Page 24 of The Intergalactic Duke's Inconvenient Engagement
She took a step back from him. “Raz…”
“But I didn’t bringyou here to talk about mining opportunities,” he said briskly. “Not specifically. I wanted to show you the prospects of not returning to Earth.”
She stiffened. “What?”
“I was actually just coming to get you, which is why I found you in the hall, because I received word from the Earth envoy.” He paused. “Your sister is also inbound to Azthronos.”
“My…sister?” Rayna’s mind whirled as if the starmap had just turned upside down. “Vaughn is coming? Here? But…how?”
“On a spaceship.” He grinned at her, then just as quickly sobered. “She was looking for you after you went missing. We got word to her and she is ecstatic to hear you are well. She said to tell you she would never have stopped looking for you.”
When Rayna swayed in shock, he took her arm and led her toward a bench near the doorwaywhere they’d entered. They sank onto the seat side by side.
She clutched at his hand. “Really? She’s coming here? How did she get a fuckingspaceship?” She stiffened. “Did she steal it? She hotwired a car when she was eleven because she saw it on TV and she wanted to see if she could do it in real life. She would totally steal a spaceship too.”
He laughed. “Sounds like a little girl raisedby a big sister who would stand as a lure while her compatriots lurked, ready to pounce.”
Rayna snorted. “In my defense, I thought you were a bad guy.”
He looked down at their linked hands. “I’m not,” he said softly.
Flustered, she let him go and knotted her grip in the robe instead. “I want to talk to Vaughn.”
“You will, soon, but she and her partner have already started the long jumps tobring them here and they will be out of communication range for awhile.”
“Her partner?” Rayna shook her head. “Vaughn was never a team player. I guess thingshavechanged.”
He gazed at her steadily. “Probably because you were gone for one of your Earth Sol years.”
She reeled again. “What?” She almost shrieked the question. “A year?”
With one hand on her shoulder, he steadied her. “Blackwormkept you that long in stasis. Your sister had tracked you as far as the Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost in a place called Sunset Falls—”
“Intergalactic…DatingAgency?” She couldn’t help that her voice was getting even shriller with every outrage. Soon she’d be chirping in the ultrasonic range. “My sister was dating intergalactically?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. But apparently her partner,who runs an independent data recovery operation, had tracked Blackworm, who was using data from the IDA systems to capture Earther brides—”
She interrupted again. “Not brides. I can tell youIwasn’t dating intergalactically, much lessmarrying.”
“Ooo-kay,” he drawled.
Hearing him reflect her Earther-ism back at her only riled Rayna more. “I wasn’t even having one-night stands,” she railed.“You say closed worlds are backward, but Sunset Falls was so small it routinely ran out of condoms on Friday nights.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe because the Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost was there and they needed to test cross-species compatibility.”
“Cross-species…” She boggled at him. “Are you saying I couldn’t have gotten laid even if I wanted to because alien fuckers took all thecock-blockers?”
He winced, and she realized she’d reached her upper registers. “That IDA outpost was closed because of Blackworm’s corruption, but your sister and her partner were able to extract enough data to eventually help track back to the hidden space station. And you.” He eyed her. “So I guess you could get laid now.”
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob. “This is all so…crazy.”
“Which is why I wanted to show you this.” He nudged her slightly to face the slowly spinning stars. “I wanted you to see that it’s not all bad, not all Blackworms and black holes. There’s beauty here too, yes?”
The map—not to mention the room and everything she thought she knew—wheeled endlessly, and the seat seemed to vanish under her butt. Only the warmth of Raz’s thigh against her knee andthe rock-hard muscle of his shoulder against hers kept her grounded at all.
“Okay, okay,” she whispered. “My sister is coming, and she’s bringing a spaceship and her boyfriend—”
“Dejo Jinn is a hivre, and they aren’t male/female binary in quite the sense you mean, although your language lacks the nuance to—”