Jewel (5 page)

“I think I could do that,” she told him, wondering if he
meant he wanted to lick her pussy. She wanted him to try. Hathor especially
liked to talk about all the guys she’d made lick her to orgasm. She made it
sound like the best feeling in the world and Jewel really wanted to know what
she’d been missing. She might even be willing to suck on Erik’s dick if it got
him to show her what it was like to have a handsome man kiss and lick her
pussy.

With a groan, she pulled herself to her feet with a little
help from Erik’s strong shoulders. In doing so, she discovered she wasn’t quite
as clean as she’d thought she was, so she filled her hand with cleanser and
scrubbed self-consciously at the mess remaining on her breasts and stomach,
turning about so that the spray hit her front and not her back.

Erik took advantage of the opportunity this presented to
familiarize himself far more personally with Jewel’s ass, kissing and licking
her surgically tightened buns and sending tingles of pleasure shooting through
her body.

Jewel couldn’t help moaning in response. She’d never
expected her rear end to be this sensitive. Almost of its own accord, her body
leaned over so she could plant her hands on the wall of the stall to help
support her weight. She spread her legs as wide as she could in the close
confines of the shower, trying to make it easier for Erik to get to her ass and
pussy.

Erik continued to tickle her inner thighs with his fingers
while his lips sucked and kissed her ass. She felt slutty in all the right
ways, her ass stuck out behind her while the hot water bounced off her
shoulders to run down her back and over her breasts. Erik’s fingers stroked
higher, brushing against her swollen pussy and sending increasingly intense
jolts of pleasure shivering throughout her body.

She closed her eyes and tried to ride the feeling. This
wasn’t the way she’d ever imagined sex before, Kole—she meant Erik, Erik—taking
her from behind, but here her lover was for the second time in ten minutes
fixating on her backside.

She shivered again as his fingers barely penetrated her
labia, releasing a torrent of hot juices to run down her thighs.

“I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” Erik whispered.
“Your whole body, everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman all in one place.”

He stroked her again and Jewel’s body shuddered strongly in
response. Her elbows shook under the effort to support her weight as she leaned
against the shower stall wall. “It’s like you were made just for me,” Erik told
her.

Not for you
, an evil voice deep inside Jewel chided.
You
were made for Kole Delling and you know it, Jewel. Mama and Papa made you for
Kole, not this man.

She squelched the inner voice before it could completely
shake the mood Erik was stroking in her. She wasn’t experienced in lovemaking
but she had made herself orgasm lots of times—especially since she’d managed to
shut down the spy in her head. She knew herself well enough to know she had a
very good chance of coming if she could just get her conscience to shut up for
a few minutes.

Erik seemed happy to help her. His mouth slipped lower,
finding the lips between her thighs. His tongue tickled her crevice, lapping at
her juices as his fingers slid up to her clitoris. Surprised by the sensations,
Jewel opened her eyes, looking down between her legs. Erik’s free hand stroked
his own erection, encouraging it to regain its full girth and length. His chin
stuck out beneath her lips as he burrowed his face more firmly into her pussy.

Her breathing grew ragged. Her heart pounded in her chest
and though she shut her eyes again to help her brace against the waves of
pleasure, she could still see his dick in her mind. The large head popped out
of Erik’s fist as he stroked himself, only to disappear again as his hand rode
his length again.

“I can’t believe I’m already this hard again,” Erik muttered
into her pussy. “Stars, Jewel, look at what you do to me.”

She was more interested at the moment in what he was doing
to her. She dropped one hand from the wall and tentatively covered his fingers
where he probed her. Her fingers slipped over his and shyly tried to show him
the way she liked to be touched—gentle, circular motions, not this rough back
and forth that was exciting but not quite right.

Erik didn’t quite get the message. Instead he abruptly
grabbed her by the hips and twisted her around so that her back slapped up
against the wall. He didn’t seem to notice how roughly he was suddenly treating
her. All of his attention was on her pussy, which he attacked from the front,
pushing her fingers away so he could get his mouth on her clit.

This was what Hathor had talked about—the warmth, the
pressure, the rhythmic sucking edging her up to—

“Mr. Gunnarson, please report to the briefing room.”

The sound of Lara’s Everson voice over the ship’s intercom
confused Jewel, threatening to knock her body out of the orgasmic groove it was
cruising in. It did not, however, divert Erik from sucking on her pussy.

Everson’s voice repeated, “Mr. Gunnarson, please report to
the briefing room.”

