Chapter 2
Why was he toying with her?
Nor muscled far enough into the doorway to trigger the safety feature and prevent it from closing on him, despite her best effort. He wasn’t trying to intimidate her—much—but he wanted to know why she piqued his interest. He’d come a long way on instinct and impulse, and he wasn’t going to ignore them now.
She was a bland little thing, with sandy blondhair and mud-puddle eyes. In her soft, cushy estate slippers, she didn’t even reach his chin. While he’d encountered more than his fair share of lovely, lethal females in all sizes and colors, she was not one of them. And yet she’d sidetracked him from the inquisitive, willing, and striking vrykoly with nothing more than a startled gasp and a pointy little nosey nose poked into his evening.
He peered past her. “Where’s the other Earther girl?”Thatone had the lethal loveliness that usually attracted him.
“Lishelle has her own room.” Trixie paused. “But she would be here in a hot second if I needed her. And so would Rayna.”
And so would the His Grace, the Duke of Azthronos, came the rest of the unspoken threat. But Nor wasn’t afraid of the duke or anyone else in this pampered house.
He eyed her. “What areyouso scared of?”
“An alien with his pants unzipped drags me to my room and won’t go away, even though I asked.” Her voice edged upward. “Gee, I dunno. What would be scary about that?”
He blinked. “You didn’t ask me to go away. You said I can’t come in.”
“I said…” She tucked her chin. “Okay, fine. Go away.”
“No.”
She groaned. “That’s why—”
“And zippers are for backwardprimitives,” he informed her. “Zippers don’t exist on sophisticated, highly advanced, mannerly Azthronos. And they certainly shouldn’t be sealing up one’s genitals.”
With an adorable snap, she said, “Sophisticated manners usually call for sealing up your…pants withsomething.”
He smirked. “I didn’t sayIwas sophisticated or mannerly.”
She tried to order the door to close, but it beeped a friendlyreminder that the way was blocked: by him.
“You’re not very polite either,” he noted. “Besides trying to slam this door on me”—he scowled at her—“the very first time we spoke back on theGrandy, you disconnected the comm on me. Why?”
Ending her attempts to override the door controls, she sighed. “Because you were—and are—being provoking, on purpose, for no reason.”
“No reason?” He leaned alittle more through the doorway. “I don’t need a reason to be provoking.”
“Because you are a pirate.”
“Was,” he corrected. “Was a pirate. Now I’m the captain of the duchy’s flagship—”
“So you think you could at least fasten your pants,” she interrupted.
He refused to reply to that. “—And I made it this far because I never let nippy little mishkeets in house slippers tell me what to do.”
“You can do whatever you want,” she sniped back. “I just don’t want any part of it.”
He half closed his eyes. “Even the part in my pants? You keep bringing that up.”
And to his surprise, what was in his fatigueswasup. Just slightly, not enough to be annoying yet, more like intrigued. But that was more than what had been going on when Commander Illya made her request earlier.
Since decidingto pursue the captaincy, he’d had to let his other pursuits—specifically, the pursuit of attentive female companionship—fall by the wayside. Illya’s offer had amused him, and he’d been more than willing to demonstrate the erotic arts to a vrykoly engineer just for the experience and to break his abstinence streak while theGrandiloquencewas undergoing maintenance and resupply. But he’d blamedthe ghost-mead for dampening his physical response. As its name implied, the sweetly powerful Azthronos export had a bad habit of summoning old demons.
“I want nothing from you, Captain,” she said stoutly.
“Myname is Nor,” he murmured.
