Chapter 2—Maxx

Nothing, not even a charging, wild-eyed burden from Xenoxx, could make me tear my eyes away from her when she walked out. She was tall and lean, her legs and hips on full display in her tight black pants. Her skin had a silvery sheen to it, which wasn’t strange for human females when they sweated. Still, I was unaccustomed with how it glistened up close, or how her low-cut top barely contained the swell of her chest. Or the way her dark ponytail swayed around her hips.

And her scent… I could still smell her arousal when I’d retrieved the package from inside her pants.

“Hello? Maxx?” Behind me, Axxel effortlessly undid the ropes that bound us together and to our chairs.

Most ships and terraformed planets had built-in translators that automatically changed our words to one of the human tongues called English. My thoughts often strayed to their language anyway since they had such a rich vocabulary for everything. I still usually cursed in Xenoxx though because for me, nothing beat my favorite: fuxx.

Simple. To the point. Two fierce Xs for maximum effect. I would die on this particular fixing hill.

“Xenoxx to Maxx,” Axxel said, raising his voice. “Are you here?”

“Yeah,” I grumbled and stood, letting the rope fall to the floor. “I’m here.”

“So, welcome to our current situation,” Axxel said, gesturing around the tiny room as he came to stand by me. “Can you please pay attention?”

“I said I’m here.” I hardly recognized him without his sword and battle armor.

I hardly recognized myself without them either. Captain Nera had confiscated everything but the clothes on our backs when she and her crew forced us onto her ship.

Captain Nera with her long legs and those pouty lips…

“No, you’re with the captain. You might as well have followed her out the door.” Axxel smiled as he studied me, such a stupid smile because I knew exactly what it meant. “You should just choose her as your wife.”

See? I was right.

“Absolutely not,” I said with a sigh.

“Then why do you keep staring at the door like you’re hoping she’ll come back?” Axxel nodded, his damn smile stretching wider now that he’d caught me doing just that.

Damn him. “I can’t choose her. Not after the things she’s been through.”

“Maybe she’s looking for a little something something to get her mind off said things.”

“I don’t think adding my problems to her problems will help anyone.”

Axxel shrugged as he started to pace the too-small brig. “So what now? Walk out of here, pick up this ‘package,’ as your girl likes to call it, and be on our merry way?”

“No, we stay here. And she’s not my girl.”

He rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. What about us, then? You’re the king of Xenoxx. You can’t stay here forever.”

“We wait for her to give up making the delivery, fly someplace else, then we’ll make our escape.”

“You actually think that woman will ever give up?” he asked, gesturing toward the door. “Have you met her? She took the package right out of your hands.”

“No, she did not. That’s not what happened. I let her have it after she kneed me in the balls.”

He could be so thick-headed sometimes, especially when he was trying to rile me up.

“Oh, did you?” He chuckled. “Was that before or after you fell in love with her?”

I groaned as I dropped back into the chair. “Can you stop?”

“For right now…maybe.” He circled around so he could aim his stupid smile at my face. “But when we get off this ship and get back to Xenoxx, you’re going to need to come up with a great excuse why you didn’t bring a wife home with you. She might marry you. You never know. She did let you put your hands down her pants, so it’s like you’re halfway to marriage already.”

“I was trying to get the weapon, not feel her up.” I mean, I’d done both, but my High Sword, otherwise known as my second-in-command and the general pain in my ass called Axxel, didn’t need to know that. From the way he was looking at me, though, he didn’t believe me either. “Pipe down so I can think.”

“Flalora is near here, which is actually kind of perfect. Marry the captain, take her to the honeymoon planet, and then boom.”

“Yeah, no,” I sighed. “And you mean bang, not boom.”

“Do I though?” He laughed.

And he kept laughing, the dolt. Never one to give up or to ever stop teasing me about my lack of a wife, Axxel always saw the good in everything. He always found reasons to laugh, even during the thick of battle. I both loved him and hated him for it.

“Flalora, or maybe Baka, is likely where she’ll put us down if she gives up and decides she can’t land on Klio-3 anyway, which she can’t, so…” He held out his hands as if all our problems were solved.

