Starflight (Starflight, #1)(51)
“Where were those pictures taken?” she asked. “They’re beautiful.”
Cassia lost her grasp on the powder puff, and it sailed to the floor. At once, her eyes found Kane’s and softened in sadness. “Just someplace I used to live,” she said. Kane finished a brushstroke and used his thumb to skim the outside of Cassia’s wrist in a touch so brief that Solara would’ve missed it if she’d blinked. But she hadn’t missed it, and in that sliver of a moment, she watched an exchange of pure intimacy pass between them.
Definitely not brother and sister, she thought.
Neither spoke after that, so she kept silent. But Solara couldn’t stop prickles of worry from creeping over her. She and Doran had slipped into an easy trust with the Banshee crew, and yet she knew nothing about what had brought them all together.
Who were these people?
Doran battled a wave of dizziness, squinting hard to bring Solara into focus when she and the crew returned to his room. He had imagined how she might look in her dress, but nothing could’ve prepared him for the complete transformation that made her into a stranger—strikingly beautiful, to be sure, but so unfamiliar that the sight of her caused his brows to pinch together.
It was her eyes he noticed first, peering at him beneath long, iridescent lashes. Two butterfly wings fluttered out from her upper and lower lids, painted in autumn tones and treated with a holographic glaze so they appeared to blink along with her. When combined with the halo of silver ribbons woven through her braids, the effect was mesmerizing. But he couldn’t reconcile those eyes with the pair he’d grown accustomed to watching across the dinner table each night during games of Would You Rather.
He let his gaze wander and took in the ball gown, which twinkled with the brilliance of a starry night sky. The strapless design hugged her curves like a second skin, highlighting her bare shoulders and arms, and through some miracle that defied gravity, her breasts were thrust upward in a display halfway to her chin.
Doran nearly swallowed his tongue, trying very hard not to stare and batting down the selfish urge to wrap her in a blanket so that nobody else could see her like this. He forced his eyes lower, all the way to the tips of her toes, which alternately flashed pink and purple with animated lacquer. Her fingernails were polished as well, and her tattoos concealed. In all her glitz and glamour, he could easily imagine her gracing the cover of a fashion magazine.
He didn’t know how he felt about that.
Warring impulses tugged at him in a jumble of emotions he didn’t understand. He wanted to keep looking at her, to tell her that she took his breath away, but at the same time, he wanted to ask her to wash off the makeup and put on her regular clothes, to remove the flashy polish and let the beauty of her naked toes shine through.
He wanted her to be the Solara he’d come to know—his Solara.
Cassia bumped Kane with her shoulder. “Look. He’s speechless.”
“We do good work,” Kane agreed, admiring their creation.
When Solara glanced up at him again, Doran found his voice. “Wow,” he told her. “I don’t know what to say.” But she deserved more than that, so he added, “Five thousand credits was a small price to pay. You’re stunning.”
Her answering smile warmed his heart.
“And you’re forgiven,” she announced. Before he could ask what he’d done wrong, she turned and padded away. He called after her to be careful, but he wasn’t sure she heard.
Sometime later, as he lay awake in the darkness with nothing but his pain to keep him company, it occurred to Doran that once he reached Obsidian, he and Solara would part ways. She would continue on to her job in the fringe while he finished his father’s errand and returned home to clear his name. Their paths might never cross again.
He didn’t know how he felt about that, either.
Actually, yes, he did.
But before he had a chance to examine the reason for the new tightness in his chest, another dizzy spell came over him, along with a vicious chill that seemed to leach the marrow from his bones. Doran huddled beneath the covers while his insides pulsed like an abscessed tooth. He hoped Solara returned soon with his medicine. Otherwise they might part ways a lot earlier than he’d planned.
With its flashing billboards illuminating the craters of an anchoring moon, the retail satellite was impossible to miss by any pilot taking the direct route from the nearest outpost to Obsidian—the route the Banshee had carefully avoided. This place was a tourist mecca, a respite from the months-long voyage where travelers could cure their cabin fever with honeyed wine, laser quests, and chintzy souvenirs.
But none of that interested Solara.
She leaned forward in her seat and peered out the shuttle window, scanning past multicolored scrolling advertisements for QUICK SHUTTLE REPAIR! and LOOSEST SLOTS IN THE GALAXY! to the single security checkpoint located at the top of the static bubble shielding the complex. That narrow apex was the only way in or out.
Not the ideal blueprint for making a quick getaway.
“Please tell me there’s a secret back door,” she said to Renny, who cut the shuttle thrusters and steered toward the checkpoint, essentially casting them out of the frying pan and into the fire. Their craft drifted near enough for Solara to make out the silhouette of a cloaked laser canon, invisible but for the distorted space around it, which rippled like heat waves rising above asphalt.