“Half then,” he amended flippantly. “As I’m half Thorkon.”
Again, there was a diffidence in his tone that made her hesitate. “What’s the other half? Bad boygigolo?”
“Gigolo,” he repeated slowly. “Ah. I like the sound of that. No, your word is pirate.”
She sniffed. “Now that I believe.”
He laughed. “Is that the first time you have agreed with me?”
It probably was, and it didn’t seem like something he should be so pleased about. She stopped at a doorway. “This is my room.”
After what seemed like a heartbeat too long, he released her elbow. “I’llsee you inside to make sure youareinside, not creeping around anymore tonight. Unlock it.”
As reluctant as she was to let him anywhere nearer her private refuge, she pressed her thumb to the identilock, and the door chimed softly. “Okay? You can go now.”
“Inyougo,” he prodded.
With a scowl, she slipped through the half-open portal. “You can’t come in.”
He braced one hand at the top ofthe doorway and canted his body forward, staring down at her. “I didn’t ask.”
In the black ship’s fatigues, he was like a shadow in her doorway. But with his arm stretched overhead, hiking up the coat, and the top tab of his pants still undone, a tiny sliver of tawny skin showed in between.
Did aliens have bellybuttons?
He was close enough—and she was close enough to her retreat to comfortablyfocus on specifics—that the light from her room filtering through the doorway picked out a faint scar near his left eye. The silvery mark of raised skin curved from his temple and over the sculpted cliff of his cheekbone. She knew firsthand how high-tech and skilled the medics on theGrandiloquencewere; so why did he still have a scar that could’ve been healed away with a few rounds of dermalregeneration?
She realized she was leaning forward too and caught herself back with a snap.
He exhaled, not quite a laugh, and the whiff of a caramel-like sweetness underlined the sharp tang of ethanol. Consumption of alcohol, apparently like cats and rats, was ubiquitous to the universe. Her pulse skittered nervously. “You’ve been drinking,” she accused.
When he inclined his head, the luxuriouswaves of his hair fell across his cheek. “The very grateful commander brought along a bottle of ghost-mead to thank me for explaining the, ah, ins and outs of reciprocal social skills.”
Drinking, as if sleeping with a fellow officer wasn’t bad enough. God, he was everything that had ever made her life miserable. “You better not be drunk driving the duke’s dreadnaught,” she warned.
“Are you goingto tattle on me, mishkeet?”
Through clenched teeth, she said, “Stop calling me that.”
“Shall I call you cat-rat instead?”
“Myname,” she said tartly, “is Trixie.”
