Page 21 of Jewel of the Alien Bandit
He didn’t glance away from his screen to cluck his tongue like he was sympathizing. “The shuttle is a bit much for one passenger, you can take the spare pod, but they are slower. Might be just as quick to wait until after the dance when there will be more departing. Do you want me to call your escort?”
“I don’t mind the time to think,” I assured him. If I stayed for the dance, Trent might not keep his word to wait on informing his ship about what I was.
As soon as I reached outside of Estreldez’s atmosphere, and near the moon my ship was orbiting I sent out the signal to Carmen that I was returning.
A few minutes later my comm was buzzing.
Carmen didn’t give me the chance to say anything before she was ready to tear me a new one.
“Do you not care about your life? We’ve done nothing but bail you out since you were a kid and this is how you repay us?”
“The High Commander of the Krelis Hive was there, and if I didn’t leave we’d have more trouble than not finishing a job.”
We’d be dead, I thought, but I’d put up a decent fight. My ship was beat down, but I knew how to handle her. We’d damage their ship, and take out a chunk of their warriors by aiming for their water synthesizer.
Carmen took me out of my suicide mission thoughts. “You’re in deep shit, Vareo. Jax already had you marked on the job with the client. You will have no support from the team should you require intervention with them not being thrilled about your pitiful performance.”
“This is just another way for you–” The comm disconnected before I could finish my own rant about them tacking on more debt for ‘protecting’ me from a jilted client. This was what they would have tried to do even if I did get the jewel. Any excuse to keep me under their bone claws, and in service to bring them more credits.
I smashed my hand on the dash of the small pod. “Fuck.”
This job was too good to be true, and now I was even farther from escaping this star system.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Luan
THE POD OPENEDto a disgruntled woman with black hair pinned back, and a scowl on a much too symmetrical face.
Words were streaming out of her mouth before she could process that I was not her shipmate, Vareo.
“Worthless piece of space trash. I should gut you for what I have to deal with because–” she cut off when her gray eyes met mine, her lips flattened before they curved up in a small devious grin. “Who do we have here?”
I might have been jealous of the beautiful woman on Vareo’s ship, but the greeting she had intended for him told me she probably wasn’t mating with someone that she’d termed trash.
Lifting my hand for hers, she automatically grabbed my offered hand unthinking before I pulled myself from the pod to stand before her. That was usually how I handled most situations, if you act fast enough people didn’t have enough time to process their own reactions.
“Thank you.” She was quite tall for a female and my head only reached her shoulder, which reminded me of how similar in height she was to Vareo. “I know this is probably a surprise to have me boarding your ship. I am a guest of Vareo, or should I say the space trash you might have been referring to earlier.”
She stepped aside for me to enter, watching curiously as I looked around. This was a rather small transport deck, and I could hear the whiz of the decompression modules whirring in the background, hissing like dying glorbins. There were no overlay screens, just bare metals, and a strange smell that reminded me of the smelting farms where we brought our jewels to reform and package them. This ship was in need of repairs, I surmised.
“Tell me, ‘guest’ of the scum off the ship’s haul, what business did you have to board today?” The woman sounded pleasant enough, but something told me she wouldn’t be helping convince Vareo to return to Estreldez. I’d have to speak with him directly for that. Or at the very least find out why he left so suddenly.
“He was one of my compatible mates,” I told her honestly, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit to her that he had left without telling me after what we had shared together. I blushed thinking about his hands on me, and I couldn’t hide the glow of my loh responding to that memory.
Before I could explain any more about how he had information I needed, she saved me having to figure out what to say by assuming what had happened.
“So, he thought he could bring his new fuck toy on our ship and what? Did he think Jax would be thrilled to have another liability on a job after screwing up?”
Pursing my lips in distaste at the idea of her calling me a liability I tried not to think about how that’s what my mother and Loric would call me for deciding to leave the planet, even if it was only on an orbiting ship. Strange enough, I had no problem being called Vareo’s fuck toy, because the way she said it made me think he didn’t usually have that option. I was smiling despite myself, happy that he wasn’t toying with other women,and it seemed not even the gorgeous and foul-mouthed one he shipmated with.
“What the fuck are you smiling at?” she grumbled while folding her arms over her ample chest, which was much larger than any estreld I’d ever witnessed.
“You have the temper of a hergslat,” I said with humor. We often used hergslats to help quarry the stones and jewels because their anger made them perfect for smashing the rocks into manageable chunks, and we never had to mistreat the beasts because they were easy to migrate and raging helped them file down their claws. The woman stared at me, growing more angry as my smile refused to falter despite her displeasure.
“That must help you with your bounty hunting,” I added, trying to explain it was a compliment. “It makes hergslats tough and, to be honest with you, they are quite sweet when you approach them correctly.”
“Are you relating me to an animal that resembles a large rodent with many clawed legs, and tusks?”