Erik pulled away from Jewel. “Void! Of all the rotten
timing.”

Jewel couldn’t help but agree with that notion. She was
still intensely turned on and she needed some release. Her hand covered her
pussy, but she felt too self-conscious to masturbate when Erik was pulling away
from her. What if he got angry? What would he think if she kept playing with
herself when duty called?

Erik rose to his feet and kicked at the wall of the shower
stall while Lara Everson went on to summon Ship’s Navigator Mustafa Peron, Deck
Officer Emmanuel Warrant and Ship’s Engineer Ana Yang to the briefing.

Jewel didn’t know what to say. She was still clutching
herself beneath the water’s spray, too horny to stop and yet not comfortable
enough to continue. She felt abandoned, and yet knew in some portion of her
mind that that wasn’t a fair emotion. Erik didn’t want to leave her. His dick
was still hard and he was clearly enraged by the interruption. What was she
supposed to do?

Erik must have sensed her hurt and disappointment because he
suddenly turned back to Jewel and wrapped her in his arms. “Damn it all, I am
really sorry about this. I know you understand I don’t want to leave now, but
it’s important to me that you also believe in your heart that I don’t want the
last few minutes to be a one-time thing. I meant it when I said I think you’re
special. Maybe we can continue this in my cabin when we’re both off duty
again?” He smiled encouragingly. “I don’t have a roommate now, but I’m willing
to take one on if you’d like to be it.”

Jewel’s heart melted. Things had definitely been moving too
quickly, but she suddenly felt confident that everything was going to be all
right. Erik could be the guy she’d been dreaming about now that she’d escaped
the threat of the Armenite marriage that had hung over her head her entire
life. “I’d like that, really,” she told Erik. This time she initiated the kiss.

His fingers slipped down to her ass again, squeezing
delightfully, making her sore pussy tingle with renewed excitement.

“Mr. Gunnarson,” Everson’s voice crackled over the speaker
again. “Captain Kiara has ordered me to tell you to stop wasting water with the
purser and get both your asses to the briefing chamber pronto. She doesn’t want
to have to tell you again!”

Jewel’s head snapped away from Erik’s in horror. “What did
she say?” she asked, even though she’d heard the words perfectly clearly. “How
did she know?”

“That rotten bitch,” Erik responded before storming out of
the shower and turning off the water.

“Hi Ana,” Jewel said, forcing herself to suppress a wave of
sudden shyness as the ship’s engineer appeared at the other end of the corridor
outside the briefing room. It hadn’t been an easy twenty minutes, hurriedly
dressing with Erik and then racing through the corridors to the briefing room.
Everson’s not-very-vague comments about Erik and her showering together had
been said over the ship-wide address system—not piped solely into her cabin—and
everyone they ran into had a look, a comment or a knowing smile for them as she
and the exec strode past them.

Erik didn’t seem troubled by any of this, much to Jewel’s
frustration. When crewmembers laughed and offered them a thumbs-up, Erik was
quick to flash the symbol of approval right back at them. He’d also wanted to
hold her hand, as if inviting more people to speculate on the fact they’d just
had sex. Jewel couldn’t stand it. Where she’d grown up, such doings would have
had her face plastered across all the tabloids with embarrassing headlines such
as,
Cartel Princess Gets Personal Service
and
Princess Caught
Cleaning Help in Shower
. She was much too private a person to want everyone
talking about her like this.

But if there was one person on the
Euripides
that
Jewel might have confided her encounter in, it was Ship’s Engineer Ana Yang.
They weren’t exactly confidants yet—Jewel was too nervous about slipping up and
revealing some clue to her real past to feel comfortable developing a genuine
friendship. But Ana had taken Jewel under her wing in those first few days and
taught her a lot about how to get along on a starship. If there was one woman
on the vessel Jewel hoped she could talk to about something this important, it
was Ana Yang.

“Don’t speak to me, you bitch,” Ana hissed at her as she
stormed down the hallway in their direction.

The sudden hostility stunned Jewel. “Ana?”

Beside her, Erik groaned as Yang turned the full force of
her fury in his direction.

“And you! Is this why you broke up with me in Thimble?
Trading me in for a younger model? How long have you been fucking her, you
bastard?”

Horror slowly infused every cell in Jewel’s body as she
realized what the older woman was saying. “Ana, I—”

“Don’t talk to me,” Ana snarled. “I thought you were my
friend!”

