Shore Leave (Star Line Express Romance Book 2) Read online

  “Don’t worry, Chlo,” she says. “Lasson’s crazy about you, if you haven’t noticed. He’s just very busy with work.”

  A strange-looking tall, thin male with a blue-dyed neck and wisps of pearl gray hair sprouting from his wrists meets us at the doorway.

  “Fitch,” Kaera says, “this is Chlo Nightbird.”

  “Now I see everything,” Fitch says, and he lifts up his hand to take mine as the hairs on his wrist kind of float about. I try not to stare.

  “I’m Chengdry,” he says, as though I might understand this cryptic reference.

  “Indigenous,” Kaera says in explanation.

  “I didn’t know there was an indigenous population on Choryn,” I say. “I thought—”

  “Hah,” says Fitch. “We weren’t all eliminated. Some of us are still here.”

  “As am I,” says the rich baritone of Lasson Birtak, who’s just come into the entryway.

  “Birt,” Kaera says as they embrace.

  “Birt yourself,” Lasson says to her.

  I back up a bit since it seems as though, now that their embrace is over, Lasson is going to embrace me. Not that I don’t want him to. It’s that I do want him to. But he doesn’t come forward and instead turns around and starts walking through the house.

  “Aren’t you going to give Chlo the grand tour?” Kaera says.

  “It’s time to eat,” Lasson says. “Maybe after.”

  “I’m going to help Fitch,” Kaera says, nodding at me, then winking.

  Lasson stares at Kaera, then leads me out onto the beach, where a table and four chairs have been set up. The two suns of Choryn send wicked glints off the surface of the gently lapping ocean.

  I stare out at the water, then look back at this spectacular house. Part of it is below the sand, almost at one with it. It’s its own sand-and-ocean combination, alive. The place settings on the table are all the color of sand and sea.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” I say.

  “I didn’t,” Lasson says.

  Lasson

  “I—” Chlo Nightbird says to me, but I cut her off.

  “I wouldn’t,” I say. I want to get this out right now. Before I accidentally tell her what I’m really thinking, which is that I wish Kaera hadn’t come and that Chlo and I could spend this evening together. Alone.

  But good Chorynean liar that I am, I’m smoothly telling her how she wasn’t invited and how I would never invite her here. Or anywhere. The stereotypical Chorynean liar would go further, embellishing, driving his point home. But I’m more subtle than that.

  “I can leave,” Chlo says.

  “It’s not necessary.” And damn you for saying that.

  “It’s necessary for me,” Chlo says, but she and I both know she’s almost trapped here, since how would she get back to the Thray without my help? Or Fitch’s? Or Kaera’s?

  “Go right ahead,” I say, feeling almost relieved, yet the knot has tripled over itself now and it’s as though the ocean is pouring itself through me.

  Chlo starts to say something else, then stops. She’s caught sight of the magnificent suns setting here over the water and she’s forgotten about me. Anyone would forget about anyone else or anything else when they’re in the presence of this heart-wrenching phenomenon.

  Everyone on Choryn can see our two suns setting, but here on the shore, something more is added, turning an everyday occurrence into a condensed lifetime of emotional exaltation.

  “Lasson,” she says in a whisper, and reaches out her hand, which I take in mine. A reflex, I think. Or I’ve fallen prey to the very spectacle I built my house here for.

  She squeezes my hand and I squeeze back. I see my suns set every day, yet right now it’s as though I’ve never seen them before, never seen them set before, and the colors and movement and synergy the twin suns create have taken over my senses.

  “Chlo,” I say as I let go of her hand and slip my arm around her waist. She’s very small, petite even, and I look out over the setting suns, at the lapping waves, at the distant horizon, and think how small we all are. Even Choryn itself.

  “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she says, still whispering.

  “Nor was I,” I say as I turn around to face her.

  She puts her trembling hand on my shoulder. I put my trembling hand behind her neck. To steady her. Because I’m about to kiss her. I must kiss her. The ocean is telling me to. The suns are urging me to.

