CHAPTER THREE
Battle Plans
I held onto Damian while he carried me into his bedroom. I wasn’t sure who was flying Artemis, but I was sure they had it worked out. Tomorrow, I would worry about the real world. My guys had made tonight really special, like a dream I hoped I wouldn’t wake from.
Damian la down on the bed in one of the extra bedrooms. I climbed on top of him, straddling his lap.
“Hi, Damian.” I ran my hand down the side of his face. “How are you?”
He exhaled a long breath. “Better now.”
Judge had gotten really muscular in our time apart, but if anything, Damian had lost weight. He was still gorgeous but leaner, and there was, if possible, even more wariness in his eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault.” I was going to have to say this to all of them. In all the time I’d spent obsessing, I’d never thought, not for one second, they’d blame themselves for a Zombie infestation. “None of it.”
He traced my face with the tip of his index finger. “It is, but I’m not going to argue with you about it. The truth is, you were dead. For a little more than half a year, as we tried to get back to Orion, I thought you were dead, so you were in my mind. Then for two years, maybe, you were dead. We didn’t know. You’re here. I should be able to take a breath around the pain. Only I haven’t yet. I don’t know why.”
I kissed his cheek, lingering over the spot to breathe him in. “Because you’re Damian. Because your heart is huge. Because you love me. Because it might take a little time for you to believe it.”
He closed his eyes, and his body shuddered. “Diana …”
I kissed him all over his face, anywhere I could reach—the tip of his chin, his cheeks, his closed eyes.
“Damian, I love you. I was never dead. I was almost dead but never actually. I woke on this side of the galaxy alone, wondering if all of your timelines had moved on without me. I’d spend time fixating on things. Like, did Judge ever get Evander to admit they had screwed up the glass? Or did Damian go back home and fall in love? What was his wife like?”
His eyes flew open. “Diana …”
I held up my hand. “I didn’t know if you were dead, either. It was possible you’d lived a whole life without me. I know pain, too. Please believe me, my love.”
He kissed me straight on the lips. “For the record, I never would have ever moved on. There wouldn’t be a wife. There wouldn’t have been a life.”
I wanted his pain gone. It was going to take some time and maybe some help. But we had tonight. That was everything. “Then I guess we would have both been pretty miserable souls.”
He kissed me long and slow, his hands coming around my back and pulling me to him against his chest. He was warm, and we were both alive.
I rocked against him, making sure to rub his cock against me. His hands slid down my hips, and he moaned. His eyes opened, and he placed his forehead against mine. I loved that feeling, so close, so connected to him.
“Please, Diana.”
I never could resist his please. “Anything, Damian. What do you need?”
“You. I need to feel you alive. Please, can I be inside of you?”
I reached between us, having to back up a little do so, and stroked his cock on the outside of his shorts. He sucked in his breath.
“You can be inside of me just about any time you want. Always. For the rest of our lives, which, assuming nothing else goes terribly wrong, will be a long time.”
His nostrils flared. “Do you remember our idea for the farm on the planet where no one would find us?”
“We can still have that.” I kissed him lightly on the lips. “As soon as the people who want to kill me or kidnap me are gone.”
“Wait …”
I shouldn’t have brought that up, and so instead of ruining the mood, I opted to distract him. I pushed down his shorts and pressed him deep inside of me.
He grunted, his head falling back against the headboard. “Shit, Diana. I’m—”
“Close, I know. That’s how I want you, Damian. Deep inside of me, hot and ready.” I didn’t know where the words came from. I wasn’t this way with anyone else. But I’d always understood what Damian needed, and I loved giving it to him. Maybe I should have been sore and tender, but I wasn’t. Adrenaline rode me, and I wasn’t going to question it right then. I wanted him.
I moved slowly at first, drawing him with me, holding his eye contact as I moved. He breathed heavily, his hands gripping the bed. Inside of me, his cock pulsated. I could feel how much he wanted me. There was nothing headier than that.
I travelled up and down his cock, our hips dancing together. He’d moan and I’d gasp. I was close, too. Damian was ready, and I was too.
“This is too fast.” He bit down on his lip, his neck muscles straining. “I’ll make it up to you.”
He reached out, stroking my breasts, brining my nipples to peaks. “Nothing to worry about. You come, and I’m going to come.”
Damian nodded once. “Please.”
“Do it, Damian.”
