King of Cups

Driven by desire, guided by fate, can two lonely souls find love and stop a war before it can start?

Retired soldier and covert operative, Alex Hambly, tends bar on Madhatter Station, out near the galactic rim. He’s fighting an impossible attraction to the sexy card dealer, Della - a mysterious woman who sometimes sees the future. She also kicks ass when the need arises, which makes her even more desirable in his eyes.

When the heir to the alien jit’suku empire is threatened, only Della can identify the would-be assassins. It will take all of Alex and Della’s combined skills to save his life and prevent an all-out galactic war. From the frying pan into the fire, Alex and Della wind up aboard ship, headed for the alien homeworld.

Startling, unforeseen events put their lives and millions of humans and jit’suku in dire jeopardy. Can they find a solution not only for their people, but for themselves and the forbidden love they can no longer deny?

Alexander the Great.

Yeah, right. Alex Hambly was an operative, plain and simple. Not great. And nobody called him Alexander. Well, nobody except Della. She didn’t do it often, but she was the only one with balls enough to even try.
Every once in a while she teased him about her beloved deck of cards and the King of Clubs. It was also called the King of Cups in Della’s ancient tarot deck, and she swore the card represented him. Alex shook his head. He was king of nothing except maybe the rectangular patch of deck behind the bar in The Rabbit Hole. That was the unlikely moniker of the small tavern on Madhatter Station that was his domain. For now.

He’d moved around a lot in his profession, both as a special ops soldier and now as a supposedly retired, very special operative. He’d retired from the service after his time was up but the Enhancement he’d volunteered for and his own particular set of skills made him the perfect choice for spy work.

Alex didn’t have family. None that he was close to, anyway. He liked covert work and he even liked tending bar. It was a natural fit that he’d taken over the little establishment out on the galactic rim. The Rim was where the real action was anyway. It was where he’d spent most of his youth as a grunt, fighting the jit’suku, a humanoid alien race from a neighboring galaxy bent on conquest of the Milky Way. His deeds on the Rim as a young grunt were what brought him to the attention of the special ops community and what earned him the invitation to volunteer for genetic Enhancement.

Enhanced soldiers were top secret but they did exist. Scientists had cooked up a genetic manipulation cocktail that changed them on a molecular level. Alex was so much more now than he had been before. He had sharper senses, stronger muscles and faster reflexes.

He was a so-called super soldier, but he wasn’t, and never would be, king of anything.

That Della though, she would insist on tweaking him every few days with the nickname only she used for him. She’d sidle up behind him while he was working at the bar and utter some request or other in that sexy dark voice of hers, following up by calling him king in some way. Usually by calling him sire, or my liege with that little smile she reserved just for him.

It never failed to get a rise out of him. Just like Della never failed to provoke a rise further down on his anatomy. The woman was hot. Smoking hot, in fact.
She was also clairvoyant. Markedly so. It was a trait shared in her family, or so she had explained when her niece Adele had shown up a few months ago and helped stop a pirate takeover of the station. Della still looked too young to be Adele’s auntie, but apparently she had an older sister who’d married young, so there were only a few years between lovely Della and her niece. After both women had seen visions of the pirate attack Alex had learned to respect their premonitions and warnings.

So when Della nearly fell off her chair one night right before closing time, he sat her down at a quiet booth where he could keep an eye on her and brought over a steaming cup of espresso. He knew from prior experience that the caffeine helped her recover after a strong premonition.

“Thanks.” Della gave him a tired smile as he put the tiny cup and saucer on the table in front of her. He kept this special china especially for her use. Not that he’d admit it aloud. Showing a soft spot for anyone in his line of work was dangerous. He watched as she lifted the delicate cup and took a cautious sip of the hot beverage.

“You okay?”

“I will be in a minute.” She drank, closing her eyes as she breathed. Deep, calming breaths.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly, but we’re going to have to.” She sighed, displacing the fringe of her wispy bangs with the delicate puff of air. He always found the action endearingly feminine.

“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”

“And I don’t know what to make of what I’ve been seeing.” She seemed genuinely frustrated. “It’s disjointed but it pertains to you. I think maybe you can help sort it out. If you’re willing, that is.” She looked up at him from under her lashes and there was no way he could refuse her appeal. The woman held him in the palm of her hand and she likely knew it.

