Still kissing her, I scooped her up in my arms and headed back to our quarters.
She broke away from our kiss, laughing. “Aren’t we supposed to stay and have a party?”
“We can get back to the party later,” I growled, my beasts dangerously close to the surface. “But now that it’s official, I cannot wait any longer. I need you.”
Nora wrapped her arms around my neck and made a contented little noise as she pressed her lips against mine. “I think that sounds perfect, tiger of mine. I’ll go anywhere with you. As long as we’re together, I don’t care about anything else.”
Epilogue
Braxen
“Unholy cordrodites,” I breathed out the curse as I took new readings on the small blue and green planet below.
Commander Dax and Captain Jalek had been right about this place. It was an utter wastehole.
I hit the cloaking mode on my ship and ducked lower for a closer look.
The whole damn planet was dying. They were poisoning it.
General Galatov might have missed the glances Jalek and Dax gave each other when he mentioned how thankful his human female mate would undoubtedly be to be taken off this hellhole and brought into the larger galactic community.
But I didn’t miss the looks. For some reason, those two thought Earth females would be just as happy staying where they were.
That was clearly insane—but having heard some of the mating ceremony preparations Lucy and Nora had been making, I did not put it past human females to want to stay someplace that was horrible.
They had weird ideas. In fact, humans were clearly on the slightly deranged side. But General Galatov wanted a human mate, so I was determined to get one for him.
For perhaps the hundredth time, I fed all of the general’s genetic information into the computer and waited for the list of candidates to appear.
I had already checked out the top two. As it turned out, they both seemed to be already mated. One already had kits. The other lived with a human male. Nora had warned me that those types would be even less happy being taken away than ones without partners—whether or not they were officially mated to those partners.
I had to take Nora at her word. Even though she hadn’t been willing to meet with me for a formal planning session, she had been certain to track me down afterward to give me advice on finding the perfect mate for the general.
So here I was, back in the same city that Nora herself had been taken from.
I buzzed over the nature preserve in the center of the island city. Part of the problem with Earth was that far too many humans crowded together in small spaces, when there was plenty of land to be had in other parts of the world.
I shook my head. I would rather spend the rest of my life unmated, waiting for the opportunity to join with a Drovekzian mate—no matter how unlikely it was that we would have kits—than end up with one of these insane human females.
I couldn’t imagine what the captain and the commander saw in them.
Very little fur, inferior cultural norms, and from the most backward planet I have ever visited. Yuck.
I made another sweep over the nature area.
Give it a rest, I told myself. Luckily, you’re not here to find your own mate. You are here for the general.
I waved a few more details into the computer, waiting for it to respond and remembering that Commander Dax preferred the old-fashioned interfaces that required manual touch.
Perhaps that kind of tendency was why he had ended up with a backward human.
I, on the other hand, liked to consider myself a forward thinker. The new wave controls suited me perfectly.
The computer let out a beep, letting me know the third human match for the general had been located. Oddly enough, she, too, was walking through that nature preserve. Or along the edge of it, anyway.
I could put my scoutship in stealth mode, drop down in front of her, and let her walk directly inside before she even knew what had happened.
Then I would take off and explain to her on the way back to the Levelock.
Perfect plan.
I waited until the path in front of her was clear of other pedestrians and followed it exactly.
“Computer, project an image of the surroundings in subterfuge mode. Our goal is to capture that female before she realizes what has happened.”
“Affirmative.”
These new ships were wonderful—and immune, thank goodness, to Karlaxon interference. This ship didn’t need any further input to complete the maneuver perfectly.
Once we took off again, I jumped up from my seat in the cockpit and raced toward the entryway as the scoutship took off, our prey captured.
Sliding around the corner, I came face-to-face with the general’s matched mate—and came to a halt, totally blindsided by her.
She was beautiful.
She wore her dark, silky hair gathered at the crown of her head in some sort of band and falling like a shiny waterfall down her back.
Her clothes were odd—not at all suitable for space travel, consisting as they did of an outer garment the covered her torso, a fabric tube that covered only part of her legs, and footwear that included torturous-looking spikes on the bottom—no one would ever be able to walk in those. No one rational, at least.
Her utter irrationality was confirmed when she turned around, took one look at me, screamed, and then began swinging a heavy bag off her shoulder and toward my face.
I tried to fend her off, hoping I could explain to her that I needed to have her implanted with a translation matrix. But she kept shouting, “Get away from me, you fucking kidnapper! Help! Mugger, thief, kidnapper!”
Finally, one of her swings made contact, and the boxy bag she carried thunked up against my head, knocking me sideways.
But that wasn’t what brought me to my knees.
No, what knocked my feet out from under me was her scent. It hit
