Page 23

Jaz

While I stared at the dots gaining far too rapidly on us, my mind spun.

Mate? What the fuck did that mean?

Had I really just mated a Drake?

I’d wanted him, yes. Very badly. Okay, I’d come at him like a bitch in heat. I freely admitted that.

But mated ? That implied a permanency that I hadn’t intended at all. I’d thought we were mutually carried away in the heat of the moment. If I were honest, it had been building since that first moment in the alley. But desire did not dictate a permanent arrangement.

At least, I hadn’t thought it had.

My panic rose as my world view tilted. Why had this happened?

Was it caused by the serum? We’d hardly been in a safe place at the time, yet I’d been driven by something so powerful—I couldn’t begin to understand it.

And even through my dismay, my entire being, body and soul, quivered with the need to do it all over again.

As if something deep inside me believed what he was telling me…

But had I really just intended to screw him, and walk away? That seemed like kind of a bitchy thing to do. A human male would be more than agreeable to those terms. But he wasn’t human.

He certainly wasn’t human.

He was still inside me, but not nearly so tight, now. I supposed trying to outrun a battlecruiser on one engine might have something to do with it.

“Need a closer look at what that planet offers,” he said through gritted teeth.

Which was a polite request for navigation.

I hit the harness release, and disengaged carefully.

He inhaled sharply as I slid off him, every inch—and there were many—sending electric zings through me.

I staggered on wobbly legs over to the navigation seat, and strapped in.

Took a deep breath, and began tapping at the touch screen, calling up Ssanue’s charts.

As I did so, his words echoed through me. Do you want this? I have to know, Princess Jazmin.

The answer to that had been simple and driven by raw, primal desire. He hadn’t said anything about mating, though.

I wanted to be free. Not mated to one of the very creatures I was running from .

Right?

Yes. I felt betrayed. Tricked into something I’d not agreed to. Maybe by the serum? But definitely by my own body.

And by Zyair. If he’d known this might happen, he should have told me.

I needed distance, like, now. But something inside me wailed, even as the thought passed through my mind. Did they really only do this locking thing when they mated? How did his body even know I was mate material?

No, Dammit. I had not agreed to mate a Drake.

Far too many questions, and this was not the time to demand answers. At least I could now formulate the questions without his damned cock vibrating me to another climax. Which had been awesome. Spectacular. Breathtaking. Okay, I didn’t have the adequate words for what I’d just experienced.

Focus, Jaz . We were close enough to the planet to see that the clouds obscured pretty much all of its surface. And these weren’t white fluffy friendly clouds. They were dark and roiling, with lightning shooting through them.

I scanned the data popping up on the screen. “Five main continents. Only one has anything remotely approaching dry land—looks like a pretty wet place. Huge sections of the landmasses are more swamp than anything else. Unless we’re interested in an ice vacation—there are frozen areas at the poles.”

More alarms sounded. “Our remaining engine is failing,” Zyair said. “Swamps are good, so long as they do not suck us twenty feet down. Softer landing.”

I eyed him. “Are we going to be able to land?”

His mouth twisted as he scanned the gauges. “Repulsorlifts are at 30 percent.”

That wasn’t good. I grimaced and hit the ship-wide comm unit. “We are attempting a landing at Ssanue, but we will be coming in hot. So strap in and brace for impact.”

“Are you trying to get us killed?” Kurt’s shrill voice replied.

“Feel free to exit at will,” I snarled back. “The airlock is available.”

Silence. Then a click.

“I do not like this Kurt.” Zyair’s voice had dropped a full octave. “For how long have you known him?”

“Most of my life. He’s my half-brother’s friend, the company’s head of security, and the major pain-in-the-ass jerk who wanted to apply for a license to mate me.”

At first, he didn’t respond. Then he growled, “You will never be his mate. Or Senaik’s, either.”

The viciousness of the tone had me shooting him a glance. Although he refused to look at me, his jaw was clenched so tight that muscles were jumping in his cheek.

“I agree,” I said. “But it is just one of the reasons I can’t go back.” I cast another look at the navcube, and sucked in a breath. Four of the dots had all but caught up, and they were spreading out. “They’re trying to line us up for an EMF containment field.”

His mouth pulled even tighter. “Shut down power to everything except that one engine.”

My fingers danced over the array of switches and buttons.

The lights on the small bridge dimmed, and then went out.

The ship was oddly quiet without the internal machinery running.

