Chapter Six

 

The multitude of alternating see-all screens that covered the front wall flashed scenes of celebration, joyful shouts and relieved tears. Sam’s eyes burned from staring at the monitors too long—really, he wasn’t crying like the little blonde girl in the see-all on the bottom left corner who was overjoyed to see her mommy alive.

He rubbed at his eyes, hoping his brothers would give him a break—the last cycle had been a hell of a ride and exhaustion was the culprit for his overemotional state. With the mineworkers safe and accounted for and the collapsed section of the mine secured, Sam could finally allow his mind to focus where it wanted to—on Achelle. Hell, at this point, he couldn’t even block thoughts of his mate from his brothers, who were mentally bitch-slapping him each time his imagination became sexually graphic.

“We can handle it from here.” Cannan shuffled reports on the interactive touchtable before looking around at all his brothers in the standard meeting room—a dozen narrow hoverchairs, scrolling info walls, the usual—to rest his gaze on Sam. “Get out of here. Your three-day bonding bed awaits.”

Sam gave a grateful nod before hitting “lock” on his files and heading out.

In the aftermath of the media raid, the halls were shockingly quiet, as though resonating with the whoosh of silence heard after a great storm. The garage now stood empty but for their family-sized ship. He stopped and looked around the empty room, needing to take a moment to collect his turbulent thoughts before sitting in the pilot’s chair.

He hated flying at the best of times.

The relief that had reached into his stomach and loosened his gut when the last miner rose up from the shaft and reunited with her family had nearly brought Sam to his knees. As the CEO of their company, he took his duty to protect his workers seriously—his brothers often thought too seriously. But he knew even if they didn’t that any one of them would behave exactly as he did if they had to shoulder responsibility for the lives of the men and women who worked for them.

Time after time he’d thought how thankful he was that Achelle was safe at home. Just knowing she was in their room waiting for him made the brutal hours he’d spent working to recover his people bearable.

With a sigh, he boarded the ship and left for home, mentally reaching out to Achelle as he sped across the moon’s uneven surface. He was met with a vague mishmash of thoughts, the kind that spun through a sleeper’s mind. A smile broke over his face as he imagined how he would wake her when he returned to their rumpled bed but when, several minutes later, he made it to their room, she was nowhere to be found.

He activated the all-know with the punch of his fist. “Locate my mate.”

“Mar Achelle is off-moon, having taken the one-man flip ship,” the feminine voice stated without emotion.

“How long ago?” he asked as he ran out of the room and down the hall toward the nearest chute to return him to the garage.

“Eleven hours, fourteen minutes, twenty-two seconds.”

Damn. Talk about a head start. “Trajectory?”

“Unknown.”

“Probability that the destination is Ploice Two space station?”

“High.”

Sam ran through the garage and activated the streamer, the fastest ship in the garage, a personal egg-shaped transport made of living metal that warped around his body, crackling as it morphed from liquid to solid. Encased in the claustrophobic ship, he pressed his palms against the empathic inner skin of the craft and thought, Ploice Two.

The low, singing engines engaged to propel him out of the garage and off the moon. As claustrophobia spun his thoughts and emotions out of control, he gritted his teeth, trying to push the memory of his parents’ death out of his mind. But the fear he felt for Achelle seemed to meld to the memory of his parents’ accident and sear his frontal lobe, acting out for attention like the child he’d been when they’d died.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

With a goofy grin on his fourteen-year-old face, Sam scanned the newly updated chip embedded in his hand that now identified him as a class-A student flyer. The scanner blinked white, accepting his license, and the full-heavy, a company ship transporting mining equipment to their new site on Twellen Moon where his younger brothers waited for them, rumbled to life like an old male coming awake after an alcohol-induced nap.

Pride in her twinkling silver-blue eyes, Sam’s mother leaned over from the copilot seat to press a kiss to his cheek. “I can’t believe my baby is learning to fly,” she said, brushing his unruly hair from his forehead.

