This kiss was not brief. This kiss was not a question or a tentative gesture or a thing to be interrupted by a wet-nosed dog. His hands found her waist and pulled her close, and she let herself be pulled. The counter at her back was the only solid thing as he leaned in, letting her get used to his nearness. She placed her hands on his chest, then let them slide up to encircle his neck. Her senses flooded with him,and she kissed him back with all the joy and reckless courage the day had given her. A tremble raked through her as she buried her fingers in his hair. His gills flared, releasing air she felt on her wrists. She could not get close enough to him. Even pressed up against him was too much distance.
When they broke apart, she was breathing hard and so was he, and his forehead rested against hers.
“Come back to my room,” he said. “Please.” His voice was low and rough and he pulled back just enough to look at her. To make sure. “Only if you want to, Holly.”
She looked at him. At the man who had come to her hotel to buy her outpost and ended up building shelves for her tea station. Who had swum through underground pools with pure bliss on his face and kissed her in the rain and told her he wanted her to succeed even though it meant he would fail. Who was looking at her now with an expression that was open and wanting and patient, and who would walk away if she said no, and she knew that, and it was one of the reasons she wasn’t going to.
“I want to,” she said.
She pulled out her wrist comm and sent a quick message to Tyer:Would you mind looking after Bean until the morning?
The response came back almost instantly:Sure.Give Vipp my regards.
Holly pressed her lips together to keep from chuckling and tucked the comm away. They had not been as subtle and she’d thought.
Rasker took her hand. They walked through the dim lounge together, past the counter and the empty trays and the ghost of a day that had changed everything, and out into the quiet hallway.
He stopped at his door and turned to her, and the look on his face made her breath catch. He kissed her again, slow at first, then deeper, and she felt it everywhere. His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck and she pressed into him and the hallway was too bright and too public and entirely beside the point.
He pulled back just enough to find her eyes. Then he lifted her, one arm beneath her knees and the other at her back, and she let out a startled laugh and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“This is dramatic,” she said.
“Let’s go withromantic,” he said. “You deserve romance. You deserve a lot of things.”
“So do you,” she whispered, and kissed him as he carried her through the door and kicked it shut behind them.
Thirty-Eight
Holly woke to a sound she couldn’t place.
It was dark. The dome’s daylight cycle hadn’t engaged yet, and the room was lit only by the faint blue glow of Rasker’s personal transmitter on the dresser. She was warm. The sheets smelled of salty air and the soap he used. His arm was draped across her waist, heavy with sleep. She could sink into this. Be here, forever. This man, and all the parts that made him who he was, had burrowed into her heart. She was making Moone’s Landing a working station again,andshe’d found love. This was about as blissful as she’d ever been in her entire adult life.
The sound came again. A buzz. Insistent and small.
Her wrist comm. She had left it on his bedside table, and the screen was lit, pulsing with notifications. She reached across Rasker’s chest and picked it up, blinking at the display.
Fourteen messages. No, sixteen. The number climbed as she watched. Most of them from Sam.
Holly’s stomach tightened. She popped out the earpiece and pressed it into her ear. She hesitated, knowing in her gut that nothing good was contained in these messages. The bliss she’d felt was about to be shattered, and she packed up as much of it asshe could, shoved it into a quiet pocket of her mind, and tapped the first message.
Sam’s voice was clipped, controlled, but she could hear urgency beneath it. This was new.
Holly. Pressure spike in the water system. The reading I flagged last night just blew past tolerance. I’m heading down to check it.
She tapped the next one. Timestamp: forty minutes later.
It’s bad. Main distribution line ruptured somewhere in the underground system. Water is dumping through the rain heads at full volume in three zones. The garden took a direct hit. I’ve shut down what I can from up here, but the manual valves are underground and the caverns are flooding. I can’t get in there.
The next.
The cavern backup has knocked the filtration system offline. No water running to the square or the hotel. Repeat, no water to the hotel. Your guests have no water in their rooms.
And the next, his voice tighter now, stripped of everything but information.
Air circulators are down. Don’t know if it’s related or coincidence but the timing is suspicious. Spaceport grid is fluctuating again. I’ve rerouted power to keep the force fields stable, but I’m juggling. Holly, I need you at the control tower. We may need to evacuate.
Holly sat up. The sheet fell away from her and cool air hit her skin, but she barely noticed. She was already pulling messages forward, scanning timestamps, listening to the cascade of increasingly dire updates that had accumulated while she slept.
