I didn’t think I was good enough.
Of course, I had no idea if Zyair was, either. He stood over the pilot’s seat and arched a brow at its placement—he currently wouldn’t be able to fold his long legs to fit into the space. He leaned over to hit a button, and the seat obediently moved backward.
When he lowered himself into place, he winced and growled. Then he peeled off the upper half of the coveralls and fully unzipped them before yanking them lower on his hips.
I ripped my gaze away from the naked skin thus revealed. It was marred with half-healed talon marks, butwowsers! He was one gorgeous hunk of Drake. And it seemed he preferred to be piloting more or less in the nude.
With the essentials now unbound, he sighed in relief as he settled. For the first time, I witnessed how the design of the seatfacilitated Drake wings—each side of it was indented to leave room for them to pass beyond the seat itself. It had always left my shoulders feeling unsupported, but Zyair’s wings spread comfortably a little behind and above him. And the weird notch at the back of the seat was to leave room for their tails.
Zyair’s twitched as he pulled the harness into position across the most splendid pectoral development I’d ever witnessed—well, except for maybe Xandros’s—and strapped in.
When he glanced my way and raised a brow, I took a long breath and plunked my butt into the navigator’s seat, which was seldom occupied. While in realspace, I usually handled both navigator and pilot duties for theStardrifter.There was seldom so much incoming information that a second person was necessary.
It felt weird being there, instead of in the pilot’s seat. The control panel sloped away from me, and I placed the navcube in the hexagon-shaped holder that protruded from it. It currently showed the slipstream dockyard, but it was a static display. Until we left the slipstream itself, it couldn’t pick up on the realtime data.
By the time it did, things were likely to be pretty well in motion.
Zyair occupied himself with adjusting the controls. Piloting theStardrifterinvolved the use of both hand levers and foot pedals. I loved the sensation of becoming part of the ship, and I could tell by the way Zyair fiddled with them that he wanted everything positioned just right.
As I watched him fuss, a small amount of my internal worry abated. He was certainly acting like an experienced pilot.
Another chime sounded—the three-minute warning. Zyair hit the internal comm on the dash. “Check in.,”
“Strapped in and ready,” Xandros rumbled from the starboard gun port.
“Ready,” Rhodes stated from the port side.
“As ready as I’m going to be,” Yani said from the engineering bay. “Sookie’s strapped in too.” She’d have Sookie in her little travel crate, where she wouldn’t get tossed around.
I was hoping there wouldn’t be too much tossing. But I had my doubts.
“Do I get a vote?” Kurt complained.
“No,” I said, and shut down the comm.
“When this is over, you can explain how you ended up flying with that annoying male,” Zyair growled.
I’d rather forget about Kurt than explain him. Zyair started flicking switches, and a deep thrum ran through the floorboards beneath my feet as the realspace engines came online.
We weren’t supposed to do that until the slipstream released us. “The authorities will be pissed,” I murmured.
He grunted. “I’m afraid we are about to do all kinds of things that are discouraged.”
“What’s life without adventure?” I asked.
He shot me a look. “Indeed,” he stated, and then, he smiled.
Fucking hell.It transported him from gorgeous to some other status that I lacked sufficient words for. I sat transfixed, my mind filled with static.
Fortunately, Zyair looked away again, and I was able to recover. My dash screen on the panel was live and ready for data from the navcube once it was clear of the slipstream’s interference. He’d put me in charge of handling the slipstream authorities—it would be best if their equivalent of police stayed out of things. According to Zyair, the Nirzks would have their talons deep into the local establishment—getting stopped by the port authority would only ensure our delivery to their nemesis.
I had no idea just how I was going to keep the authorities at bay. I’d rather be doing the flying. So long as we were just ordinary flying…
I was reasonably certain that we wouldn’t be.
“We will be—good,” Zyair rumbled.
“Are you going to tell me that you do this kind of thing all the time?”
