Page 245 of Galaxy Games Four-Book Box Set (Galaxy Games)

245

Already Home

T wo Weeks Later…

Maya

It’s been a couple of weeks and I still can’t get used to the day/night thing on board. I’ve set my wrist-comm to military time, which helps immensely. That’s good, because there’s no sun to give visual cues.

It’s night because my wrist-comm says it is, and because there are less staff on the bridge than during the day. A’Dar and I have developed a routine of sitting up here for a while before retiring to bed.

Will I ever tire of this view? I never quite got the hang of looking at the constellations back on Earth. I couldn’t tell Orion’s belt from Leo the lion. So it’s not that the sky studded with stars looks so different at another end of the galaxy. It’s just that the stars are so vivid up here. And the nebulas.

There’s been one off starboard for the past day. Purples, greens, and Caribbean blues that almost look like the eye of God.

I take a deep breath and cuddle closer to my mate’s wide, muscular chest. He still mostly goes by the book—the two-thousand-year-old book—in the way things are done on board, but the addition of over a thousand women has changed things. As has his own machta . I doubt the captain having his mate on his lap is anywhere in his rule book.

But that’s what we’ve been doing every night. I sit on his lap, and we gaze at the stars.

We got the cart before the horse in our relationship. We were tearing each other’s clothes off before we knew anything about each other. I don’t regret it. That was just the way it was. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting to know each other, although that first day when I babbled for hours, first by telling him fairytales and then my life story, gave him a lot more information about me than I had about him.

We’re catching up, though, between him running the ship, me running point on the females settling in, and giving in to the never-ending demands of machta.

A’Dar leans to kiss my head. His lips rummage through my braids to touch my scalp. He loves to work his thick fingers through my hair and arrange my braids. Every morning, he gets them to look more like his array. It must be a Xenon thing, almost a compulsion, because most of the mated women who leave their cabins are now sporting braids. Except for Anna. Her crewcut just won’t conform.

There is only one woman who is still having trouble with her new situation. The others were released from medbay within days of leaving Earth’s atmo. With Sara and Marc’s help, they’re in the process of accepting their new circumstances, as we all are. Some are handling this change in circumstances better than others.

The woman who still can’t control her almost constant tears is still in medbay. I visit her daily to give the staff some relief. I wish I could say she’s coming around, but things don’t seem to change. Marc said in his psych rotation one of his teachers put it this way, “Some people are metal, some are glass.” I guess this female was so fragile something inside her simply shattered. The male in machta with her is still in stasis in his cryo pod.

Things are different on the bridge tonight than they have been. Not only is A’Dar’s body a tight, unforgiving slab of muscle, but the tension is so thick I can almost taste it.

“Worried?” I ask as I keep my eyes focused on the front screen.

“Aye,” he rumbles against my back.

A’Dar

We arrive on Xenon tomorrow. There isn’t a male on board whose mind isn’t focused on this.

At first, I told myself the reason we couldn’t hail our home planet was that our equipment was old, but we’ve been picking up chatter from all across the galaxy just fine. Then I calmed myself by thinking that hailing frequencies must have changed a lot in the last two thousand years. But Ran’Kin has repeatedly told me the truth of the matter—there is nothing coming from the planet.

My officers and I have come up with several options of what to do if the planet is uninhabited, but I have made no decision. We need to know what we’re working with, and I have to see it with my own eyes.

As Maya turns on my lap, her hip grazes my cock. The simple brush of her clothed body against my clothed body awakens my seldom-dormant machta. What a treasure she is. The light of my life, my new reason for living, and the fulfillment of so many of my dreams.

Tonight, fulfilling machta will do more than physically ease my body. It will ease my mind.

She must feel my cock hardening beneath her ass because she peers up at me and smiles.

“Forward stairwell, mate?” she asks with a cocked brow. “Maintenance closet across the hall?”

“Is our cabin too boring already?” I accuse.

“I’m saving that for after we take the edge off.”

Her small hand grazes the hard ridge of my cock as she slides off my lap. She bends to whisper in my ear, “Forward stairwell. Don’t make me wait.”

Every male on the bridge knows exactly what we’re doing. Not only does everyone on board know we’re still in the heavy throes of machta , but to Xenon ears, her whispers hide nothing. My crew is already used to it. Those who have mates understand, and those without have no contempt, only well-hidden envy.

Moments later, we’re in the stairwell. My cock is out of my pants, and her uniform pants are open. Whoever designed them must have done it during a lucid moment of her own machta , because they have an auto-zip between her legs for easy access at times like this.

“Evil male,” she scolds. “You made me wait.”

“Evil mate,” I answer, then use the pad of my thumb to pull down her bottom lip for me to suck into my mouth, then nip. “You couldn’t have waited more than five seconds.”

“Five seconds too long,” she accuses when I release her lip.

Our coupling is quick and frenzied. I’m on to my beloved mate’s tricks. She knows I’m worried about what we’ll find tomorrow and is trying to distract me. She’s doing a good job of it.

She’s wet and ready for me, as always. I slide into her with a relieved groan.

“Like coming home, my heart,” I husk into the shell of her ear.

She stills, and I pause, wondering if I’ve been too rough or hurt her somehow.

Her small hands reach up, her palms cupping my cheeks.

“Did you hear what you just said, Adore?”

Her golden eyes seek mine as if they could bore into me hard enough to give me the answer to her riddle. When I shake my head, she continues, “This is home, mate. You and me. In this stairwell, or the storage closet, or our cabin, or in the back of the theater while we’re watching two-thousand-year-old Xenon movies where the female parts are played by males.

“Don’t you get it? You’re my home now, my love. And I’m yours. And no matter what we encounter tomorrow, whether it’s sad or happy news, it won’t break you because you’re already home. We both are.”

Although I didn’t think I could love this female more, it’s like my heart cracks open and exposes an inner chamber I’d never discovered before. Because she’s right. We’re already home.