Renegade Runner Nicole Conway (christmas read aloud txt) 📖

I took a few more staggering steps before my legs gave out again. I couldn’t breathe. The heat was too much. My body trembled out of control.

Without a word, Phox yanked me off the ground in one fast, fluid motion. He hefted me over his powerful shoulder, running full steam over the barren terrain. He leapt heaps of wreckage and darted around the smoldering remains of ships that still crackled with flames, breathing hard through clenched teeth.

I gripped his shoulder with all my strength, fighting for every breath. Alive—I had to stay alive. We would make it. We had to.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he snarled with every step, muttering like a madman under his breath. “Don’t you dare die on me after all this. Damnit, I mean it. You hear me, human? I’m out here bustin’ my ass trying to keep us alive. Least you can do is keep breathing.”

“S-Screw you.” I groaned. “I-I’m not … d-dying here.”

“That’s better. Almost there.”

Shakily lifting my head, I stared out behind us at the glowing horizon. He hadn’t been joking around about this killer sunrise. One of the rising suns looked a lot like the one we had on Earth, but the other two were far brighter, smaller, and close together. I couldn’t stand to look at them for more than a second.

Phox skidded to a halt so suddenly, I nearly slid right off his shoulder. Something beeped and hissed and then there was a rush of cool wind against my back. He rushed forward a few steps and spun around, basically dropping me onto my rear before he rushed back to a control panel beside what looked like a much more modern hatch door. It zipped closed in the blink of an eye and sealed with another hiss and sequence of beeps.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t see anything. It took a little bit for my eyes to readjust from the blistering sunlight outside to the dim lights of an unfamiliar ship’s interior. Soft bluish light strips ran along the floor, leading from a sleek two-person cockpit into a small cabin with a tall metal-and-glass table mounted on the floor. I didn’t care much about any of that, though.

It was cold inside. The life support and shielding systems were working. Thank god, Phox, or whoever for that.

I flopped back against the cool metal grates that lined the floor, closed my eyes, and focused on taking deep breaths. The sweat on my skin made me shiver, and my drenched hair stuck to my neck and chest from where I’d unzipped the front of my suit. Phox could probably get an eyeful of my bare breasts if he looked my way. Whatever. I didn’t care. I was alive.

We both were.

The floor flinched with a loud THUD, and I cracked an eye open enough to see Phox flop down onto the floor right next to me. He lay with his arms and legs sprawled out unceremoniously, and his face flushed and soaked with sweat. His hair was drenched, too. I supposed of the two of us, he’d had it worse. He’d actually been out running around in that heat.

“T-Thanks.” I gasped as I closed my eyes again.

“For what?” He panted hoarsely.

“Not leaving me there to die.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I said I was coming back, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. But I was beginning to wonder.” Rolling my head over to the side, I gave him a groggy smirk. “Just wanted to make sure I was cooked all the way through, huh?”

He barked a deep laugh that was, unfortunately, sort of pleasant. “I prefer my humans well-cooked.”

Without thinking, I snorted a laugh and gave his arm a teasing swat.

He cracked an eye open, regarding me with a puzzled stare. Uh, right. That kind of thing probably didn’t translate across solar systems and other alien races. Oops. Awkward.

“So, what now?” I quickly changed the subject.

“Now we wait for the sunlight to wane and the temperatures to drop enough that I can step outside without bursting into flame,” he replied as he closed his eyes again. “Then I try to fix this ship so maybe we can limp the rest of the way to finish line.”

“It doesn’t fly?”

“Not after taking a few plasma-rifle shots to the engines. But the damage doesn’t look too bad. We’re not gonna break any land speed records, but I think I can get it running again.”

Okay. It was hard not to be impressed. This guy really was a jack of all trades. Annoying. Rude. But useful. “How do you know all of this?”

Phox just shrugged. “Gotta make a living somehow.”

“So, what, you’re a spaceship mechanic?”

He gave another one of those devastatingly charming laughs. “Sort of, I guess. In a very limited and semi-illicit kinda way.”

Illicit? Wait, did that mean he … ?

“You’re a thief?” I balked.

“I prefer the term salvager,” he corrected. “Some call us ‘jackals,’ though. And I don’t just steal stuff. I freelance my skills some, too.”

“And what does that mean, exactly?”

“Occasionally, I will take jobs from certain individuals who need specific work done, items acquired, or … you know, things punched.”

Great. Out of all the aliens in the galaxy, I had wound up paired with the one who worked as a professional criminal. Fantastic. And so freaking typical. My taste in men had never been stellar—hah. Thinking back on it forced my medium-well cooked brain to rehash all those high school memories. Miserable first dates where I got ditched for someone else. Cheaters. Liars. Guys who dumped me as soon as they figured out I wasn’t going to blow off track practice to spend time with them because, guess what, I had plans for my life beyond just being a baby factory. Whether it really was my poor taste or just that I had the worst kind of luck when it came to the guys who popped up in my life, I’d never even met a guy I considered serious relationship material.

By Brinna standards, Phox was right on par.

“Is that what