“Oh, yes.” She tilted her hips until the base of my cock massaged her clit, and the beginnings of my mating orgasm coiled deep down in my balls.
I paused, holding myself above her even as every fiber of my being screamed at me to drive deeply into her, to make her mine. “Are you certain?”
Her eyes took a micro-moment to focus when she opened them. “Certain?”
“This time will be different. When a Khanavai male’s mating cock emerges during sex, it creates an unbreakable bond with his mate. It’s a chemical connection like nothing on Earth.”
She paused, and my heart pounded in my chest as I waited for her response. “We’ll be mated forever?”
“I will be. The mating cock’s effect on human women…varies.”
“You’re saying I could leave you, but you would never leave me?”
“Basically, yes.”
She reached up to hold my face between her hands, gazing deep into my eyes. “Then I should be the one asking you if you’re certain.”
“I’ve been certain since the first moment I saw you across that parking lot on Earth.”
Tears filled her eyes again, and for a micro-moment, I feared she was about to tell me she couldn’t go through with it.
But then, she pulled my face to hers and whispered against my lips, “Make me your mate, Wex, and I promise I will never leave you, either.”
With a groan, I plunged inside her—and the heat of her surrounding me felt like coming home.
This time, I drove deep with each stroke. Deandra met my driving force with her own, until sweat slicked our bodies, my torso slipping against her breasts as my cock slid into her.
Her body trembled, the quiver coming from deep within, her pussy fluttering around me as her orgasm began to build.
I buried my lips in her neck and sucked lightly at the sensitive place below her ear.
“I’m going to come, my love,” I rasped—knowing I couldn’t stop, but needing to give her one final chance to change her mind.
“Yes, yes,” she gasped, almost incoherently. “Please, yes, come inside me.”
Deandra surprised me by coming first, her body bucking under mine, grasping my mating cock with her slick pussy as if trying to hold on to it forever. The liquid heat of her enveloped me, and I could hold out no longer.
The force of an orgasm with my mating cock slammed through me, and I lost all control as I poured myself into her, crying out her name—that beautiful name that I alone could call her.
The world around us disappeared, leaving only the two of us as my mating cock cemented the bond between us, tying me to this amazing, beautiful, strong human woman. Our connection spiraled through me, flooding every part of my body, mind, and heart with my love for her.
And when I could see again, I realized that Khanavai warriors, too, sometimes cried tears of joy.
But only their true mates were ever allowed to see it.
Epilogue
Grace
As the transporter cone lit up around me, Hannah started sobbing. “You can’t do this, Grace. That was my name they called. You can’t go!”
“I’ll come home,” I promised her. “No one will want me. I’ll be back.” But I couldn’t tell if she even heard me.
Maybe once I got up to Station 21, I would be able to find a way to contact her, to let her know that I was okay, that I wasn’t abandoning her.
But I had to do what I’d done.
Hannah was barely twenty-one years old, and beautiful. Those alien monsters would be fighting over her. If she was taken to Station 21, she wouldn’t come home.
No, this was for the best.
The last thing I thought of as the transporter sparkles faded around me and everything went black was that day all those months ago when I had watched, my heart in my throat, praying that Hannah’s name would not be drawn as Vos Klavoii read out each Bride Lottery “winner’s” name.
We had lucked out then—the only piece of luck either of us had had in over a year.
I couldn’t count on that luck to hold.
So the very next day, I started searching for a way out. Not for me—for Hannah.
I had talked to Douglas’s parents first, as much as it pained me to see them—and for them to see me.
But they were wealthy and had all the right contacts. Eventually, Doug’s father had put me in touch with someone else who had even more of the right connections. They put me in touch with yet another person, and I followed the chain all the way up, until I finally finagled a meeting with someone who could do what I wanted him to.
“It’s simply a matter of attaching Hannah’s Bride Lottery ID to your information.” He gave me a long, assessing look. “That will double your chances of being drawn in the lottery, you realize.”
“I don’t care. Do whatever you have to. Just make sure if her ID is drawn, I’m the one they take.”
And then I had given him my life’s savings. All of it.
Even the money from the accident.
“If she gets taken to Station 21,” I told him, “I will hunt you down and kill you myself, if I have to.”
The small man in the expensive suit sitting across the desk from me looked me up and down as if measuring my determination, and had nodded. “I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”
The memory of his voice was ringing in my ears when I materialized inside the transporter tube.
A Khanavai technician glanced at me, then did a double-take. Regaining his composure, he tapped in the code to open the transporter and handed me a container of some kind of sports drink. “Drink this,” he instructed me, too obviously trying not to stare.
I sniffed the drink, then shrugged and gulped it down.
From outside the room, I heard some woman half-yelling. “This is some kind of set-up, isn’t it?”
I snorted and shook my head.
Of course, it’s a set-up.
Everything about the Bride Lottery is a
