Shade ran a hand through his short hair, still not used to feeling it so close to his scalp. The movement wasn’t very satisfying without anything to shove back.
He strode into his office, still seeing the freckles across Tess’s nose. They weren’t very dark; she’d have needed more sunlight for that. She also had a few on her chest. They’d looked like a constellation, a pattern to follow between her straight collarbones and the upper swells of her breasts.
Tension like he hadn’t felt in a while whipped through his body. Rosy lips and a cute ass were just the start of it. He hadn’t been crass enough to add NT to the acronym, but he’d noticed her nice tits as well.
Shade frowned as he tugged out his chair. She was attractive all over, but blue eyes, freckles, and an atomic blush were what had left him feeling like he’d been punched in the chest.
Sitting at his desk, he pushed aside the remnants of the late lunch he’d been eating when Tess had come in and then powered up the tablet that might give him some answers about his latest guest. While it got going, he rummaged through some paperwork, not really seeing it. He was still too focused on the way Tess had frozen, going from a little flirty and confused to petrified all at once.
Who had she pissed off? Some galactic officer? Was she a deserter? A rebel? Despite not having much of a game face, she’d seemed ready to put up a good fight.
And then there was the fact that she’d bought ammunition, when not that many people had guns. LW-9 bullets were for Grayhawks, and there was nothing illegal about buying them, but it sure as hell raised questions in his mind.
Shade wanted to call her scrappy, but it didn’t quite fit. For the spirit maybe, but not for the physical part. She’d been tall and strong and fit. Her eyes had looked older than the rest of her, though, like she’d already been to hell and back and made choices most people never had to face.
Determined. That was it.
She’d looked like she could take care of herself. So why did he have this itch under his skin, like he wanted to make sure she wasn’t in trouble too deep?
When the tablet was ready, he typed in the pass code to the secure database only he and about a hundred other people in the galaxy had access to. This was where shit went down. This was where he made his money.
He scrolled through the latest entries first to get them out of the way, but his mind wasn’t really in the right place to check them out. Rebel. Rebel. Rebel. Escaped convict. Kidnapped scientist. Rebel. Priest.
Priest?His eyes stopped for a moment. That was unusual. Not many people fucked with the Powers, just in case they were real.
“Not interested,” Shade muttered.
Going to the search bar, he typed in Tess Bailey.
No matches came up for a current job. No bounty. No info.
Adjusting the search criteria, he typed in just Bailey.
Again, nothing.
He tried Baylee, Bayleigh, Bailee, and Baileigh, all without a hit.
Good. She wasn’t anywhere on the up-to-date Wanted or Retrieve lists. That brought a little relief to the tension in his gut.
Shade switched databases and widened the hunt to birth records, telling the search engine to ignore any hit from more than forty years ago and to eliminate all males from the results. There was no way she was forty—more like twenty-five—but he was working large out of caution.
After an interminable wait, about five kabillion Baileys popped up.
He sat back in his chair and scrubbed his hands down his face. He’d need a year to sort through all that.
He narrowed the search to birth records for women under thirty. Still too many. He used the same criteria for just Sector 12 and got Baileys under a number of different spellings, but no Tess to go with them. Same thing for Sector 8.
He groaned. She’d probably given him a false name anyway, and this was a wild-goose chase.
“Well, shit. Who the hell are you, starshine?”
Shade hadn’t expected his tablet to answer, but all of a sudden, there she was, filling his screen as a new message came through from the first window he’d opened to the restricted-access database. His eyes widened, and adrenaline ripped through his blood.
He stared at the enormous WANTED above her head and felt his stomach twist.
The sum below her picture oftwo hundred millionin universal currency made his jaw drop.
Shade stood up, thunking both hands down on his desk and glaring at the tablet. He leaned over for a better look—and to make sure he was reading this right.
