She leaned in, bracing her hands on the seated Merc’s bare thighs. His muscles felt like steel cables beneath a thin layer of skin. She brought her face right up close to his, until the tips of their noses were almost touching.
“If we all come back from this mission in one piece,” she went on. “I’ll let you have a little revenge of your own.”
“Revenge?” Nash murmured.
“That’s right. Revenge. I’ll let you tie me up and do anything you want. Anything at all. How’s that sound?”
Nash didn’t even have to answer. Fairchild could see from the look in his eyes that his mood was already improving. He was already thinking of all the horrible things he would do to her.
She could feel Reece’s eyes on her too. Her old friend was probably staring at her in amazement, unable to believe that she had just made such an offer.
Or maybe he was just checking out the way her bathrobe was riding up on her.
The damn thing really was awfully short.
***
The dining room was a statement. An absurd one, in Fairchild’s opinion. Hand-painted frescoes of planets and nebulae. Gilded sconces lit with flickering holo-flames. And the table.God, the table. The damn thing ran the length of the room like a landing strip of polished mahogany. Sitting in her high-backed chair near one end, Fairchild couldn’t help but remember a similar piece of furniture in the briefing room back on Bastion-5, and all the shameful things she had done on top of it.
As for the dinner itself, Dutton had outdone himself. Tendrils of steam rose from the mountain of pasta heaped in a big porcelain serving bowl in the center of the table, filling the air with a mouth-watering aroma. The scarlet sauce was the color of fresh blood, but it was a million times thicker, and it was packed with chunks of savory sausage that had been cooked to absolute perfection.
Fairchild leaned across the table and scooped a second helping onto her plate. Her first had disappeared in about sixty seconds flat.
“I’ve gotta hand it to you, Dutton,” she said, settling back into her seat. “I never would have pegged you for a cook.”
Across the table, Dutton shrugged humbly.
“I do what I can,” he said.
Nash, who was sitting beside him, was already murdering his third helping. He mumbled some incomprehensible compliment through a mouthful of food. Meanwhile, at the head of the table, Reece swirled his wine glass. “It’s nice having a chef on the team,” he said.
Fairchild quirked an eyebrow at Dutton. “You telling me youalwayscook for these assholes?”
Dutton shrugged a second time.
“What can I say? Cooking is my favorite thing to do, next to killing.” He quirked a brow of his own. “Though I can think of one other activity that’s gunning for that position.”
The way he looked at Fairchild as he said it sent a tide of heat rushing into her face. She took a sip of wine to cool herself down again.
“Where’d you learn to cook?” she asked.
“When I was a kid,” Dutton answered softly. “I was born and raised on Pelopon. Do you know it?”
Fairchild nodded. The planet was famed for its harsh, militaristic culture. The warrior clans of Pelopon produced some of the fiercest soldiers in the galaxy, trained to fight as soon as they could hold a weapon.
But what did that have to do with cooking?
Dutton went on: “Before I was born, the city-state in which I was raised was attacked by a neighboring clan. I am told the siege went on for many cycles. At last, when the supplies were running low, and defeat seemed imminent, the leaders of my clan sent a message to the Guild and hired a team of Mercs to save the city. The Guild sent a team of three men. Only three. The siege was ended in a day. The Merc team slaughtered half of the attacking army and drove the other half back to their own territory.”
Fairchild nodded thoughtfully. Even the great warriors of Pelopon were still just men. They were no match for the genetically and bionically enhanced killing machines of the Guild.
But she still didn’t see what this had to do with learning to cook.
“There was just one problem,” Dutton explained. “The leaders of the clan did not have enough money to pay the Guild’s high fee, so the Mercs demanded a different form of payment—my mother.”
Fairchild understood. She was all too familiar with the Guild’s breeding practices. In those cases where a client was unable to pay with money, the Mercs might take a woman instead, sharing her and impregnating her with their seed. Due to the dangerous and itinerant nature of the Merc lifestyle, the woman would be left behind on her homeworld to birth and raise the child alone. Later, when sufficient time had passed, someone from the Guild would retrieve the child, who would then begin training to become a Merc.
Fairchild’s own childhood had followed that pattern, more or less.
