Then she stood, slow and deliberate, and crossed the deck plates between them. She stopped close enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin and catch the faint scent of her hair. When she reached up and cupped his jaw, her callused fingers sliding along the line of it, he forgot to breathe.
Her mouth pressed to his. Warm, dry, and certain. At the first brush of her lips, all his thought processes scattered to the four corners of the Empire.
Then she broke the kiss and stepped back. Her hand left his jaw, and the sudden absence of it bit cold against his skin.
Three seconds. Maybe less. And it hit him like a round straight to the chest plating.
Not because it was the best kiss he’d ever had—He’d had wilder, deeper, more erotic… the full back catalog—but because she hadn’t yielded a single draanthing inch of it. Her hand on his jaw had steered the whole thing, start to finish, and he’d just… let her.
“We’re even,” she said and sat back in the pilot’s chair.
“Fred,” she said in a voice so level it was almost insulting, “run the diagnostic on the port thruster again. I want to know if that vibration is a sensor ghost or a cracked housing.”
“Running,” Fred said. “Housing integrity is at ninety-eight percent. Vibration is likely harmonic resonance from the drive core.”
“Check it anyway.”
Her fingers returned to the console and picked up exactly where they’d left off, while he stood in the doorway like a draanthing idiot who’d never been kissed before.
Which, for the record, he had. Multiple times. By many females, some of them famous. One of them even on a live broadcast after a championship final, which had trended across three systems for a week.
None of them had left his hands hanging at his sides like they’d forgotten what hands were for.
The pressure of her fingers still sat against his jaw like a phantom weight that wouldn’t shift. He was suddenly aware that she was typing, and what was he doing? He was standing here like some lovesick idiot who’d never seen a female before.
Say something. Literally anything. This is your whole thing.
He was the male with the lines and angles and exit strategies. He’d once talked his way out of a doping inquiry with a smile and a compliment about the investigator’s shoes.
His mind was blank.
“Right,” he said. It came out rougher than he’d meant, and she didn’t even look up, which was somehow worse than if she’d laughed at him.
Off the doorframe, he headed back down the corridor before his mouth could do anything else without consulting his brain first. He didn’t make it far. Halfway down the passage where the light was dimmest, his legs made an executive decision to stop working. He ended up with his shoulders against the wall, staring at the opposite bulkhead and breathing like he’d just run a full defensive rotation in kit.
Get it together. It was a kiss. Three seconds. You’ve had longer handshakes.
But his head wouldn’t cooperate. It kept snagging on the same moment… her hand on his jaw, her mouth on his, warm and certain and completely, absolutely deliberate… and every time he tried to push past it, the memory just reset and played again from the top, like a highlight reel stuck on a loop.
She’d chosen to do that. That was the part his brain couldn’t file. Nobody had made her, nobody had pushed her, she hadn’t owed him a single thing after the stunt he’d pulled, but she’d stood up and crossed the room and put her hand on his face. Not because he was Raaze the celebrity or Raaze the exile or Raaze the lying piece of trall who’d conned his way onto her ship. She’d looked at him, just him, the version with nothing left to sell, and she’d still crossed the room.
He dragged a hand down over his face. His skin felt too tight.
“Draanth,” he whispered.
He shoved off the wall. He needed to move, needed to wear himself out before he turned around and went back to the cockpit and did something monumentally stupid like kiss her again. So he headed for the cargo bay because it was the only space on this draanthing ship where he could pace without running into her.
Debt settled.
The corners of his lips quirked. The beautiful little female might think that, but hell no.
They weren’t done. Not by a long shot.
The cockpit was quiet except for the soft hum of the engine and the occasional click of Fred running background diagnostics. Cait sat in the pilot’s chair with her feet tucked up under her, and a mug of caff-stim balanced on her knee.
She wasn’t drinking it, though. Instead, she was staring at the internal camera feed.
She hadn’t meant to pull it up. She’d been checking the cargo bay temperature regulators because the environmental system had flagged a minor fluctuation, and she’d switched to visual to make sure nothing had shifted during the course adjustment, and then?—
