Depths of Blue Page 27

  “I think you’re capable of more than just killing.” Torrin rested her hand on Jak’s bare chest, between the swell of her breasts. She could feel Jak’s heart racing. Telling her story had been hard. “You’re damn good at loving, you know.”

  Jak smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I don’t know if I can give you what you deserve. I don’t like to think that far ahead.”

  “I think we can work on that, don’t you?” Torrin said tentatively. “I’d like to think you’ll be around for a while.”

  The smile on Jak’s face was shy, but this one looked genuine and relief washed over Torrin.

  “I can’t promise anything, you know. For all I know, I’ll catch a bullet tomorrow or next week. You learn not to plan too far ahead around here.”

  “That makes sense, I guess.” A deep sadness filled Torrin. It occurred to her that she had very little perspective on Jak’s life. She had no idea how anyone could survive the kind of uncertainty and loss that Jak had endured. That she was still alive and sane was a testament to her mental and emotional strength. Torrin felt downright shallow by comparison.

  “It’s nice to have you here now,” Jak said, looking back over at her. Clearly, she sensed something was wrong and was trying to let Torrin know she was okay. “I really enjoy spending time with you.”

  “Even if all we do is fuck like bunnies?” Torrin meant the question to be funny, but it came out a little bitter.

  “There’s nothing wrong with fucking like bunnies,” Jak said seriously, then, “what are bunnies anyway?”

  “They’re small, furry Earth animals that are known for their powers of reproduction. Apparently, they have long ears and little cottontails and incredible sex drives. I’ve never seen one except in holopics. They are kind of cute.”

  “Well, as long as they’re cute.”

  The giggle that bubbled up surprised Torrin. Jak watched her gravely, but a twinkle lurked in the back of her eyes. The hidden amusement made the conversation even more absurd, and Torrin rolled over to bury her face in the pillow so she could let out a full belly laugh. When she finally stopped, she looked up to catch Jak watching her with surprising tenderness, a satisfied smile playing about her lips. Her serious nature hid a dry sense of humor, one that kept Torrin on her toes.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” Jak said.

  “I know, but the look on your face. ‘As long as they’re cute.’” Giggles threatened to overwhelm her again.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be fucking like something that was hideous.”

  “An excellent point.”

  “So how about you?”

  “How about me, what?” Torrin was confused by the sudden change of direction.

  “When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

  “Would you believe that I wanted to be rescued from a perilous situation by a gorgeous stranger who would then have her way with me?”

  “No.”

  Jak’s flat denial struck her as hilarious and she had to fight down another attack of the giggles. “Fine,” Torrin said, once she’d regained some composure. “I wanted to be a whole slew of things. When I was really little, I wanted to be a stunt rider in a rodeo. Then I wanted to be an interstellar explorer. After that, I thought maybe being a soldier would be exciting.” Jak wrinkled her nose at the statement. “I know, what was I thinking? I forced myself to stay in that gig for too long before bailing. Too much uncertainty and bullshit. Plus, I never learned how to deal with those who didn’t make it back.”

  “I hear you on that,” Jak murmured.

  “So after the soldiering gig, where I had to actually grow up, I decided to become a merchant. I could indulge in the explorer part of my nature, see new places, that sort of thing. Plus, I also discovered that I’m really competitive.” Jak turned a shocked look on her, and Torrin smacked her on the shoulder. “Behave.” Jak looked deeply wounded, and Torrin smacked her again.

  “So I have another question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s a rodeo?”

  Torrin sat bolt upright in bed. “Are you kidding me? You don’t know what a rodeo is?”

  “I don’t think we have too many of them around here.”

  “A rodeo is a ton of fun. There’s only one on Nadierzda. It comes by Landing every few years. Half of the town turns out to see it. It’s like a carnival but with livestock.”

  Jak looked even more confused.

