Page 13

Come on, sweetheart. I’m harmless. Honestly, you can trust me. You know you want to.

Her mouth tightened and then she sighed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Yeah, you might as well make yourself useful if you’re going to be underfoot all the time.”

It was a win.

He grinned as she spun around and headed down the corridor again. He waited until her back was turned before following, because he had enough sense not to let her catch him looking too pleased with himself.

But not enough sense not to look at all.

She moved easily, even with the heavy boots and the mug of soup in one hand. There was muscle in her arms, obvious beneath the sleeveless tank top, and lean definition in her shoulders when she shifted the datapad tucked under her other arm. The coveralls tied around her waist hid the rest of her figure, but not entirely. She was small, lithe, and built from hard work.

And she was utterly beautiful.

“The main corridor doors need checking,” she said, taking another mouthful of soup. “Manual releases on half of them are sticky. The galley pressure sensor throws an error every third cycle, and the aft coolant return makes a noise I really don’t like. Also, for some reason the number two waste recycler has decided it only works if somebody threatens it.”

He blinked, but she kept walking.

“The cargo bay clamp controls need cleaning out. The emergency lighting in the port-side sleeping quarters is crap. There’s a loose deck plate outside medbay, and I need to get into the wiring trunk above engineering because some idiot routed a comm line through a power conduit.”

He waited for her to tell him what she wanted him to do. Or for some kind of test to prove he wasn’t as useless as she seemed to think he was.

But instead, she just kept listing faults, each one delivered with the same grim irritation. She didn’t ask him to fix the doors, check the coolant, or crawl into a maintenance space anywhere. She didn’t point him at a tool locker or tell him where she wanted him.

Odd.

He’d offered help. Human females were generally very direct when they wanted something. At least, the ones he knew were. They didn’t give him a long list of problems and then expect him to work out which one he was meant to solve first.

B stopped dead just inside the engineering bay, turning around.

He almost walked straight into the back of her but managed to catch himself at the last second. His boots skidded a fraction on the deck as she looked up at him. She had to tip her head right back to do so.

Draanth.

He knew she was smaller than him. Of course he did. Humans always were smaller than Latharians. But there was small and there was small. And she was definitely the latter. She barely came up to the middle of his chest, dark hair scraped back from a face that was all sharp eyes and sharper attitude.

“Were you actually listening?” she asked.

He looked down at her. “Of course.”

Her eyebrow arched up.

Well, no… he hadn’t been listening to her. Not really. He’d been listening to the sound of her voice, which wasn’t the same thing at all. And he’d been thinking about the shape of her body under those coveralls, the strength in her arms, and whether she’d look at him like that if he got her alone somewhere without Layla or Stevie or a hundred badly maintained ship systems between them.

But he knew better than to say that.

“The main corridor manual releases are sticking,” he said. “The galley pressure sensor throws an error every third cycle. The aft coolant return’s making a noise you don’t like. Waste recycler two needs threatening before it functions. Cargo clamp controls need cleaning, the emergency lights on the port-side sleeping quarters are unreliable, there’s a loose deck plate outside medbay, and an idiot routed a comm line through a power conduit above engineering.”

She didn’t say anything, just watched him with that eyebrow raised. Like she was waiting for him to lose his nerve.

He held her gaze, biting back his smile. He’d had excellent recall all his life. It was useful in a fight to remember where all your opponents were. It was also useful when piloting an area with three different Imperial patrol routes crossing the same sector. And it was useful now, apparently, when a suspicious little human engineer wanted to catch him not paying attention.

She still didn’t look convinced.

Something warm and fuzzy spread out from the center of his chest, and he realized he was enjoying himself.

She was suspicious and spiky. The kind of female who would bite someone’s head off before letting them see that she’d been hurt. He wanted to know who had put those spikes there and whether he could find them and kill them. Then he wanted to get close enough to smooth the spikes down.

Which was absolute suicide. So he kept his mouth shut.