Normally he’d duck and weave to avoid his mother’s demonstrative behavior but today he happily accepted her babying. He was, after all, at the age of adulthood and adult males honored their females—especially their mates and mothers—in all things.

“I’m going to pull away from the dock, Samius,” his father said, his low voice ringing with a happy note of satisfaction. “You can take over, with your mother’s guidance, as soon as we’re clear.”

Sam looked over his shoulder at his father who sat buckled into the imposing captain’s chair and gave the large, thick-muscled male a nod of his shaggy head. The disembark signal flashed green outside the bridge’s main view screen and the docking clamps disengaged, releasing the jumbo-sized ship to navigate away from the station.

They accelerated slowly, giving Sam plenty of time to review their plotted course and submit it to the station before taking over the controls and heading out into the vast darkness of space. The first in a series of short jumps went well and was met with praise from both his parents. No matter how hard he tried to maintain a countenance of solemn concentration, he couldn’t beat back the jittery joy that came with his first flight.

Suddenly, without warning, the ship trembled as if in fear, the hull screamed like an injured infant. Electrical lines broke and unraveled from the ceiling, snaking wildly though the air, sparks burning up the oxygen, making him choke on smoke-thickened atmosphere.

On the control panel, every light indicator flashed red, every system was offline. The hull had been—and continued to be—breached. External see-alls showed…damn, a meteorite storm tearing holes through the ship, breaching the hull, killing the engines, tearing through the vessel like tiny missiles. They were almost past it, but the ship was more than crippled; the vessel had become a deathtrap preparing to snap and kill them all.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother jerk and slump in her chair. Only the restraints prevented her unconscious body from sliding to the floor. He released his seat buckle and checked her pulse… Nothing.

“Dad!” he shouted.

No reply.

As if in slow motion, he turned to find his father writhing in his chair, one of the unraveled lines biting at his chest, sending jolts of electricity through his muscular form, killing him before Sam’s eyes.

Sam stumbled over to his father and knocked the line away. Even before he checked, he knew he’d find no pulse. The burn marks and stench of burnt skin and released bowels stole his hope.

The emergency siren squealed to life, a high-pitched scream that stabbed past his panicked thoughts only to peter out just as quickly, going off-line like everything else.

Trembling from head to foot, Sam ran across the bridge, dove into a chute, and stumbled out onto the first main deck where emergency capsules were located.

The air was thin there, forcing him to pant and gasp as he ran to the closest porthole and manually forced the door open to crawl into the capsule. The door sealed, he pushed and kicked the release lever until at last the tiny life raft popped free and floated away from the ship and the last of the meteor storm. Sam choked on his shock and grief and guilt. Later he would learn that an experienced pilot would have seen the signs of the meteor storm and avoided it. Sam’s ignorance had killed his parents.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Sam reached the old, clunky space station, he compressed the streamer into a sleek, handheld device that he pocketed as he made his way through the glittering shopping district, once again following Achelle’s pulse-pushing scent. The feeling of déjà vu bit at his heels as he ran down the wide walkway. He prayed to the gods high and low that his mortal mate was still on the run-down station…and within his reach.

It felt as though she was close, but maybe that was wishful thinking. As long as she’d been gone, Achelle could have found and purchased passage on a new ship going anywhere.

Her scent led him into a crowded ship repair shop named Toio’s that looked more like a den of thieves than a legit business. Four unwashed, unshaven males squatted in the middle of the main room, barking at each other like rabid dogs as they played dice, gambling credits that were no doubt stolen.

“Hello?” he shouted over their yelled curses.

A long, lanky male with a mashed nose glared over his shoulder before returning his attention to the game. “Yeah, what?”

“I’m looking for my mate. A blonde, magenta eyes—”

“Captain of that piece-of-shit commuter ship grabbed her a couple hours—”

Sam spun and ran out of the shop, backtracking toward the docks, realizing now that her scent had been so strong because she had doubled back on her trail. But concern over whether she’d done so of her own volition or was taken against her will was what drove his feet to a dead run. He moved in and out of the clumps and groups of family and friends strolling, window shopping, laughing and talking, loving each other and the time they were having while he felt his whole life slipping away from him.

