Page 12

Oh, for God’s sake.

Five seconds ago, she’d been ready to drag Layla bodily out of the room by her hair for flirting with the hired help. Now she was getting offended on Layla’s behalf because he wasn’t responding?

She didn’t just need food, she needed sleep. Lots of it. That was the only explanation. Her brain had started eating itself.

“B?” Hope spoke up from the other table. “You want to sit with us? There’s room.”

Blythe looked over. Hope and Callie sat with mugs and meal trays, looking way too settled for people who were meant to be launching inside the next twelve hours.

“I don’t have time,” she said sharply. “And neither do any of you if you want to leave this station on time.”

Hope’s face fell, and the galley went quiet. Grabbing her meal from the hydrator, Blythe turned on her heel and swept out of the room, the sound of trays being pushed away following her out.

Blythe made it three corridors and several mouthfuls of soup before she stopped feeling quite so homicidal.

Not much, mind. She still had a ship held together by optimism, old wiring, and whatever deity looked after idiots on a budget. But the soup helped. It really helped.

The deck plating rattled underfoot as she headed back toward engineering, datapad tucked under one arm and soup mug in the other. The wiring fault was still waiting for her. It should have been an easy job, but every time she got halfway through tracing the damned line, someone needed her for something else.

Like a missing pallet or a bad equipment manifest. Then there had been the crate of medical supplies somebody had put next to the coolant filters because apparently common sense was rarer than hen’s teeth.

And the doors. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second and sighed.

The bloody doors.

It was one thing for the quarters to have manual releases. Annoying, but manageable. You got trapped in your cabin, you swore, spun the wheel, and got on with your life.

But the main area doors were a different matter entirely.

If they lost power in an emergency, people needed to move. Fast. Nobody wanted to be trapped behind a jammed bulkhead while smoke filled a corridor or pressure started dropping. And this tub had enough questionable systems that she didn’t fancy betting lives on patches held together with tape and a prayer.

A soft, heavier tread sounded behind her.

She kept walking, pretending that she hadn’t heard. Which she probably wouldn’t have if someone was talking to her, or if the vents on this section of corridor were still playing up. For a big guy, he was really light on his feet. But she had excellent hearing... partly through good genetics and partly through paranoia.

Maybe he was headed the same way. The ship was small enough that everybody was always headed the same way eventually.

But he stayed with her through the next junction. So she stopped, then whirled around so fast the soup sloshed in her mug.

“What do you want?”

He stopped a few feet away, hands up, palms open in the universal signal for surrender.

And damn it, he was even more handsome up close.

And too tall for the corridor... He had to dip his head under a low-hanging conduit housing, those broad shoulders nearly brushing both walls. His shirt pulled across his chest when he raised his hands, showing off a body that had no business being attached to a charter pilot. Pilots sat on their asses and watched screens and got fat. They did not look like they could pick up the engine room and carry it off if they got bored.

His eyes caught the corridor lights strangely. Huh... Blue, and green.

Handsome young men were trouble. Always had been, so naturally this one had a face that made her want to stare at him and punch something at the same time.

He didn’t flinch at her tone, just stood there and smiled. Charmingly. Fucker.

“Well, there’s not much for a pilot to do before we push off, so is there anything I can help you with?”

For a moment, Rann thought B was going to tell him to draanth off.

Her eyes narrowed, dark and suspicious as she looked him over. Not in the way Layla had though. She looked like she was assessing a faulty pressure seal, trying to decide if he was worth repairing or if she should just throw him out an airlock before he caused a problem.