Made for Two Heroes Read online

  According to Jed, however, Danjer had been reluctant to accept the title of Iron Duke, having retired to a villa about two and a half hours south of Judipeao and hoping to resume his career as a musician. Due to the current uncertainties prevailing in the Epsilon quadrant, it appeared he’d been forced to put those plans on hold, at least for the time being.

  Hailing from a democratic, self-governing planet like Earth, it was hard for Gray to imagine a modern society that was content to be ruled by an unelected official, yet the citizens of eYona were apparently devoted to their queen who had only recently replaced her mother on the throne. Gray knew nothing about her other than the fact that she’d acted both swiftly and decisively when she’d offered the Alliance safe harbor for one of their battle cruisers. As a result of that help, they’d run the Grundian High Command to ground.

  And for that, the eYonan queen had earned Gray’s admiration.

  He’d barely settled into his chair in front of his desk when a call came in from his commanding officer back on Earth. Pressing a button on the communication console, he took the call. There were no security markers on the communication so he turned on the speaker so Jed could listen in if he wanted to—if he didn’t fall asleep sometime during the conversation. The Cajun, as he was known among his Spaceforce contemporaries, had assumed his customary pose, stretched out on the wide bed’s snowy comforter with his boots crossed at the ankles and his eyes half-closed.

  After exchanging a few preliminary courtesies, Commander Owens asked for an update on the status of Judipeao’s new lift station. Gray reported that the installation was complete and that it was currently in use flashing individual travelers up to the orbiting spaceport where the big space cruisers were docked. Owens was pleased with the news and even more impressed when Gray mentioned they’d recruited eight hundred eYonans to join the ranks of Spaceforce. With Gray’s report out of the way, the commander turned the discussion to security matters. “Intelligence has warned us to expect a retaliatory attack against the royal family there on eYona.”

  “The royal family? Should we redeploy our forces to Iverannon?” he asked, knowing that the queen held court at the ancient northern fortress.

  “Negative. Our sources suggest the enemy has targeted someone at Judipeao.”

  If there were any members of the royal family at Judipeao, it was news to Gray. He shot a look at Jed who, as a native, might know something. The Cajun’s somnolent eyes revealed nothing, however. Gray slouched back in his chair and addressed the commander. “If there are any royals here at Judipeao, I’m not aware of the fact.”

  “The enemy might have gotten their wires crossed. We’d be more than happy if that were the case. But root around at your end and see what you can learn from your eYonan hosts.”

  At that point, the conversation took a surprising turn. Commander Owens wanted to discuss Lacey! “Listen, Gray,” he pointed out brusquely. “Velvet’s sister might be the best damn secret weapon Spaceforce has ever had. The medical officers here at Earth Base Ten have suggested that her new powers might be…limitless. We’d like to have kept her here and studied her some more. If she were a monkey, we would have! But we couldn’t keep the poor girl cooped up in a lab forever.”

  “I understand, Sir,” he answered, though in truth he couldn’t fathom where the hell Owens was going with all of this.

  “How is the young officer doing?”

  “She…has a lot of emotional issues she’s dealing with, as well as coming to grips with her new capabilities.”

  “I hope you’ll do everything you can to keep her happy and healthy and a member of Spaceforce,” the commander stated in such a way that it sounded like both a heartfelt wish and an order of the highest priority.

  Gray frowned as he exchanged a look with Jed. “I’d have done that anyway, Sir.”

  “I’ll leave it in your hands, then, Lieutenant Commander. Forward all charges to Regional Command at Earth Base Ten.”

  Moments later, after Gray had signed off, he leaned back in his chair and pushed out a sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” Jed asked in a lazy drawl from his horizontal position on the bed.

  Gray gave a wry smile. It had gotten to where the Cajun could read him almost as well as Velvet could. “That,” he grunted, waving a hand at the communication console.

  “It’s like you told the commander,” Jed murmured. “You’d have done it anyway. You’d have done your best to keep Lacey happy.”

  “Yeah,” Gray agreed. “But somehow it feels different now that I have orders to do it—orders to keep her healthy and happy…and a member of Spaceforce. Somehow it feels like some sort of betrayal.”

