Daring Read Free

taking on the new royal pains of commanding 173 different planets’ military as they somehow merged into a unified command?
    Kris would have to ask Mac . . . but not now. Not while she and her grampa were locked in a battle to see who could avoid blinking the longest.
    Retired General Tordon cleared his throat in his place by the bookcase. The king glanced his way, and so did Kris. Trouble to his enemies. Trouble to his friends. Double trouble to his superiors. Whenever one spoke of the Longknife legend, it was rare that Ray and Trouble were not mentioned in the same breath.
    He was Grampa Trouble to Kris. She’d learned the hard way to expect trouble when she saw him coming.
    â€œYou know,” Trouble began almost diffidently, “it’s an ancient and respected custom that when a superior expresses a preference, it’s treated as an order.”
    Kris greeted that gambit with thoughtfully pursed lips . . . and a glower of her own.
    The retired general soldiered on in the face of Kris’s rejection. “When a king gives an order to a lieutenant commander, the officer’s response normally is ‘Yes, sir, Your Majesty.’ ”
    â€œYes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir,” Kris said under her breath, for the entire room to hear. When it was clear her message was received by all, she added, “Just like you always did, Grampa Trouble?”
    Grampa’s lips showed just the hint of a smile as he turned to his king and shrugged. “She’s our kid, Ray.”
    â€œShe’s an undisciplined brat,” came back in a royal growl that any old lion would be proud of.
    Kris locked eyes with her royal grampa and prepared to renew their unblinking war. To keep from being too bored, she used her peripheral vision to check out how her own team was taking this little family unmeeting of the minds.
    Abby, Kris’s maid and occasional spy, seemed unbothered by it all. She studied the coffee table/comm display between their couches as if she might somehow decant whatever secret it had lately displayed.
    Across from her, Lieutenant Penny Lien Pasley likewise eyed the table. She was Kris’s intelligence analyst, interrogator, and, by right of her upbringing by two cops, usual contact with the police, a frequent and inevitable part of any visit Kris paid to a planet. Right now, her eyes were also fixed on the low table between the couches.
    Beside Penny sat Colonel Cortez. As a result of having led a hostile planetary takedown that Kris had defeated, he was her prisoner. Since she’d put him on her personal payroll, he was her tactical advisor and principal ground logistician. He’d last begged to be returned to prison . . . any prison . . . rather than risk the cross fire at another Longknife family confab. Today, he calmly studied the ceiling.
    Closest to Kris, and in the direct line of fire between her and her royal grampa, sat Jack. As her Secret Service agent, he’d sworn to take a bullet for her. With her spending more and more time away from home, Grampa Trouble’s suggestion that she draft him into a Marine captain’s uniform and head of her security had sounded like a good idea. Only after he was in uniform did Grampa Trouble let drop that, as the security chief for a serving member of the blood, Jack now had authority to countermand any order of Kris’s that he considered a risk to her safety.
    And Jack had a pretty broad definition of what constituted Kris’s safety.
    They were still working out their differences.
    And Kris was now a lot more careful about any suggestion coming from Grampa Trouble.
    Today, even in the holy of holies, Jack’s head swiveled slowly, eyes searching for anything that might physically harm Kris.
    Grampa Trouble cleared his throat again. And again, that got his king’s and Kris’s attention.
    â€œYou know, Commander, when one is given a mission a couple of hundred light-years out in space, normally,