Best Kept Secrets Read online

  We hoped the plant would have valuable medicinal properties, and Josh had been promised a huge sum by the Pharm-Co Company back on Earth if he brought back samples. The money they were offering was enough to buy us a whole new hopper—which I was beginning to think was a good idea. Not because ours was broken or in need of repair, but because lately it had begun to seem too cramped for the two of us to be in such close proximity. Or at least, Josh seemed to think so.

  I nibbled my bottom lip and stared at the lush green globe swinging beneath us as I contemplated the recent change in my big brother on this latest trip. In the past, Josh had always been very loving and warm. He’d hug me when I felt sad and sometimes even held me on his lap when we cuddled up at night to watch our favorite shows on the com-link. He often kissed my cheek and called me “sweetheart” and other endearments as well as shortening my given name of Cassandra to “Cassie” when he was feeling particularly sweet.

  There was nothing sexual about our interaction—Josh had never, ever done anything inappropriate with me. He was an honorable man, and I had the feeling he would rather cut off his right arm than hurt me like that. Despite the fact that we had no real blood ties between us, he considered himself my big brother, my protector. And besides, he had always seen me as a little girl who needed protection and care—not as a woman with any kind of sexual nature. So he was kind and affectionate to a fault.

  But not on this latest trip. Since we entered the cramped confines of our spacehopper the month before for our mission to Svortza 6, he had become withdrawn…aloof. And he almost always seemed to be ill at ease whenever I was around.

  It’s my fault, I told myself miserably, moving the controls to adjust our orbit somewhat. He’s uncomfortable because of what happened in the shower last month. I know he is.

  In the beginning of what I had come to think of as “the truth-plant mission,” Josh and I had had an…well, an incident for lack of a better word. It was disturbing for both of us, and we had barely left Earth orbit when it happened.

  The incident had happened while we were taking our nightly shower together. I know it sounds strange, but it wasn’t like we showered together for any kind of kinky, weird reasons—it was the simple need to conserve water. Even with the ship’s recycler going at 100 percent, H2O was still a rare and precious commodity in deep space, and we couldn’t afford to waste a drop. The nightly shower was a routine for us—something we had done a thousand times before on our different space missions and nothing ever happened between us. We just kept our backs to each other while we did a quick soap and rinse and then got ready for bed.

  This was the first time we had showered together following the changes to my body, however. During our long layover on Earth, we had each our own room, and there was no need for communal showers. In fact, it was probably the normal gravity on humanity’s home planet that finally jumpstarted my late development. Anyway, by the time we got back on board The She-Creature, our affectionate name for the little spacehopper we traveled in, I was a whole new woman so to speak.

  Of course Josh had noticed my new curves—I knew he had—there was no way he could miss them. But we had been able to keep our distance on Earth, so it wasn’t really shoved in his face. Now there was no way he could avoid looking—not in such tight quarters.

  * * * *

  It was awkward but still, when Josh and I squeezed into the tiny bathroom together, I tried to act like nothing had changed. I adjusted the water temperature and hummed a nervous little tune under my breath as I got it just right.

  But I found I couldn’t meet his eyes when I dropped my towel.

  Though I wasn’t looking at him, I could definitely still feel Josh studying at me. A glance at his face showed that his eyes were wide with shock as he took in my ripe breasts with their puffy pink nipples and the curly blonde thatch between my thighs. Another glance, farther down, showed something even more disturbing—Josh had a hard-on.

  In all the years we had been showering together, my stepbrother’s body had never reacted to mine. But now it was—and in a big way. My eyes widened as I took in the length and girth of his cock. It was nine inches at least and so thick around I was sure I wouldn’t be able to circle it with my fingers even if I tried. Of course, I would never try such a thing with my own stepbrother. Just the thought of it made me blush.

  Josh seemed to be blushing too, though he turned away from me so quickly it was hard to tell. Normally we laughed and joked in the shower, splashing each other and having fun. But this time there was a strained silence between us as we stepped into the tiny plasti-glass booth. Without talking about it, both of us were careful to keep our backs to each other and neither of us said a word as we washed.

  It was awkward, but it still might have gone all right if not for the reeter bug.

  Reeters are pests that like to infest outgoing spaceships, and they’re uniquely adapted to a zero-g, freezing environment—in other words, space. They stick flat to the side of a spaceship, just waiting for an opportunity to get onboard. The minute somebody pops an airlock to make repairs, they invite themselves inside. Since they can hold their breath indefinitely and extreme temperatures and poisons don’t bother them, there’s almost no way to kill them except to squash them dead.

  But none of that tells you how they look. Reeters are descendants of roaches from Earth. They’re long and flat with a shiny purple-black shell and long, twitchy antennae. When they skitter around, they make a horrible chitinous clicking sound that makes my blood run cold every time I hear it. In size they’re about as big as my palm, and I flat-out hate them.

  We had been doing pretty good with the reeters this trip—I’d only seen two, and Josh had killed both of them right away. He liked to tease me that my fear of the ugly bugs was girly, but this was one time when I didn’t care if I looked weak. I might have been training to be a xenobiologist but not all forms of life held the same fascination, as far as I was concerned.

  I could deal with deadly animals in all shapes and sizes from the massive hairy man-eating angorths of the Andromeda Galaxy to the blidgers that live in the Crab Nebula and have poison so toxic a single drop will eat through a metric ton of flesh. But if a life-form was little and skittery with a lot of legs and might crawl on me or get caught in my hair, forget it—it had to die.

  So there I was, in the shower, trying hard to ignore the sudden awkwardness between myself and my stepbrother, when suddenly I heard the telltale click-click-click on the tiles above me. Despite the hot water, fear made my whole body go cold. I looked up and sure enough, there was the biggest reeter I had ever seen. Forget the size of my palm—this one was the size of my head. It was sitting there on the wall, looking down at me with its antennae waving as though wondering which part of my naked flesh it wanted to crawl on first.

  I did what I always do when I see a reeter—I shrieked and tried to get away. I can’t help it—it’s an instinctive gut reaction. Girly or not, nothing brings out my flight-or-fight response like a great big nasty bug.

  At that point, my only thought was to get away from the ugly thing. And since Josh was blocking the entrance to the shower, I tried to go around him on the far side, near the wall. My sudden actions took my stepbrother by surprise and he turned, trying to find out what was going on. The result was that we wound up completely naked in each other’s arms with my breasts pressed to his muscular chest and his still-hard cock branding my lower belly.

  “What the hell?” Josh bellowed as I basically climbed him like a tree.

  “Reeter!” I gasped, clutching at his shoulders and wrapping my legs around his hips. “There’s a—” I broke off as something more important than the pesky space bug got my attention.

  Due to my panicked escape attempt, my big brother and I were pressed together in the most intimate way imaginable, and I do mean intimate. Despite the many times we’d shared the shower, there had never been this much contact between us before. My nipples rubbed against the hard planes of his chest,