by Lace, Lisa
Rev stopped too and put his arm around her waist, looking up.
"Yes," he said, "this world only has two moons, but they are beautiful."
"How many moons does your planet have?"
"Depends on which planet you are on."
"Your people have more than one planet?"
"We have an empire actually. One hundred and ten planets within our sector."
"What about your world though, where you grew up?"
"The capital planet has three moons: Endra, Mikten, and Phaben. There is a story about our moons. Do you want to hear it?"
"Sure."
"Endra was a powerful queen, mated to Mikten, our fiercest warrior, but Phaben, Mikten's twin brother, felt a mating urge towards Endra too. Mikten beat Phaben in battle for rights to Endra, so Phaben couldn't be her mate. However, Phaben would not be denied. On nights when Mikten wasn't with his queen, Phaben would steal inside her bedchamber and pretend to be Mikten."
"Didn't Endra know the difference?"
"She claimed she didn't because the men were twins and shared the same scent."
"I don't know. It sounds like Endra was getting double her pleasure."
Rev smiled. "Perhaps. It is said that when Mikten covers Endra in the sky, he lays with her, and when Phaben conjoins her, he is in her bed. When Mikten and Phaben are together, they fight over Endra, but neither can win. Their loyalty to each other is such that neither can hurt the other.”
"That's some story. What happens when the sun eclipses all of them?"
He shrugged. "It's never happened in living memory. It's an old story," he said.
"So where did you live on the capital planet?"
"The palace," he said nonchalantly.
"The palace? Wait, did your parents work there?"
"You could say that. They did carry out many diplomatic missions."
"Ambassadors?"
"Sometimes they are expected to be those. The brother of the Emperor is also expected to stand in the Emperor's place in formal ceremonies and such."
"The brother of the—" Tracy stopped short. "Wait, are you royalty?"
"I'm part of the royal family, but no, I'm so far from the chain of succession. I'm not royalty."
"I don't see the difference," she said.
"Only the Emperor, his siblings, his wife, and his children carry titles, and they are considered royalty. The rest of us have honored positions in court, but we are considered commoners like everyone else."
"On my planet," she said, "it's much different. Anyone who can claim a bit of royalty does so. I am related to the future King of England, in fact."
"You are?" he said dryly.
"Oh yes. My great, great, great, grand something was a brother of the man who was the head of the Spencer line in England, and the Spencers married into the Windsor-Mountbatten line. Technically I'm a cousin many times removed, but then again, so are a couple million other people in my country."
He laughed.
"I am duly impressed, my lady," he said with a chuckle.
"You should be." She stuck her nose in the air in mock imperiousness.
He took her arm and twirled her around to face him.
"I am impressed," he said huskily. "And awed. I could have searched the thousands of planets in the Aligned Worlds, and I would not have found someone as perfect as you are."
A few snarky responses ran through Tracy's brain, but the sincerity with which he stared at her stopped her from speaking. Again, a warm glow threatened to take over her heart.
"You better stop talking like that. Otherwise, I'll end up falling in love with you."
Rev blinked. "What are you talking about?"
"Love. The Big L. What two people feel so that they seek each other. The warm feelings that bind two people together?"
Her voice rose when she spoke these last words. Rev saw she was frustrated with trying to communicate what was to her an essential point.
"Tracy," he said. "I hear the word you are speaking, but my people do not have an equivalent word in our language. There must not be, otherwise it would translate through the language chip, but I assure you that I am bound. There is not a single force in this universe that can sever that bond. Even if we were to live apart, which seems to be your wish, I will always be your mate."
It was her turn to blink. "Always?"
"Yes. There can never be another for me now."
Her response shocked him.
"Oh fucking shit!" she sputtered. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I just did."
"No! I mean before. Don't you think you should have discussed this with me before you took a hunk of me with your mating bite?"
Rev recoiled, struck by the anger in her words.
"If I recall, we weren't doing much talking then," he said with heat. "And you insisted we have sex. Do you forget saying, 'You are denying me the only pleasure I'm getting out of this mess’?"
"I didn't know sex would bind you to me permanently! You don't even love me! Oh, this is bad, very bad."
