Prince of Passion (18 page)

For a moment, he wanted to tell her that intimate congress in the sand was never as pleasant as it seemed, but what came out was a groan as his back and shoulders flamed.

He shook his head as she struggled to pull her upper body out from underneath his.

Her brow furrowed. “You have to contact the
Asphodel
. Tell them not to lose sight of the raider ship. They will have to go to ground to fix the hatch, and Omel and the sachet are doused in neurotoxin. They’ll be in an uproar, but we can’t lose them.”

Remembering how Rynn had grabbed at Omel, Icere could imagine the spy was already comatose. The crew of the ship would be touching her and the sachet, spreading the poison.

A short distance away, Luac was digging himself out of the sand with Kylara’s help, looking dazed but functional. Ky popped the comm-link from behind her brother’s ear and crawled to Icere. “Here.”

He murmured his passcode, his voice rough.

“Brother!” Benedetta’s cry made him wince. “We see you. Are you—”

“Bené, hush.” He relayed Rynn’s message. “Don’t let them up into the cloud cover where they can hide. With those engines, they’ll have a speed you can’t match. Force them down.”

Across the clearing, Pisey and his second were assisting the remaining guard to his feet. The guards hastened to the Saya, who waved them toward Luac, her face turned upward, fiercely focused on the battle above them.

With the guards’ help, Luac was quickly unearthed. “Come on,” he shouted. “They’re heading out to sea, toward the barge.”

The guards started after him to the shoreline, Kylara right behind, but she paused to lever Icere to his feet. “You’re hurt.”

“But not dead.” He glanced back at Rynn who stood with her hands clenched in front of her, violet rings glistening with poison. The qva’avaq around her wrist shimmered brighter yet.

She stared at him but did not try to touch him. “Let’s go.”

They hastened toward the beach. When they cleared the trees, the sky opened up overhead to a view of the
Asphodel
harrying the raider ship, trying to nudge it back to land. But the raider dodged, seeking an opening to bolt for the clouds. For all its bulk, the raider whirled like the vicious attack vessel it was. The
Asphodel
, with her slim nacelles and tapered fuselage, shrieked as she matched the turns, sounding as if she cleaved the air with her cries.

Each screaming circle took them farther out to sea, toward the crowded barge.

“Tell them to shoot it down.” Rynn’s voice was flat.

“They’re almost over the malac field,” her lieutenant protested. “A spill there—”

Rynn looked at Icere. “Tell them. We can’t let this go on.”

Icere opened the comm. “Bené, you’re heading toward a floating city. Too many possible hostages or victims. We have to bring them down.”

Her voice was quiet in his ear. “Whatever it takes to stop them. That’s what you told me when you left.”

“I know.” But there was so much more to lose now. “Tell Corso—No, wait.”

“Icere,” Rynn said. “Do it.”

He held up his hand as he spoke rapidly into the comm. “Tell Corso to come down hard from above. But give them a bottom out.”

“Give them an out? But they’ll make a break for it, and the
Asphodel
can’t—”

“They’re diving to evade! Do it now!”

Across the tossing waves, the
Asphodel
stooped like a hawk attacking a shark: an impossible fight. The raider ship rolled to its side, a masterful move that left the
Asphodel
aiming at nothing, and had the raider ship skipping nimbly over the waves, the broken hatch raised like a mocking wave.

The raider cleared the
Asphodel
’s wake, with only open sky above. Its powerful engines screamed a farewell, blasting the water into a giant foaming curl.

But as the ship started to climb, the curl unfolded in a writhing mass of tentacles.

The malac launched itself from the waves, its mighty siphon expelling a towering pinnacle of water that seemed to hold it aloft as it snagged the bow of the raider ship with one thick appendage.

The engine screeched, but the ship was already nose-down, and the burst of energy only hastened its descent as the huge, enraged and aggressively territorial malac took the intruder down. The ocean foamed, huge breakers spouting in all directions. The ship listed, still momentarily buoyant. The malac snaked its other tentacles around the dark plasteel in a terrible embrace. A silent scream of bubbles gushed from the mouth of the open hatch.

“So there’s a practical reason you don’t let sheerships land here,” Icere noted.

Luac grunted. “Not a problem we advertise to the tourists, for obvious reasons.”

The raider ship rolled with the weight of the clinging malac. One tentacle slapped the water in rage, and the siphon spouted again, high enough that the
Asphodel
had to dodge.

“Water pressure could rupture the seals on the downed sheership,” Kylara said. “Resisting the vacuum of space isn’t the same as the pressure of the deeps. But with the engines intact, there should be no environmental danger.”

“To the malac field, anyway,” Luac said. “But even if the water pressure doesn’t get the raiders, the malac will crunch right through the hull.”

Rynn stepped into the surf. “We need the information they have. Between the neurotoxin and the threat of drowning, they should be no threat. I’m going—”

Icere grabbed her elbow. “Let the Ni-Saya.”

She flinched away from him, keeping her hands carefully clear, but she glanced at Luac, who stepped forward eagerly.

“I want to do this.” His eyes narrowed. “I need to talk to one of those raiders in particular.”

Ky nudged him. “Icere and I brought a sub. We have dive gear and more spear guns.”

Rynn nodded at her lieutenant. “Go with them. Bring me the crew, mostly intact. The
Asphodel
can help raise the ship itself. I think both will have much to tell us about who paid them to steal our aphrodisiac.” She tilted her head toward Icere without meeting his gaze. “And then you’ll have answers to the questions that brought you here.”

The note of dismissal made him wince more than the pain in his blistered back. The others certainly seemed to take it as a dismissal. They tromped down the beach toward the sub Ky had left at the shore.