  “We’ll talk it over with Velvet,” Jed told him with a disinterested yawn.

  Gray snorted softly as he watched Jed close his eyes. The Cajun had that disinterested act down cold but it didn’t fool Gray. Jed was always looking out for others. During their last mission, Jed had intervened to stop Velvet from walking out on Gray. Putting Velvet’s needs before his own, the Cajun had been ready to sacrifice his own desire for her to make sure she was happy.

  They didn’t come any better than Jed Castille and Gray would have done just about anything for his longtime wing companion. Well, anything other than give up Velvet.

  Jed might be a saint.

  Gray wasn’t.

  * * * * *

  Velvet took the news about Lacey surprisingly well. In fact, she seemed almost relieved that her sister’s well-being had become a matter of interplanetary concern. “I’ve been worried about Lacey,” she admitted as she loosened her tie and settled on the edge of the bed. As she crossed her long, slender legs, Gray followed her graceful movements with intent absorption, trailing his gaze down over her formfitting regulation gray knee pants and high leather boots.

  “She hasn’t been sleeping at night,” Velvet continued, her pretty brows creasing into a frown as she spoke. “The way she’s explained it to me, all of her reactions are heightened—her reactions to potential threats as well as her reactions to the opposite sex. Her sex drive is apparently off the scale. She needs somebody. Now!”

  Gray didn’t lose any time getting his opinion out there in the open. His best friend and former roommate had been drawn to Lacey since the moment he’d first laid eyes on Velvet’s pencil sketch of her sister several months ago. “Jason’s the obvious choice,” Gray growled, backing up and hitching his butt on the edge of his desk.

  Velvet shook her head. “No. Not Jason.”

  “Why not?” Gray argued, watching her distractingly soft pink mouth. “Everyone knows he’s in love with Lacey. His eyes follow her everywhere she goes.”

  “Because she’ll know it’s him. She’ll know! And she doesn’t want to fall in love with him. She doesn’t want to fall in love with one man.”

  Throwing a cautious glance at Gray, Jed spoke up quietly from his chair. “I think Junkie was on the right track. Lacey needs two lovers.”

  “I agree,” Velvet followed up before Gray had a chance to oppose the idea. “I think Lacey would accept Jason as a lover as long as there was another man.”

  Gray groaned. “That won’t work for Jason.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t tell you why not,” he answered, his gaze still stuck on her moistly parted lips, “but Jason has his own set of issues.”

  “Well, in the meantime,” Velvet persisted, “Lacey needs a man now. I say we send someone to her tonight. She doesn’t have to know who it is. She doesn’t want to know who it is! Just someone.”

  “Junkie,” Jed said. It wasn’t a suggestion.

  “No way!” Gray exploded, feeling edgy and hot and wanting this conversation to be over so he could make love to his wife. He’d risen early that morning and had missed taking her while she was still warm and soft with sleep. Right now it was feeling like a long time since last night when he’d shared her with Jed and his cock was in full agreement with him.

  “How many men do you trust
?” Jed shouted, his eyes narrowing into vibrant green slits as he rounded on Gray in an uncharacteristic show of emotion.

  “I don’t know,” Gray growled, rolling his shoulders. “You. Jason. Match. A handful!”

  “Same here,” Jed fired back at him. “And Junkie is one of the men in that handful.”

  Gray groaned as he flicked his hungry gaze back to Velvet. “Does it have to be Junkie?”

  “He’s smart, quick, trustworthy and I know for a fact he can keep a secret. What do you have against him?”

  “He’s just such a cocky, arrogant, flippant…”

  Jed started snickering while shooting a look at Velvet.

  “What?” Gray asked, feeling like the two of them were ganging up on him.

  Velvet’s smile crooked up at the edges. “You just described yourself.”

  Gray’s jaw tightened as he crossed his arms over his chest and looked away.

  “Gray,” Velvet said softly, rising from the bed and gliding gracefully toward him. With one hand snaking around his waist, she raised herself on tiptoe and pressed her lips beneath his stubble-roughened jaw. He managed to ignore her for all of three seconds, then he swept an arm behind her and pulled her into a long, rough kiss.