Rev didn't know what to do in the face of Tracy's distress.
"I don't understand," he said.
"Of course you don't fucking understand, you big, dumb alien. Love is everything! It is the most important thing between a man and a woman, and your people don't even have a word for it!"
Rev stood there paralyzed, not knowing what to say, but he understood that something was missing. Something she found crucial in a mate. Again he struck the brick wall of his many failures these past few weeks, and he couldn't provide the one thing she found vital.
"So, it's all just sex to you," she said.
"Just sex? Tracy, the sex, the binding, that is everything. Those warm feelings that you speak of, they could or could not last, but a mate is a mate, always."
She stared at him, struggling to understand what he was trying to say. This was a cultural divide, not a biological divide. It was something that separated their two species.
"Sexual feelings may or may not last. Real love never dies," she said.
They looked at each other unblinking in the moonlight. Neither one said anything for a long time.
"We are aliens," she said finally. "Alien to each other."
Rev's face crumpled. Tracy kept talking, but he didn't hear her words. Did she understand what she was saying? What a rejection from a bond mate would mean to him?
"Things can never be the same between us, Tracy."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rev wouldn't even look at Tracy.
They walked towards the miners’ camp in the light of the double moons. The only sound was the relentless crunching of the darkened sand. Ever since Tracy had called Rev an alien, he hadn't spoken a word to her.
She didn't know what to say in her defense.
After all, it wasn't her fault that she was abducted, shoved out of an airlock to fall thousands of feet to an alien world, or found herself mated to a big green guy whose native language didn't have a word for "love."
Right?
Okay, maybe that last thing was a tiny bit her fault. Because when it came to dancing the horizontal mambo with Rev, she was a more than willing partner, and she didn't know why. It's not as if green was her favorite color.
Until now.
It was all very confusing.
But one thing she did know. Tracy did not like the silence between them.
"Rev."
He stopped walking and turned to her. His face, though healing rapidly, still had traces of the dark bruises he’d received when he was tossed out of a hovering spaceship like garbage.
Tracy wasn't usually the type of girl who bit her lip, but she was biting it now.
"What?"
"I'm sorry."
Rev's eyes widened just a bit, and then he looked away, shaking his head. When he looked back at her, his face was so sad Tracy wanted to cry.
"No, my Tracy, I am the one who is sorry."
He turned his back to her and continued to w
alk.
Tracy just stood there, tears blurring her vision. How dare he? How dare he just say he was sorry, as if everything were a huge mistake? As if she were a huge mistake?
"You fucking asshole!"
He turned back towards her.
"What?"
"You heard me! How dare you! How dare you treat me like I'm the biggest mistake you ever made in your life!"
In a second, his feet slid through the sand. He reached her and threw his arms around her.
"Stop. Stop this. You are not the problem. I am the problem. I haven't done a single thing right since my brother disappeared, and I mated with you without thought of the consequences. If I don't please you as a mate, then I have only myself to blame."
Tracy gulped when she realized how deeply she’d hurt Rev with her words. Even if his language didn't have a word for "love," he had feelings. She just might not understand all of them.
"I didn't say you didn't please me. But we're different. We're from two different planets, for heaven's sake."
"Where I come from, that is not a problem." He sighed and turned away from her again.
Tracy grabbed his arm and pulled him back to face her.
"Where I come from it's a huge complication. So let's deal with it."
He planted his feet apart in the sand and crossed his arms.
"So?" he said, as if tossing out a challenge.
"For your people, sex is the most important thing. For my people, love is. You tell me your sexual feelings towards me will never change, that they can't change because that's how your people are built."
"Yes," he said tersely.
"And I get that it is hard for you to understand I don't feel the same way, because I'm not built that way."
"Tracy, why do you keep stating the obvious?"
"Because I want everything between us to be perfectly clear. On top of everything, our mating, or whatever it is, is illegal in galactic society because I'm not from the right place."
"Tracy—" he started in protest.
She held up her hand.
"Let me finish. None of that matters."
"Of course!"
