Sons of Lyra: Stranded Read Free Page A

trunks.

    All too quickly, he came
to a halt in front of the cryo-sleep chamber. The door swished open
and she followed him in. It was as hot and stuffy in the room as it
had been in the rest of the ship.

    She stood in the middle of
the room and looked around her. He went to one of the glass and
white metal pods and opened it. A cool breeze touched her skin,
pleasant and refreshing. She went to the pod on the opposite side
of the room to the one he’d opened and pressed the button. It
whooshed open. Chill air washed over her skin. It was
wonderful.

    She remained there,
enjoying the cool air and how refreshing it was. She didn’t even
move when it turned colder, freezing her skin. His hand came to
rest on her shoulder. She moved now, turning to look at him. There
was fire in his eyes and they burned her as he looked her over. Her
nipples hardened into peaks that pushed against the tight material
of her white vest. She blamed the cold.

    Looking into his eyes,
with his hand resting on her shoulder, she felt connected to him.
Her body was aflame where he was touching her, his fingers lightly
grazing her skin. She couldn’t believe she was standing alone with
him in only her underwear. Something surfaced in his eyes that she
couldn’t read and his expression altered for a brief moment before
returning to normal. What had he been thinking in there? Was it
about her? Was it about them? She laughed internally at herself for
being so ridiculous. He was miles out of her league. Her
imagination was playing tricks.

    His hand trailed off her,
leaving her feeling bereft. Her gaze followed him as he crossed the
room. It slid over his back muscles again, slowly falling to his
shorts. The tight white material really left even less to the
imagination than his flight suit did, if that was
possible.

    He turned to face her when
he reached the benches near the shuttered window. His physique was
stunning, better than any she’d seen in the brochures of Lyra Six
or imagined in her fantasies. Her eyes delighted in following the
lines of his muscles, over his smooth defined chest to his taut
abdominal muscles, and then onwards to the point where they ended
and the shaping around his hips led her eyes down to his
shorts.

    She swallowed, burning
up.

    “ Take a seat,”
he said in a voice so husky it startled her out of her
reverie.

    She sat down on the bench
opposite the one he was near. He opened the screen across the
window to reveal the never-ending darkness of deep space. In the
distance she could see the spiralling arms of the closest
galaxy.

    “ It’s
beautiful,” she said.

    He sat on the bench and
she knew his eyes were on her again.

    “ I never get to
see it where I work,” she said, feeling the need to
explain.

    He was looking out of the
window at the galaxy when her gaze slid across to him.

    He was beautiful. He was
more breathtaking than that galaxy or anything she’d ever seen in
her life. He made her glad she’d been drafted. The idea that she
might have spent her whole life never seeing such a man, only
seeing the grimy dark engine rooms of half-dead freighters and the
dusty space ports of the outer colonies, made her ache and made her
happy to serve her galaxy’s leaders.

    “ It’s the
reason I wanted to be a captain,” he said in a voice tinged with
sadness.

    “ Your brother
is a captain also,” she said, wondering if he was so very different
to his brothers.

    He smiled.

    “ He is,” he
said and then whispered so quiet that she barely heard him, “he
sent me you, a real star, more beau—”

    She frowned, her heart in
her mouth and her mind screaming out for him to finish his
sentence. Had she imagined it? Had he been on the brink of saying
that she was beautiful?

    In the distance, the
gravity drive whined.

    She grabbed her bench at
the same time as he grabbed his. There was a clunk, a shudder that
rocked the ship, and then she was drifting off the seat, only her
hands anchoring her.

    She