  “Do we have to do this?” he growled when he finally pulled away from her lips, his eyes roving over the delicate features of her lovely face.

  “Yes,” Velvet said. “And you should be the one who escorts Junkie to her room. Lacey knows you two don’t get along so she’ll never suspect it’s him.”

  “How the hell are you going to stop her from finding out that it’s him?” he grumbled, spreading his hand over the curve of her ass and pulling her lower body against his while his cock throbbed to life.

  “She can wear a blindfold.”

  Gray shook his head and rotated his hips to give her a taste of his growing erection. Her sultry smile reeled him in like a siren’s call. “You’re forgetting about her enhanced powers. If she wants to see through the blindfold, she’ll through it!”

  “But she doesn’t want to see through it. Don’t you see? She won’t try to see through the blindfold because she doesn’t want to know who it is.”

  “Yeah?” Gray rumbled on a dry note of skepticism. “Well, won’t she suspect it’s him when she feels that big…thick…fucking…braid of his?”

  Velvet’s hand trailed down toward his groin and he pulled his lower body away from her an inch so she could get there. Turning her hand, she ran the back of her fingers over the thick mass of flesh stiffening behind his presslock. “He can cut it off.”

  The delicious sensation of her fingers teasing his hungry flesh pulled a long shallow gasp from his lungs. “Then she’ll know the next morning when she sees him walking around with short hair!”

  “No, she won’t. His hair is long enough that he can braid the two ends together again.”

  As Gray watched, his clever, scheming little wife slid her finger into the top of his presslock and drew it open in a slow, downward sweep. As though unwrapping a present, she laid his pants open and gazed warmly at his well-filled cock pocket while the pink tip of her tongue made a provocative appearance. He growled as it swiped across her deliciously full upper lip. He loved those lips, that mouth. Loved kissing those sexy lips. Loved fucking that seductive mouth. He growled again as she reached inside his black silk cock pocket and pulled out the heavy weight of his thick shaft. While she wrapped her slender fingers around the base of his erection and stroked the long, veined length of surging flesh, Jed worked her pants down her legs and her boots from her feet. Lifting her and pulling her legs open, Jed settled her over Gray’s cock head while Gray reached behind him on the credenza for a lubestick and handed it to his partner.

  But Jed waved it off. “You guys go ahead.”

  “Go ahead?” Gray sent him a suspicious look while his plum-shaped tip sat nestled at the hot, wet entrance to Velvet’s soft pussy. Any man who could turn down sex made Gray suspicious. Any man who could turn down sex with their wife, Velvet Meadows, had to be out of his mind.

  Jed backed away. “You’ll make it up to me later,” he predicted with a satyr’s smile. “I need to talk to Junkie about his hair. I need to make sure he’s willing to cut it off. He’s a bit proud of the braid.”

  Gray groaned at the prospect of owing Jed in bed while, at the same time, he relished the idea of a little private tryst with Velvet. “If you’re sure,” Gray grunted in a strained voice, his gaze firmly attached to Velvet’s cleft, her mound powdered with sunny curls, the soft, full lips of her sex pouting prettily.

  “You’ve got ten to twenty minutes,” Jed chuckled. “Don’t waste them.”

  As the bedroom door closed, Gray lifted his wife swiftly to the bed. Spreading her out on her back, he settled his weight between her legs and smiled down into her eager amethyst eyes. It wasn’t often he got to experience the pleasure of his lovely wife flat on her back and captured beneath his weight and he was looking forward to some quick and dirty missionary work. His hips punched forward in a savage claiming thrust as he filled her pussy with the burning length of his hungry cock. A deep moan built in his chest as her perfect silken heat wrapped his shaft and her long, slim legs moved up his sides. And that was before she started making those soft kittenish noises that drove him out of his ever-loving mind.

  Chapter Three

  With one hand wrapped around a pint of cold beer and the arousing image of Lacey Meadows embedded firmly in his mind, Junkie stood at the alehouse bar with Olan and Matchstick Maloney. He had just about decided that he liked Earthers, if only for the wonderful alcoholic beverage they’d brought with them and which had usurped the place in his heart that he’d reserved for eYonan lemonale. He didn’t mind Maloney, either. The guy was a genius. You’d only to mention a few provocative ideas and the guy pulled out his workpad and started drawing things up. With his elbows propped on the bar, Junkie chuckled as the Spaceforce lieutenant’s design took shape before his eyes.

