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barrier, with enough heat to melt the ionic glass between them, was the demon she’d just exorcised.
    Ava forgot how to breathe. He stared with the intensity she’d felt. Heat. Power. Need. And like the sharp edge of a blade, the hunger bit into her twice as strong as before.
     
    ***
     
    Seth damn near tore Frost’s ship apart, and still couldn’t find anything to indicate she’d lied. It appeared that the vessel was in the shop for a paint job. The exterior tiles were gone, stripped away and probably in the paint booth as she’d claimed.
    Nothing illegal showed up in the hold. He’d gone so far as to test for drug residues. According to her manifest, when space control cleared the Avira for launch on a prior world, the hold had been empty.
    It didn’t mean she hadn’t been up to illicit activities. Seth knew he’d missed something, could feel it nagging at his mind, pulling on his instincts, the very same instincts that led him to her ship and not the room she’d claimed to have rented. His gut feeling was on, and Captain Frost’s ionic walls were coming down before he left. Even if he didn’t find anything, she wasn’t off the hook.
    If she hadn’t broken the law, why did she blow backward through a wormhole?
    He blew out a breath, left the flight deck, and moved toward the crew’s quarters. He pressed his hand into a gel lock, triggered the mechanism to pop open, and entered the room. Sounds of running water drew his attention to the lavatory. His anger got the better of him, and before he knew it, he stood in front of the shower, unable to move.
    Fuck . And all he could do was stand there and suffer.
    As Seth stared into Ava Frost’s eyes, he knew exactly who she’d thought of as she’d masturbated in the shower. She didn’t blush, even though he’d witnessed her pleasuring herself. Nor did she seem to care that she didn’t have anything on. As she stood there with a feral look on her face, she popped the release on the ionic shield, cutting the power to the Tourmaline crystal particles that clumped together when charged. The microscopic matter broke apart, and the shield vaporized, leaving nothing but air between them. Jewels twinkled back at him from a luscious body.
    For a simple freighter captain, she had a lot of expensive jewels and technology. Most freighter ship captains couldn’t afford ionizing shields to create inner walls, and they most definitely couldn’t afford even half of what was certainly a fortune in Nexian stones covering Captain Frost’s body.
    Ships with ionic walls could change their interior layout with a punch of a button, creating a larger area to store freight or more cabins to accommodate an expansion in crew or passengers. The walls could be solid or transparent as her shower had been. Handy when someone had something to hide, since ionic walls could also be used to create hidden rooms inside a ship to smuggle illegal goods.
    The technology seemed a little excessive for someone dealing in legal trade. Seth made a note to check her outer shields for similar technology, something only found on the best battleships. If her ship had an outer gravity field that suspended ionic particles, there was a good chance she was involved in something illegal. The outer shields were a quick fix, when a hull received a blast, and only one kind of ship would take hits from a League destroyer.
    Seth snatched a towel from a shelf and tossed it to her, resisting the temptation to act on everything his dick begged him to do. “When you’re dressed, we need to talk.” Gods, the woman made him crazy. He knew she was up to something. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind, and yet her tricks were getting to him. He’d been cuffed an hour before, and thoroughly humiliated when his first mate came to free him. But here he stood, like a moron, craving more of her, seconds away from making the mistake again.
    She didn’t bother to wrap her body. She rubbed her hair dry and dropped the towel to