If Achelle was lost, he would be incomplete. He and his brothers had all bonded to her. Ranes mated for life. Without her…their family would be forever broken, he half the male he was meant to be.

At the long, orange-and-white-striped chute that would return him to the polluted docking ring, he pushed his way past several slow-moving groups and shoved his way into the airstream. He burst out onto the dock and stumbled in his bulky boots before he caught his footing. A centuries-old passenger ship loomed in front of him, Achelle’s sweet smell leading Sam up the steep plank to the captain who walked with a distinct limp. He grabbed the lean man’s shoulder and wheeled him around.

“Where is she?” he asked, getting right up into the captain’s generically handsome face and letting the male see the violence Sam knew showed on his own visage. “Where is my mate?”

The captain jerked his shoulder out of Sam’s grasp and stepped back, placing himself higher up on the ramp so he looked down on Sam, a sneer cutting across his symmetrical face. “If you’re talking about the blonde bitch, I refused her passage. Don’t need trouble like her on my ship.”

The growl that clawed its way up Sam’s throat and tore out of his mouth widened the captain’s eyes and loosened his jaw. The man stood in a state of shock that would have been laughable if Sam weren’t so pissed off.

“Where exactly did you see my mate last?” He bit each word off as if he was tearing meat from the bone.

The captain’s eyes widened and bulged. He swallowed twice before responding. “O-over by the far chute.” He motioned with his head, nodding toward the service chute across the port from where Sam had entered.

A full-heavy obstructed Sam’s view, and for a moment Sam stood there staring while flashes of his parents’ death in the same type of ship ripped through his brain, reopening old emotional scars. Shaking his head as if he could fling the memories away, he refocused on his mortal mate.

He bolted down the narrow plank and hopped over the rail when he neared the end. The people in his way, the ships crowding around him didn’t even register—they were nothing more than ghosts, blurred obstacles that stood between him and his mate.

Her scent pounded through him now, rich and refined like moonberry wine, delicate on the tongue and silky smooth as it slipped down his throat.

He found her around the full-heavy, slumped on a long bench, hands folded in her lap, head down, her long blonde hair obscuring her beautiful face. When he sat at on the opposite end of the bench, he heard her quiet crying, tasted her salty tears on his tongue.

Closing his eyes, he breathed past his self-loathing. Her unhappiness, her despair were his fault. He’d pushed her too far, too fast—not that he’d had any choice thanks to their Rane genetics. But if he’d just been able to keep from coupling with her before they’d reached his brothers, if the bonding ritual would have been explained to her and properly completed…things might have been different. She might not have run from him.

Now that he’d found her, he didn’t know what to do. Force her to return home with him? He was not the captain, caring only for his own wants and needs. Let her go? Allow his bonded mate to leave him to live a half life as half a male? Every cell in his body revolted at that idea.

A bonded Rane male without his mortal mate—was nothing. The same could be said about a bonded Rane female but Achelle was half human. And humans were notorious for breaking their mate bonds, their marriages, and bonding with someone else.

 

Achelle felt more than saw Samius sit on the opposite end of the squat metal bench, his long legs making him look like an adult sitting in a child’s seat. The moment she sensed him, she came alive and her heart leapt as if trying to reach him.

He doesn’t love you. How could he? He knows your body, not your mind.

She winced at the pain that accompanied her thoughts, lancing her heart, matching the emotional with the physical pain.

You love him. The thought sang, a ringing of ancient Earth bells, the kind she’d read about being used in weddings.

She laughed at the ridiculous thought and wiped at her overflowing eyes, smearing away her tears.

“Achelle?” Sam’s voice was thick with unnamed emotion, which comforted her.

At least she wasn’t alone in her bewilderment. And if his presence here meant anything, it was that she didn’t have to be alone ever again, not if she didn’t want to.

