Fairchild eyed him suspiciously for a moment. How had he known to do that? Even at the academy, she’d never told him about her childhood. But then, her reticence had probably clued him in on the fact that she didn’t want to talk about it.
Either way, she was grateful. Reece had saved her from putting a damper on what had turned out to be a surprisingly nice day.
One she didn’t want to end.
“I don’t know,” Fairchild said, pushing her chair back and rising from the table. “You boys can hit the sack if you want to, but I’m still feeling a bit antsy…”
She sauntered away from the table, swinging her hips a little more than necessary with every step. When she reached the doorway, she paused and glanced back over her shoulder.
“I think I might go take a dip in the pool,” she said. “Be a shame to let it go to waste.”
Fairchild was still wearing the same short bathrobe that she’d put on after her shower. Now she let it slip down her body and fall in a heap at her feet. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
She stood in the doorway of the dining room for a long moment, letting her three teammates get a good long look at her. Then shestepped around the corner and headed down the corridor in the direction of the swimming pool.
Approximately two seconds later, she heard a huge commotion behind her. It was the clatter of falling silverware and broken dishes as the Mercs scrambled over the table to follow after her.
She smiled.
CHAPTER 13
Late that night, well after midnight bythe Allura’sclock, Reece lay on his back in the oversized bed, his naked body awash in a sea of expensive satin. Fairchild was nestled against his side, sleeping. The other two Mercs were positioned on the other side of her, also asleep. Nash was snoring noisily. Dutton was so quiet he could have been dead. The room was dark.
Fairchild had pretended to be reluctant about snuggling, even though it had pretty much been her own suggestion. Once they got to Calyxia, she’d said, their bedroom would be under round-the-clock surveillance. It wouldn’t be enough for them to fuck like lovers. They would have to sleep that way too.
Reece hadn’t argued with that.
He was tired from the hours of practice they’d put in. He’d slept with plenty of women in his day, but never one with Fairchild’s stamina. He’d been through combat training sessions that were less exhausting. Every muscle in his body was sore—every fiber, every cell.
Shit, even his dick was sore from all the rutting he’d been doing. He could only imagine how Fairchild was feeling, considering she’d been pulling triple duty.
She hadn’t complained once.
But then, she wouldn’t, would she? Too competitive for that. A Merc, through and through. Reece smiled.
He looked down at the fierce warrior resting in the crook of his arm, her body nearly as hard and deadly as his own. The roomwas dark, but his ocular augs allowed him to see her anyway. He studied her face. Even in sleep, her expression was intense, brow furrowed slightly, as if resting was a struggle, a fight.
Reece knew he should be sleeping too. Another long day of training lay ahead, and his body needed all the recovery it could get.
His mind, however, was still churning.
Before the mission, the Guild had provided him with a full dossier on Fairchild. He hadn’t planned on reading it. He already knew everything he needed to know about her. She was tough, determined, and loyal to a fault. She would kill or die without question.
But then they’d had that little spat in the concourse of Sector HQ. That was the factor that had changed Reece’s mind. He hadn’t read the dossier out of anger or spite. Quite the opposite, in fact. If he was going to make this mission work—and he wanted it to work, for Fairchild’s sake—he would need to understand everything about her.
Including her past.
It was a common enough story. Her mother had been compensation for Guild services; her fathers a band of Mercs who had been long gone by the time she was finally born. Her mother had tried her best to raise the child, but life in the rimworlds was often brutal and never fair. A pox had left Fairchild motherless at the tender age of five, too young to understand why an uncaring universe had robbed her of a family, but still old enough for it to hurt.
It was years later when the Guild finally came looking for her, sweeping through the empty ghost-towns of her homeworld. They had found her alone and half-feral among the pestilential ruins, surviving off refuse and vermin. Her Merc genetics had spared her from the plagues that had gradually depopulated her planet.
The Guild became the closest thing she’d ever had to a home.
Her squad had been her family.
As he lay in bed, surrounded by his sleeping comrades, Reece thought of his own family. He thought of his three Merc fathers, Aeron, Murdock, and Zeth. And he thought of his mother, Rona. She wasn’t a Merc, but she was as tough as one.
He thought about what he would do if anyone ever took them away. He thought about the lengths he would go to for revenge.
