Breakwater: Rick (BBW Bad Boy Space Bear Shifter Romance) (Star Bears Book 2) by Becca Fanning Read Free Book Online Page B

I can think of is to leave Lytos for good, but where would I go?”

    Even on the run, she’d always imagined that one day, the dust would settle and she would be able to return to her asteroid. She hated living there, with the stink and the violence and the feeling that she’d never be anything more than she was, but the thought of never getting to live there again was surprisingly painful.

    “You’d go anywhere you wanted,” Rick answered. “I mean, you lived your whole life on that hellhole. If you can survive Lytos, you can survive anywhere.”

    This was a lie; being able to survive on Lytos meant that Zosha could survive on Lytos, or places like it. It meant she could sleep with one eye open, always on guard. It meant her fight-or-flight response, firmly weighted on the side of flight, had a hair trigger that had saved her life more than once but would never let her feel at home anywhere properly civilized. Rick knew it as well as Zosha did, but it was better than no reassurance at all and she allowed him to lead her back to the kitchen.

    Hyde and Dominic looked unimpressed by her reentrance, but she ignored both them and Custer’s smirk in favor of addressing the captain and Annie.  

    “I’m in,” she told them. “I think you’re crazy for wanting to do this, but I’m in.”

    Annie smiled. “Glad to have you on board.”

    The next hour passed in a frenzy of planning that consisted mostly of Annie convincing the others they could just shift from the get-go and kill anyone who tried to get in their way and picking Zosha’s brain for information. Once she had drilled everyone’s script into their minds to her satisfaction, she declared the meeting disbanded and told the crew members to return to their duties and Zosha to rest up.

    Zosha had the alarming thought that if Annie and Spinner ever met each other, they would either kill each other or take over the galaxy.

    The captain and Rick shared a long look that ended in the captain walking to the cockpit and Rick walking Zosha back to his room.

    “He’ll fly us in. At warp 8, it should take twelve hours,” Rick told her as he keyed in the passcode to his room.

    “Three and a half weeks of switching ships and hopping city to city and asteroid to dwarf planet to space station to get away from Lytos,” she told him, “and twelve hours to get back. It doesn’t seem right.”

    “That shouldn’t be new,” he responded. “Annie was right, though. You only got about an hour and a half of sleep in the cockpit, you really should lay back down.”

    Zosha couldn’t think of anything else to do, so she fell back on the mattress.  

    “How are you feeling?” Rick asked her, shoving the papers on his desk into stacks.

    “I think I’m actually so terrified I can’t even feel it anymore,” she answered. “You?”

    “Eh. A little itchy from anticipation. Concerned about little Rahm’s defenses. Happy that your shit is getting figured out.”

    “So is yours,” Zosha pointed out. Rick walked over and sat beside her, leaning back on the headrest.

    “Happy about that too,” he said and put one hand gently on the crown of her head. She relaxed as he began running his fingers through her hair again. “Now, get some sleep.”

    She closed her eyes, certain she wouldn’t be able to get a wink of sleep, and woke up eleven and a half hours later to Custer yelling over the intercom for Rick to get his ass in gear.

    Rick moaned from where he’d passed out beside her and propped himself up on his elbows. They locked eyes and he gave her a crooked grin.

    “Let’s go finish a war, shall we?” he said, and for the first time Zosha really, truly felt like this might just work out.

    They gathered in the cargo bay. Dominic and Annie were staying behind. Rick and Zosha were splitting away from Captain Ingram, Hyde, and Custer to avoid drawing too much attention and then meeting back up at a rendezvous point after forty minutes. From there on, it