His movements sped, stroking my clit, making my insides clench in anticipation. When he came, it was beautiful. His face revealed a mixture of pleasure and pain. He pulled me against him, tighter than I had been, and I was lost, my body spending all that I had left around him. I collapsed on his shoulder, and he spoke love in my ear. I couldn’t make out what he said; maybe it was nonsense. But I got the gist. He loved me. He’d never let me go again.
I was more than fine with that.
Sometime later, I woke up. The ship had slightly changed direction. All the time I’d spent on Artemis had made me very attuned to her shifts and changes, even in space. The coordinates I’d given the guys should have been a straight shot to the first stopping point on our way to the rendezvous point. Steps had been taken to disguise the final planet where we would winter and wait for Sandler to relax. Then we’d retake the station and end his abilities to conduct his war machine.
All I had to do was not get taken in the meantime and act like I didn’t know they wanted me. My friend Paloma had been key in us gaining this information, but no one had heard from her in a month. I hoped she was okay.
Damian had an arm and a leg slung over me. I gently pulled out of his hold, and he murmured something unintelligible before rolling over onto his side. I quietly crept to his closet and grabbed a long shirt. I’d only known my guys in their uniforms, but like me, they’d acquired clothes along the way. Damian’s shirt fell past my knees, so it would do for now. I quickly went into the bathroom and cleaned myself. The adrenaline had worn off, and now my body actually hurt from all the lovemaking we had done.
I’d never felt so completely achy and happy at the same time before.
On quiet toes, I made my way to the control room where I wasn’t surprised to find Sterling at the helm. He needed less sleep than the others, or at least it usually seemed that way.
He looked up when I came in, and he smiled, although I knew I hadn’t surprised him, thanks to his super-hearing. He usually tried to hide those attributes, lest someone find them off-putting. I never minded. “Shouldn’t you be out cold?”
“Think I’m kind of overstimulated, if you want to know the truth.” I sat down on his lap in front of the control panel. “You changed direction. It woke me. What’s going on?”
Sterling bit lightly on my neck. “This is Damian’s shirt. I think we need to make a rule that you can’t wear any of our clothing. I have no issue sharing you with these guys—they’re like my brothers—but I want you out of his shirt and in mine.”
I pinched his leg. “I’ll wear yours tomorrow. Focus. Why did you change directions?”
“Because I got a weird reading, and I wasn’t sure if it was space junk or something I should be concerned about. I’m new to this side of the galaxy. I’ll learn the rules fast, but I have to learn them, nonetheless.”
I nodded. His words made sense, yet the anxiety in the pit of my stomach that had always been there surged back to life. I forced myself to breathe the way I’d been taught since I woke from the medically induced space coma and had to deal with my new reality. I controlled my anxiety as best I could, and when I couldn’t, I asked for help. Or I went totally numb. That had been a third option no one had liked. Right then, I needed to focus.
“I am familiar with this side of the galaxy. Tell me what you saw.”
Sterling tugged me up his lap a bit. “Are you okay?”
“You’re reacting to my anxiety. It’s always with me now. I’ve got it handled. Let’s talk about what we need to really worry about, okay? It helps me to keep the stresses right out in front of me where I know what they are so I don’t start jumping at phantoms.”
He ran a hand down my back, smoothing my shirt. “This is new. You weren’t anxious when you were with us.”
“Don’t know if it’s because the infection almost killed me or if something in my brain chemistry changed when they saved me or if it was waking and thinking you were all dead or moved on without me.” Like Damian, I hated saying the word dead. “It’s changed me. In any case, I promise I’m not in a tailspin right now. I’ve had some help.”
I turned to look at him. He’d raised his eyebrows but didn’t otherwise comment. “Okay.”
The question had to be asked. “Are you wishing you’d stayed on the other side of the galaxy now that you know I might have a panic attack to go with my silence? Losing my ability to speak was one thing; downright can’t catch my breath in terror is something else entirely.”
Fury passed through Sterling’s eyes for a second before he reined it in. “I love you. What I want is to be able to go back in time and make it so we never left so you’d never have had to endure what had to be hell. Okay? I’m worried about you, and I’m entitled to be so. You’re my wife. You have an anxiety disorder I can’t snap my fingers and fix.” He shook his head. “I worried about you not talking.”
“I didn’t slip into that. I think I was too … mad at the universe.”
He actually smiled at my description. “Don’t ever, ever ask me if I regret anything about you again.”
