A Menage Made On Madison [The Federation 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  Knox sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I’m just tired.”

  “No excuse, buddy. I’m tired, too. You might be handling the admin, but I’m dealing with front of house. And that isn’t exactly a picnic. I have people asking for compensation on items that were in their hotel rooms on the other side of the complex. I have people complaining about their own particle units. I have people complaining left, right, and center. So don’t make out like you’re the only one with the workload.”

  He peered at her through lashes so thick no man should have them—hell, she should be so lucky–but she didn’t fall for that sexy glance. Instead, she just cocked a brow, folded her arms against her chest, and said, “Talk to me. Don’t keep me out of the loop. If this is how our relationship is going to be now, then it sucks. You never used to hide anything from me. Or if you did, you were a lot better at covering it up.”

  That made his lips twitch. “We’re not ganging up on you, Parker.”

  “Yeah, well, it sure feels like it. Why do I think, if I happened to talk to Rafer about this, he’d be on the exact same page?”

  Knox shook his head. “You’re wrong about that, actually. This is my idea. I haven’t even spoken to him about it.”

  “That shouldn’t make me feel better, but it does.”

  “Honest to the last, that’s my Parker,” he murmured with a faint sigh.

  “You should go to bed. You’re no use to anyone if you’re overtired.”

  “I have too much to do. I had a nap about an heura ago.”

  “Yeah, well, have another one after you’ve explained what the hell is going on.”

  His lips tightened. “It’s Rafer’s coup, he should be the one to share it with you.”

  She scowled at him. “There is no coup. We’re all equals here.”

  He glared down at his desk. “His team have managed to discover who purchased the necessary kit to build the bomb that went off.”

  “Oh? Who was it?”

  “A group of left-wing Madisons.”

  Now that shocked the hell out of her. She jumped to her feet, then sat back down again. She thought back to the notte of the bomb when Rafer had mentioned Madison DNA. She guessed that made sense now.

  “Madisons? You can’t be serious. We’ve always had the backing from the people here. We’re the main provider of jobs, for Christ’s sake.”

  He shook his head. “It’s to do with the dome.”

  She stilled. “The reconstruction? They’re pissed about that?”

  Knox sank back into his chair and rocked. He looked straight ahead, didn’t spare her a glance as he murmured, “Apparently, the new dome’s position will cut through a piece of land that is holy to the Madisons.”

  “But we had the plot surveyed.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Why would the surveyor hide that from us? That’s what we paid him for.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Parker. I know all this. I’m as out of the loop as you are. I have no idea why the surveyor would hide a tiny piece of information like this. We can change the angle of the dome. That isn’t a problem. We could move it so it doesn’t dissect this piece of holy land.

  “I just don’t understand why this has all been brushed under the carpet. It would have been so easy to solve. I would never construct anything on a plot of sacred earth. It goes against everything I believe in.”

  Parker frowned. “Unless the Madisons didn’t believe that you’d listen to them. They might have thought they had to show a united front? Or a militant front. Whichever. Just to make you listen to them.”

  He shook his head again. “I can’t believe that. The surveyor could have stopped all this in its infancy by telling me about the plot, and we would have had no problem in asking the architects to alter the tracks. The only way we know now is because Rafer’s team has been looking into potential threats against us.”

  “Do we know who the groups of left-wingers are?”

  His lips tightened. “We know who three of them are.”

  “We do?”

  “They’re on our payroll.”

  Parker gasped. “Do you mean to tell me that someone on our staff set that bomb?”

  “It’s looking that way. We don’t know who yet. Just that they work for us.”

  She covered her mouth with a hand. “Oh my God, this can’t be happening.”

  “It is,” he retorted grimly. “And this is very real. Apparently, Rafer’s technicians traced the purchase of the explosive. They found a trail that led them back to the hotel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The people who were messing around with the front desk ledgers…they’re behind the bomb.”

  She blinked, then sighed. “His team traced the money floating around our hotel, discovered the holders, then saw they weren’t registered to the hotel, and Rafer told them about the guys fiddling with the books…. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “Yeah. Now you know why I feel like crap. But something bigger is going on, Parker. And I have no idea what it is, but somehow, we’re in the middle of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It all falls back to the surveyor. Rafer has put his team onto investigating the guy. He obviously had some kind of agenda to withhold this information from me.”

  She pressed a hand to his shoulder. “Thanks for telling me this, Knox.”

  He shrugged. “You were right. You needed to know. Let me guess, you’re still not going to visit my family.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “At least, can you understand why I wanted you to go there?”

  She nodded. Once. “I can. But my place is here with you. Nowhere else.”

  He grimaced. “And what if I said I won’t be able to keep my act together if I have to worry about you?”

  “Oh, baby, that’s real sweet, but it’s not going to work. Nothing’s going to happen to me. And if you think this doesn’t work both ways, then you’re crazy, Knox. What if something happens to you? Huh?” She eyed him, and with a pleased smile, continued, “I tell you what. If you come with me, I’ll go to your parents’ home.” Knox froze, then studied her. Before he could say anything, she quickly inserted, “And Rafer, too. You can’t get out of this by pulling some kind of twin switch.”

