The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Sixteen

“You smell like an unwashed mammoth, Sir,” Zoe said respectfully as Mal climbed down the rope-ladder from their transport’s gondola.

“That’s ‘you smell like an unwashed mammoth, DEAR,’” he reminded in a low tone as a young Tibetan family with at least five kids – maybe six, he hadn’t been able to keep track because they moved around so much – came down behind them. “We’re on our honeymoon, remember?”

“Oh, the glamour of it all. This will be a memory I cherish forever,” she said, dryly, as she brushed the dust off her coat. “Nothin’ says lovin’ like a six hour mastodon tour of mile after mile of lonely steppe.”

“Oh, c’mon, it was romantic,” Mal insisted. “We saw some wildlife. Fresh air.”

“We saw a gorram herd o’ the same kind o’ beast we smell like. It was majestic . . . for about a minute and a half. And that ‘fresh air’ is like to give me pneumonia.”

“Better than the ‘honeymoon’ you and Wash took, you first got hitched.”

“Three days in a shuttle with a case o’ champagne an’ zero-gravity sex?” she said, skeptically. “You’re right. Freezin’ my ass off on a smelly elephant is just piles better.”

“Somethin’ to tell your grandkids about,” he agreed smugly.

“You know somethin’ I don’t? ‘Cause last time I looked, Wash wasn’t exactly eager for fatherhood.”

“You that eager for motherhood?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

Zoe was a warrior born, a soldier without peer. He had seen her do things in battle that men twenty years her senior, with at least that much experience, couldn’t do. Anything he ordered her to do, he knew it would be done – no matter how impossible.

But Zoe as a mother? The subject had come up a few times, of course – part of that second ‘X’ chromosome, he figured. But it was a fancy. Had to be. Like that time she tried to learn the guitar, or that creative writing course on the cortex or . . . like her relationship with Wash.

He never saw that coming. Never expected it to last. Figured he was out a pil