Tears threatened to burst from Jewel’s eyes. “But I didn’t
know—”

Ana grabbed Jewel by the front of her shirt. “I said don’t
speak to me,” she shouted.

“Ana,” Erik said. He placed a hand on her forearm as if
planning to pull her off of Jewel, but the engineer whirled on him the moment
he touched her.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” she said. “How could you dump me
for this surgically enhanced prissy little princess?”

In the back of her mind, in a part still sheltered by shock
from the fury of Ana’s attack, Jewel protested the use of the term prissy.
She’d done everything her job required of her and more on this tour. But before
she could argue the point, Erik stepped up his defense of her.

“Ana, I don’t think Jewel even knew we were together. We
were always discreet—”

“And why was that?” Ana interrupted him. “Were you
embarrassed to be sleeping with me? I wasn’t young enough to stroke your fat
ego? Didn’t the other men on the ship want me enough that you felt you had to
crow about your latest conquest?”

Jewel took a step away from both of them, recoiling from the
pure vehemence of Ana’s rage.

“I had nothing to do with that announcement,” Erik
protested. “How was I to know that the captain was monitoring my water
consumption?”

“Well maybe you should have considered that she might still
be mad you aren’t fucking her anymore!”

This was too much information for Jewel. Erik had slept with
Captain Kiara too? How was that possible? Was there any woman on the ship he
hadn’t had sex with? She didn’t want to think about it. She’d just given the
man her virginity and now everything was turning ugly. Was she just another
girl on his string? Did she matter to him at all?

Jewel turned to flee and bumped directly into the briefing
room door, which unhelpfully opened for her. Captain Kiara, Mustafa Peron and
the
Euripides
’ third-in-command, Deck Officer Emanuel Warrant, were
already waiting around the table.

“Nice of you to join us, Ms. Aurora,” the captain said.

Jewel felt her heart sink even further. There was no denying
the anger in the captain’s eyes or in her tone of voice. This was going to be
terrible.

Peron laughed when he saw Jewel’s expression. His grossly
swollen nose and blackened eyes added a hint of sadistic cruelty to his
appearance. “Let me guess,” he said. “Ana just found out about you and
Gunnarson. And you just found out about Gunnarson and the captain.”

“Mr. Peron,” Captain Kiara warned him.

The navigator laughed again. “What can I say, Captain? We
all know how Gunnarson is. He’s a good exec, but he gets around with the female
crewmembers.” He smiled lasciviously at Jewel. “We could run a pool on how long
you’ll last.”

Jewel’s spirits plummeted even deeper. How could this be
happening to her?

Peron cruelly moved in for the kill, obviously enjoying her
discomfort. “Nothing’s truly private on a starship. If I want to find out, you
can’t slip anything past me.”

Jewel’s battered pride wouldn’t let her continue to be
silent. She needed to wipe the grin off Peron’s face and she knew just the way
to do it. “No, I guess we can’t. It has to be the size of a star system for you
to miss it.”

Peron stopped laughing and got to his feet. “You’ve got a
nasty mouth, you know that, Aurora?”

“She’s also correct,” the Deck Officer observed. “You want
to explain to everyone how you missed factoring an entire star system into your
course calculations? Because there’s a definite chance none of us are getting
home again thanks to you.”

Peron whirled on the man. “We’ll get home, Warrant. And
plotting a starship’s course is complicated even in the well-established space
lanes. Out here in the Fringe where the navigational charts are incomplete at best—”

The door opened behind Jewel and Erik strode into the
briefing room, interrupting what was, to Jewel’s mind, an incredibly lame
defense of unforgivable carelessness. Erik didn’t say anything. He just strode
past Jewel, an unhappy frown upon his face, and took a seat at the end of the
table opposite Captain Kiara.

Ana entered behind him, looked around, and pointedly took
the seat between Erik and Warrant. Unfortunately that left Jewel the only
remaining chair—the one between Erik and Peron.

She suppressed a sigh and sat down. Peron looked no happier
with the seating arrangements than she did. “What’s she doing here anyway?” he
asked. “She’s the purser—not a real officer.”

Captain Kiara finally stirred herself to acknowledge that
her officers had finished gathering. Everything Jewel had learned about
leadership growing up in the Cartel Worlds told her that Kiara was mishandling
this meeting. She should have been the last person into the room, striding in
quickly, implicitly impressing everyone with the value of her time. Kiara was
cut from a different mold. She’d probably been the first in the room, waiting
with an angry expression for the others to arrive. It didn’t seem like an
effective leadership strategy.

