“No. At love.”
At—?
“Love,” she repeated. “The one thing left on your to-do list. The one most important thing. The one thing you couldn’t bring yourself to do, until you were just about out of time.”
He closed his eyes, swallowing the lump in his throat. He knew what he’d done, what he’d said, just as Delta Five turned into intergalactic debris. “I didn’t tell Winnie.” His voice was raspy.
“Tell her what?” The flickering light from the candles in the chandelier overhead danced in Jezebel’s dark-brown eyes.
“The last thing on my list. What I never told her.”
“And what did you never tell her?”
He stared at the bartender. It was clear from her tone she knew what he never told Briony Winn. Why in hell was she being so obtuse?
Frustration tinged his voice, made him narrow his eyes. “You know damn well—”
“Yes, Raphael Macawley, I do. Know damn well. But that’s not at issue here. What’s at issue is, do you know? And can you tell her? Because if you can’t, there’s no sense in our sending you back to her, now is there?”
“You can send me back to my ship?”
Jezebel made a tsk-tsking noise with her tongue. “Not if you can’t tell her, we won’t.”
Tell her. Tell Commander Briony Winn he loved her. Loves her. He nodded his head vigorously. “I can.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
His eyes widened. “Now?”
“No time like the present.”
“But she’s not here.”
“For good reason. You need to practice first. You weren’t born a starship captain, you know. You had to work your way up to that exalted position.”
He picked up his glass, let the last shot of Pagan Gold burn down his throat. Then he drew a deep breath. “I love her.”
Someone in the saloon behind him made a rude noise. Loudly.
Jezebel slapped her hand on the bar. “None of that, now! Man’s a virgin here. You got to cut him some slack.”
Virgin? He’d rarely lacked bed-partners. Mac almost burst out laughing, but sobered quickly as Jezebel’s eyes narrowed.
“Raphael. Now, listen up.”
He flinched. No one ever called him Raphael – and remained standing for very long.
“You go say ‘I love her’ to Briony and she’s going to be looking left and right for whoever this ‘her’ is.
You’ve got to say what you’ve got to say to her. Understand?”
He nodded.
“Well?”
He closed his eyes, saw Briony’s quick smile. The way she wrinkled her nose. The way she fiddled with her hair when she was tired.
The way she chewed on the end of her lightpen when puzzled over incoming data, or some glitch the sensors couldn’t unravel.
The way she shared high fives with the crew when a problem was solved. And that little hip-bumping victory dance he caught her doing once, down in engineering.
And more than once, a compassionate hand on a shoulder, when things were less than victorious. When just being there said more than kindly words.
He opened his eyes but still saw her, and not the rainbow of colors dancing through the rows of etched crystal glasses, or the warm tones of the ornately carved bar.
“I love you, Winnie. I love you, more than you’ll ever know.” His voice became thick with emotion.
“More than I can ever explain. I’ve loved you, and always will.” He looked down at his empty glass, turned it around in his hands.
Jezebel sighed softly. “There’s hope for you yet, Mac.”
“So how do I get back to the Intrepid?”
“You don’t.”
“But you said—”
“I said you get a second chance at love. I didn’t say you can pick up your life right where you left off.”
Jezebel drummed her fingers on the bar. “Listen up, now. You screwed up, you admit that?”
He nodded.
“That has to be undone. Or else all your pretty words are for naught. She’s convinced you’re heartless, you know.”
Because she knew him well. Most of his crew saw only his competence, his unflagging dedication. “A tireless compulsion towards perfection,” one division chief’s review stated early in his career. “A true Macawley.”
But Winnie knew his compulsions were a facade. And she didn’t give a damn that he was a true Macawley.
“How do I undo all that?”
She held up her hand, splayed her fingers in his face. Jeweled rings glistened. “My people have a story.
It says that fate has five fingers. But we always start here, first.”
She touched the center of her palm. “From there, we have choices. We say, five choices. But each choice we make only once.”
She wiggled her index finger. “This was your choice, many years ago. From there, you made your next choice.” She touched her index finger to the center of her other palm. “That gave you five more choices.”
He understood. Each finger, each choice, was a path. A oneway street. Every decision he made – or didn’t make – led to the next one.
“There was a time, a point at which telling Briony Winn how you felt about her would have mattered to her. But you didn’t make that choice at that time. So it doesn’t matter to her now.”
Something hard constricted in his chest at her words. He’d loved Briony for so long, it was almost second nature to him. And he assumed if he ever told her, she’d respond in kind. He loved her so damn much!
But she didn’t love him. Couldn’t love him. He’d been a fool. In his selfishness, in his cowardice, he’d let the moment go by.
“Then why even bother with all this?” he asked harshly.
She waggled a finger in his face. “Temper, temper, Raphael. We’re bothering because what is now isn’t the only reality. You will get a second chance with Briony. But not with Commander Briony Winn of the Alliance ship, Intrepid. With Lieutenant Briony Winn, junior-grade drive tech on the Versatile.”
The Versatile! Hellfire and damnation, he’d just made XO, been transferred to that damn rust bucket, and let everyone on board know he was damned unhappy about it. Including one still-wet-behind-the-
ears-and-straight-out-of-the-academy Briony Winn.
He was a Macawley, after all! Of the Radley’s Station Macawleys. His uncle was a senator. His grandmother, an admiral. His father took the millions his own father had made with Radley Intergalactic and made another billion on top of that.
The Winns were nobody in particular. And nobodies in particular got assigned to derelicts like the Versatile. Not Macawleys.
If Briony Winn hadn’t been so damn good at her job, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed her.
Third-shift drive techs were not his usual fare.
She had been good; brilliant, in fact. And she had had a mischievous smile and a sparkle in her eyes to go with that brilliance.
By the time he’d realized just what a priceless gem she was, she had been lost to him. Or rather, she had been totally unfazed by his pedigree, his money, his rank, and his infamous attitude.
The last of which she’d taken great pains over the years to rattle every chance she got.
Which was why he loved her as much as he did.
Because she didn’t give a damn that he was Raphael Macawley.
“It won’t work, Jezebel. She made it clear a long time ago that our relationship was purely professional.”
“Then you’re going to have to change her mind, aren’t you?”
“You don’t understand. At the point I met her, on board the Versatile, I—” He stopped as if a blinding light were suddenly flashed in his face. “I’ll know it’s possible for her to love me. That’s it, isn’t it? You send me back ten years, and I’ll know—”