By the Sea of Sand Read online

  Their love is a memory too dangerous to recall.

  Life is not easy by the Sea of Sand. The remote outpost and its lighthouse were never meant to serve as a place for wounded soldiers to recover, but that’s what it has become. Teila has lived in the lighthouse for her entire life, and now she also takes care of the men and women who gave their sanity fighting the Wirthera’s hive mind.

  Captain Kason Reed was willing to give his life for the Sheirran Defense Forces, but now he can’t remember anything except bits and pieces of the war. When his attraction to his caregiver, Teila, causes him to make advances toward her, she becomes the aggressor, urging him with her body to explore the memories of his past—memories that all seem to draw him back to Teila…

  Those returned by the Wirthera never come back whole. Their bodies are flooded with nanobots designed to trigger homicidal rage when the soldiers remember what happened to them. No matter how much Teila wants her new patient to remember her and the life they shared, before, she can’t remind him.

  If she does, he might kill them all.

  By The Sea of Sand

  A Futuristic Romance

  Megan Hart

  By the Sea of Sand

  Megan Hart

  Chaos Publishing

  Copyright 2012, 2019 Megan Hart

  Chaos Edition, License Notes

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  ebook ISBN: 978-1-940078-92-2

  print ISBN: 978-1-940078-93-9

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  photo credit: VSanandhakrishna, 3quarks, RomoloTavani

  cover: Chaos

  Dedication

  To my kids, because you’re the best thing I’ve ever done.

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  And to my husband Robert, who makes every day a delight.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Passion Model

  Also by Megan Hart

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Life was not easy by the Sea of Sand.

  Perhaps it was not meant to be, Teila thought as she shielded her eyes against the searing glare of the triple suns overhead. If life were easier here, more would’ve come to homestead Sheir, stripping the planet’s difficult-to-find resources faster than they could be replenished. It had happened in other places. It had made war.

  Then again, she thought, there would always be reasons for war.

  “Mao?” Beside her, Stephin tugged the sleeve of her robe. “Mao, I’m hungry.”

  Teila stroked her fingers through the length of her son’s tangled blond curls, whipped by the heated wind and useless to comb. “What do you want, sweetheart?”

  The little boy jumped and clapped. “Milka! Milka!”

  Laughing, Teila scooped him up. She pressed her face into the warmth of his skin, relishing the boy’s unique scent—milka, soap from his recent bath, a hint of her own perfume and, of course, the everpresent sand.

  “Let’s see what we can find for you in the kitchen. Come.”

  But before she turned from the railing of the balcony overlooking the sea, Stephin cried out, pointing. A whale calf had breached the sands, its burnished red and orange segments glistening with the oils that protected its skin from the constant grinding of sand against it, and also what made it so valuable to whalers. The calf rolled its immense tubular body over and over, exposing first its belly, then its back, to the suns’ heat and light that fed it.

  If there was a calf, there was a mother nearby. Sure enough, in a moment the female also breached the surface. She was twice the size of her baby, her segments a deeper, duller red. Feelers topped with sensory organs vibrated, sensing the air for disturbances that would indicate a whaler or other dangers, but the sea was clear as far as Teila could see.

  She and Stephin watched the whales for a minute or so as the giant creatures rose and fell beneath the sea’s gritty, evershifting surface. As the mother rolled, her segments ground against one another, whipping her oily coating into pellets that migrated outward along the edges of her scales.

  “Oh, look, Stephin. Maybe we’ll get some fresh milka.”

  As they watched, several of the pellets, each easily the size of Teila’s entire body, worked their way free of the mother whale’s skin. Denser than the sand, the milka pellets would remain on the surface of the sea even as the whales themselves, fully fed from the sunslight, disappeared below. With no whalers or milkasloops in sight, the pellets would likely drift for days or weeks until someone discovered them or they eventually were ground to dust by the constantly grinding sands.

  Teila didn’t have a milkasloop, only a small scudder, but she was well skilled in the use of it and had all the tools to gather milka—at least for their personal use. She didn’t have the room to store more than one pellet at a time, nor the licensing to sell it. It was, in fact, illegal (if overlooked by most of the local authorities) for her to gather it herself instead of reporting it. But there was nothing better than fresh milka.

  Leaving Stephin in the capable hands of his amira, Densi, Teila quickly shucked her robe, leaving her in a sleeveless undershirt and leggings, and wrapped her hair and face in a scarf. Grabbing the long milka hook and some rope, she went down the long spiral stairs into the base of the lighthouse, then to the boathouse and the dock beyond it. Tilting the solar panels, she urged the scudder away from the dock and toward the smallest pellet.

  She’d marked the location of it from the lighthouse balcony, but of course the swelling waves had shifted it. The first pellet she came across was too big—twice the size of the scudder. Teila shifted the solars to urge the scudder a little farther from the lighthouse, skimming it along the undulating sands. The winds fluttered the edges of her scarf, and she wished she’d taken the time to slip on a pair of goggles.

  The pellet she’d been aiming for came into view. It was still easily as big as her boat, but when she hooked it and tied it behind, there was no trouble pulling it. The pellet’s smooth surface skidded without friction on top of the sands, tugging a little at the scudder’s back end as she steered it toward the lighthouse.

  She could’ve stayed out here forever, or at least much longer. As a girl she’d spent hours on the sea in this boat and an equal number on her father’s much larger whalecraft. It had been years since she’d been brave enough to leap onto a breaching whale in order to scrape free the smallest and freshest pellets, the most coveted. But once she’d been one of the best milka harvesters.

  Nobody bothered to do it that