”
His voice came out nothing more than a pathetic, hoarse whisper.
She startled at the tone of his voice. “To save your life?” She took his face in her hands, her cold, soft fingers, sticky with blood, sliding over his cheeks. “Yes. I’d do anything.”
“Not that.”
“I can’t believe you came here,” she whispered.
“I can’t believe you left me,” he whispered back, the anger fading under her touch.
“I left to save you.”
He pushed her back with his chest against hers, in the closest thing he could manage to a hug while on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back. “I don’t like your methods of saving me.” He’d mimicked her line.
She let out a watery laugh, and her body trembled against him.
The pearl thief, having put down his weapon, kept casting wary eyes at Tor. A fact he had not overlooked. Tor didn’t even bother turning to look at Merona or anyone else in the room, his eyes were all for Klym, but the fucker had to know, and Klym needed her pearls back. “That Vaniiya-damned guard of yours stole your daughter’s pearls.”
Klym’s eyes widened on his. Her lip trembled. “You got them back?”
“You sold your mother’s pearls?” Merona whispered, and for that, Tor did look back, because he wanted to see the look on his face. It was ashen. He looked like he’d taken a grazer hoof to the solar plexus.
Klym didn’t look at Merona. She just stared at Tor. “You got them back for me?”
“Of course.”
He rested his head on her sternum, got his nose between her perfect breasts and rubbed back and forth. She smelled like home.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Why did you really leave?” he asked, trailing his nose up her neck to press a kiss there. “If it was just about Pijuan, you could have hidden.”
Her throat moved against his cheek. “You took me for peace. And you used me as a side perk.”
How had she found out? He pulled back to see her eyes. Wet and warm and gray. “The other way around. Peace was the side perk.”
Her hands tightened in his hair, and she brought her lips to his. He groaned. The last time they’d kissed felt like it was a few centuries ago. She tasted way better than the ball-gag. Her lips were worth crossing a few galaxies and risking a little torture. He groaned against her and felt her lips curve against his.
Why the Premier had to choose that precise moment to walk up, Tor couldn’t have said. But he stood over them, tall and skinny with hair the color of a carrot, and cleared his throat.
Klym didn’t even acknowledge him. Her thumbs stroked along the corners of Tor’s lips.
“Come home with me.” He finally said the thing he’d come here to say.
“Yes,” she whispered.
The Premier cleared his throat.
The hollow feeling in Tor’s chest, the one that had been gnawing and sucking and tearing at him since the minute she’d disappeared in the riot, dissolved. He dropped his face back between her breasts and shut his eyes.
47
Freedom is overrated
“DONE.” TOR GLANCED over at Klym and dropped his hands from the console in the front of his ship.
She slid the buckle on her harness and pulled
