Chapter 18

Bren snagged the carry-all full of beer bottles and took the lift down to the flight deck. He felt good. The Silvana was fully stocked and back in the airstream, he had two excellent contracts and another minor one, and he was going to go work on a vanship with a woman who was beautiful wearing nothing but grease and dirt. There was something on the horizon, something that Sophia wasn't telling him, but for the time being, he was in a good place.

He scaled the side of the Warlock easily and put the carry-all in the pilot's chair. Sophia called out from one of the compartments that made up the rest of the space of the ship, all tucked between the cabin and the engine housing.

"I'm back here."

He followed the sound of her voice and found her in front of an open access hatch in one of the cargo compartments. "Stabilizer?" He asked, glancing over her work.

"Yes, even though it's functional. I had to check the gate here, and I know this stabilizer release is always a bit sticky, so I thought I'd fix it while I was here." She didn't look up from what she was doing, and Bren felt a sudden surge of affection.

He leaned a shoulder against the open door and watched her instead of grabbing a tool and going to work on something else. For a woman who'd been trained from birth to be a princess, she made a damn good mechanic.

"What else have you worked on?" He found himself asking. She tilted her head slightly in a gesture to elaborate. "Other ships, I mean."

"Just this one." She paused to stroke a thumb down the edge of the open hatch in blatant possession, and Bren's affection turned abruptly to lust. He shook his head roughly to get his mind back on track. He looked around for the toolbox and rummaged inside it for a probe that he knew she was going to need soon.

"Where did you find it?" He asked, handing her the probe just as she was about to reach into the toolbox for it.

"Thank you. And I didn't find him. He came up for auction and there was some breathless newscreen about the ship of death being on sale. So I went down to Tarawa and bought him." She leaned close to wiggle the probe into the tight spot between the two thick ropes of twisted wires so that she could test the stabilizer release without having to go back to the pilot's console to start it up.

Bren blew out a short breath in amusement. "I should have figured. I'm still surprised Sikandar let you repair and fly it."

"Ow! Damn." Sophia's hand had slipped and she'd stabbed the delicate end of the probe into her finger.

Bren went cold as he watched her put her bleeding fingertip in her mouth. He could feel the avalanche coming, but he didn't say a word.

Then Sophia took her fingertip out of her mouth, tilted her chin up and looked him right in the eye. "I didn't tell my father I was repairing the Warlock or that I was planning to be a pilot." She said, a new intensity showing through her usual serenity. "I told him I was making the ship into a museum dedicated to Carolina's memory."

Bren closed his eyes. Here it was, the thing she'd been hiding from him. He sat down on the floor and pushed back with his feet until his back was against the corner where two walls of the compartment met.

"The newscreens put you at a religious retreat." He said softly.

"It would be political suicide to admit that a princess just ran away." Even though he couldn't see her — wouldn't open his eyes to look at her — he could hear the discomfort clearly in her voice.

"Do they know where you are now?" He asked.

There was a long pause, then, "No."

He nodded once, then opened his eyes to watch her, affection and lust now long distant memories. "Why?"

Sophia was kneeling facing him, the fingers of one hand rubbing over the healing ridges of stitches on her forearm. Her expression was probably a mirror of his; wary, unsure. Her short braid had fallen forward over her shoulder, and she flicked it back without looking away from him. "I had my doubts about Carolina's death. Until the Warlock came up for auction, I didn't have anything to work with. Then he was mine, and I just ... couldn't stop thinking about it."

"So you came gunning for me." He said, deadly soft.

She winced slightly, but gave no other indication of her discomfort. "So I came looking for you. But I was wrong. You had nothing to do with it."