  But Chlo kisses me first. She has to stand on her tiptoes. Her lips are soft, needy, kissing my lips with light kisses, then harder ones. She’s breathless.

  I pull her in closer.

  Our feet are bare, and mine grasp into the sand for purchase. I move her away slightly to look at her. Those bright green eyes. She must certainly be from Engra, yet there’s something else there in her eyes. She’s looking straight into mine.

  I lean forward again and we kiss some more. This time I kiss her, taking her, showing her that I want her and that I don’t need her. That’s what my kisses say. You could be mine, but I refuse you.

  She moves closer and I pull her in tighter.

  “Chlo,” I say between kisses. I run my hands up and down her compact back, then pull her against me so she can feel everything I’ve got to offer.

  I put my hand between us. The front of her party dress is soaked with unmistakable need.

  “I didn’t invite you,” I say, reminding both of us that I didn’t want her here.

  “I want to leave. Now,” she says as she pulls up the back of my shirt and puts her hands on the small of my back. That isn’t where I want them.

  I pull up her skirts and find her moist and ready.

  “Leave,” I say as I stroke the folds of her sex.

  She moans with the same need that I moan with. She wraps her thighs around my leg and I push against her. If she doesn’t leave soon I’m going to have her right here on the beach, next to the dinner table.

  The twin suns and the ocean and sand have taken hold of us both. We must do their bidding, undulating, moving in the inexorable course of the cosmos.

  Our kisses become more urgent. I pull her even closer to me to feel more of her. This is why I didn’t want her here, I think.

  The suns lower themselves, their reflection fanning out over the gray ocean, splashes of crimson against the whitecaps.

  “I’ve summoned a rollcar for you,” I say, lying.

  “Good,” she says between kisses. She’s almost as good a liar as I am. But as we both know, lying is a Chorynean birthright. She could never top me in this game. I would no sooner call a rollcar for her than I would lose my hold on her and rush out into the ocean to drown.

  “It will be here in a moment,” I say as I crush my mouth against hers. The breaking waves, their force increasing, rush about, their insistence equaled by mine. By Chlo’s.

  “It can’t,” she says, unclasping my belt, “be here. Too. Soon.” Her breaths are shorter than mine. I probe gently into her and she clamps onto my fingers. I want to taste her, but every time I duck my head she pulls me back up and I let her even though I don’t have to.

  “Kiss me,” she says. “I have to leave.” She fucks my hand while she says this. Her back is arched.

  “I would never invite you here,” I say, reminding her while I put my thumb on her sex and bring her to new heights.

  “I. Would. Never. Come. Here,” she says as her rhythm increases to a wild need. I pull her even closer, kiss her harder than I yet have, let her move up and down on my fingers as I rub her clit back and forth with my thumb.

  I hold on to her shapely ass as she finishes, her wild spasms accompanied by a wilder aching moan.

  A flood of red-orange reflections light up the sky for half a moment as the twin Chorynean suns make their astounding exit into the instantly black night.

  I hear Kaera’s footsteps on the patio and loosen my hold on Chlo Nightbird, pulling out my fingers, sucking on them to taste the sweetness she’s denied me. I fix my b
elt.

  Chlo backs away. The backyard lights haven’t come on yet. It’s deathly dark here as it always is after the suns set. Yet like all Choryneans, my night vision is excellent.

  Does Chlo realize I can see her eyes?

  They’re filled with liquid pleasure, but underneath that there’s fear.

  The same fear that’s in mine.

  Chapter 3

  Chlo

  “Have you two had a chance to talk?” Kaera says, and it’s all I can do not to run down the beach, run anywhere, and escape both Kaera and Lasson. What have I just done? I pull down on my skirts as though that will undo what’s just happened.

  I can’t see anything. The two vibrant suns leave nothing behind when they set. Night on Choryn is darker than anywhere else in this galaxy.

  “Why would I want to talk with her? She’s your friend,” says Lasson.