  He frowned. “What the hell’s a twin switch?”

  At his confusion, she blushed. “I take it you’ve never heard of The Parent Trap.”

  “No, should I have?” he asked, still bemused by her flight into twentieth century films.

  “Not particularly. But do you mean to tell me that you and Rafer never switched places? You never became Rafer for the deya, and he you?”

  He shook his head. Slowly. All the while he looked at her like she’d grown another head. Damn, she should be used to that look by now, but it still made her want to flick him on the nose.

  “No, why would I want to swap with him?”

  “I don’t know. When you were kids, maybe so he could sit in on a test in a subject you were crap at in school? Or vice versa?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You humans had a funny sense of humor.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I get that a lot. Anyway, do we have a deal?”

  Considering she completely expected him to say no, she dealt with his reply with surprising aplomb. “Yeah, we have a deal. I’ll get my Andris to sort out the details.”

  She blinked at him, once more, then cleared her throat. Twice. He looked at her, a gleam in his eyes and retorted, “Didn’t expect that, did you?”

  After sticking out her tongue at him, she got to her feet. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Do you mean to tell me you’d prefer to face terrorists as well as Griljerrd knows what kind of threats than face my mothers?”

  “Don’t think badly of me, love, but yeah. Any fucking deya of the semanal.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was hard not to be bitchy when people stared at you. When they gawked and drooled, and downright wat
ched every single move you made. And considering Parker was used to being looked at like she was dog dirt on people’s feet, this weird adoration was unnerving. Hell, it was more than unnerving. It freaked her out. Big time.

  It had been this way ever since they’d all disembarked the ship and made it onto Shuzon territory. The instant they made it into the spaceport, folk started pointing. When they made it down to the landing port on the planet itself, the pointing had only gotten worse.

  “I think they’ve seen the headlines about us,” Parker commented when one gaggle of girls actually stopped in the landing port to stare.

  She hated Shuzon. Not that she’d ever tell her men that. Shuzons loved their planet. She knew Knox missed being here, but he resigned himself to being on Madison because that was where his business was based. She knew, as they got older, they’d be coming here more and more often. Especially if they had kids who could take over the business for them.

  The deya they had to live here, maybe retire here, was a deya she dreaded.

  Hell, it was two hundred annals in the future and she still dreaded the notion of it.

  Of actually being close to her mothers-in-law. Of living on the same planet.

  The idea was horrendous.

  Shuzon itself was pretty beautiful. Like Earth pre-Industrial Revolution, but it had all the advantages of an advanced society. The Shuzon people and its government had always cared deeply about the planet, unlike Earthlings. So while Shuzon was light-annals ahead of Earth’s advancements, it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. Nature was embraced at all times. It was like living with hippies who were hooked onto the net. A head-scratching juxtaposition.

  The landing port was a perfect example of Shuzon’s merger of nature and technology.

  The runways were there, but they were of grass, and they were lined with trees. Huge hybrid trees that consumed each and every single toxic gas a ship bled into the air upon takeoff and landing.

  Once they made it into the terminal, there were no harsh lights and smells of industrial cleaning fluid to overcome the stench of lots of bodies confined in one small area. Nor were there the mini-malls, as had been the case back on Earth. The floor was a natural sandstone, the chairs were of Luisianan hemp that molded to each body for maximum comfort.

  There were no shops, only food halls, and they didn’t sell fast food. They created one-of-a-kind meals using fresh produce. The air was scented with flowers that lined the halls in huge indoor gardens. Plants were dotted here and there, trees, too. Nature and humanity came together, as was the Shuzon way.

  It was probably that that made her dislike this place. As wrong as the Earthling way had been, even to this deya, she wasn’t accustomed to it—living like a hippy, eating only organic produce, sitting on natural fibers and being inside where the walls weren’t lined with tiles but with organic matter that refreshed the air.

  They’d actually imported some of the lyla plant to use in the Shuzon quarters back in the hotel, for God’s sake. This was normal for Rafer and Knox. But not for her. It was too green. On Earth, she’d lived in Little Rock. Not the greenest place in the world.

  She sighed and steered around the gawking gaggle of girls and thanked fuck when she saw their tuli. It was like an automated rickshaw. There were varying levels of tuli. The richer you were, the more you could afford bigger and better vehicles. Theirs was the size of a limo back on Earth and was already preprogramed with their ultimate destination: Underworld.

  Yeah, okay, so that was the teeniest exaggeration, but she was sure Hades’s dark angels would give her a warmer greeting than she was about to receive from her so-called family.

  The landing port was one story. Most places on Shuzon were. Considering the planet was four times larger than Earth, yet had a quarter of its population, there was plenty of space. No need for high rises, either, as they didn’t actually believe in the concept of cities. Shuzons would have been considered radicals back on Earth. They all had farms and grew sixty percent of their own food. They were usually self-supporting. Dotted around the place were the important locales like the landing port, or shops with specialty items. But they weren’t in towns. Shuzon had actively discouraged such a cultivation of humanity living together in a small space.