Gods, she didn’t know what she wanted anymore. But really, how could she say she wanted him and retain any self-respect after he’d backed her against a wall. Yeah, she’d been foolish, running, falling into the hands of Captain Grab-Ass again—a smile twisted her lips—but who would’ve thought that all she’d had to do to get rid of the captain’s unwanted attention was to stop running and face him… Well, that and awake before he boarded the ship so that she could grab a handful of his junk and twist until his face turned purple and he released her, whimpering like a little boy who’d lost his favorite toy.

She glanced at Samius, peering through the long length of hair that fell like a curtain around her face. What she saw stopped her breath and broke her heart. He looked at her with such raw longing in his square-jawed, masculine face that she winced. What were the chances of him feeling the same way about her as she did about him? And could either of them trust feelings apparently fueled by their Rane nature?

“Will you talk to me?” He met her eyes, proving he was paying far more attention to her than he had let on.

“I don’t know what to say,” she replied, and it was the truth.

“Then will you hear me?”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked on that one word, reflecting how torn she felt inside.

He slid down the bench until they sat hip to hip, close but not touching. “I thought the natural drive to couple would supersede everything else between us…or not yet between us. I know my arrogance now.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “If I had been honest with you from the start… Well, maybe you wouldn’t have believed me, but at least the Rane need to bond with your mate and his brothers wouldn’t have taken you by surprise. At least then you could’ve trusted me a little.”

He gripped his knees, holding on to himself as if holding on to his intense feelings. Achelle realized then that it was more than intuition that allowed her to read him so well. This was part of what it meant to be a bonded mate. Too bad he was right. He’d lied. She couldn’t trust him. More, she couldn’t trust herself when it came to him.

He seemed to sense her conclusion, his head dropping, his shoulders angling down. She could feel his response and it wasn’t what she thought it would be. Achelle had expected anger, demands—not this, not disappointment, sadness, acceptance.

She felt her brow go all wrinkly. She was honestly stunned. Would he really let her go without a fight?

Only one way to find out.

She gripped the edge of the bench before collecting her courage, pushing up off the cold metal to stand on shaky legs. “I’m sorry. I really am. But I’ve got to go.”

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t move or look up to meet her eyes. He simply sat frozen, a humanoid statue depicting a man resigned to a life of unhappiness.

Achelle turned and walked away.

 

Elbows on knees, Sam watched Achelle leave. It was like watching his parents die all over again—his life was a vacant tomb, a mined moon, a room full of fool’s gold. Empty. Hollow. Worthless.

He stood and pulled the streamer from his pocket. The cool living metal seemed to freeze the blood in his veins and numb his hand, his arm, then reach inside the cavern of his chest to ice over his heart.

Better than the pain, he thought as he walked to his landing spot and activated the ship to close around him so he was like an embryo within an egg.

The flight home was an epiphany. He was utterly fearless, flying at breakneck speeds, piloting the tiny vessel past stars and planets, living and dead. For the first time since the day he received his learner’s license, he flew with a casual confidence that could come only from ignorance, arrogance or in his case, apathy. Live or die, he did not care.

At home his brothers read enough through their familial bond to know to keep out of his way, avoiding him as he pounded down the hall to his room. Empty. Like everything else. He stood in the center of the large, open space that waited no more for his mate’s contribution to the decoration. Like Sam, the room would remain incomplete.

He didn’t know how long he stood there in a stupor but what roused his consciousness was a long ring coming from the all-know on the near wall. On legs that felt as broken as the rest of him—he must have stood there forever—he crossed the room and answered the ring.

Instead of a call from one of his brothers or a foreman at the mine, a see-all popped up on the panel to show Cannan walking into the garage in subbasement two to greet…Achelle.

Sam’s heart skipped and pounded in his chest.

Achelle stepped down from the flip ship and said something to Cannan that was inaudible to Sam over the see-all. But he didn’t care what she said—she could rage, scream, condemn his actions for the rest of their natural lives—as long as she was here to stay.

