Chloe didn’t believe it for a moment and she doubted Reuel did either. “I want to know why you burst into my cabin and started a fight,” Chloe demanded.
Jared narrowed his eyes at her, his jaw tightening until a muscle began to jump there, as if he was grinding his teeth. After studying him a moment, she glanced at Kane and Damon. They looked just as furious. Her heart thudded dully with dismay as it became clear that they were as angry with her as they were the three men they’d tried to beat the shit out of. “Salina said something to you, didn’t she?”
Something flickered in Jared’s eyes.
“At least tell me what she said.”
“She told them that you had called a meeting in your cabin with the three of us and she wondered why they had not also been summoned,” Sebastian growled angrily.
Chloe turned triumphantly to Reuel. “You see! Itoldyou it was that bitch! She started the whole thing!”
Reuel’s face hardened with anger. “That might well be true, and I will certainly discuss the matter with her, but she did not finish. If it is true, she merely brought the two groups together and they took it from there. Your men have been a discipline problem for some time, although I have tried to overlook it. I believed, eventually, that they would recall that they are a team and that they should work together as such. I have not seen that this is the case, however. In point of fact, that debacle in your cabin seems a stronger indication that they will become worse not better.”
Chloe swallowed uneasily. “Well! They did trash the cabin. I say they should cool their heels here in the brig for a few days … maybe a week and then they’ll have to put it back together.”
Reuel narrowed his eyes at her thoughtfully. “I believe you are as much a part of the problem as Salina is in your own way.”
Chloe gaped at him indignantly.
“I believe that I should remove them from your dance card and assign a different group to you. They will be rotated to some of the other women.”
Outrage instantly overcame Chloe’s speechless indignation. “Woah! No fucking way are you sendingmymen to fuck those other women! And I’m not taking ‘replacements’ damn it! They aremymen! I’m not assigning any-damned-body else to take care of their recreation.”
Reuel stared at her in surprise. “You agreed that it was necessary to the morale of the crew to offer recreational sex.”
“I still do, buttheyare my crew. I don’t see any reason at all to switch things around when I’m perfectly capable of taking care of them myself. Your crew can mix it up as much as they want to. There’s plenty of women. In fact, they don’t have as many men to entertain as I do … and I’m handling it just fine!”
“If you were handling it fine, they would not be fighting one another,” Reuel said pointedly. “And I might add, that my crew is now larger by a dozen more—males. There were no females among those we took.”
It was impossible not to feel hurt at that comment. She lifted her head and glanced at her crewmen, but she discovered she couldn’t meet their gazes. She swallowed a couple of time convulsively and finally nodded. “Whatever you think is best.” She cleared her throat. “You should probably just exclude me. I’m not a cyborg and … well, that’s probably the problem.”
Pushing past Reuel, she left the hold at a brisk walk, trying not to give the appearance of fleeing the scene.
She should’ve known that fucking cunt, Salina would be laying in wait to enjoy the fruits of her labor! She smiled gloatingly when Chloe passed through the crew quarters and it was all Chloe could do to ignore the provocation. The reflection that the bitch would probably break her in half was certainly a factor in trying to ignore her, but she thought it was her wounded pride and her hurt that was mostly responsible. She couldn’t think beyond the absolute necessity of convincing anyone that happened to look her way that she was completely unaffected.
It was only recreational sex anyway, she reminded herself—supposed to be therapeutic in relieving stress more than anything else. And clearly Reuel was right if it was true that her guys had still been fighting among themselves.
Well, she knew it was true. She’d been working hard to pretend she hadn’t noticed they almost always looked like they’d traded punches with someone even when they weren’t battered enough to look like they’d been beaten half to death.
She desperately wanted to retreat to her cabin and cry her eyes out, but it was a disaster area and besides, she had her pride, damn it! She wasn’t going to let the damned cyborgs know she didn’t have any spine! She did stop to survey the damage for a few moments, trying to decide what she was going to do about a place to sleep until her cabin was put back to rights. As she stood staring glumly at the mess, though, some of Reuel’s crewmen arrived and began to sort through the rubble.
Heaving a shaky breath, she left and headed to the bridge. She didn’t especially want or need to go to the bridge. It was pretty much the only place on the ship that she still had, mostly, to herself, though. For a while she simply sat glumly in the captain’s chair, staring at nothing in particular and struggling with her thoughts. They rambled from one thing to another—mostly things that only depressed her more—but she found herself re-evaluating her decision to settle on this new planet they were looking for.
What was the point, really? She didn’t have to go to such lengths to avoid the law. She wasn’t a cyborg. She didn’t doubt that they were after her, but it always came down to fines more than anything else. That was mostly what the laws were about—getting more money.
Actually, even if she spent a little time in jail, just how different was that going to be from living on the damned ship? Her cabin probably wasn’t much bigger than a jail cell.
She hadn’t actually viewed the Salvager as a prison before, but that was what it was, she thought abruptly. She was secluded from life by the metal hull of the ship just as surely as she would’ve been if she’d spent most of her life in prison—and itwasmost of her life, she realized, well over half of it now.
What would she do with herself on the planet even saying they found it? She hadn’t ever done anything but ramble around space collecting junk to sell to people that sorted the junk and resold it for something else.
She frowned. She’d pretty much agreed to turn the ship over to Reuel to collect the cyborgs that were scattered all over everywhere. It occurred to her that that would be a worthwhile job. There would be a living in it—of sorts. She didn’t see why it wouldn’t work if she kept up her salvage operation, for that matter. It would be a good cover for Reuel, a good reason to go from one planet to another.
It wouldn’t be that big of a change from what she’d been doing already and, really, she was pretty much a creature of habit. She’d never been like her father. She didn’t especially enjoy wandering just for the sake of seeing different things. The only reason she’d ever been comfortable was because they had their own little world and nothing changed that much—until they took Jared and Kane onboard.
She didn’t want to think about them, though. Shrugging her thoughts off, she went back to the task of studying star charts. Something flickered in her mind when she looked at one star system and she frowned, trying to decide whether it was familiar because she’d looked at it so many times or if it was a memory. As she stared at the name of the primary colony world, a faint memory did surface—of Billy and Bud arguing with her father about stopping there.
Her father had pointed out that they didn’tneedsupplies and they’d pointed it out that it wasn’tsuppliesthey were after.
