Chloe sought patience. “My time of the month? The fertility cycle,” she said tartly. “It’s a monthly thing—28 Earth days, roughly.”
He frowned thoughtfully. She patted him on the cheek. “Check your data banks. I’m going to be off limits for about a week and it’s just as well because none of you are really in any shape to be looking for recreation.”
He looked so disappointed she felt her resolution falter. She sighed in defeat. “Ok. Next time I have a free day, I promise—to give it a try. I’m not going to promise to do it, because I’m not at all sure about this wild orgy you have in mind, but we’ll try a couple of positions and if it isn’t too scary, we’ll go with it. Alright?”
He brightened so quickly she couldn’t help but think she’d been manipulated, but she let it go. Truthfully, she was intrigued by the idea. It just made her a little nervous.
When she finally tracked Reuel down, it was to discover that he was overseeing more repairs to the Salvager. She hadn’t just imagined that shudder when the ship emerged. Some of the repair welds, so hastily performed, hadn’t held. They devoted a full day to reinforcing the hull where the explosion had weakened it before they took the ‘skip’, a longer jump than the first two and entirely in a different direction. The ‘skip’ landed them on the frontier, but several quadrants from their ultimate goal. They waited several days to see if they had anyone trailing them before they took the final jump.
Before them lay an almost endless blackness. It gave Chloe the creeps just looking at it, but it also brought back far stronger memories. She’d stood on the bridge with her father, she knew, many years ago, staring at the vast darkness of deep space, fearful that her father would decide to explore the smattering of stars they could see in the distance.
She thought he would have except that the crew was more vocal about their own fears than she was, and angry. They demanded that he turn around.
“This is the place,” Chloe whispered. “I remember.”
Reuel stood staring out for a very long time and finally addressed the computer. “Run calculations on the distances of the stars to our position.” He glanced at Chloe. “You were somewhere around here when you made the jump?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I remember staring out at this.”
“You do not remember what the destination was that your father chose when the jump failed? Or what the last star system you visited was before you reached this point?”
She frowned. “I’ve tried.”
“We’ll send out the probes once the computer has calculated the distances for us and the probability of planets of a size that we would be looking for.”
“I’ll study the charts again. Maybe something will come back to me.”
* * * *
Chloe had so lost track of time that when she answered the knock on her door and discovered Sebastian, Lucien, and Thor on the other side she merely gaped at them blankly wondering what all three were doing visiting her at the same time.
“It is your free night,” Sebastian prompted.
Chloe blinked at him. Slowly, a frown formed on her brow. “Well, if it’s my free night, what are you doing here?”
Sebastian’s face fell. “You said that we would try that position?”
It still took a few minutes for that to sink in. “Oh. Oh shit! It slipped my mind!” She studied the three of them, feeling her belly go weightless. It wasn’t altogether nerves, however, although there was a healthy dose of uneasiness threading the sense of anticipation. Truthfully, she’d figured all the time on convincing them to do something a little less … fraught with potential for injury that would be just as fun. She supposed that was why she’d dismissed it from her mind. “I did promise,” she muttered. “I must have been out of my mind at the time.”
Stepping back as it occurred to her that she didn’t really want them all standing in the corridor—at her door—she gestured for them to enter and poked her head out to look up and down the corridor to see if anyone had seen them.
As luck would have it, Salina was propped against the door of the shower room, looking straight at her. Chloe’s face went slack with surprise and dismay when she spotted the woman, and she quickly ducked back into her cabin and closed the door.
She frowned, suspicious immediately that ‘luck’ good or bad didn’t have anything to do with it. It seemed to her that Salina was always somewhere around since she’d finally been released. Granted, they had a fairly small community, but she sure as hell didn’t bump into other members as often as she did Salina.
Which suggested psycho bitch was stalking her.
It gave her the creeps, but she discovered when she turned around that Sebastian, Lucien, and Thor had already stripped naked and that effectively distracted her from her anxiety about the woman and redirected her anxiety to a more immediate problem. “Ok. I’m tense.”
“I will give foreplay,” Sebastian volunteered immediately, surging toward her and sweeping her up.
“I do not know why you should give foreplay,” Lucien complained, glaring at Sebastian as he carried Chloe to the bed.
“I am squad leader,” Sebastian said pointedly when he had set Chloe down and commenced to stripping her flight suit off.
“Yes, but this is not a military operation,” Thor said tightly. “I think we should all give foreplay. I am willing to take turns according to squad position, but I do not see why I should be left out!”
This was starting to sound better and better, Chloe decided. Plus, there was always the chance that, once they got worked up and got her worked up, they’d forget all about trying to stick something in every hole! Not that that didn’t sound interesting, and she certainly enjoyed having their tongues in her mouth, but she still didn’t see how it was supposed to be that much fun for her. “Maybe we should try to figure out how all of you are going to manage the … uh … penetration at the same time before we go any further?”