But Zyair managed to coax more speed out of our laboring engine as we entered Ssanue’s atmosphere with the Nirzk ships hot on our tail.

Desperate to reach the cloud cover, Zyair pushed the ship into a dive.

“Shifting to sublight power,” he said through gritted teeth as he flicked more switches.

The Stardrifter shook, and the engine sounds altered.

Coming in with so little braking or flying power and almost no shields meant Stardrifter’s outer hull would heat up.

It was designed to take that, but the damage from the phaser had compromised its strength.

If severe enough, it could cause us to break up in the atmosphere.

Zyair had chosen to push our luck with a quick re-entry, and I didn’t blame him. If we’d tried to ease in, the Nirzk ships would catch us.

I swallowed as more red lights lit on the dash, but I silenced the alarms. Then the viewscreen went dark with swirling vapor.

We were entering the storm.

The moment we disappeared inside it, Zyair banked us hard left. He didn’t ease up on the throttle one bit as the Stardrifter quaked with the force of the winds—far stronger than anything Earth could contrive. Lightning flashed and hail pounded against the ship’s hull.

I swallowed and kept my eyes on the instruments that still functioned. The electricity within the storm was wreaking havoc with most of them.

Frustrated, I banged on the radar screen, which had dissolved into static. Even the navcube had succumbed and shut down. “I have no idea where the Nirzk ships are.”

“Exceptional,” Zyair muttered. “We cannot see them, so they cannot see us.”

He had a point.

“Any idea of the storm’s parameters?” he asked.

Thank goodness I’d been paying attention and hadn’t been still sitting on his vibrating shaft. “Before we shut down, the gages estimated it extended over most of this continent.”

Zyair grunted and banked again. The next few minutes were a hodgepodge of high velocity maneuvers that gave me a measure of gratitude for not just having eaten. It was much easier to pilot such a thing, than be the audience for it.

“Shaftz, bro,” Xandros complained over the comm. “I am going to disgorge my chocolate chip cookies. Land already!”

“Working on it,” Zyair muttered.

“Where’d the chocolate chip cookies come from?” I demanded.

“Galley cupboard,” Xandros confessed. “Hidden behind the kale chips.”

“Next time, I do the flying,” Rhodes stated, bringing us back to the task at hand.

Zyair snorted a tense laugh. “When we go on a sightseeing cruise, then you can fly.” He pushed down on the column, and the Stardrifter obediently dove.

We were pointed almost straight down. “The altimeter isn’t working,” I yelped.

“The cloud cover should give way in time,” Zyair said through clenched teeth.

“‘Should’ is not reassuring!” My hands clamped around the armrests while my mind frantically searched my memory—were there mountains on this continent?

Suddenly, the clouds thinned, and we could see. Zyair yanked back on the column and the thrusters at the same time, leaning forward to fire the repulsorlifts .

It wasn’t a maneuver for the faint of heart. And not one I would have tried with a compromised ship. The Stardrifter screamed.

Or at least, something did. Maybe it was some one …

Might have been me. And it might have been inappropriate.

Any effort to push air past my throat was thwarted when I was slammed forward against the restraint harness. The repulsorlifts struggled to kill our considerable momentum. I caught the merest flash of what looked like buildings beneath us—then we were snapping tree limbs as we fell from the sky.

Why couldn’t I tell if we were about to die? Did that mean we were about to die?

The Stardrifter hit something more substantial than a branch, and slewed around.

Everything went dark.

I blinked.

The Stardrifter’s dashboard came into focus—and beyond it, a completely black viewscreen. They were oddly skewed, as though I were no longer in the navigator’s seat.

I frowned. My head hurt, and when I raised my hand to it, my fingers came away bloody. When I squinted, I saw rivulets appearing in the blackness on the screen—water, washing the dirt away.

I was wrapped in warmth, and when someone breathed into my hair, I realized that I was held in strong arms. Zyair, sitting on the floor.

“Welcome back, my little Jazminite.” Concerned and somewhat frantic green eyes peered into my own. The fingers that traced my forehead trembled, ever so slightly. “Are you okay? Say something!” The fingers gently poked?—

“Ouch. Dammit, Zyair, that hurts! Don’t touch.” I pushed his fingers away. “And put me down. I don’t need to be cradled like a kitten.”

“What is a kitten?”

“A baby cat.”

“Is that one of those little felines that catch rodents?”

I peered up at him. “You’ve never seen a cat?”