Page 17 of The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
Chapter 6
Everything was going wrong.
Between confirming the security status for the estate, checking on theGrandy’s maintenance progress, and fielding not one but three blunt messages from the Duke of Azthronos about conditions at the ducal seat, Nor spent the whole day and into the night in one of the house’s lesser offices dealing with…business.
He wasn’t a businessman, not an estatelackey. He was a pirate captain.
Ex-pirate, came a whisper in his head.
Trixie’s whisper.
He checked his new dat-pad again. It had been easy enough to sync it with his old unit. She was back in her room after having dinner earlier with the other Earther girl. He wondered what they’d talked about. Growing up as a potential source of blackmail and then getting sold off to privateers before finallywinning his own command hadn’t left him a lot of time to get to know females of any planet on a personal level, but he’d seen that they liked to talk. Would Trixie reveal his bastardy to her friend? The thought left him twitching with disquiet.
If it was true, as transgalactic scientists and scholars said, that an ancient proto-species had seeded the universe with compatible genetics among thousandsof races of beings…why hadn’t they done more to make sure males and females and the other genders understood each other?
Instead, Trixie had shot him—yeah, yeah, shotathim—when really he had more to fear from her than the other way around.
If his half-brother discovered the truth, Raz could very well order his exile or even imprisonment for falsifying his heritage. IrThorkons—anyone of mixedblood—were afforded most of the same rights and privileges as pure Thorkons, but a claim to nobility was…trouble. The nobles preferred not to dilute their blood, and in times past, they had kept the purity by shedding any blood that wasn’t.
Nor didn’t think his half-brother was the sort to stoop to assassination At least not in this day and age. But as Trixie had pointed out, they didn’t knoweach other very well.
Trusting Trixie was all he could do unless he wanted to just leave.
“Are you still here?”
He redirected his attention from the dat-pad—where he’d been about to trigger a remote visual of his old pad’s recording apparatus, which he rather suspected would displease its new owner—to the office doorway. He pushed to his feet hastily. “Your Grace.”
The dowager duchess hadattended the commissioning ceremony where he’d taken command of theGrandiloquence. At the time, he’d thought she just wanted to glower at him, a half-blood outsider being the only one willing to buy the captain’s chair on the struggling flagship. Now, watching her circumnavigate the office in a slow wander, he wondered.
She’d blow it out of the sky herself rather than give it to a stranger,Trixie had said.
Maybe she’d been at the ceremony because she knew he wasn’t—entirely—a stranger.
She was an older woman, having spawned Raz—only child and Azthronos heir—when she and the previous duke were well matured. But she had the bearing and bright gaze of a much younger being. Probably she kept herself spry by spying and prying.
At the recessed side window that overlooked the nighttimecourtyard, she turned to face him. “You’ve taken on quite a bit since the duke departed.”
“Your husband or your son?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he winced inwardly. “I’m just happy to serve, Your Grace.”
She arched one outlined eyebrow. “Are you? I had the impression you were most happy to take.”
“Ipaidfor it,” he reminded her. “Quite a lot, in fact.”
“Haven’t we all,” she murmured.She touched the upswept nape of her coiffure with a reproving sniff. “If Raz insists on completing his system tour, I wish he’d at least stayed aboard theGrandiloquence. It has the biggest plasma cannons. And now that degenerate Blackworm is loose.” She fixed Nor with an ireful stare, as if it was his fault her son had decided to take a faster, smaller cruiser to finish visiting his newly inheritedAzthronos territories. Or maybe she thought it was Nor’s fault Blackworm had escaped.
“Your son will be fine,” he assured her. “As will the estate and everyone in it. Blackworm would never return here.”
She lifted her chin higher so she could fix that glare at him down the pointy tip of her patrician nose. “Bad blood always returns, doesn’t it?”
He froze, his blood congealing as if he’d justbeen ejected from an airlock. “Only if it’s stupid.”
She gave a short cough of laughter. “You don’t strike me as stupid, Captain.”
“I’m not bad blood either,” he said softly.
With another snort, she continued around the room to stand in front of his desk. “Why did you come back, Nor?”
Maybe hewasstupid to say it but… “I wanted something of his, even if it was just a ship.”