  “People show their prize stock, and there are competitions for whose animals are the best. There are also contests over who can do the best riding and who can perform all sorts of farming-type chores the fastest.” Torrin had to slow herself down. She was chattering faster and faster as she got more excited in her recounting. Like a remembered echo, she could feel the excitement she used to experience when the rodeo was coming to town. Even her mother got excited and would have her prize goats ready to compete. “My favorite was the stunt riders. Those women could do anything on their horses. I had a pony that I trained myself and I used to set myself to all sorts of tricks and maneuvers in the backyard. Well, until my mother would come and get me for chores. Mama understood, but Mother never did.”

  “Wait, women riders? And how many mothers did you have?”

  “Oh sure. Those women were amazing. I had a crush on about a dozen of them, growing up.”

  “And your…mothers?”

  “The women who adopted me were a couple. I had my mama and my mother. Mother was always the stricter of the two. I’d go running straight to Mama after being punished by her. On Nadierzda, my planet, the only couples are women.”

  “So you’ve always liked women then?”

  “Yep. But I like you best.” Torrin grinned cheekily at Jak, who blushed in response.

  They chatted on into the night. For the first time in the four days since they’d first made love, they took things slowly. For now, Torrin felt like they were all alone in the world. All that existed was the room and each other. There was no war going on outside the walls and no reason for Jak to be sent into harm’s way. She learned more about Jak in the last few hours than she had in the past almost three weeks. Even then, she felt like she’d only scratched the surface. Whenever she tried to probe more deeply, Jak gave her a pat answer or turned the question back on her.

  She tried to be understanding. Years of disguising her true self would have made even the most open person guarded and distrustful. There was an amazing person that lurked beneath Jak’s tough exterior and Torrin looked forward to peeling back the layers to get to know her. It wasn’t that Jak was reticent, at least not exactly. She didn’t volunteer much about herself, but she answered most of Torrin’s questions. It was easy to tell when Torrin was skating on the edge of something Jak didn’t want to talk about. She just shut down—the way she had the time Torrin had suggested they duck into her room to fool around.

  Torrin had only seen the inside of the room once, and that had been in passing. She knew Jak had the room to herself, but the quick glance she’d had inside had revealed that half of it was a messy state that didn’t fit at all with Jak’s buttoned-down self. When she’d asked about it, all expression had been wiped from Jak’s face. Only one topic could shut her down that quickly and Torrin realized that it must be Bron’s stuff strewn across half the room. It was no wonder Jak had problems moving on from her brother’s death, surrounded as she was by the last remnants of his life.

  Getting to know Jak completely, if she ever could, would be a time-consuming process, she realized. Strangely, that didn’t bother her, and since she’d just decided they had all the time in the world she concentrated on having a good time.

  When Jak fell asleep in her arms instead of slipping out and heading back to her room, Torrin held her and gloried in the feeling of skin on skin. She could easily have stayed entwined that way forever. It wasn’t long before she felt herself drifting off to sleep. With Jak in her arms, it was easy to let the night take her without
worrying about all the obstacles they still faced.

  Jak woke abruptly to a cramp in her calf. Torrin’s limbs were entangled with hers, one leg thrown over her hip, the other sandwiched between her thighs. Her belly clenched at the feel of Torrin’s leg so close to her pussy. For a moment, she considered waking Torrin. There were many ways she could do so, but she couldn’t decide which one would be best, so she just watched Torrin sleep.

  In repose, her face looked so innocent. Thick lashes framed Torrin’s eyes and hid the wicked glint she’d seen so often. She had the lightest dusting of freckles across her nose, Jak realized. They were enchanting, she decided, contemplating them for a while.

  It was really too bad that she’d had to shave off her hair. Jak really missed those long locks. She wondered what it would be like to thread her hands through them while they made love. The thought sent arousal coursing through her again.

