Justin Read online

  The mountains. Not extremely specific, but it was a place to start.

  Deanna wasn’t in the apartment when Justin reached it. He shucked his clothes and lay down on the bed, her fresh scent still lingering on the sheets where he’d pressed her. He closed her eyes, and sighed when his cock began to rise again.

  *** *** ***

  Deanna had spent some time after Justin left his apartment searching it. She didn’t know why she wanted to, but the ache in her heart made her need to do something.

  She didn’t find much. Justin’s apartment was bare of anything but necessities, and he had little in the way of clothes or personal belongings.

  Behind his bed, she found a wall compartment that slid open to her touch. When closed, the compartment blended seamlessly into the wall, but the catch to open it wasn’t hidden. Inside the compartment, she found two boxes.

  One was about two feet on a side and made of wood, an incongruity on Bor Narga. The box was not locked, and Deanna opened its lid to find an interior lined with black cloth and divided into sections, a top tray lifting out to reveal a deeper space beneath.

  The things that lay in the slots in these sections made her still. He had handcuffs, several pairs. Not the functional kind that Deanna carried to subdue arrestees, but thick cuffs lined with velvet, cloth, or fake fur. Each had a slim chain between the cuffs that looked almost like jewelry.

  Straps, both leather and cloth, were folded into another slot. In another she found a small, velvet-lined box that contained three small spheres. What those were for, she had no idea.

  She also found the wands—small, slender ones as well as shorter, wider plugs. She stared at them a moment, before realizing they were for insertion . . . into various places.

  Deanna’s imagination conjured Justin’s fingers warm on her while he carefully slid one of the wands inside her.

  She shivered and opened her eyes, which had drifted closed for some reason.

  Another slot carried tubes of lubrication, and another held three small glass bottles. She worked out the stopper on one bottle, smiling in delight when she breathed in the heady aroma of cardamom and other spices.

  Justin smoothed these oils on the lady he pleasured, she presumed. He’d restrain her with the cuffs and use the plugs to fill her, while he worked the oil into her skin. The straps? For teasing and tickling, or for something harsher?

  Deanna pictured herself lying facedown on his bed, her wrists fixed to headboard by the soft cuffs, while he drew the straps down her bare back. She’d be filled with the plug, warm from his caresses, waiting for his kisses on her skin, and for him to fill her himself . . .

  Deanna shuddered, nearly dropping the bottle of oil. She quickly put in the stopper and returned everything to the box where she’d found it.

  The second box in the wall compartment was smaller and made of plastic. This too was not locked. Deanna opened it and found . . . Justin.

  Printed photographs, which they still used on Sirius and other backwoods planets, lay scattered on top of souvenirs. The first photograph showed Justin, grinning, wearing a body-concealing work coverall, looking so normal.

  More shots of Justin—in a bar, holding up a glass of ale, surrounded by other laughing men; with his arm around a brown-haired woman who wore the same kind of coverall; of the same woman in a short tunic at an ocean, then one of Justin, wearing short leggings and nothing else. He balanced on a rock, laughing, while the ocean crashed behind him.

  The woman must be Shela, the woman he’d lived with for fifteen years. They both looked so happy.

  The other things in the box were bits and pieces of Justin’s life on Sirius—plastic entrance discs for various shows, his work ID for his job on the space docks then the permit to start his own offloading company, plus the deed to a house a little outside the city.

  Deanna looked closer at the deed—Justin still owned the house. That was a blatant violation of laws on Bor Narga, but not on Sirius. Touchy if the issue ever came to a trial.

  At the bottom of the box was a faded piece of silk—a Bor Nargan veil, Deanna realized when she pulled it out. The veil was old but had been kept with care. With it was a small plastic card, a note of some kind maybe, though Deanna could see nothing on it when she held it up to the light. She’d need a computer to read it.

  The veil and card gave her an idea. She folded the silk around the card and tucked both into the pocket inside her coverall. The veil was so fine it folded to nothing.