  “I thought you liked her,” Kaera says.

  “You invited her here. You talk with her,” he says.

  Is this the same male who just had his fingers inside me, his mouth on mine, who gave me almost unbearable pleasure? Deep inside me, something is still throbbing. I fear it will never stop.

  “It’s all right,” I say, doing a very poor job of making it sound as though I’m just making conversation.

  “Fitch can’t get the lights to work,” Kaera says. “We rarely use them, so it’s possible they haven’t worked for a while.”

  As she says the last two words, the lights come on. The backyard beach is now glittering, as though the sand is made of crushed gems. It might be. I’m not familiar with Chorynean geology.

  “That damn Chengdry,” Lasson says. “He didn’t want them to come on.”

  “I like Fitch,” I say, hoping this will aggravate Lasson. We’ve just had the most passionate encounter of my life and he’s acting like he doesn’t give a shit. Like we’ve spent the entire time that Kaera was inside nowhere near each other, never saying a word, and in utter, awkward silence.

  “You’re welcome to him,” Lasson says. “It’s time he found a new hobby.”

  “Kaera,” I say, ignoring Lasson, who I want to slap. “I have to get back to the Thray, because—”

  “You’re having dinner here,” Lasson says.

  “What did you do to her, Lasson?” Kaera says. Maybe she’ll slap him for me, saving me the trouble—and the contact.

  “You invited her here and inconvenienced me. The least you can both do is stay here and eat. Engra do eat, don’t they?”

  “Why do you think I’m Engra?” I say. And I thought I was hiding it.

  “It’s obvious.”

  “I want to go back to the Thray.” I look at Kaera and she understands.

  “You fucking bastard,” she says to Lasson, then takes my arm and leads me back through her twin brother’s magnificent house.

  “Going so soon?” the caustic Fitch says as we stride by him.

  “The rollcar will be here in a moment,” Kaera says. “I never should have invited you here. He might be my twin, but he can be impossible.”

  “Kaera,” I say.

  “Worse. He can be just awful. I thought he’d be different with you. I thought he wanted to be different with you.”

  Under other circumstances I might have asked Kaera what she meant and why she meant it, but these aren’t other circumstances. These are the very circumstances they are, the ones where I’ve humiliated myself by getting lured into passion, pulled into fucking the hand of this rich bastard who can’t possibly have any more disdain for me than I have for him. I shiver with a combination of fear, dread, disgust, and the aftershocks of the most powerful orgasm I’ve ever had.

  “I’ll come back with you,” Kaera says as the rollcar pulls up to the front of the house. I guess Kaera had the other one leave us at the path so I’d get the full effect of her unfeeling brother’s big fucking deal house.

  The entrance might have been grand, but our exit is forced and angry.

  “I never want to see him again,” I say as we get into the rollcar.

  “But I thought—”

  “I hate him,” I say. “I don’t care if he is your brother. I see exactly why Aymee Desryx refused the match. Exactly. Precisely. Completely.”

  “I hate him sometimes, too,” Kaera says, sighing. Even though I never said she could, she climbs into the seat next to me. “But I also love him.”

  “I hate him,” I say again, “but I also despise him.”

  Lasson

  I sit down at the table. No point in wasting a good dinner. I know Fitch went all-out and his food prep skills are unmatched. I’m very hungry.

  Fitch comes out to the back and throws the platters down on the table. He’s sneering at me. He picks up one of the plates and drops it again, for emphasis.

  “I hope you choke,” he says.

  “Why don’t you join the rest of your cursed breed and fade away like a good fellow?”

  “Why don’t you join the rest of your breed and slink off into a dungeon of guilt and shame?”

  Fitch and I have known each other too long, I remind myself. He knows the exact worst thing to say to me. And I to him.

  “Have some supper,” I say, gesturing for him to sit down.

  “I don’t need your permission to eat,” he says. Can’t argue with that. He doesn’t.

  Fitch sits down anyway and piles food onto the plate that Chlo Nightbird should be eating from. If she were sitting there instead of Fitch, I’d put my hand up her skirt and see if she could keep her cool while I tease her.

