Owen (BBW Western Bear Shifter Romance) (Rodeo Bears Book 2) (46 page)

As per her usual luck, when she woke back up, nothing was fixed.

Zosha was standing next to the bed, leaning over Aurie with her hand on her shoulder.
 

“Good morning,” she said. “The bathroom’s attached if you need it. There’s a new toothbrush in there, too, so feel free to use it.”

“Thank you,” Aurie said. “That’s very polite of you, especially in light of the whole kidnapping thing.”

Zosha winced. “I am sorry about that. It’s a complicated situation. Captain Ingram’ll explain it all, I promise.”

“That sounds… promising,” Aurie sighed. “Bathroom’s through here?”

At Zosha’s nod, Aurie walked into the small connected bathroom and shut the door behind her. It had a shower stall, a toilet, and a sink with a sonic tap and a water tap. According to the holovids, this was the point where Aurie would tap into her inner genius and figure out a way to escape. Unfortunately, Aurie was no vid hero, and even if she managed to somehow escape she had no idea how to get planetside again. She looked her reflection in the tired eyes and sighed, grabbing the toothbrush Zosha had left out. As she brushed her teeth, she ran over the things she knew and the things she needed to find out. The things she knew were: she had been kidnapped, her kidnappers seemed like pretty decent people other than that one glaring flaw, and that there was a pretty good chance that if she kept her head down and did what was asked of her she’d get out alive. What she needed to know was what, exactly, they needed her to do. She decided to hold off on a full-fledged panic attack until someone asked her to, for instance, sew a bag of something illegal into someone stomach or perform a lethal injection. For all she knew, they just really desperately needed someone to take out an appendix.

“So,” she said, walking back out of the bathroom. “Where’s this captain I need to speak with?”

“Breakfast,” Zosha said. “I hope you like dehydrated fruit.”

Aurie, suddenly starving, followed her dutifully into the rest of the ship.

Annie was sitting at the table next to Hyde, a tall brunette man, and a prodigiously hairy barrel-chested man.

“I brought her!” Zosha declared cheerfully and they entered the kitchen.

“Fantastic,” the hairy man said. “Aurelia, right? You’ve already met Zosha, Hyde, and Annie, and this is Rick. I’m Leo Ingram, I’m the captain of the
Breakwater
. We deal in acquisitions and transportation.”

“Sooo… smuggling,” Aurie translated.

“Smuggling,” the captain agreed. “It’s… well, I guess that’s all a bit irrelevant to you. You’re here because my mechanic needs medical and, obviously, we can’t just waltz into a hospital equipped to handle it, what with our criminal records and active bounties and lack of medical insurance.”

“I have medical insurance,” said a new female voice from behind Aurie. She turned to see a yawning freckled brunette about her height in a loose shirt and pajama shorts. “Is there any coffee left?”

“Wait, why do you have medical insurance?” Hyde asked, slightly incredulous. “You’ve been here for months. How are you even paying the bills?”

“I took my lifestyle change as an opportunity to reconnect with my mother. She put me back under her plan,” the brunette said, plopping down in Hyde’s lap and taking a long sip of his coffee.

“And your mother’s insurance provider doesn’t care that you’re part of a band of intergalatically infamous smugglers?” Hyde asked.

The woman shrugged. “She’s reasonably sure that her lawyers can plead Stockholm Syndrome if I ever get arrested, so, no. Is that the doctor?”

“Yeah, her names Aurelia,” Zosha answered, leaning back on her heels. “That’s Thalia,” she murmured to Aurie. She stalked Hyde across at least one system and then dismantled a corrupt government, and now they’re in love and she’s learning basic engine maintenance from Dom.”

“Who’s Dom?” Aurie asked.

“I’m so glad you asked,” Thalia said. “You’re going to be getting
very
well acquainted with him.”

“That’s the one who needs my help, then,” Aurie said, resigned.

“Got it in one. He should be in the room you guys set up, by the way,” Thalia said, taking another long gulp of Hyde’s coffee. Hyde swatted her shoulder and took the cup back.