“Purser Aurora is here to report on the state of the ship’s
stores,” Captain Kiara explained. “We’re in a bit of a jam right now—not quite
as serious as the Deck Officer has suggested—but it’s a jam just the same. The
purser’s going to help us understand our consumable constraints.”

Jewel considered the captain for a moment while she wondered
if the meeting was being recorded. Captain Kiara observed her back with her
unblinking eyes. In Jewel’s opinion, a person as lazy and barely competent as
the captain appeared to be could only rise to the top by playing the political
game very well, so she’d have to cover her ass in this meeting. There was no
way she could trust the woman with the steel-gray hair and the off-color dermal
bandage on her forehead, even if she hadn’t been angry about the identity of
Jewel’s new lover.

“We had a three percent reserve of fuel in the tanks when we
left the mining colony at Thimble,” Jewel reminded them. “Now I’m not a
navigator, but I don’t see how we can factor two more slide translations—plus
the journey to Arch—on that limited a reserve. We’re going to have to find a
closer port to slide to and resupply.”

Everyone sighed.

“There goes the bonuses,” Warrant complained.

“The cost of Armenium in some backwater is going to be
astronomical,” Ana observed. “How did you let us get in this position, Jewel?”

Jewel knew Ana was attempting to stick her with
responsibility for this disaster, but her observation actually permitted her to
strengthen the record that it was someone else’s fault. “I attempted to
requisition the standard twenty percent reserve,” she told the engineer, “but
my request was overruled as prohibitively expensive.”

All eyes turned toward Captain Kiara, who had to approve all
major requisitions. Kiara seemed unfazed by Jewel’s statement. “That twenty
percent reserve may be standard operating procedure in the League or in the
Confederacy, but it’s not out here on the Fringe and you all know it. Cargo
transport is about playing the odds. This time we crapped out. Now do you all
want to waste time bemoaning a bad turn of fate or do we want to figure out how
to get out of this mess with minimal losses?”

“The fuel situation is not our only serious supply problem,”
the Deck Officer noted. “I spoke with Dr. Brüning and he tells me our medical
supplies were never intended to accommodate the large number of passengers
we’re carrying this trip. We’re running short of all the basics and I seriously
doubt that we have enough pharmaceuticals to get the whole human complement of
the
Euripides
through two more translations.”

“That’s correct,” Jewel agreed. “We didn’t factor an
unplanned translation into our supply acquisitions. Food is going to be a
problem too if we have to make additional stops to secure fuel and medical
supplies.”

“Of all the short-sighted incompetence,” Ana muttered.

Unfortunately, Jewel agreed with her, she just hadn’t had
the influence or authority to force a more responsible policy.

“So how are we going to resolve this problem?” Erik asked.

“Exactly the subject I’ve summoned you here to address,” the
captain said. “If we can resolve these issues here in the Valkyrie System, it
will minimize the costs by negating the need for additional extraneous slide
translations. To that end, Mr. Peron has made some discoveries regarding the
inhabitants of this system, which I’d like him to share with us.”

Erik leaned forward with obvious interest. “Have we heard
from them yet?”

Captain Kiara shook her head. “Nothing since the automated
buoy message, but…Mr. Peron?”

“I have discovered what I believe to be a space station
orbiting that gas giant two million miles out from the white dwarf. It’s
actually circling one of the larger moons. It’s a planet-size mass about one
hundred and ten percent of Earth-standard.”

“While there is still no contact from the station inhabitants,”
the captain cut in, “we’re hopeful that we can cut a deal with them to make up
the current deficiencies in our stores and reserves. Ms. Aurora, it will fall
to you to negotiate the exchange, of course.”

Jewel nodded. “An isolated colony like this may be more
interested in trading with us then simply selling goods for credits. I’ll draw
up a list of items we can use for that purpose.”

The captain agreed. “I’ll want that list on my terminal for
my approval four hours before we dock with the station.”

You can always count on the captain to stir herself when
it comes time to pinch a penny
, Jewel thought. Instead of voicing this
opinion, she passed the baton to Peron. “And we’ll reach the station when?”

“At our current fuel-conserving pace we’ll be docking in
just under thirty-two hours.”

The briefing continued, but Jewel only listened with half an
ear. Her mind was already deep into her own task, itemizing the sorts of
equipment the
Euripides
might be able to trade.

Underneath the table, Erik’s foot reached out and touched
hers.

Jewel glared at him a moment before pointedly moving hers
away.