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She’d known handsome men in the past. She’d been engaged to one.

Yeah... look how that had worked out. Then her eyes narrowed. How old was this guy?

He had to be at least fifteen years younger than her, which was way too young for a charter pilot. At least, too young for the route they needed him to take. It wasn’t some neat little hop between civilized ports with traffic control holding his hand. They needed someone who could fly through the ass-end of nowhere, keep a temperamental old trader ship running, and not panic when things got ugly. And that was before they went off route...

A pretty face wasn’t a qualification.

“B,” Layla said, dragging her name out in warning.

B ignored her. The pilot’s grin had not slipped even a fraction, which irritated her all the more. Cocky bastard.

He held out a big hand toward her. “Hey, I’m Rann. You are?”

She looked at his hand like it was a coiled snake.

You could tell a lot about a person by their hands. Hers had scarred knuckles, grease beneath the nails no amount of scrubbing ever quite shifted, and tiny old burns scattered over her fingers from decades of fixing shit that wanted to explode.

His were large and strong. Capable-looking. There was a pale scar near the base of his thumb.

She absolutely did not want to know where he’d gotten that.

“Not playing this game, that’s who.”

Layla made a choking sort of sound behind him. He lowered his hand, an amused expression on his face. That was almost worse. As if he had all the patience in the world for difficult little women.

‘Difficult little woman’ was an insult that had been leveled at her all her life, and she absolutely rejected it. It was the kind of label a woman got when she spoke her mind and didn’t put up with anybody’s bullshit. Which meant he could fuck all the way off with that.

She was forty-five years old and had rebuilt drive systems in hard vacuum. She’d once held a coolant line together with one hand while bleeding from the scalp.

She was not a difficult little woman.

She brushed past them both, her shoulder clipping Layla’s as she went. And God, he smelled good. Clean male skin, something darker beneath it, and the faint, sharp bite of station air.

Bloody typical. Why couldn’t he have smelled terrible? It would have made things so much easier.

“Have your fun with him before we leave, Layla, because he’s not coming with.”

Growling under her breath, she stalked down the corridor, past the open quarters lining either side of it.

Every door stood wide because they were still loading. There were half-made bunks, bags shoved under tables, and somebody’s boots left in the middle of the floor. Layla’s room had three different outfits hanging from the locker door. Blythe rolled her eyes. The woman could haul a crate that weighed as much as she did, then turn getting dressed into a damn military operation.

At the end of the corridor, she ducked left before she hit the cockpit.

The communications room was barely big enough for the console, a pair of folding seats, and two people, provided they didn’t breathe too deeply. Stevie was already sitting in one of the chairs, fingers flying over the controls.

Blythe stepped through the doorway, then stopped when Stevie lifted one finger to tap the earpiece tucked under her silvery-blonde hair.

“Yeah, I understand what you’re saying,” Stevie said, patient in the way that meant that the person on the other end of the con was being a spectacular pain in her ass.

“But our departure slot was confirmed three days ago. We have a charter clearance, all relevant cargo declarations logged, and a crew already aboard.”

There was a reply through the earpiece, too faint for Blythe to make out. Stevie’s mouth flattened. Shaking her head, she reached over and hit the loudspeaker, and shot a look at Blythe over her shoulder as if to say, ‘Can you believe this shit?’

“—not disputing your documentation, Expedition Leader Weston.” The Dockmaster. Which was a misnomer because a place this big didn’t have one dockmaster sitting behind a desk ready to ruin any departing ship’s day. No, it had a whole damn department of them, all with seventeen levels of approval and not one person capable of finding their own ass without a procedural manual. “We are experiencing an unexpected traffic-management issue. Several outbound vessels have been selected for revised departure windows.”

“Selected,” Stevie repeated.

“That is correct.”