Lana's Comet (Outer Settlement Agency) (10 page)

The shuttle door slammed shut and her heart dropped to sludge at her feet. Cyprus wasn’t coming.

Salt stung the tiny striations where the lenses worked their way into her irises. She’d get through this. She was tough. Blindness. Galaxy saving. The loss of a man wasn’t anything to be worked up about.

And yet when the door reopened and a tall, blond man entered, her heart burned to cinders at the realization that it wasn’t him.

The door closed again and the thrusters sent their shuttle upward to the space station
Comet.
The trip on a vehicle this large took forever, but when the double-barreled metallic behemoth appeared through the porthole, she made up her mind to start over again. Why not? A few thousand people lived here. She could meet someone and begin fresh with a normal romance. The
Comet
would be the place for her new life.

Alone.

Sort of.

The door opened to raucous cheering and instead of rotating scenes from throughout the galaxy, the walls flashed her name along with a picture of the space station itself.

One man stepped forward from the crowd.

One beautiful man with short-cropped blond hair. “Cyprus?”

A grin split his face and he rubbed the place where his hair ended, just above his cheek. “They made me shave it for the new position. You think you can stand it? It shows off my ears.”

“They’re your grandmother’s ears. I...uh...saw her on the datacell you gave me. Lovely.”

“Clone ears.”

“Don’t start.”

He shifted from one foot to the other and his face displayed a very strange emotion that she might almost label as uncertainty. He cleared his throat and looked to the floor. “They wouldn’t let me see you. Then I started training and...well...I couldn’t and...shit.” He looked up, took a deep breath and tried again. “Lana, I want you to know that I—”

“How upset would you be if jumped in your arms right now?”

He chuckled and moved in closer, not stopping until the tips of his boots touched hers. “Very. These sorts of things require order and some modicum of decorum.”

“I see.”

Her heart was in the middle of burning to crispy flakes of heartbreak and humiliation when, to the delight of the crowd, Cyprus grabbed her hand and raised it above their heads. “Ladies and gentlemen! With her arrival, it’s official. We are now standing in the newly renamed
Comet Lana
.”

“What? You can’t be serious!”

But the evidence was all around her – on the walls and faces in every direction she turned. Cyprus leaned down to speak, cupping her ear in a feeble attempt to blot out the cheering hordes. “I went straight from interrogation to training.”

“I know.”

“And straight from training to you. I pulled some strings to make this ceremony happen. My mother’s here too. I figured we could spend some time together. The three of us. And you and me. Mostly you and me. We’ll both be stationed here and... hell...I just came to get you.”

The lips she’d longed for crashed onto hers and the cheers around them morphed to hoots and sighs.

She pulled back and tilted her head to the side. “What about your reputation? This public display can’t be good for that.”

“Don’t you worry about my reputation. Of course, if you doubt it, you can always join the next trainee class.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. You’ll be doing what I say from now on.” Then she kissed him again and winked, “But I’m prepared to keep that just between us.”

Cyprus puckered his lips, made actual smooching noises and shrugged. “Don’t laugh. I’m yours, Lana. I fought to get here, damn near begged to make it happen. You’re mine and I don’t care who knows it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Besides, I still you owe you a date.”

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