  The resurgence of the cramp in her calf decided for her. As comfortable and happy as she was to be there with Torrin, she needed to move. It was no mean feat to disentangle herself from Torrin without waking her. Slowly, she was able to extricate herself, all while watching Torrin’s eyes to make sure she didn’t awaken. She was cold where she’d been pressed against Torrin’s skin and she mourned the loss of contact. The loss felt more than skin deep.

  Not wanting to dwell on that thought, she felt around on the floor for her clothes. They’d ended up all over the room and for once she was thankful the rooms were so tiny. Flattening breasts that ached for Torrin’s touch was an unpleasant experience, but she crammed them into the breast binder anyway.

  With one last look at her slumbering lover, Jak slipped from the room. She stopped by her room to pick up her rifle, then slipped out of the barracks.

  Camp Abbott was still quiet. The clock in her room had read a little before 0630 hours. She would have to hurry to make the garden before daybreak. Dawn wasn’t more than a few minutes away, and the camp would be stirring soon. It wasn’t completely still, of course. Sentries manned the tops of the walls while here and there runners dashed from one building to another.

  On her way to the produce garden, Jak stopped to contemplate McCullock’s quarters. He had a single-family house to himself. It was little more than a shack, but compared to the quarters most of the rest of the camp made do with, it might as well have been a castle. The camp commander’s house was a little bigger but also housed his entire staff.

  McCullock’s room was in the southeastern corner of the house. She knew for a fact that he slept in a bed right under the window. A high-powered rifle with a penetrating round could easily punch through the thin wall. As she did whenever she saw him or his home, she calculated the best way to kill him. Before he’d attacked Torrin, she’d disliked him intensely. That dislike had crystallized into hatred as relentless as the tide. It occurred to her that if she had to make a choice between taking out her brother’s killer or McCullock, she’d have a hard time deciding which one to use the bullet on.

  The thought disturbed her. She’d promised to avenge Bron’s death, not only to herself but to him. Torrin was pulling her focus away from the goal that had kept her going for the past couple of years. Try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile her promise to Bron with her fledgling relationship with Torrin. To have one, she would have to give up the other.

  With a violent shake of her head, she pulled her thoughts away from the dilemma. This was why she didn’t think about the future. All she had was the present and she needed to take what she could from that.

  The low keening of a horn broke the morning stillness. While she’d been standing there absorbed in her thoughts, dawn had broken. Around her, the camp was coming to life. She looked up in time to catch McCullock’s frightened face staring at her through his bedroom window. With two fingers to the brim of her cap, she tossed him a lazy salute, smiled, then started walking. Let him think she was keeping an eye on him.

  She nodded to a few of the men as she crossed the camp. While she was pretty sure that very few of them actually liked her, she was secure in the fact that she had their respect. Her sniping skills alone had assured that. She thought they also appreciated the fact that while she didn’t take any crap, she didn’t dish it out. How would that change if they knew my secret? It was a question she dwelled on periodically. Besides the very real legal concerns discovery would bring with it, the possibility of losing the men’s respect weighed heavily on her as well.

  The garden was empty. That in itself was no surprise. It would have been bustling with men a couple of hours before, but any food that had been harvested was now being prepared for the camp’s breakfast. She wasn’t interested in vegetables. What she wanted was at the garden’s far edge, where local volunteer wildflowers had sprung up between the cultivated earth and the camp’s outside wall. Over the years, more than one soldier had gone courting with blossoms from the unofficial flower patch.

  Even if she didn’t have a future with Torrin, she still wanted to make her happy in the present. The comb had been a big hit, but Jak didn’t have the time to make her anything else. The relentless meetings around Torrin’s insertion into Orthodoxan territory and the constant training she subjected herself to severely limited any free time. Free time that was also taken up by the time she was spending with Torrin. She grinned and blushed as she ran her mind over what they’d been doing together.

  The bouquet looked nice enough when she assembled it. Not wanting to parade through the camp a bunch of flowers in hand, she tucked them carefully into the front of her jacket. Hopefully the flowers wouldn’t be too damaged before she could get them back to Torrin’s room.