  Deanna closed the box and slid it back into its place, shutting the wall compartment again, before she left Justin’s apartment for the darkness of the desert night.

  Pas City had cooled from the terrible heat of the day, the district and markets coming alive with people, color, lights. But Deanna turned her back on the laughter pouring down the streets and headed home.

  She entered her apartment quietly to find Reda in the living room watching a vid.

  “Sleeping,” Reda said, answering Deanna’s unasked question. Deanna nodded. She looked in on her mother, saw Kayla indeed sleeping heavily, and went on to her bedroom.

  Deanna brought up her computer, unfolded the veil from her pocket, stuck the silk into the full scanner, and read the secrets it revealed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Not surprisingly, the DNA on the veil matched the DNA for Lillian Passan. Perhaps she’d left the veil behind at DNAmo one day, and Justin had kept it for her, or perhaps she’d given it to Justin as a remembrance gift.

  Deanna set the veil aside and keyed in her authorization code to search the highly restricted DNA databases for all of Bor Narga. Very few had the clearance, but Deanna had qualified for it—something else she might lose if her captain decided to fire her.

  The DNA database found a partial match for Lillian’s DNA in a young woman called Sybellie, who had the same birth date as the anonymous birth recorded at the backstreet medic’s. The girl’s mother was listed as anonymous, father unknown, and the database showed she’d been adopted as an infant by a Vistara family.

  Why a Vistara family would adopt a working-class illegitimate child, Deanna didn’t know, but perhaps they were kindhearted, or couldn’t have children themselves, or . . . Who knew?

  The holopic of Sybellie showed her to be one of the young women Deanna had seen at the coffeehouse. Sybellie had seemed to be accepted by her friends and happy—Deanna could find no evidence in her records that she’d had difficulties in school or was thought inferior.

  There was no information listed for Sybellie’s biological father—no name, no DNA record. That was not unusual in the matriarchal society of Bor Narga, where the mother was the most important connection. Money, land, inheritance, and names came through the woman.

  The father would be listed only if he came from a good family connection or had a lot of money for his children to inherit. If the mother did not want the father to have responsibility for or even access to the child, she could leave him out of the records altogether. Many births among working-class women had no father listed.

  No one, it seemed, had bothered to check at Sybellie’s DNA for a father match. No one had cared. Lillian was the important person in the equation, not the man who’d gotten her pregnant. Though, in this case, no one had much cared who the anonymous mother was either.

  Deanna did not run the search for the father now. She did not want to risk leaving any trace of her search, and lead those who policed the databases back to Justin.

  Although, they might not notice. Deanna’s opinion of the people who watched the government databases for illegal activity wasn’t high. When Deanna worked with them to track down criminals, they took a lot of things for granted and didn’t look beyond their assumptions.

  Even so, she didn’t chance it.

  Deanna went back to Lillian’s DNA record and ran the search for her DNA again.

  After about two hours of scrolling, backtracking, and tracing through linked databases, her back aching, she found another match.


  *** *** ***

  Justin ignored the buzzing of his com that woke him out of half-drunk slumber the next morning. The caller was Deanna—she didn’t bother to disguise her number.

  He ached to see her again, but some part of him feared to. He was falling for the woman, needed her, but she knew too much, and any danger to Sybellie made him wild.

  Then again, if he kept Deanna in his sights, kept her sated with pleasure, he could control her and what she knew. Maybe.

  Either recourse was dangerous.

  Justin reached for the com to answer it just as it went silent. His thumb hovered over the button to return the call then he sighed and lowered his hand back to his side.

  Damn it.

  Time to start moving. Justin dragged himself out of bed, put himself through the shower, dressed, and decided to hit the street to find breakfast at a vendor’s cart.