To his surprise, he realized the rain had stopped. As if the ships had burned ragged holes in the clouds, fitful rays of sun danced over the waves where no remnant of the raider ship remained.

Rynn bent down to wash her hands in the surf.

“Wishing you could be rid of me so easily?” he wondered aloud.

She didn’t glance over. “I need to look at your shoulders and I can’t do that if my hands are dripping poison. Sit down here so I can rinse the sand off you.”

“Oh, I’m mostly intact.” He let a note of derision creep into his voice as he settled in the lapping waves at her feet.

That did bring her gaze up. “Through no good sense of your own.” She knelt behind him to ladle water over his shoulders. “What were you thinking, jumping out of the bushes with a hazer?”

He winced at the sting of salt, but in another moment, the pain of the burns faded as the diluted neurotoxin washing from her skin numbed his nerve endings. “Seemed better than shooting a spaceship with a dart.”

“An explosive dart. I wanted to make sure they couldn’t shoot back at the
Asphodel
.”

“We didn’t know the
Asphodel
was here.”

“You said they would be. I trusted you.”

He grabbed her wrist, his fingers tangling in the qva’avaq chain, and twisted toward her.

She stared down at him, her face set in lines hard as rock. But her hand linked to his shook with some emotion. “You’re hurt, but no worse than a bad sunburn, and every island paradise has remedies for that. We’ll return you to the
Asphodel
without a mark on you.”

He studied her. “What if I want to be marked?”

She strained away but ceased when he didn’t let her go. “With the information we’ll get from the raider ship, you’ll be one step closer to revealing the threat against the sheerways. Once they are stopped, without the danger of the qva’avaq being used as a mind control, you can become who you were meant to be.”

He used her as leverage to pull himself to his knees. “And what would I be?”

“L’auralyo,” she whispered.

“And if I want more than that now?”

She shifted as a stronger wave hit them, foaming around her shins and his thighs. “I wanted to give you a chance. With the raiders defeated, you could choose…” She did not let the errant wave push them closer together. “You might’ve been killed. Why did you follow?”

“Because I’d rather see the sheerways burn than lose you.”

For a heartbeat, she only stared at him. He searched her stony expression for the merest crack, finding none. Maybe once he would have been sunk by such apparent distance that would make even the span of the sheerways seem trivial, but he would not falter; he had been around the water long enough now to find his way inside her heart.

He tightened his hold on the qva’avaq chain. “You said I’d find the answers to the questions that brought me here. And I have.”

“In the ship we brought down,” she said.

“No. Here, with you.” He rolled her hand in his grip, exposing her inner wrist to the shifting sunlight. “My question was what purpose did I have without my a’lurilya? Where among the stars would I find my heart’s desire when my key would never be taken up by a loving hand?” He kissed her pulse above the bracelet, and she shivered. “It is in your hands now. Or rather, around your wrist. What is your answer?”

Her fingertips brushed his cheeks as she curled her hand into a fist. “What is the question?”

“Do you want me?”

The breath left her in a sigh almost softer than the waves. Still, the qva’avaq chaining her chimed in echo. “Who wouldn’t desire a l’auralyo, a prince of passion?”

He kept his gaze locked on her. “My question was, do
you
?”

“But how can I hope to keep you?” she whispered, the first crack in the armor that weighed her down.

“You have my key,” he reminded her. “You wouldn’t let it sink out of sight, forever forgotten.”

Her brow furrowed. “Is that all it takes? That I hold your key?”

“Yes. If I was only l’auralyo.”

“But you aren’t only that.”

“So I’ve discovered. So you’ve shown me. And so I ask, not as l’auralyo. Will you have
me
? Will you have my love?”

She sank to her knees with him. “Why? Why would you give me what the rest of the universe wants?”

He reached up to tangle his hands in the wet ropes of her hair and reeled her closer. “Because I don’t want the universe. I want you, my siren.”

He held his breath, waiting through one wash of waves, a second.

With the third wave, she wrapped her arms around his neck, almost knocking him into the surf. “Yes,” she said. “I want this love.”

He kissed her, softly at first, then harder, until he was left reeling like the sand washing away under his knees even as the fires of passion roused within him. But let the water rise and the wind blow whichever way it wished. Her every breath was his and would be as long as the stars would shine.

Thank You!

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed PRINCE OF PASSION, I would appreciate it if you would help others enjoy this book, too.

Lend it
. This e-book is lending-enabled, so please, share it with a friend.

Recommend it
. Please help other readers find this book by recommending it to friends, readers’ groups and discussion boards.

Review it
. Please tell other readers why you liked this book by reviewing it at your favorite bookstore sites and at
Goodreads
or anyplace readers like you gather.

And once again, thank you for being a reader!

Want to receive my
New Release & 99¢ Alert
?

Sign up for my newsletter and get breaking news on new books and sales.

Read more from Jessa Slade

ASSASSIN’S HUNGER

Sheerspace Book 3

Stripped of her identity by a cybernetic mercenary corporation, Shaxi was a mindless killer until the corporation was destroyed and set her free. Now lost and alone, she desperately needs to master her unlinked programming before she succumbs to the rogue madness. But the electromagnetic storm that might save her also blows in the Asphodel, a sheership with more mysteries and menaces than Shaxi has ever faced…including the enigmatic Eril Morav, a heartless assassin on a quest to save the sheerways, even at the cost of his own soul. Eril thinks he’ll use Shaxi to do his dirty work, but she might be the one being in the universe who can light his black-hole heart.

Chapter 1

The shriving storm was so close now. In its electromagnetic chaos, she would find new purpose.

Or she would die, with her flesh and biotics stripped away by the alien wind.

Through her ocular implant, on’Taj Shaxi tracked real-time data on the approaching tempest while her naked eye focused on the cantina’s simulated window.