  Once Knox and Rafer had placed their gear in the tuli, Parker escaped into the cabin. People were still staring at her, and she hated it. It was a relief to duck into the cool cab and hide her face. Being a hero sucked. She really wished Lizu’s parents hadn’t been famous. It would have made things a lot easier for her. If not for the hotel. She guessed she should stop being a baby about it, but it sucked. She wasn’t used to garnering positive attention, and it just freaked her out.

  When her men joined her, the tuli set off and headed toward Hypa, a loose congregation of homes where the Baxxes lived.

  They drove past poorer areas, into middle-income districts—both of them pretty similar. Even the poor here were self-supporting, the only difference being they had smaller plots of land to till. Hypa was a high-income area. So, naturally, Knox and Rafer’s family lived there. Their house was roughly the size of the landing port. It was enormous. And when they pulled up outside, amid the widespread gardens overflowing with flora, Parker had to admit the stony tension inside the tuli was down to her.

  She needed the meet and greet to be over. Now. Once they’d looked her over, sneered at her, she could usually escape back to Knox’s quarters on the compound. There were several families living within the household, and each went to their own rhythm. She didn’t have to come out of Knox’s place for deyas if she didn’t want to. And, boy, she didn’t want to.

  Parker sighed when Rafer pressed a kiss to the side of her throat. As she stood, staring over the compound, his warmth and support at her back, she tried to feel strong, in a position of power, but she didn’t. She doubted she ever would.

  These guys adored their sons, and they adored their way of life. She’d broken that. She wasn’t good enough for Knox or Rafer. She wasn’t a Shuzon female pair. They didn’t know if she could provide their eldest sons with children, and would those children be twinlings…? She had broken the pattern, and they would never forgive her for that.

  “Felixi,” Knox murmured, coming to stand close to her so he could squeeze her hand. “Please, stop worrying. I’m not a little boy anymore. We’re not little kids. It’s our life and our choice. We made that choice a long time ago.”

  Once the bags were unloaded, she watched as the tuli’s engine started itself and moved over to the Baxx’s garage, a monstrosity filled with more tuli than she could be bothered to count.

  “I wish we weren’t here,” she whispered, hating herself for feeling nervous, but knowing from the past that she had every right to dread what was about to happen.

  “I know, but while we’re away, Rafer’s team can try to discern what the hell’s going on with Madison. And we can take the time to get to know each other as a mated family. This is our time, Parker.”

  “I know it is, but if we were going to have a honeymoon, there are a million other places I’d have picked. Just so you know, the next time we go away, the decision is in my hands. Do you hear me?”

  He grinned, but nodded. “I hear you, maja.”

  “Good.” She sucked in a breath. “Right, let’s get this started.”

  She approached the house via the front path. Pebbles dissected the moss-green lawn and led to the front door, the Shuzon equivalent of glass: hii. Hii was unusual because it trapped light, and the Shuzon used it instead of other sources of illumination. The low house had a roof made from their version of thatched wheat. The walls were clay brick, a dirty brown color that reminded her of mud huts.

  She knocked on the hii door before either man could reach for their key cards, and waited for someone to let them in. It was a petty way to start, but she knew she wasn’t welcome here, that she was a guest, and guests had to be let in. They couldn’t just walk in off the street as though they owned the place. It
was strangely important that she made the distinction.

  Mara, one of the housemaids, appeared. They could see her through the glass, but behind her, Laro, Rafer’s and Knox’s mother, was close.

  “Welcome, Monseigns, Maseign,” Mara said, tone warm and welcoming, if a little confused.

  The door was suddenly pushed open as Laro ran past and straight into Rafer’s arms. She peppered his face with kisses, held his cheeks with her hands, and plonked another kiss right on his lips. Before he could even grumble, she’d disappeared and was treating Knox to the same treatment.

  One thing Parker couldn’t deny—Laro and Hira loved their sons, and weren’t afraid to show it. She’d have thought that would be common ground between them all, but oh, no. Whenever the way they treated her came to a head, it was always Knox who blanked them out of his life. Never the other way around. The last argument had happened at the previous Lubik. Knox hadn’t spoken to either of his mothers in close to three menses as far as she was aware.

  “Griljerrd, it’s good to see you, boys. Where the nya have you been?”

  Rafer grimaced. “You don’t want to know, Mom.”

  “Oh, but I do. So does Hira. You have to tell us everything. We need to know. We saw the news about the hotel. Have you managed to deal with the situation?”

  Parker noticed there was no welcome for her, and, to be honest, she was grateful. Until Rafer had to shove his nose in and ruin it all. “Yes. The press could have hammered us with their take on the explosion, but Parker saved the deya.”

  She appreciated the pep talk, but she didn’t want it. When Laro turned to look at her, a glacial expression in her eyes, she knew that Rafer’s attempt to bull her up had failed. “Yes, we also saw that little report in the news, Parker,” she intoned. “I hope you’re well.”

  The implication being that Laro didn’t give a damn whether she was or not. Parker’s smile was equally cold. “I’m fine, thank you. Where are Marx and Osion? They’re fine, I hope.”