Miranda heaved an exasperated sigh as she jostled helplessly into Jacob's side for the sixteen-hundredth time this trip. She'd tried bracing her knees against the back of the pilot's seat, clinging to the security handle by the door, and even using Jacob himself as a support, but so far nothing had been able to prevent her from bouncing around the inside of the Hammerhead like a pinball. Shepard's driving was just too atrocious to compensate for. Miranda idly wondered if she'd been any better at handling the Mako. Probably not, based on her old squadmates' frequent complaints.
And if the commander kept taking the Hammerhead through swooping leaps and dives and careening around every corner, Miranda was going to have to say something, too. The Cerberus officer was not normally given over to motion sickness, but even she was having a hard time holding onto her lunch at this point. She couldn't imagine how Jacob must be faring.
She finally lost her patience when Shepard tried to hop a gap between two plateaus, failed, and sent the Hammerhead plummeting to the ground fifty feet below. The shuttle's thrusters were simply not enough to dampen the fall completely, and all three occupants were thrown hard against their safety belts. The impact knocked Miranda's breath out of her.
"Damn it, Shepard!" she gasped angrily as both she and the Hammerhead struggled to recover. This was not what she signed up for when she agreed to accompany Shepard to Zeona to investigate a lost operative. "Could you at least try to drive in a straight line?"
Shepard was not deterred. She angled a crooked smile at Miranda over her shoulder and said with false innocence, "Problem, Lawson?"
Miranda opened her mouth to snap at her again, but found herself distracted by that particular expression on Shepard's face. How often had she ever seen the commander smile? Apparently not frequently enough to notice the dimple cut into her cheek, or the way her freckles framed the sparkle in her green eyes, until now. It made sense, she supposed. Shepard didn't usually have much reason to smile. And during the two years that the commander had spent on Miranda's operating table, she obviously hadn't worn any sort of expression at all.
Jacob cleared his throat beside her, and Miranda jolted back to her senses. Damn it. Had she been staring? The knowing smirk on Jacob's face implied that the answer was yes.
Miranda shot him her chilliest stare; the one that said say a word and I'll kill you. Jacob, being intimately familiar with that look, shrugged and looked away, but his smirk didn't fade.
Damn it, Miranda thought once again, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the heat in her cheeks. She could not let herself get distracted again. She had to be utterly focused on the mission, for the sake of all humanity. And her personal pride. She was a grown woman; she could manage.
Shepard did have a very nice smile, though.
…