  “Don’t ever let her in again,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he says. “She’s far too good for you.”

  “Next you’re going to tell me that you’re far too good for me.” I shovel a spoonful of something that tastes like plake into my mouth, but it could be anything.

  “I don’t have to tell you what you already know,” he says. “But you do need to be reminded of things that aren’t as clear to you.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s clear to me, Fitch.” I take a drink of the new-crop wine that Fitch has already poured out. It doesn’t taste nearly so good as Chlo’s residue on my fingers tasted.

  “What’s that, Lasson?” he says.

  “I should’ve made Aymee Desryx my life mate when I had her here.”

  At that, Fitch throws down his fork and rears his somewhat too-large head back in an expression I’m all too familiar with—outright derision. To ice his derision cake, he starts laughing and says, “Even though Chlo Nightbird is more your type?”

  “I have no type,” I say.

  “Ah,” Fitch says. “I suppose this little episode here on the beach is proof of that.”

  I get up and push Fitch’s chair so hard that he lands on his back on the beach. But he’s laughing now and he won’t stop.

  “Damn you for spying on me,” I say. He’s never done it before—that I know of. This entire evening is determined to destroy me.

  “Hah!” Fitch says, standing up and dusting the sand off his clothes. He picks up his chair and sits back down, takes a bite of his food.

  “It was just a guess,” he says. “But I see that I was right.”

  “Damn you for existing,” I say, and I kick over the chair I was sitting in and stomp back into the house. The house that I built to afford me some kind of peace and serenity and calm. It’s failing at all three.

  I grab a bottle of the new-crop wine from the pantry and head for my bedchamber.

  Damn you for bringing her here, I say to Kaera, but her comm is off. Again. She’s never like this.

  I open the wine bottle and take a healthy gulp. Then I get undressed and get into the shower, turn the water into spikes to pierce my needy flesh. My cock’s still half-engorged. I soap it up while the sharp spray rushes onto me.

  I look down. This same hand was pleasuring Chlo Nightbird not that long ago. I stroke myself, thinking how I wish it were Chlo stroking me instead. Thinking how it would fee
l to have her touch me, to have her sit on me and fuck my cock the way she fucked my hand.

  I lean back against the shower’s side wall. If only she hadn’t left, I think. I pull harder on myself and pour on more soap.

  Chlo has a dizzying aroma about her. I can still smell it even through the soap and the piercing spray.

  The harder I pull on myself the more my cock is begging me to get to Chlo now, as fast as I can, in any way possible. To stop now and save it for her.

  I imagine her in the shower with me. I imagine how she must look without any clothes on. Stroking myself with a terrible need, I remember her kisses, her mouth on mine, mine on hers. I look up into the spray, and it stings my desperate lips.

  Hell, if I don’t come soon I’ll break apart. I stroke harder, faster, more. I’m panting with need and desperation.

  I imagine Chlo underneath me, moving with me while I move into her. I hold on to myself with both hands, furiously pulling and stroking, the sharp pellets of water knifing over my chest and shoulders.

  Falling onto my knees, the water shooting into my back, I lean forward, finally succumbing to my insistent needs. My come erupts in an arc and I reach out for something to grab, something that isn’t me. Something that would tremble around me. The bristling streams of water disappear under my grasp.

  I look down, watching as my release swirls into the drain.

  Why were the setting suns so mesmerizing tonight? How did I lose control so carelessly? Yet it was everything I wanted. I was in control. I’ve never been more in control.

  I’ll fire Fitch, I think, then remember he’s a partner in the business. I can’t fire him.

  On my hands and knees, I let the water throw its darts into me.

  I’ll comm Rhasov again tomorrow. The lottery can’t happen soon enough.

  This time it won’t be like it was with the disobedient rebel Aymee Desryx.

  This time my match will become my life mate. As soon as possible. Without argument. Without discussion. Without delay. As it should be.