Page 220 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

I could tell how that derailed him, he tilted his head back a little, as if he were trying to assess what I’d just said.

His brows lifted incredulously, so that I could see the bright glimmer in his intelligent gray eyes.

“My language?” he asked, confused, as if the man didn’t even know he’d just used the f-word.

“Dad!” Jett exclaimed. “We’re escaping, I knew you’d find us.

We have to hurry.” He wiggled out from behind me, slipped his hand from my sweaty grasp, and hurried over to Sunder, wrapping his arms around the male’s huge legs.

He was all vibrating excitement and happiness, while I was reeling with confusion from the bomb he’d just dropped on me.

“Dad?” I stuttered out, darting my eyes from the little peace-form-shaped Jett to the huge Tarkan in his battle-form.

With their shapes so different, I couldn’t tell if there was any family resemblance, but I struggled to recognize individual features in all the different species I’d encountered over the past five years, regardless.

“Escape?” Sunder said, echoing my tone almost exactly.

Then he made a laughing kind of noise. “Oh, thank the stars. I was going crazy wondering why I liked you so much.” My skin instantly burst into an intense blush I hadn’t experienced since I was fifteen.

My brain chanted, ‘He likes me!’ over and over, like this was the most important piece of information in all of this.

“Yeah,” Jett said, “Sunder is my dad, Aggy. He’s come to rescue us.

Now we’re all here, so we can go!” He reached out and took my hand again, but he also took one of Sunder’s big, clawed paws, his tiny hand dwarfed by those big fingers.

Tugging a little, the big male willingly came along, so that we were all standing clustered together.

Amar’s tiny little hand was what I focused on then, realizing that the small three-year-old had remained quietly tucked behind my skirts, observing what was going on with his huge blue eyes.

Feeling like I could finally act freely, I bent down and picked up the boy, hugging him to my chest. Like he’d done a million times since he was a baby, he curled his body against me, tucking his head beneath my chin.

When I looked up from my little charge, Sunder was staring at me, at Amar, so trustingly resting against me.

“Let me guess. You came here for that one,” he said, pointing at the small boy I was holding, “and I came for this one.” To indicate Jett, he rubbed a hand through the boy’s wild black mop of hair, making the kid squeal.

I nodded. “Amar is the son of my best friend.” He had only been missing for three months by the time I got here, but it had been enough to make the boy quiet and shy.

I hated how much his experience had traumatized him and would be forever grateful to Jett for taking on the role of ardent protector, despite his own young age and small size.

Though… if Sunder was his dad, Jett wasn’t going to stay small for long.

“We can’t stay here. Come on. If we hurry, nobody will realize that we weren’t where we were supposed to be,” Sunder said. He reached down and folded his hand around mine, urging me away from the door, the tantalizing nearness of freedom.

“Hold on, we’re right there, we can leave. This is the perfect opportunity to escape!” I protested as I dug in my heels in vain, but he just kept dragging me along. Watching me struggle made Jett giggle. I tried to pull my hand free, but his grip was much too firm.

“Yeah, and on the other side of that door is a courtyard full of slaves being addressed by their new Lord and Master. I know it looks like a good opportunity because it’s quiet inside this palace, but trust me, the place is swarming with security, especially the spaceport,” he explained in crisp tones, dipping down to throw Jett over one shoulder without breaking stride so he could hurry our odd party more quickly through the empty hallways.

“Did you even plan that far ahead?” he demanded.

“Did you have a ride ready off this planet? Or were you just winging it?” I was angry at being caught so unprepared, and apparently doing something that was going to get the boys and myself into really bad trouble if Sunder hadn’t stopped us—that is, if he was speaking the truth.

There was no denying that Jett knew him, likely, they truly were father and son.

So I had to believe that he had his child’s best interests at heart.

He’d come to rescue his son, so he wasn’t a bad guy.

He wasn’t a bad guy. My hormones cheered at that last bit, free at last to think guilt-free of his sexy muscles.

So he wasn’t exactly pretty, not with those features and those tusks, but he was all man.

I had changed from struggling against him to jogging at his side, but he still hadn’t let go of my hand.

I wasn’t sure whether I should try to extract myself again or bask a little in the physical contact.

The rough but warm texture of his skin felt good, and these past months, I’d been touch-starved without my family, away from Earth.

Let alone the fact that I hadn’t been with a man since my abduction, and it wasn’t as if my sex life had been rich before, either.

As we rushed past the bunkroom where the boys stayed and my assigned quarters next to them, I felt a pang of intense dislike at seeing these places.

I wanted us to be out of here. After I’d hyped myself up, running away with the kids impulsively earlier, it was like a slap in the face to be back here.

At least it didn’t seem like Jett or Amar were that bothered by it.

I felt the soft slap of Sunder’s tail hit my lower leg, and my eyes immediately jolted away from the doors to look at his backside.

He wasn’t looking at me, shouldering through the door and into the practice courtyard ahead of me.

Yet I had the feeling that he’d done that on purpose, distracting me.

Uron was still sprawled out on his bench in the corner—maybe even in the exact same position—but the bottle from his foul brew had disappeared. Had Sunder come in here, noticed we were missing, and still taken the time to get rid of that thing?

He let go of my hand, setting Jett down on his feet with a grin. “Good boy, I heard your little rumble. That was very clever.” He squatted to the boy’s level and rubbed a big, clawed hand through Jett’s unruly locks while the boy kept on beaming at him in the widest grin. “I knew you’d hear me!”

“I did,” Sunder confirmed, and I had the sinking feeling that Jett had led his dad right to us.

That was what that look had been about when I asked him to lead the way, thinking of how to get his dad to follow us.

I wanted to remain pissed about the fact that we were still stuck here, and that Sunder had been a little condescending about my failed attempt.

I had to admit, though, that Jett had been really clever, even if I had no clue what sound, exactly, he’d been making that had allowed his dad to hear him.

I hadn’t heard a thing, so it had to be a sound beyond my range of hearing.

“Yeah, that was smart, Jett,” I said. “You could have told me Sunder was your dad, though, we would have waited for him then.” He was just a kid, probably with conflicting instructions from the people he trusted.

Things would have gone a lot more smoothly if I’d just known that Sunder was his father.

For one, I wouldn’t have spent all of last night tossing and turning, equal parts aroused from that visit and terrified that I’d been found out.

Sunder and I shared a look, and in those deep gray eyes, I saw a similar thought, and then a flare of heat.

Oh, I was definitely not imagining his attraction to me.

Not that this was the time or place to act on such things; we had two small children relying on us to get out of there.

If I judged Sunder correctly, he was a man with a plan.

I had to figure out what it was and make sure he’d take Amar and me with him when he got out of there.