Joanna Wylde - Jerred's Price

She finished up her breakfast and dropped the plate into the galley’s cleaner. Then she marched purposefully toward the cockpit. The door was open, and she stepped in without asking permission. He sat in the pilot’s chair, apparently waiting for her to arrive. Just looking at him was a shock—every time she saw him, his face surprised her.

It was as if her mind’s eye never remembered his scar, the way it slashed across his face and twisted his expression into a perpetual snarl.

Why didn’t he get it fixed?

She almost asked the question, but managed to catch herself in time. Just because he was an ass didn’t mean she needed to act like one, too.

“Where are we headed?” she asked, settling herself down in the co-pilot’s chair as is if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He turned away from her, studying his instruments for a moment, then he spoke.

“It’s probably better if you don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m meeting with someone, and it really isn’t relevant to your situation.”

“Well, I think it’s rather important,” she replied. “I need to do some research, find out if it’s a good place for me to settle for a while.”

“It isn’t,” he replied coolly. “You’ll need to stay with me a bit longer than just this first stop, I think.”

“You may think that, but I’d really like to judge for myself,” she replied firmly. “I agreed to give you sex in exchange for a ride. I didn’t agree to become your indentured servant.”

“I’m well aware of that,” he said slowly. “But in this case, you won’t be able to get off quite yet. We’re meeting in open space—it’s been planned for months. There’s nowhere for you to go.”

The way he said it was so smug, so annoying, that it made her teeth clench. Smug bastard.

“Maybe I’d rather go with whoever you’re meeting,” she said pertly. Instead of getting angry, though, he just burst out laughing.

“I sincerely doubt that,” he said finally. “This guy makes me look pretty damn good. I think you’d be better off if you just stay out of sight while he’s here.”

“Afraid I’ll like him better than you?” she asked.

“No,” he said slowly, “I’m more afraid that he’ll kill one or both of us to protect his identity. He only expects me to attend the meeting, and he’s not a trusting kind of man.”

She shivered, and fell back in the seat, unsure of what to say. Jenna chimed a warning, and he turned to her.

“We’ll be jumping to hyperspace before too long. If you’re going to stay up here, you need to strap yourself in.”

She nodded, and reached around to grab the straps. This was always her least-favorite part of space flight. People who traveled a lot seemed to think it was no big deal, but the jump always made her feel queasy.

He seemed to go through the preparation checklist far too quickly for her comfort, as if he were barely noticing each of the details and checking the settings. He didn’t even do the math himself, trusting Jenna to feed him the numbers. She added sloppy piloting to his list of faults, in addition to being a jerk. Hopefully he wouldn’t get them killed.

That morose thought was the last she had before they twisted out of normal space with a gut-wrenching shudder. She reached to unhook her belt, wanting to go back to her cabin and lie down for a while, but he held out a hand to stop her.

“Go ahead and stay strapped in,” he said. “We’re only going to be in transit for about fifteen minutes, and then we’ll be out again.”

“Why?” she asked, startled. “We can’t go very far in 15 minutes.”

“That’s the point,” he said. “It’s not far at all. We only left normal space to keep anyone from following us. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that we’re only going a few light years from Transit Three.”

“Is this so we can meet your friend?” she asked. “The one you won’t tell me about.”

“Yes,” he replied. They fell silent for several minutes, and she contented herself with watching the patterns on the ship’s view screen. She knew they were mathematical calculations translated into colors by the computer, but they seemed like some kind of weird landscape after a while.

“Jenna, is that what you see through your sensors when we travel outside of normal space?” she asked abruptly. Jerred looked at her in surprise.

“Yes and no,” Jenna replied. “They are a visual representation of the mathematical explanations I am creating to understand and govern our current state. Thus they represent the data that governs our position. But my sensors are not capable of providing information on that which is around us at the moment.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I am not being presented with data I have the capacity to detect.”

“Is that a fancy way of telling me that you can’t see anything?”

“Yes,” the computer said. “I can envision calculations that make our current state possible, but I cannot collect any data on that state.”

“Why not?’

“Because the very act of attempting to collect the data changes the data collected,”

Jenna finally said after a long pause. “Thus any data I collect is, on a certain level, being created by my collection. Thus I prefer to project images of the theoretical data, rather than any I might attempt to bring in from the outside.”

Gisele fell silent, wishing she hadn’t asked. Jenna was a weird computer.

“We’re ready to drop back into real space,” Jenna announced after a brief pause.

Even as she said it, another warning chimed, and the screen before them abruptly filled with stars.

And another ship. No, it was a space station. No ship was that big.

It was huge, much larger than anything Giselle had imagined. It bristled with armament, and several smaller ships hovered nearby. Not only could it destroy their ship like an insect, it could swallow them whole if it wanted to.

“I can see why you were nervous,” she muttered to Jerred. “I’ll stay in my cabin. No problem.”

“Good idea,” he replied dryly. “You might want to go there right now. I’m getting a message from them.”

She stood and walked quickly out of the room. There was something about that station that she really, really didn’t like. Perhaps it was the fact that it seemed to be pieced together from bits of smaller ships. She didn’t doubt for a moment that they were pirates.

She was definitely in over her head.

Her self-imposed exile didn’t last nearly as long as she would have liked. Not two hours after she had gone to her cabin, Jerred commed her and asked her to come out.

“Our guests want to meet you,” he had said through the speaker, giving her no indication of what she should do or how she should act. She opened the door uncertainly and walked out into a situation that seemed tense at best.

There were five armed men in the room. She tried not to look at any of them directly, focusing her attention on Jerred instead. He stood as she walked into the room, holding out one hand to her.

She looked to his face for some kind of sign, but it was completely impassive. She took his hand and was strangely relieved when he pulled her against his side.

Then she looked at the man standing across from him and felt faint.

He was big—every bit as big as Jerred, although not as muscular. He had short, spiky white hair and his skin was so pale it hardly seemed to have pigment at all. His eyes were a piercing blue, light and icy. Tattooed across one cheek was a scarlet symbol, something she didn’t recognize. It looked bloody and carnal. She would have thought him handsome if there had been even a hint of warmth or humanity in his eyes. There was none.