“Good to know. Thalia, why don’t you show Aurie there?” Annie said.

“Because I just sat down?” Thalia replied.

“And you’re not actually doing anything until Gamma shift, which gives you plenty of time to come back later,” Annie told her calmly.

“Fine,” Thalia said, rolling her eyes. She leaned back to peck Hyde on the cheek before sliding off his lap and walking towards Aurie and Zosha.

“Tag me into lead kidnapper duties, Z,” Thalia said, holding her hand up. Zosha grinned and high-fived her.

“Have fun.”

“Okay, so, any question?” Thalia asked as they stepped back into the hallway.

“I don’t know where to begin,” Aurie said. “Your crew… isn’t what I was expecting for a bunch of kidnappers.”

“Alright,” Thalia sighed. “Rundown of the crew: the original crew was Hyde, Dom, Rick, Leo, and Custer. All of them are bear shifters. They picked up Annie through a series of happenings of soap opera proportions, which sort of set off their trend of picking up women in various parts of the galaxy, myself included. Leo and Annie are together. They’re both reasonable, but don’t fuck around with either of them. Zosha’s with Rick—that’s the brown-haired dude—and has been since she accidentally got the crew into the U4 game. Zosha’s sweet, but she’s smart and she’s spent her whole life in an uphill battle for survival, not to mention she’s seriously connected. Rick’s the first mate, and if someone says that Dad said to go do something they’re talking about him. Delphine was sent to kill the crew and got captured instead, leading to her and Custer falling in love, which will make sense after you meet Custer, who defies description so I’m not wasting my time. My name, again, is Thalia. I’m a journalist, and I’m with Hyde, the technician. The last member is Dom, who you’re about to meet. Quiet, sweet, reserved. Oh, look, here we are.”

The room Thalia lead her to had obviously been recently repurposed, boxes pushed against the wall to make room for some medical equipment and a table in the center of the room with the man Aurie assumed was Dom sitting shirtless on it.

If this was another day manning the walk-in clinic, the man on the table would have been the highlight of her week. Even sitting she could tell he was short, but he more than made up for that with the almost delicate structure of his face that should have contrasted sharply with the hardness of his body but somehow didn’t. He had the same golden eyes as the other men on the ship and close-cropped dark hair.

He looked up. “This her?”

“This is her,” Thalia confirmed. “Dominic, meet Aurelia; Aurelia meet Dom.”

“The very least you could do in this God-forsaken situation is call me Aurie,” Aurie muttered.

Thalia quirked an eyebrow at her but said nothing.

Aurie turned her attention back to the man on the table.

“So, what seems to be the problem?” she asked.

He gestured behind himself to what, on further observation, was a more rudimentary version of the X-ray machine she used back at Grand View. “There’s something in my neck. It needs to come out.”

Aurie walked around him and inspected the medical equipment, deciding she didn’t really want to know where it came from. It was easy enough to boot up and select the “localized scan” option, waiting for the attached wand to light up blue. Picking it up, she turned back to Dominic.
 

“Alright, let’s get this over with,” she told him. “Face forward and lean over.”

He complied. She was about to ask where, exactly, she should start looking when she saw it: a thin, pale line in his tan skin approximately an inch and a half across.

“This will tingle a little, but you shouldn’t feel any pain,” she said, placing the wand against his neck and waiting for it to do its job. It only took a few seconds for the image on the screen to clear and for Aurie, heart sinking, to see a very specific problem with her kidnappers’ request.

“So, um,” she started with no little amount of apprehension, “there may be a slight… complication.”

“Complication?” Thalia asked in a terrifyingly mild voice.

“Yeah, um, you see this?” Aurie asked, pointing at a small white square on the screen. “This is a chip—I’m assuming that’s what you wanted me to look for?—that’s imbedded in Dominic here’s neck. It doesn’t look like it’s hurting anything, it’s pretty small, but from this X-ray it looks like it was put in before he finished growing. That means it’s pretty deeply imbedded in his neck and what’s more, I’m a bit wary of how close it is to his spine. Honestly, I don’t have the skill to get this out and even if I did, I couldn’t recommend going through with it. He’s much safer leaving it in.”

