"Dense," Danika muttered.
"What is dense?" Seth asked suspiciously.
"Youare!"
He thought that over. "Is that an insult?"
"It damned sure isn't a compliment!" Danika snapped. "It means you're thick headed and I don't want to talk about it!" Flipping onto her side, Danika presented them with her back.
Even if it hadn't been embarrassing to discuss such things with the guys, she thought resentfully, she wouldn't have wanted to when they were so easily provoked into fighting! They'd just go out and pick a fight with poor Basil and end up in the brig again!
They were almost as bad as her little brothers had been, constantly bickering with each other and punching each other! She'd lost track of the number of times her father had had to break up physical disputes between them!
She'd broken up a few herself, if it came to that--until they got so big that she couldn't manage it by herself anymore--and it was usually over something stupid. Like who'd gotten the last of the milk! Or whose turn it was to do the chores they hated the most.
Of course, it all boiled down to who was the boss, in her opinion.
And she supposed that might be what it was with the guys. They were trying to establish the pecking order.
In her opinion, Seth was top dog, hands down, but she supposed neither Dane nor Niles were ready yet to concede that.
* * * *
Seth did not believe that Danika was asleep. He knew it did not take him long to drop to sleep once he had lain down to do so, but she seemed far too tense in his opinion to actuallybeasleep. Obviously, she was trying to go to sleep, though, and did not want to talk anymore ... which irritated him because she had insulted him and not only not given him the chance to defend himself but she hadalsonot given him the chance to discover why she had insulted him in the first place.
Feeling unwelcome, he got up and moved to another bunk and settled there to brood over it and try to untangle the emotions from the conversation to see if he could better understand what had just happened. It was no great surprise to discover that that was a nearly impossible task. He had already discovered that when emotions entered a situation they tended to dominate and make clear, logical thought nigh impossible. He finally decided, however, that one of the reasons he could not separate emotion from the event and understand was because none of it made any damned sense anyway!
Danika had a habit of responding to a question with another question rather than an answer!Thatwas why they never seemed to make any progress toward an understanding!
Was this a human thing, he wondered? A woman thing? Or a Danika thing?
Because he was not at all certain that he had enough memory capacity to break the conversation down to something hedidunderstand and he could foresee a great deal of frustration in his future dealing with humans in general and Danika in particular if every conversation left him baffled and certain that he had missed something critical.
It occurred to him that mayhap it was the emotions he felt now that he had not felt before, because they seemed to boil inside of him and pull him in first one direction and then another--and sometimes two different directions at once--until he was not certain for more than a momenthowhe felt. Or whether he should cling to logic and try to ignore the emotions or if he even could now that he felt them.
He could not recall that he had had any difficulty following Danika before the awakening, though.
Thinking back over it, however, he realized another thing. They did not have conversation before the awakening. Danika merely issued orders that were not open for discussion. He countered with Intel that might affect the outcome if there was any information that she was not aware of and that was that.
So mayhap the problem resided in the attempts at conversation? This was not a very reliable means of communication, he realized, because it did not rely heavily on facts--and often not even on truth.
That thought led him to a startling conclusion.
Everything that Danika had said had been an attempt toevadeanswering his question.
And he could not think of any reason that she would evade rather than answer other than the possibility that she thought he would grow angry about the answer!
Someonehadbeen trying to sex her!
He was so angry after he finally deduced that that it wasn't until a great deal later that he concluded that it had consumed all of his reasoning resources for a good twenty minutes to arrive at an answer that he should have been able to figure out in nano-seconds. That shook him, gave rise to doubts about his mental capacity that he found extremely disturbing, but he was too consumed by rage to analyze it at the time and feel the sense of inadequacy he felt later.
He shot off of his bunk in a towering rage, determined to demand the identity or identities of the man or men who had ... chased Danika into the brig in order to avoid them.
He was distracted from his goal by a commotion as guards marched a half a dozen new prisoners into the holding area, unlocked the cell door, and shoved them into the cell. The one in the lead--an ugly brute with yellow hair, a blackening eye, and bruised, swollen jaw--was grinning from ear to ear as if very pleased with himself. His gaze had gone immediately to Danika the moment they arrived and remained fixed on her as he strode very happily into the cell, crossed the room, and plopped down on the foot of the bunk.
That time it did not take Seth nearly as long to analyze the situation and arrive at a conclusion.
"It is I, Danika! Basil."