Unable to bear the silent scene any longer, he left the room at a run and didn’t skid to a stop until he was in the garage, inches from his mate, taking in the bounty of her presence in his home.

“You’re here,” he said stupidly.

She took in a shaky breath. “I belong with you. I know that—oomph!”

He grabbed her and hugged her to him. Tight. His hands roamed her body, relearning each curve and line until he couldn’t bear the clothing separating them and pulled her dress with his house colors over her head.

She gasped and crossed her arms over her high breasts, glancing over Sam’s shoulder, drawing his attention to the fact that Cannan still stood there watching them with no compunction or modesty. Sam didn’t give a damn but since his mate was covering herself from his gaze, he turned to his brother and said, “Leave.”

The multitude of scars on Cannan’s face twisted as he grinned, his eyes dancing with light and laughter Sam hadn’t seen from his brother since the mining accident that had disfigured him.

From his pocket, Cannan pulled out an unbelievably large magenta ruby that perfectly matched Achelle’s eyes. “Welcome to the family, mate of my brother,” he said, bowing, his arm outstretched, offering the precious stone to her.

Achelle gasped at the offering, looking from Cannan to Sam. He smiled and nodded, encouraging her to take the gift.

One arm still covering her breasts, she reached out with the other and plucked the ruby from Cannan’s hand. “Thank you.”

Cannan met her eyes for a brief moment, blinking back tears, and then fled the room.

“I didn’t want to be rude to him but, Samius, I can’t accept this. It must be worth a fortune,” she said, worry clearly visible in her bright, beautifully expressive eyes as she studied the stone.

“The stone belongs to you just as we all do.” Sam took the stone from her and carelessly dropped it in the puddle her dress made on the floor. Then, catching the side tabs of her panties, he exposed her fully to his gaze so he could drink her in like a lost male on a desert planet falling upon a spring and greedily gulping down fresh draughts of water.

In the first language, mortal mate meant life bringer. And truly he never understood the meaning so well. Now that she had returned, by her own volition, he wasn’t going to question it, afraid that if he did, she would change her mind.

Cupping her lovely face between his hands, he kissed her, softly planted kisses at first, then long, lingering ones, which engendered heat that burned through his body like liquid fire, chasing the cold from his heart, leaving in its place hope and requited love.

She moaned into his mouth and, wrapping her arms around his neck, pressed the full length of her naked form against his body.

Damn. He was way overdressed.

Breaking from the kiss, he kicked off his boots and stripped at breakneck speed, tripping on his trousers and going down on his knees. After the initial smack of his knees cracking on the hard floor, he glanced up and kneeled there transfixed. Not a bad place to be, he decided when his gaze leveled with the blonde triangle of curls at the junction of his mate’s thighs.

The temptation too great to overcome, he leaned in and nuzzled her, inhaling her delectable scent. She was aroused, thank the gods. The sweet smell of her body preparing to accept his made his mouth water in anticipation of her taste. She shivered at his touch as he parted her petal-soft folds and licked her most tender flesh. He delved and sucked and flicked his tongue, holding her to him when she began to sway, looking up to see her enraptured face as he brought her to the apex of her pleasure.

“Oh!” She threw her head back and trembled, her muscles seizing, her body sagging. She slid down into his arms as her orgasm liquefied her bones. He kissed her neck and pressed her into the floor, moving between her legs, fitting himself against her body, waiting for her to open her amazing eyes. When she did, he slid inside her, opening her until he filled her completely.

Propped up on his forearms, he leaned down and took her mouth, then kissed his way to first one breast then the other. Gently biting her nipples, playing his tongue over the hard buds, he began to thrust, moving slowly at first, glorying in the feel of her flesh fisting his cock. Tight. So tight.

She whimpered and lifted her hips from the floor, meeting his thrusts, welcoming his invasion, digging her heels into his flexing ass and demanding, “Give me more.”

Nuzzling her ear, he whispered, “I give you all of me.”

And he did.