  His door opened before he could reach for the control, to reveal Deanna standing in the sunshine holding two coffees. She held one out to him.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Justin braced himself on the doorframe and blinked down at her, the half-hangover pounding through his head. “Ready for what? Are you arresting me? Luring me into your paddy wagon with coffee?”

  “What are you mumbling about? I hired a car. You want to go up to the Vistara, don’t you? It’s almost time.”

  Sure enough, a tiny hovercar waited a few feet down from Justin’s apartment door. “What the fuck?”

  Deanna thrust the coffee into his hand. “If you want to go to the Vistara, better to let me drive you in a private car than get caught walking around up there. You were going to try to go again today, weren’t you?”

  Yes. “I was giving it some thought.”

  “Then get in the car.”

  Justin took a gulp of coffee. He grimaced, the brew cheap, even for Bor Nargan coffee, but it cut through the haze in his head.

  Deanna walked off toward the car, giving him a nice view of her ass in the tight coveralls. He walked after her, trying not to stumble, and the passenger door of the car slid open for him. Saying nothing, Justin climbed inside.

  This wasn’t a patrol car. It was a private conveyance, meant for a driver and a couple of passengers, nothing luxurious about it.

  Justin drank his coffee in silence, though his pulse raced and his mind jumped from worried thought to worried thought.

  If he didn’t talk, didn’t even say the word Vistara, Deanna couldn’t tell anyone, without lying, that he wanted to go to an area restricted to him. If she, a patroller, drove him up there, Justin couldn’t do anything about it, could he? Not his fault that a patroller dragged him through the district for reasons of her own.

  Deanna slid into the driver’s seat, sealed the doors, and touched the controls. The hovercar rose, rather bumpily, and slid slowly through the crowded streets to the main thoroughfare.

  Justin watched Deanna’s slim fingers tap controls as she programmed her destination. When she sat back to let the car take over, she reached into her coverall and pulled something out of her pocket.

  “I’m guessing you’ll want that back,” Deanna said, laying Lillian’s scarf and her coded note about Sybellie in his lap.

  “Shit.” Justin snatched up both, the silk of the veil soft on his fingers. “Where the hell did you get these?”

  “From the compartment in your bedroom, behind your bed.”

  “You searched my apartment?”

  “You made me angry,” Deanna said. “So I did a search. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better. I found those. I couldn’t read the card, no matter how I tried to break the code, but the scarf was Lillian’s.”

  “I know.” He stuffed card and veil inside his tunic pocket.

  “It gave me an idea of how to trace her.”

  Now fear joined the roiling inside him. “I told you, I don’t want you tracing her.”

  “And I told you, I’m not going to tell anyone about Sybellie. It wouldn’t be fair to her.” She adjusted a control to move around another, slower, car. “I know why you’re worried, and you’re absolutely right.”

  Justin opened his mouth then closed it again without speaking. He wanted to trust her, but he didn’t trust himself. He was forming affection for Deanna, the hot little patroller, who had so far proved that she didn’t mindlessly follow the rules.

  And she was hot. Wait, did he think that already? Maybe he was letting his need for sex with her override his common sense.

  Who was he kidding? Need for sex with her was absolutely messing with his common sense. Being in the close space with her, breathing her scent . . . His hangover was dissolving under a rush of need.

  “What else did you find while you were searching my place?” he asked.

  Her little, shy, sideways glance made his blood heat. “One or two things, in that wooden box. I didn’t understand what they were all for.”

  Aw, she was so cute when she blushed. Deanna had lost her businesslike stance, and had once again become the woman who’d asked him to show her how to bring him off. “Make an appointment with me, sweetheart, and I’ll teach you all about the things in my magic box.”

  Deanna’s blush deepened, and a for a moment, he thought she’d agree. But then she lost her smile and looked serious. “I wanted to ask you about your lifemate, Shela. She never had a child, did she? But obviously you can make one, and you wouldn’t have had the sterility inoculations on Sirius.”

  The delightful thoughts of watching Deanna sift through his box of accoutrements while he showed her what each plug, strap, ring, and clamp was for, fled.

