The Red King - Michael A. Martin [124]
But his sour, disappointed expression seemed to leave a peculiar afterimage on the monitor screen. Focused, perhaps, through the lens of her conscience.
U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 57047.7
Vale woke up and immediately experienced a moment of extreme disorientation.
She began to remember where she was just as Jaza rolled toward her on the bed. She sat up, covering herself with a sheet as she rested her elbows on a heap of pillows, crumpled sheets, and bits and pieces of both of their uniforms. He smiled at her, apparently unfazed by their mutual nakedness.
They had ended up in Jaza’s quarters, not hers, she recalled. It was the first place she had gone after reporting back to Captain Riker following her time aboard Vanguard.
“So. Hi there. Oh, boy,” she said, stopping just short of addressing him as “Commander.” She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so awkward. What the hell have I just done?
But she was also still intensely glad to see him, considering how close they both had come these past few days to never being able to see one another ever again.
“Are you all right, Christine?”
She laughed. “I’m good. Really good. Really.”
Very gently, almost prayerfully, he took her hands between his own. Somehow, the sheet she had draped over herself remained in place; she suddenly felt embarrassed by her obvious attack of shyness.
“You seem uncomfortable,” he said.
“Well, this does potentially change things between us, doesn’t it?”
“How?”
“Well, for one thing, you aren’t calling me ‘Commander’ anymore.”
He chuckled. “Would you like me to?”
She answered with a laugh of her own, and the tension began to drain from her body. “Not at the moment. Maybe we can agree to leave Starfleet protocol on the bridge.”
“Agreed. But seriously, do you have any regrets?” Jaza asked. “I don’t. But I can certainly understand if you do. We’re supposed to be officers, after all.”
Vale nodded as she considered his question. Then she decided that her regrets would have been far worse had she not been honest with him about her feelings after her return from Vanguard. Who knew when some future emergency might separate them again, perhaps forever?
“If it’s a problem—”
She placed a finger over his lips, interrupting him. “If it’s not a problem for our captain and our chief diplomatic officer, then I suppose it doesn’t have to be for us.” Then she kissed him.
After they withdrew from the kiss, they remained reclining on his bed, regarding each other in expectant silence.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said finally.
She grinned in response. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Of course.” Another one of his beatific smiles was slowly spreading across his face.
“All right. I was wondering what we’re going to do for the next hour until we’re both due on the bridge.”
“I could make a suggestion or two,” Jaza said. “Anything else?”
She grinned. “Yes. I was also thinking what a wonderful surprise it was to find that Bajoran men have ridges in places other than their noses.”
She rose back onto her elbows and let the sheet drop away from her. Then she put her hands on his shoulders, and pushed him onto his back.
Standing just out of the sight lines of the comm system’s visual pickup, Deanna Troi sensed her husband’s barely contained frustration. It felt like a tightly coiled spring that might let loose at any moment, lashing out at everything in its path.
To his credit—or perhaps to his detriment, Troi thought—not a trace of any such emotion was reaching Will Riker’s face as the dour, gray-haired Klingon dressed him down from the computer screen sitting atop the ready room’s Elaminite wood desk.
“I still don’t think you’ve told me everything you know, Riker.” Khegh, general in the Klingon Defense Force and governor-administrator of both the Romulan continent of Ehrief’vil and the newly brokered Klingon-Reman Protectorate, snarled from the small desktop monitor screen.
Will leaned forward across his desk, placing his elbows on either side of the ancient