Starflight (Starflight, #1)(3)
“Quit standing there,” he said. “You can start by taking Miss DePaul’s bag.”
But the girl—Miss DePaul, presumably—gripped the handle of her pet carrier with ten red-tipped fingers. “I don’t want her touching my things,” she declared, and clicked toward the boarding platform.
Doran shrugged and handed Solara his tuxedo jacket. When they reached the boarding entry, he shouted, “The door, Rattail. Open the door!” She scrambled ahead of him and heaved aside the metal barrier. As Doran preceded her through the gateway, he murmured, “Well, you’re off to a poor start.”
Solara clutched his jacket and resisted the urge to choke him with it. Maybe there was something worse than not being picked.
The beeping awoke her from a dead sleep, but in her foggy state, Solara couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She scanned the darkness for the source of the awful sound until a pillow arched up from the bottom bunk and smacked her in the face.
“Turn off your band!” hissed one of her roommates.
Understanding dawned, and Solara tapped the Accept button on her bracelet. By now, she should be used to Doran’s constant requests. The sadistic jerk hadn’t allowed her a full night’s rest since they’d boarded the Zenith a month ago, so he wasn’t likely to start now.
“He’s ruining my sleep,” another roommate whispered. “Why does he keep torturing you?”
That was a good question.
Solara pulled on a pair of pants and thought about it. The obvious answer was his white-knuckled hold on a grudge from freshman year, the urge to put her back in “her place” after she’d won his father’s award. But aside from that, sometimes she wondered if Doran craved attention. He reminded her of a boy in the group home who used to pull her hair. When she’d complained to the nuns, they had brushed off her concerns, claiming that the boy liked her. But she didn’t enjoy having her hair pulled, so she’d put a stop to it by sinking her fist into the boy’s stomach.
Maybe that was what Doran needed.
After wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she slipped quietly into the hallway and waited for the motion-sensor night-lights to activate. Soon a thin strip glowed in the middle of the floor. She knew from experience it would take 872 steps to reach Doran’s first-class suite from her position in the steerage class level, so she didn’t waste another moment getting there. The last time she’d waited too long to respond, he’d fallen asleep, only to summon her an hour later to pull a clean shirt from his walk-in closet. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he hated small spaces. It made her want to lock him inside a luggage trunk.
She knocked softly on his door. Most valets had key fob access programmed into their indenture bands, but of course Doran didn’t trust her enough for that.
Once the door slid into the wall, she stepped inside his suite and immediately stopped short to survey the damage. He’d hosted another party. The empty bottles littering the carpet made that clear. Someone had overturned the sofa and rearranged the furniture in what appeared to be a tic-tac-toe grid, and naturally she would have to clean it up. But that couldn’t be why he’d called her in the middle of the night.
Or could it?
She slid a glare toward his bedroom but refused to go in there. If the lingering scent of Miss DePaul’s perfume was any indication, he wasn’t alone.
“Did you need something?” Solara shouted.
Doran’s voice was sleep-roughened when he demanded, “Excuse me?”
She closed her eyes and drew a slow breath. “How may I assist you, Mr. Spaulding?”
“I’ve got insomnia,” he said. “So I might as well make use of it and get some work done for my internship. Come in here and take notes for me.”
Solara didn’t move.
It was one thing to fetch a T-shirt from his closet, but spending time with Doran inside his bedroom—in the middle of the night? Not for all the fuel in all the ore refineries in all four quadrants of the galaxy.
A rustling of blankets sounded from the other room, followed by a heavy sigh. “Stay there,” he grumbled. “I’ll get dressed and come to you. But for future reference, anyone who stinks like a toolshed is safe from my advances.”
Frowning, Solara lifted a lock of hair to her nose. She’d spent an hour touring the auxiliary engine room yesterday, but she didn’t smell like grease. At least, she didn’t think so.
He padded into the living room wearing a dark bathrobe that concealed everything but his bare feet. “Feel safer now?”
She answered, “Yes, Mr. Spaulding,” and meant it for once.
Doran turned an armchair upright and plopped into it, not bothering to create a seat for her. He flicked a wrist toward the opposite wall. “You’ll find a tablet on the desk. I assume you know how to transcribe, considering all the years the headmaster let you spend at my school.”
Jaw clenched, she nodded.
“I’ll dictate from my…” He trailed off as a trio of lines wrinkled his forehead. “Damn it. Where’s my data file?” Without giving her a chance to guess, he made a shooing motion with one hand. “I’ll have to find it. Wait in the hall. I don’t want you to see where I keep my valuables.”
Solara suppressed an eye roll. The only thing she wanted to do with his data file was soak it in hot sauce and shove it up his nose, but she obediently waited outside until he reopened the door. Then she powered on the tablet and opened a new document.