  Olan’s elbow jabbing between his ribs warned him that someone had walked though the alehouse door. When he lifted his head and turned, Junkie found Saxon’s cousin sauntering across the old wood-planked floors toward them. “Who was that woman looking for you earlier?” he immediately asked Olan as he sidled up to the counter and motioned the ‘droid barmaid for a drink.

  Olan’s head turned swiftly toward the entrance, unsettling his thick mass of fair curls. “What woman?”

  “Dark hair. Big eyes. Long legs.”

  Olan narrowed his interested gaze on the man they’d grown up calling Slash but who was now known as Lieutenant Jed Castille. “When? Where?”

  Jed jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Three minutes ago. Out in the yard.”

  Amused, Junkie watched as Olan emptied his pint in a quick swallow and strode off across the room, his cleated boots scraping against the planked wooden flooring.

  “You could have just asked him to leave,” Match pointed out in a drawl, arching an eyebrow in Jed’s direction.

  “What would be the fun in that?” Jed asked, an evil grin curling his mouth as he lifted his pint of lemonale to his lips.

  “You want me gone too?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Jed answered.

  Matchstick closed his workpad and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll work up a prototype,” he promised Junkie as he backed across the room.

  “Prototype?” Jed questioned as Junkie gave Maloney a parting salute.

  “We’re working together on a business venture,” Junkie answered, being purposely vague. “So what’s up?”

  “I have a proposal for you.”

  “Yeah?” Junkie grunted, turning back to the high wrought iron counter and lifting his own drink to his lips. “What sort of proposal?”

  “One that involves cutting your hair.”

  “My hair!” Junkie spluttered then wiped his wrist across his mouth. “No thanks.”

  “You might want to reconsider after you’ve he
ard the details.”

  Junkie shook his head. “Whatever it is, no thanks. The ladies like the long braid. It’s better than a feather and a lot more convenient to transport.” As though to demonstrate what he meant, he grabbed the tapered end of his hair and dusted the thick brush across his slightly parted lips.

  “I can just imagine,” Jed quipped dryly. “But I know a lady who needs to get laid like there’s no tomorrow. The problem is, she doesn’t want to know who’s laying her…and she’d recognize that braid of yours.”

  Junkie almost dropped his heavy pint glass. “Lacey?” he whispered.

  Silently, Jed nodded.

  Reaching for his sword, Junkie pulled it swiftly from its sheath. With his hand fisted around the middle of his long braid, he laid the edge of his blade against the gleaming midnight strands.

  Jed stopped him with a hand on his thick wrist. “Not now,” he hissed. “Don’t go hacking the damn thing off here where everyone can see. Besides, you’re going to need it later.”

  Junkie gave him a questioning look.

  Jed glanced at the square timepiece he pulled from his pocket. “Let’s go see Velvet,” he muttered after checking the time.

  Following Jed’s lead, Junkie glanced around the tables as he strode across the alehouse’s age-worn floors. Just the thought of bedding the Adept beauty had a twinge of interest stiffening his cock, his shaft stretching and expanding inside his snug leather pants. And, if he understood Jed right, it was going to happen under the most ideal of circumstances. He got to fuck her without her knowing who he was. Absolutely, positively, no strings attached. There was no doubt about it. It was Junkie’s lucky day.

  * * * * *

  An hour later and a pound lighter without his waist-length braid, Junkie stood in the wide corridor outside the door to Lacey’s bedroom. He’d been provided with one of the copper communicators used by Spaceforce. Hanging on the shell of his ear, it didn’t look a whole lot different than the curled piece of aluminum that Olan wore as jewelry. He’d left his own jewelry—his three flat cockstones—in his locker at the foot of his bunk in the men’s barracks. He was ready. At that point, the only thing that stood between him and utter bliss was the abrasive Spaceforce officer at his side, growling last-minute instructions.