In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) by Nathan Lowell Page A

You’ve told this story before.”
    “Just the other day, actually.”
    He nodded. “It must have been horrific.”
    “We found the crew where they’d dropped. Most of them in their bunks. Some at duty stations.”
    “How could such a thing happen?”
    I felt my jaw clench. “They removed the alarm-system board from their engineering section. Environmental instruments picked up the rise in carbon monoxide, but the alarm couldn’t sound because the board wasn’t there.”
    “That makes you angry,” he said.
    “No, it frustrates me.”
    His grin came back full force, and he just raised his eyebrows.
    “Yes. It makes me angry.”
    “Why?”
    “It was so senseless. They were operating on a shoestring, sure, but to take out the alarm? Gods, how much could it have cost to replace it?”
    “Senseless. Another senseless loss,” he said.
    I took a deep breath and the image of Greta’s body lying on the decking, her blood staining the back of her shipsuit, filled my mind. “Lots of senseless death.”
    He settled in again, putting his feet flat on the floor and folding his hands in his lap. “And now we come to the real problem. Who was she?”
    His comment caught me sideways. “My engineer. My lover.” My eyes stung and I had to swallow a couple of times. “My friend.”
    “Senseless death.”
    “She got between an assassin and his target. It was an accident.”
    He did that slow blink thing again. “That hardly seems like an accident.”
    “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She took a knife that was meant for somebody else.”
    “And you think it was an accident?”
    “I think I caused it.” I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “If she hadn’t been with us, she’d still be alive.”
    “Well, if she’d never been born, she’d never have died, either.” He gave a little chuckle. “The loss part. Sure. This was a woman you loved.”
    I nodded but couldn’t find breath to speak. “She pushed me away at first. I was being an ass.”
    “How so?”
    “I had this really rigid stance about relationships among the crew.”
    He nodded. “That’s not unusual in commercial environments. The power differential can feel insurmountable.”
    “She was amazing. She had the sharpest sapphire blue eyes. Brilliant engineer. Learned at her father’s knee.” I looked up at him. “She was my conscience. Once I nearly made a fatal decision. If it had gone well, we’d have made a few credits. If it had gone wrong, we’d have all been smeared across the surface of an airless planet.”
    He nodded. “Then what?”
    “The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to see her there, just out of reach. She was everything I ever imagined. Brilliant, clever, gorgeous. A truly gifted engineer and a great shipmate.”
    “Sounds like she’d have made a good mate-mate.”
    “Except she was crew.”
    “So you let this idea that because she was crew she was untouchable get between your head and heart.”
    I looked down at my hands. The white knuckles surprised me; I unclenched the fists. “Yeah. When I became too much of an ass about it, she took me to the cabin and told me that it was impossible, that we’d never have a relationship. That I wasn’t going to be anything more to her than a captain.”
    “Ouch.”
    “Yeah. It made it better. A little.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, it wasn’t just my ethical considerations that stopped things from progressing. She didn’t care for me that way.”
    “Unrequited love was easier to deal with than holding the key to happiness and not being able to use it?”
    I looked at him, but his grin stayed in place. “Something like that.”
    “That changed. What happened?”
    “I started my own company and left the ship. She followed me a few months later. We hashed it out when we didn’t have the captain-crew barrier between us.”
    “And then you hired her anyway?”
    “Well, more like we formed a partnership. I couldn’t fly without an engineer,