“Fine.” I leaned against his chest. “What did you see that made you shift direction?”
He pointed at the control panel. “There was a sudden flash—so brief I almost missed it, and that’s saying something—and a surge of petroleum output in the reading. Now, that might be a glitch. We used to see Francium all the time that wasn’t really there.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s not good news. Don’t do anything yet. Okay? We are being followed, and the way Garrison Sandler screwed up his ships, we do sometimes see petroleum. We will have to defend ourselves. Don’t react yet. Let’s pretend we didn’t see. I need to let certain parties know this has happened before we take action. We may not take any. Someone else might do it for us. Wake the others.”
I got off his lap, and he rose. “Sweet baby, I hate to ask this, but do you know what you’re doing? Conducting this kind of operation wasn’t something you did two years ago.”
I’d always loved his nickname for me, and I hoped when this was over he still felt the same way. Some things had changed, in big ways. “Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I know how to do a lot of this stuff now. Get the guys, please? I want to show everyone all at once how we’re going to send coded messages and whom we send them to. Then, if we get the go ahead to fire, we’ll do so.” I hoped Artemis was up to the task. She was an old ship, and she’d just been through the black hole. Again. “Otherwise we might keep going through space pretending they’re not there. That might be the best use of our time at the moment. We’re not supposed to be here; we didn’t anticipate you guys showing, obviously. My family will have had to adjust plans to account for us.”
Sterling’s eyes were hard. “I hate that you live like this. I want Damian’s version of life where we’re all living on that farm. All right. I’ll get the guys.”
“Great.” I took a long, deep breath. I didn’t know what kind of trouble we were in.
They all arrived surprisingly fast and dressed. Only I remained half-attired, in Damian’s shirt. He must have liked it because he grinned from ear-to-ear before he reined it in. Judge and Lewis remained passive, but Cash looked me up and down before briefly scowling. Wearing one of their clothes clearly crossed a line I hadn’t considered. For now, we had more important things to worry about.
“Sorry to wake everyone, but we have a situation.” They were all lined against the back wall, and for a second I felt like I was about to give orders like my mother did. The sensation was not particularly comforting, and I forced myself to move on. “I’ll be as brief as I can. For years now, Sandler Cartel has wanted Mars Station. Well, they want more. Garrison Sandler wants to control the universe. He wants to make himself a universal dictator. Mars Station is a stepping stone for him.”
Cash nodded, fast. “We got that impression earlier. You’re faking fleeing.”
“Correct. Since I was young, I’ve had a best friend name Paloma Delacroix. For a variety of reasons, she got sent away to live on the other side of the universe as a kind of a punishment. There, she met and fell in love with four men. They turned out to be Sandler’s missing sons. One of them, Quinn, was the original orchestrator of the plan Sandler uses, more or less, to fight us. With Quinn’s help, and a considerable amount of risk on their part, we have created counter plans which should win us the way, eventually.”
Sterling cocked his head to the side. “I’d love to see those plans.”
“I’ll get them for you. The thing is, one of the ways Sandler planned to beat my mother was to take me. Specifically me. He planned to kidnap me and sell me into bride slavery somewhere in the dark planets. It would have been a nightmare. He thought he could break her that way. He was probably right. She wouldn’t be able survive any of her children being taken. That’s what was happening when I got thrown through the black hole to you guys. That’s what they were trying to do.”
Judge walked over and held me against him. “He didn’t get you. We did.”
“I’m so lucky I can’t even believe it.” My tongue thickened in the way it did—or at least felt like it did—right before I temporarily lost the ability to speak for a while. I pushed away the sensation. Too much emotion always threatened my voice. “They don’t know we know. They don’t know Quinn and the others are working against them. They don’t know that by the time we’re done, Sandler won’t even have the planets he used to control. The Sandler boys plan to go home.”
Damian cut to the chase, as usual. “So you’re at risk. And we’re at war.”
“I am at risk. I always was. At least I know it now. If you don’t want to be at war …”
Sterling cut me off. “Don’t say it. We talked about this. We’re with you. We love you. We’re not going into that hole again, although I’d love to whisk you away because I think going back to Evander-controlled space would be trading one fire for another. If this plan is solid, we’ll get on board.”
Cash pointed at my arm. “And I have some ideas about some things we can do so you don’t need needles constantly.”
I loved my guys so damned much.