Page 3 of Her Consort
“They’re all black wires,” she muttered, using the nose of the cutters to nudge her way through the nest and get a better look at the components underneath. When it came to explosives, Ocymit or Terran, it didn’t seem to matter. They were all built pretty much the same way, with the same identifiable parts. She had to do a physical trace of the wires before she felt comfortable making a decision on which to cut.
“Take your time,” Kogan said. “I’m just admiring the view.”
A prickle of irritation climbed her spine, dashing up out of the shadows of the subflooring to center in the flesh of her ass. Piper came up out of the hole so fast, she whacked her helmet on the lip of a floor panel. Glaring at him through the lighted faceplate, she rubbed the back of her skull through her suit. “Asshat.”
His smile was wolfish. “You’ll notice I waited until after you disarmed the mine before I said anything.”
“See if I disarm the next one,” she vowed, shoving to her feet and storming past him. Her angry stomp off was destroyed three steps later when she crossed from his floor panel to the next and heard that ominous click. She froze, then closed her eyes. “Oh, for the love of—”
“Ocymits are dangerous, trap-setting, money-grubbing bastards,” Kogan reminded her.
“Nobody’s seen one since the war,” she stubbornly insisted.
“One doesn’t have to see one to lose the fight,” he just as stubbornly replied. “One only has to explode.” He held out his hand.
Piper handed him the wire cutters. “It’s the black wire,” she wryly said as he pried up the floor panel behind her.
“It’s all monochromatic to me,” he told her cheerfully, dropping to one knee. “I’m color blind. Don’t move.”
This wasn’t the first booby trap she’d seen him disarm and, unless she smothered him in his sleep, it probably wouldn’t be the last. But as she stood there, basking in both the bright lights shining through the hatch behind her and the humiliation of being clumsy enough to set off their second trap in under twenty minutes, she couldn’t help but admit the view was pretty nice. The silver suits they wore were neither slimming nor form-fitting, but when he lowered himself to his belly to wedge his head and broad shoulders one burly arm at a time under her section of booby-trapped floor, with his legs spread wide for counterbalance, that suit became molded to his ass in a way she’d never seen before.
His was a fine ass, too. Coupled with lean hips and thick thighs, the high round curves of it looked damn near… what was the word? Molest-able. Clearly, she’d been in deep space too long, but his was the kind of ass that made a girl want to dig her nails in. And bite. Maybe even give a little smack or two, just to see if it had a bounce to it.
Kogan wiggled his way back out of the hole. “You want to do what to my what now?”
“I said you’ve been down there forever. What’s the holdup?” Her face burned, sending ribbons of slow warmth twisting through her abdomen to tangle in places that never should have burned for anyone as irritating as Kogan. “Why?” Piper cleared her throat. “What did you think I said?”
Grunting, he started to thread his head and shoulders back under the floor. “That you want to wear my genitals on your…” His legs suddenly lashed and she heard it when the back of his head whacked the underside of the booby-trapped panel. Kogan all but flung himself back up onto his knees, knocking his head again on the lip before he withdrew enough to stab her with an accusing finger. “Asshat!” he cried with such unexpected discovery that she almost took her foot off the explosive’s switch. “All this time I thought that nothing but another colorful human curse word. You want to wear my genitals on your face!”
Her face didn’t burn now, it scalded. “That is not what that means!”
“I was paraphrasing. I personally see no erotic appeal in the literal translation. Unless—” Cocking his head, he cautiously asked, “You actually do want me to rub them atop your head? Again, no erotic appeal in that, per se, although since they would already be in the general vicinity, if you’re interested, there is a move I could show you…”
“What? No!” If her body grew any hotter, she was going to spontaneously combust and yet, horror upon horror, her gaping mouth refused to form another single coherent rejection for what he was suggesting. Worse, her brain was running with it, summoning up a whole kindling pyre of images—him and her, hip to head, with the masculine musk of him filling up her senses while she opened to take that first long-denied taste upon her tongue—images fit to haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. The twists in her gut became strangling knots, but not before the warming tug of them ignited a slow, thumping pulse between her thighs. “That’s not what that… what I…” God, she couldn’t breathe right. Her heart was too high up in her chest. She couldn’t do this whole conversation. She pointed to the floor. “Disarm the damn mine!”
“I disarmed it the first time,” Kogan soothed. “I was going back for the cutters I dropped.”
Every nerve in her body was doing the most amazing impersonation of an ocean wave, rolling up her one way and down the other, lingering in places she really, really wished weren’t responding. To him, of all people. He wasn’t even people. He was a big, hairy Neanderthal of an alien who had been the biggest pain in her ass for two very long years. One would think on a salvage ship the size of a small city, if she didn’t want to see someone then she wouldn’t have to. It was amazing how many times she ran into Kogan in the halls, more often than not, fresh from the showers and wrapped only in a towel.
Sometimes, not even a towel.
Great. Now she had that in her mind as well.
Having retrieved the cutters, Kogan pulled out from under the missing floor panel, but not all the way. He shone his wrist-light through the crawlspace to the next panel. “I think we’ll encounter fewer traps if we went under the floor.”
That killed some of the pulse in her nethers. But only some.
“I get so much as one spider in my suit and I’m going to climb all over you.”
He perked.
“To get back out of there,” she snapped when he opened his mouth. “What’s wrong with you? We don’t even get along!”
Rising slowly, he looked at her. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but as the corner of his mouth curled, the sheer closeness of his powerful physique began to do weird things in the pit of her stomach.
“No, we don’t,” he agreed, but with a glitter in his stare that made the tiny hairs on her arms stand up and her nipples tighten into peaks. “No. We sure don’t.”
