She closed her eyes and drew a slow breath. “How may I assist you, Mr. Spaulding?”
“I’ve got insomnia,” he said. “So I might as well make use of it and get some work done for my internship. Come in here and take notes for me.”
Solara didn’t move.
It was one thing to fetch a T-shirt from his closet, but spending time with Doran inside his bedroom—in the middle of the night? Not for all the fuel in all the ore refineries in all four quadrants of the galaxy.
A rustling of blankets sounded from the other room, followed by a heavy sigh. “Stay there,” he grumbled. “I’ll get dressed and come to you. But for future reference, anyone who stinks like a toolshed is safe from my advances.”
Frowning, Solara lifted a lock of hair to her nose. She’d spent an hour touring the auxiliary engine room yesterday, but she didn’t smell like grease. At least, she didn’t think so.
He padded into the living room wearing a dark bathrobe that concealed everything but his bare feet. “Feel safer now?”
She answered, “Yes, Mr. Spaulding,” and meant it for once.
Doran turned an armchair upright and plopped into it, not bothering to create a seat for her. He flicked a wrist toward the opposite wall. “You’ll find a tablet on the desk. I assume you know how to transcribe, considering all the years the headmaster let you spend at my school.”
Jaw clenched, she nodded.
“I’ll dictate from my…” He trailed off as a trio of lines wrinkled his forehead. “Damn it. Where’s my data file?” Without giving her a chance to guess, he made a shooing motion with one hand. “I’ll have to find it. Wait in the hall. I don’t want you to see where I keep my valuables.”
Solara suppressed an eye roll. The only thing she wanted to do with his data file was soak it in hot sauce and shove it up his nose, but she obediently waited outside until he reopened the door. Then she powered on the tablet and opened a new document.
“I’m ready,” she said.
But Doran had fallen silent. She glanced down and caught him staring at the felony tattoos on her knuckles, his face leaking color by the second. The whites of his eyes kept growing until he looked like he’d seen a demon, and Solara half expected him to retreat to his bedroom and pull the covers over his head. She cursed herself for leaving her room with naked hands. She should have remembered to put on her gloves.
“You didn’t have those when you were at my academy,” he said, tugging absently at his earlobe. “I would have noticed.”
“No.” Her first instinct was to look at her knuckles, but she fought it. She didn’t want to see them. “They’re fresh. Only a few months old.”
Doran swallowed hard, his gaze never leaving her hands. She found it odd that he hadn’t laughed at her yet, not that she was complaining. “That’s why you didn’t graduate. You were expelled.”
“I still graduated,” she said. “Just not from the academy.”
“What did you do?”
The question made her shoulders go tense. It always did. She knew she could give him the easy answer—she’d been caught stealing. But that wasn’t the half of it. As the nuns always said, the devil was in the details. It was the details that shamed her beyond any punishment a judge could hand down. The details hurt like a slash to the heart, and she would die a thousand deaths before sharing them with Doran.
“I don’t remember,” she told him.
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes, Mr. Spaulding.”
“You have to tell me,” he insisted. “It’s my right as your employer.”
No, it wasn’t. She knew the law. “I made a mistake and I learned from it. I didn’t hurt anyone. That’s what matters.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asked, and swallowed hard enough to shift his Adam’s apple. He almost seemed afraid of her, which couldn’t be right. Nothing scared the Great Doran Spaulding, except closets and possibly the absence of mirrors. “We’ve already established that you’re a liar.”
Solara didn’t want to play this game anymore. She would clean Doran’s suite and fetch his slippers, but she wouldn’t give him a piece of her soul. “If you trust me enough to let me in here, you must know I’m not a threat to you.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“I don’t like talking about it.”
“Fine, then.” He thrust a finger toward the door and ordered, “Get out.”
She drew her eyebrows together. Was he serious or just jerking her around? Sometimes it was hard to tell. “But what about the—”
“I don’t want your help,” he said. “Be at Miss DePaul’s suite before breakfast to tend to that thing she calls a dog. Aside from that, I don’t care what you do.”
Then he stood from his chair and turned off the light in a clear dismissal.
Solara blinked a few times before setting down the tablet and backing out of the room. She returned to her bunk expecting another summons, but she slept undisturbed until the morning alarm rang.