Dealers' Choice - Susan Hayes Page 0,27
reassurances, they kept Xori between them, some instinct making them both aware of the need to keep her safe, even here. He didn’t question it. He’d made that mistake once, and the cost had been steep.
Tink led them to an open door. “This is your suite. All the housekeeping bots have been programmed to respond to your requests, and I can be summoned simply by calling my name.”
“Do you have a privacy mode?” Vic asked.
“Of course. It’s already been enabled. I have a subroutine that monitors for mentions of my name, but nothing else. Will this suffice?”
“It will. Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Victor. I shall leave you to enjoy your evening.” Tink didn’t simply blink out of existence, she flew into the nearest wall and vanished into a cloud of sparkles that lingered for a few minutes before fading away.
Xori giggled. “Interesting exit.”
“What I want to know is how it could tell us apart. Not many can,” Ward wandered further into the room as he talked, looking around in wide-eyed amazement.
Xori laughed harder. “It isn’t difficult.”
They spun to stare at her. “Care to share the secret?”
She waved a hand. “Nope. You still owe me an explanation for what happened outside.”
“Right.” He really didn’t want to talk about it. It was one of the few things they hadn’t mentioned to her in their sessions.
“Wine?” Ward cut in. He’d pulled a bottle – an actual, old-world style glass bottle – out of an ice bucket and held it up.
“Good thinking.” Vic pulled out a chair for Xori and the three of them took their places. Like everything else, the chairs were lush, comfortable, and decorated in shades of red and gold. There were menus on the table, and a tablet that would send their orders to the galley to be prepared and delivered by the household bots. It was the perfect setting for their first official date. Now all they had to do was convince Xori they were a risk worth taking.
Ward poured the wine without reading the label. He knew more about astrophysics than he did about wine making, but he was confident that if it was stocked on this ship, it would be incredible.
“To new beginnings,” Xori raised her glass as he finished pouring.
They answered her toast and drank, then Vic leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what Wolf and I were talking about out in the corridor, but once I do, I’m hoping we can forget about it and just enjoy our evening. This isn’t the time or place to go over it in detail.”
She nodded. “Another time. Maybe in my office? That would make it sort of official, instead of just the three of us being together. Even though we’re not doing sessions anymore, I still want to help you.”
“Setting up a few boundaries?” Vic asked.
She flashed them a little smile. “A few, yes. Probably not enough to keep everyone happy, but well…as you said. Human rules really don’t apply to me.”
“Or us,” Ward agreed.
“Alright then.” Vic said, his voice shifting to a story-telling cadence. “The night we got taken, I had a bad feeling. A gut instinct about Ariel. I dismissed it without saying anything. Ward made a crack about it. Said this time, if I sensed a problem, to say something.”
“I was out of line,” Ward said. They’d both made mistakes, and tonight really wasn’t the moment to discuss it. He didn’t want to talk about this at all, which is why they’d never brought it up in their sessions, but things were different now. She needed to know.
Ward rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension there. “When it was happening, I didn’t see it.” He managed to keep most of the anger and regret out of his voice. “Not at the time. Later it was obvious she was setting us up.”
“If I’d said something, I could have stopped it,” Vic said.
“If I had been thinking with my big brain instead of my little one, I might have seen it.” He wanted to take the words back the second they flew out of his mouth. It’s not that Xori didn’t know they’d been ordered to fuck Ariel once they were under her control. They’d covered that early on, though thankfully not in detail. The thing was, neither of them had ever mentioned that sex was how she’d caught them in the first place.
Sitting here, on their first official date, seemed like a spectacularly bad time to mention it.
Xori blew out a soft breath,