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“I told you,” Rann piped up from the doorway. “There was some kind of device attached to the hull. Hidden behind the vent housing.”

For some reason, just hearing his deep voice sent a wave of reassurance through her. Which was stupid. Completely and utterly stupid.

She’d known him less than a few days. He was a liar, a too-young pilot with no luggage, no paperwork, scars all over his body, and apparently enough secrets to fill a cargo hold. He should not have made her feel safer just by standing there.

Then his words registered and she raised an eyebrow pointedly at Stevie.

Joe had had a backup plan anyway. Figured. The arsehole had sent thugs after her on the station, but had planted something on the ship in case they got away. Which meant he’d already have dispatched a ship to pick up his wayward property.

“Are we on the alternative route?” she asked.

Stevie shot her a hard look. “Do you think I’m stupid? Of course we are.”

Blythe lay back with a grunt of satisfaction. Good. The alternative route was longer, rougher, and had no proper stop between here and their destination, but it kept them well away from the lanes Joe’s people would expect them to use.

“Okay, what am I missing?” Rann demanded. “I can’t help if I don’t know what the d—fuck is going on.”

The silence that fell in the small medical bay and the fact no one would look at him told its own story. Rann sighed. If they didn’t want to tell him, then he couldn’t make them. Nor did he have Anson or Jex’s ability to go digging around in their computer looking for what they didn’t want him to know.

“All right,” he said with a sigh, pushing off from the doorframe. “Keep your secrets. It’s not like they almost got the two of us killed.”

Stevie lifted her head and fixed him with a hard look. “I might say the same about you, Norman.”

“What? Norman?” Blinking in surprise, B tried to twist and look up at him, but Layla tsked and pushed her back down again. “Who is Norman?”

Stevie hadn’t quit glaring at him. He bit back another sigh. Draanthing Jex and his draanthing joke.

“It seems that Randall here is Norman Smith, according to his official documents,” said Stevie.

“What? Seriously?”

From this angle, he couldn’t see B’s face, so he couldn’t tell if she was more amused or horrified at the name Jex had saddled him with.

“Would you admit to a name like Norman Smith?” he challenged.

When in doubt, go on the offensive and try and keep your opponent off balance until you’d found an angle. Not that he considered any of the females aboard his enemy, but right now he needed them not to look too closely at his cover story. Certainly not when they had an enemy prepared to blow bits off their ship.

Stevie folded her arms over her chest, leaning back against a counter at the back of the room. “I guess I’m not seeing why anyone would lie about it.”

Oh, she was a tough one, all right. Meeting his gaze with a hard one of her own, she didn’t look away. Rann had noticed that some humans, especially females, didn’t like direct eye contact. Saw it as confrontational. Which, draanth, yeah, it was. It was meant to be. Whether they looked away or not, it didn’t change that, all they did was weaken their own position.

B and Stevie clearly weren’t the non-confrontational type of humans though.

And there were no non-confrontational Lathar.

Leaning back against the doorframe, he folded his arms as delight and amusement ran through him at the battle of words. He rarely got this on the Lady’s Dream. Ryke was the boss so no one argued with him. Covak got annoyed and started to break things. Tell was about as talkative as a bulkhead, and Anson just threatened to turn his shower cold for a week. He didn’t know the new crew well enough to start anything with them, and he wouldn’t have with Jex and Jesh anyway… either of them could turn him into a pretzel without blinking. And Mira was just too sweet and nice to pull this kind of trall on.

“Well,” he said. “One. It doesn’t exactly say intergalactic ace pilot, does it?”

Stevie arched an eyebrow, letting the silence stretch out, waiting. He grinned at her, knowing full well she expected him to fill it. He wasn’t going to, though. Silence, like direct eye contact, didn’t faze him at all. Plus, this was a favorite trick of Ryke’s, and he was always frustrated that it never worked on Rann.

But then he’d been trained to withstand M’Suun-level interrogation, which meant that short of actually killing him and trying to extract what he knew from his dying brain, they were trall out of luck. And even then, his adaptations had been worked out to ensure rapid degradation of brain matter after death, so all bets were off.

Sure enough, Stevie broke before him, irritation written across her delicate features that he’d made her talk first.

“And two?”

“Two?” he asked, his expression innocent.