  “No,” he said in a quiet voice. “Shela couldn’t. That was . . . hard on her.”

  “I’m sorry.” Deanna sounded like she meant it. “You stayed with her, though. I mean, you knew you could have kids, but not with her.”

  “Yes, I stayed.” He wondered what was going on behind those pretty eyes. “Not her fault, and I wanted to be with her. Why are you asking?”

  “No reason.” She swerved the car up the last of the hill to the double street where the coffeehouse lay. “We’re here.”

  Deanna pulled the car over, parking it behind hovercars in which Vistara women were driven half a block by their chauffeurs to go shopping. The coffeehouse was open and full, and the four young women sat at their table by the window.

  Justin sat back in his seat and slowly let out his breath. Deanna had parked closer to the coffeehouse than he usually got to stand. The car’s tinted windows hid them from the passersby on the street, but unlike Brianne’s car, its windows didn’t have so much shielding that they blocked out the windows of the coffeehouse.

  Justin saw Sybellie clearly. She laughed at something one of her friends said, her mouth open as she clenched her hands around her coffee cup.

  She was so beautiful. Justin saw much of Lillian in her, but her eyes were the same shape as the ones that looked back at him from the mirror in his bathroom. The rose color she chose for her veils suited her, matching her pink lips and . . .

  “She paints her fingernails,” Justin said in tender wonder. “Pink to match her veil.”

  “I see that.”

  He felt himself grinning like an idiot. “Am I supposed to say, that looks nice, honey, or tell her she shouldn’t spend all her time on manicures? Damn it, I don’t know how to be a father.”

  “I don’t know what you’re supposed to say. I don’t have kids either.”

  The sadness in Deanna’s voice tugged at him. “What did your mom say to you?” he asked.

  Deanna glanced at her fingernails, which were smooth but short. “I’ve never had my nails done, so nothing about that. She did once tell me, that’s a nice pistol, honey, but don’t spend all your time at the firing range.”

  Justin had to laugh, even though her voice had gone sadder still. He rested his hand on Deanna’s thigh, liking the wiry strength of it, remembering her in the shower, her skin soft and feminine.

  She was
giving him a gift, he realized, letting him see Sybellie without interference. He was going to kiss her for that. And more.

  Sybellie was telling her friends something, her eyes animated, hands moving as she related whatever was the funny story. He wanted to hear it, wanted to see her roll her eyes and say, Dad! when he asked her about it.

  He wanted it so much it was killing him.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” he said softly. “I want to see her, talk to her, hug her—just be with her. But I also want to protect her. And I can only do that by staying away from her.”

  He felt Deanna’s gaze on him. She was looking at him in understanding, sympathy even. No, she was definitely not like any other patroller he’d ever met.

  The girls were leaving. The four of them walked out, pausing outside the coffeehouse to talk still more.

  Justin couldn’t take his eyes off Sybellie. She was so young, so innocent and pretty. Lillian had been much the same, but Lillian had already been hardened when she was twenty, by having to grub for a living. Sybellie was soft, unused to the world, untouched. Free. Happy.

  There was much hugging, and then two of the girls walked away, their arms linked. Sybellie and her other friend remained, still talking. At times, they both were talking at the same time without realizing it, and Justin laughed.

  He watched her, his heart full, his daughter three steps away from him, and she never knew it.

  Sybellie’s friend walked away, Sybellie waving. She scanned the street, as though deciding which direction to go. Her gaze swept over the car, not seeing Justin behind the tinted glass, not knowing he sat there, his entire being aching for her.

  Deanna’s fingers closed around his and squeezed. Justin clung to her hand, glad she was with him, knowing she’d done this for him.

  A man walked past the car, an off-worlder by his clothes. He stopped and looked at Sybellie. Justin noticed him only because the man took a few quick steps forward, put himself in front of Sybellie, and started talking to her.