“I’m willing, Del. Let me close up and we can talk here. No place safer on the station.”

She nodded. He knew she was well aware of the special safety precautions built into the fabric of the bar itself. This tavern had been designed as a secure place where information could be passed from operative to handler and vice versa. Alex had stepped in as the proprietor when the last man retired—this time for real—and had inherited a number of operatives that he now ran as their handler.

Alex had retired from the more active parts of the game, going from field agent to field handler. He liked the job. It allowed him to stay in one place for a longer period of time. Put down roots. Make friends.

Della was one of those, yet she was also part of the game. During the last crisis, she’d told him—and him alone—out of the group of spec ops soldiers they’d been stranded with, that she was a secret agent. She’d done it subtly. She’d given him a name and a code. He recognized both and knew that her clearance was above even his. She was probably working for his boss’s boss.

What she was really doing here, dealing cards in his bar, he still didn’t know. He wasn’t authorized that high and he knew better than to ask.

He closed up shop quickly. The bar had been mostly empty anyway. He didn’t bother with the mundane chores. Anything the bots didn’t handle he could do tomorrow before he reopened for first shift lunch break.

Della was his priority now. Della and her mysterious visions of the future.

Alex poured himself a Pearson’s Star Ale and brought a cup of regular coffee over for Della. She still looked a little pale.

“How are you feeling?” he asked as he placed the larger cup and saucer in front of her, pushing the empty espresso service to the edge of the table where the server bot would pick it up on its next round.
“Better.” She pushed her hair back from her face with a pale, trembling hand.

“Drink the coffee. It’ll help.” He took the seat opposite her in the cozy booth. “So what is it? What did you see?”

Alex was one of the few people who knew the very real power of Della’s gift. She played at telling fortunes in the bar every once in a while but most of the patrons figured she was just scheming for entertainment or coin. Then again, her predictions of the future had an uncanny way of coming true.

He’d seen her in action more than a few times and knew her foresight was the real deal. It was him she turned to when the particularly powerful visions took her by storm. She had to sit down for a minute to regroup when that happened, as she’d done just now.
Her color was looking better as she sipped at the coffee. He was pleased to see Della’s pretty face vibrant with life once again, though her brows drew together in an expression of dismay.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.” The deliberately sultry tone of his voice startled her gaze up to his. He sent her a smile and immediately the frown lines eased just a bit.

“All right. Here goes.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “Remember when the pirate jit’suku ship tried to take the station? There were a few jits who stayed on board their ship during the action. A young man, an older fellow and a couple of soldiers. They were released without charges because they hadn’t actually taken part in the siege itself. When the rest of the crew boarded the station and tried to take it by force, that small group stayed on board their ship for whatever reason, and didn’t engage in any combat.”

“I remember.” Between the small group of retirees in the bar with Alex and one of his friends stealing the pirate ship, they’d managed to reverse their fortunes in a hurry. It had been fun to be engaged in field action once more.

“Tomorrow, that young jit man and his…entourage, for lack of a better word, will be back on the station, despite my niece’s admonitions to him to stay out of human space. The fool.” She made a face. “I see him. Sometime after first shift lunch break. On the departure concourse.” Her eyes squinted as if she tried to look at something that wasn’t quite there.

“Is this something you know from your contacts or something you know?” Alex thought he recognized the signs, but wanted to be sure.

“A little of both, actually. You know I can’t talk about certain things, but they do give me a lot of leeway in how I conduct my work, making allowances for my gift. Right now, my gift is telling me that I have to be on that concourse tomorrow.”

“Why?”

She frowned. “I don’t know exactly. All I know is that we have to be there or...”

“Or what?” The expression on her face didn’t bode well. And it didn’t escape him that her plans had gone from I to we in the blink of an eye. It didn’t really matter. Whatever the situation, there was no way he was going to let her face it alone. At least this way, he wouldn’t have to argue with her about it.

“If we aren’t there to stop it…” she paused, her expression grim, “…that young man will die and our war with the jits will escalate beyond anything that’s come before.”