  Her trip back to the barracks was uneventful, but she was glad she’d thought to hide the blooms. The camp’s streets were awash with men on their way to the mess for breakfast. She nodded to a few of the members of her insertion team as she entered the barracks. They stood in the long hallway, chatting idly. When they showed no sign of moving on, she scowled at them. Her reputation for surliness prompted them to move along out of the barracks.

  “Have a beautiful morning, Sarge,” one of them said over his shoulder as they left through the front door. The two men with him laughed and followed him quickly out the door. The men of her unit took her bad temper in stride. A couple of the braver ones occasionally tried to tease her about it, but everyone still remembered or had heard about what had happened to the man who’d pushed her too far in basic training.

  She slipped back into Torrin’s room once the coast was clear. Torrin lay curled on the bed in the same position that Jak had left her in with her hand lying palm down in the space that Jak had occupied. Carefully, Jak pulled the flowers out of her jacket and fluffed them up a little bit. They hadn’t been too badly mangled by their trip in her coat. It was probably a poor substitute to waking up next to a person, but it was the best she could offer. Gently, she deposited the flowers on the pillow where her head had been less than an hour before.

  Torrin deserved better than someone like her. She needed someone who could commit to her. Between her promise to Bron and a war that would probably kill her sooner rather than later, Jak couldn’t give her that. It was hard to keep Torrin from getting too close. With a sinking feeling, she realized it was probably too late already. For both of them.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jak stood calf-deep in muck and trained her rifle on the fence of shimmering blue in front of her. Men crowding the trench to either side radiated a nervous tension. Intel had come down that the Orthodoxans had a raid planned and this section of the fence would be dropping. McCullock had decided she should be in the trenches when that happened.

  She bared her teeth at her recollection of the meeting where he’d given her the orders.

  “Stowell, this will be our best bet for gathering actionable intelligence for what’s happening on the Orthodoxan side. I want you there to count men as they come through the downed portion of the barrier.” He’d smiled at her. To anyone else, th
e smile probably looked genuine. She and Torrin knew better. McCullock was doing his best to get her killed. Letting him catch her lurking outside his home had perhaps been a tactical error. “You’re the best we have, so I want you there in the front lines.”

  “I think the better vantage would be at the top of the escarpment for the raid, sir,” she’d offered.

  “We have plenty of men who could do that,” McCullock had countered, voice oh-so-reasonable. “You’re the best, so your job will be the hardest.”

  Faced with his orders, delivered in such an agreeable tone in front of a room filled with witnesses, she’d had no choice but to agree. McCullock no longer met with her alone to pass on orders; he’d taken to issuing them in front of the group of men who’d been put together to prepare Torrin’s insertion into Orthodoxan territory. They thought they were sending in a black ops soldier to take out the leader of the Orthodoxans. Jak had to admit the ruse was a good one. The mission was highly compartmentalized because of the supposed assignment’s high stakes. It had the added advantage that no one really expected it to work. When Torrin didn’t come back, they would assume that she’d been captured and that the Orthodoxans had hushed up the assassination attempt on Supreme President Weller.

  The planning group consisted of ten men, Torrin and Jak. McCullock probably thought that he’d gained the upper hand with his new tactics. Idly, Jak wondered whether she should just be done with it and put a bullet through his brain anyway. She still had some Orthodoxan ammo and the rifle. She could pick a perch to which no one would be able to track back the shot. He’d never see it coming. As much as she would have liked that, she had to admit that she’d have to feel a much stronger threat to Torrin before murdering the bastard in cold blood.

  The man next to her coughed wetly, a deep tearing hack. He leaned over and spat into the morass at his feet. Jak leaned imperceptibly away from him. Disease was rampant in the trenches. With so many men in such close quarters in the filthy conditions, it was almost impossible for the camp doctors to stay ahead of the various viruses and bacteria that called the trenches and the men who inhabited them home.