If only it were that simple.

I shook my head. “Too risky. Besides, we need that weapon before it gets any closer to Klio-3.”

“Then we commandeer the ship more than we already have?”

“That’s considered an act of war when it’s against an Earth Space Fleet ship.” Which meant we were already in deep white because we’d already commandeered it.

But we needed that weapon though. The weapon, also known as the captain’s package, which she didn’t seem to know anything about. Thank the goddess for small miracles.

“Only if Earth Space Fleet can prove we did it,“ Axxel added while jabbing a finger in the air for effect, “which so far, your lovely captain can’t.”

“Also too risky.”

“Just whisk her away, then.” He sagged against the metal wall and crossed both his arms and ankles, the pose he reserved for judging me, something he did often. “You know you want to.”

“Even if I did want to, which I don’t, how would I go about that? You think her crew will just let me ‘whisk her away,’ as you so bluntly put it?”

“We’ve got enough rope here.” He lifted the rope that had bound us for all of two seconds. This wasn’t our first bout with a little freedom on this ship. If there was one thing I’d learned lately, it was that humans were terrible at tying proper knots.

“You’re suggesting a robbery of a military ship and kidnapping a captain so she’ll marry the King of Xenoxx against her will. Don’t you think that will raise a few eyebrows?”

“I didn’t say it was a good idea, but it lets us avoid Klio-3 and gets you a wife.“ He tilted his head, seeming to think on that a little more. “Actually, yeah, that’s a really good idea.”

“She won’t marry me. Even without the kidnapping, she wouldn’t. Not me, Axxel.“ I gave him a pointed stare with the hope he’d get the exact message I was trying to send him without using the actual words. “You know that.”

He nodded, likely because that particular message I was trying to send couldn’t be ignored. “She doesn’t have to know what you are, just who you are. You want her, Maxx. Out of the thousands of human females who have been paraded in front of you, she’s the only woman who’s gotten your attention. You’re a king. She’ll come around to royal life pretty quickly if you ask me.”

“Nobody did. Absolutely no one.”

Sighing, he ran a hand through his spiky hair to spike it up even more. “Is it because of her past? Is she too famous for you?”

For years, the video feeds of her shining, happy face, and then her shattered, irreparable soul, had ricocheted across all galaxies. Everyone knew who Captain Nera Cotrobin was. Everyone.

But when I’d looked into her eyes while retrieving the package, I found something far deeper there than desire, though there was plenty of that too. There was a well of impenetrable strength within her. Where all that strength had come from, after all she’d been through… That was a secret she would probably never tell.

“Maybe someday you’ll be as famous as she is,” Axxel told me. “Until then, I’m afraid you’ll just be the King of Xenoxx.”

He’s not one to easily give up, is he? Such a pain in my ass.

I rubbed my temples and ground my teeth together. “Axxel, I will shut you down if you don’t stop talking. We need off this ship safely, with the weapon, and away from Klio-3 more than I need a wife.”

“Mm, debatable.”

I shot him a warning look.

He threw up his hands and started pacing again through the room. “If your lady captain friend finds a way around our sabotage on her landing gear and delivers the weapon to Klio-3, we’re screwed. Even as the Xenoxx king, I doubt you can change that.”

He was right. We weren’t in a position to make a deal with Captain Nera to put us down someplace else either. If she even suspected Klio-3 was where we didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t put it past her to find a way to drop us there even faster. We deserved it after all the trouble we’d put her and her crew through, but the weapon in the wrong hands spelled disaster.

Down on Klio-3, the weapon spelled cataclysm.

“If she finds a way to put us on Klio-3,” I began in a low voice, “we escape and then call the rest of the Royal Swords for help. That’s what we’re doing.”

Axxel paced in front of me and then stopped to look me in the eyes. “And if they don’t get there in time?”

I was afraid he’d ask that.

I shook my head of any possibility of that happening. “That’s what we’re doing. End of discussion.”

“Fine.” Axxel shrugged, his face twisted into an expression of doubt. “End of discussion for now, but if we get jail time for fixing with the Earth Space Fleet, you can pretty much count on me saying I told you so.”