Page 4 of Remmen

I was done with this. All of it. Boxed it up and left it on Earth with the good plates and the worse decisions, because wanting things had never once worked out in my favor. Whatever was climbing my throat now hadn’t asked my permission, and it wasn’t getting it.

The minotaur woman running the dock finally got back to me. She’d been working the ramp through the whole disaster, ticking names off a paper, shorter than the men and moving like she was running behind schedule. Somewhere in the thick of it she’d already shouted something at me about saving her a counselor. Now she took me in properly, blood and all, without a blink. “I’m Nezara, the head of the Agency here in New Knossos. Thanks for the help.”

“Glad to be useful.” I meant it more than I wanted to.

“You’ll fit right in.” She clapped her folder shut. “Come on, then. Let’s clear off and let these gentlemen go and meet their brides in peace. Nothing spoils a first hello like blood.”

The brides. Right. A dozen women were coming down the ramp in a nervous cluster, here to marry monsters they’d never laid eyes on, and every unpaired giant on the dock stood up a little straighter.

Not my circus.

As far as the bulls went, I was off limits and I was happy about it. There’d been some lawyerly language in the stack of paperwork I’d signed before boarding about fraternization and romantic entanglements that basically boiled down to: look but don’t touch.

Fine by me.

And the mayor was certainly looking his fill.

He hadn’t stopped since I’d looked up from Giles. No glance and away, none of the polite sliding-off you’d give a woman kneeling in someone else’s blood. He looked at me like he had all day and meant to spend every minute of it on me, slow, down and back up, not one bit sorry about it. If eyes could caress a person, he’d have had me shivering by now.

They could. He was.

And I looked right back, because up close he was enormous, and I couldn’t stop myself noticing it. Those hands could span my whole waist and lap over. One of them had passed me a cloth a minute ago that all but disappeared in his palm. And I could guess, on no evidence at all, exactly how those hands would feel closing over my hips and lifting me clean off the ground. Setting me down wherever he wanted me.

The crate at my back was a foot away. Half a step and he’d have me against it, all that size crowding in until there was nowhere left to go, nothing but shoulders and heat and the smell of him. It should have scared me. It pressed my thighs together on the cold dock and thinned my breath instead.

I wanted that broad hand spread flat between my shoulder blades, holding me still against all that chest while I found out what he tasted like.

I’d made a practice of wanting nothing I couldn’t have. He’d undone it in no time, and all he’d said was his name.

Look but don’t touch. On paper it had been the easiest promise I ever signed. Three feet from all that, it read like a dare.

Then he made himself stop. He stepped back and gave me a small, correct nod, the kind you give a stranger you’re finished with.

“Counselor.” He said it like a man shutting a door. Then he turned and went, back into the crowd toward the ramp and the brides and whatever else was his to carry, and took every degree of that heat with him.

The dock felt colder the second he was gone. Which was fine. Ideal, even.

Nezara peeled me off the dock and pointed me at the town, and Chelsea caught up before we’d cleared the bay, looking about as steady as I felt.

We’d shared a transport and a grand total of maybe four sentences, most of them mine, none of them worth keeping. But there’s nothing like watching a man nearly bleed out on the welcome mat to hurry a friendship along.

“Is Giles going to be okay?” she asked.

“He’ll be dining out on that scar for a year.”

She let out a breath that was half a laugh. I decided Chelsea and I were going to get along.

The town was a strange little place. Half of it old dark timber, low and wide, built for bodies twice my size. The other half gray prefab, dropped in among the wood and not matching a thing. A forge smoked at one end. A market was going up at the other. A place still arguing with itself about what it wanted to be when it grew up.

I could relate.

The office was one of the prefab boxes, and my apartment was the box set on top of it. Small. Clean enough. A bed, a table, a chair, a window. Chelsea had the door next to mine, Giles would have the one past that once Otho turned him loose. My whole new world, it turned out, would fit on one short walkway.

“Settle in,” Nezara said, already going. “Someone will turn up in the morning with a schedule and more forms. There are always more forms.” And she was gone, on to the next line on her agenda.

My bags would be delivered later, but at least I didn’t need to unpack just yet. I went to the little window and looked down at my new street, because it beat flopping down onto the bed and reconsidering all of my life choices.

Half the town was down in that street, but I found him in a heartbeat. The tallest one on the road, unhurried, the good coat catching the last of the light. Walking away like the dock hadn’t happened at all.