“No, he’s not,” Thalia sighed, “and neither are we.” She opened up a comm channel on her multi-tool. “Hey, guys, I really hope you’re still in the kitchen, because we’re about to need to have a little family meeting. Me, Dom, and Aurie will be up in five.” She clicked the link out.

Aurie stared at her. “I don’t think you understand. He’s not in mortal danger from this. It’s…annoying, maybe, but not fatal.”

“He has Rogerson disorder,” Thalia told her.

Aurie blinked and leaned slightly away from Dominic. “Oh.”

“The chip generates some kind of high-pitched noise, or something that his brain reads as a high-pitched noise, that causes him to shift unexpectedly,” Thalia continued.

Aurie had, in her many years working in various hospitals in various areas of the city, learned the very important lesson of not blaming people for their medical conditions. It was poor medical practice. With that said, the knowledge that she was standing next to a man who might, spontaneously and without warning, turn into a feral bear at any second was…alarming.

“Oh,” she said again in a slightly higher voice. “That’s… oh.”

Dominic snorted. “Don’t worry, Princess. They’re keeping me under a mild sedation until we figure this out.”

“And that’s working?” Aurie asked.

“Well, they wouldn’t keep wasting the medication if it weren’t,” he replied with far less sarcasm than she probably deserved.

“That’s just fantastic,” Aurie said woodenly. “So, we need to get back to the kitchen?”

“We do,” Thalia said. “Come on.”

Aurie walked stiffly behind her as they returned to the rest of the crew.

“Breathe,” Dominic muttered behind her.

“What?” she asked.

“I said breathe,” he said. “They’re not going to blame you. You’re going to be fine.”

Aurie swallowed. “Thank you.” Then, “you have excellent bedside manner, do you know that?”

Dom chuckled softly. “Thank you. I assume you do as well, when you haven’t been recently kidnapped.”

“Oh, no, I’m about this bad all the time,” Aurie replied.

In front of them, Thalia snorted.
 

“If you want Custer to ever stop making fun of you, you might want to stop flirting before we get in earshot.”

Aurie felt her cheeks heat. She needed to lay off the rom vids—there was a very, very low chance that her kidnappers were going to secretly all have hearts of gold, and that she and Dominic would fall madly in love and she’d go off gallivanting in the stars with them forever. That just wasn’t the way her life was laid out.

Dominic sighed. “Don’t be like that, Tali, I’d hate to have to ask you to pull another double shift.”

“Ooooh, you asshole,” Thalia hissed at him, though Aurie could see that she was smiling. She looked like she was about to say something else, but they reached the kitchen first.

Despite Dom’s assurance that she would be fine, she instinctively curled in on herself as they entered the room. The crew of the Breakwater, other than Zosha, had never seemed particularly cheerful, but with the anticipation of receiving bad news they seemed sinister.

“So what seems to be the problem, Aurelia?” the captain asked.

Aurie swallowed. “The chip? That you wanted me to remove? He’s grown around it. If I tried to take it out, especially without the right equipment, I’d paralyze him. If you want it out, you need to take him to a specialist.”

“Think she’s lying?” Hyde asked, eyes narrow.

“Well, I don’t exactly have a wealth of medical training,” Thalia replied, dry as a desert, “but I’d say she realizes she’d be more expendable if she couldn’t do it, so no, I don’t think she’s lying.”

“So where can we get this done?” Annie asked, eyes like needles.

Aurie hesitated. She wasn’t one to play hero, but at the same time, she knew she’d never forgive herself if she handed someone else to them.

“Look,” a blond man she hadn’t met yet drawled, “it’s like this. If you don’t tell us where we can get someone to do the operation, we have to do this all over again and, for obvious reasons, we can’t let you go until we’re done. Now, maybe this next person is good for the operation. But maybe not. Maybe we have to do this a whole bunch of times. Or, you can give us a name, and it all ends with no one getting hurt and no one disturbed that doesn’t need to be.”