"I said, let me finish. If we let ourselves get bogged down in complexity, we'll never get clear of this mess. Yes, we've got big problems, but I've found that to get through big problems, the best thing to do is strip things down to the most essential parts and toss out the rest. We have a saying on Earth. 'It is what it is.' So, you and I are different in some ways, not different in others, and apparently, we are enough alike that we can get along. It is what it is."
"Are you done? Because I'd like to say something."
"No. Just wait. I like having sex with you, Rev. I more than like it. It's freakin' awesome as a matter of fact, so there are no problems there. If I should happen to call the sex we have 'lovemaking,' it's because great sex cultivates feelings of love in humans, and you'll just have to accept that about me."
He grinned. "Sex with me is awesome?"
Tracy smacked him in the shoulder and he winced. Leave it to a guy to concentrate on that.
"Yes."
"Good. Can I say something now?"
"Okay."
"You are amazing. I couldn't be luckier."
"What?"
"Just because I don't understand the 'love' you keep talking about doesn't mean I don't appreciate your qualities. You are brave, fearless, smart, resourceful, and compassionate. Don't think for a second that because you are from a nonaligned world that I think any less of you as a sentient being. In fact, all of that makes you sexier. The women in my society want a certain level of comfort before they’ll take a mate. We have to measure up in material ways before we are even considered. Tracy, you look into a man's soul to judge him worthy or not, and that's amazing. For that, I can't lose you. What's tearing me up is not knowing how to work everything out."
"Wow."
He smiled. "But I do feel better knowing you find me pleasing as a mate."
She rolled her eyes. "Back to sex again."
"What is wrong with that?" And Rev glanced down at her breasts, his thoughts obvious.
"Nothing. But we do have some problem-solving to do. Eyes up, mister."
She used her hand to guide his chin up so his eyes met hers.
"What do you see as the first order of business in this problem-solving?"
"Getting off this rock."
"Agreed."
"But not before finding my friend Carol."
"Okay."
"So we keep going to the miners’ camp."
"Yes."
"See, we had a plan all along."
"And the rest of it?"
"It is what it is. We have another saying."
"What is that?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
* * *
Rev liked how Tracy made things seem simple, or "stripped things down to their essential parts." He saw how her mind worked. She tore down mental roadblocks so a task didn't seem as difficult as it could be. It was a bit of mind trickery, but it seemed to have worked for her so far, so he was willing to try it.
What did he have to lose?
And he noticed that she figuratively and literally put one foot in front of the other in a steady pace, not overwhelming herself with things she couldn't handle.
Like the idea of being permanently mated to a man who came from outer space.
It was brilliant actually, this philosophy of 'it is what it is.'
He could imagine her conversation with one of her friends on Earth.
Yeah, I did go away, and I met the most amazing man. Well, he isn't a man, actually, but that's no big thing. Everything is in the right place and works just fine, if you know what I mean. Yes, you can meet him, but don't be surprised. He doesn't look like us, but it is what it is.
Of course, Tracy going back to the Earth she remembered was impossible. It was one of the crueler things women who were abducted had to face if they were ever rescued from the wiver rings. By the time they arrived in Aligned World space, they were thousands of light-years from home. The planet they knew was long gone. The family and friends they had would be dead. Even the culture they were familiar with would have morphed into something different.
If they were returned to their planet of origin, assimilation back into the current culture would be difficult, to say the least.
Rev wondered if Tracy understood this about her situation. She was an intelligent woman, but he didn't know how much exposure she’d had to the science of space travel.
He wasn't looking forward to having that discussion with her.
They had traveled most of the night, and the moons had dipped towards the horizon. The rocks that housed the miners’ colony first appeared as a faint dark smudge against the horizon, but they grew taller and more solid as they moved closer. The first edges of dawn backlit the small mountain range.
Suddenly a dark shadow swept over them, and Rev stopped in his tracks. Ahead of them, the transport from Jaal's spaceship pulled into position and hovered over the entrance to the miners’ camp. With a hard jerk, Rev pulled Tracy down into the sand.
"Hey!" she protested.
"You see that?" he said. "The transport."
Tracy looked where he pointed and nodded her head. "We have remarkable timing. Do you think it will land?"
"A transport doesn't have weapons, so, yes. If Jaal wants to carry out his plan, he'll have to."
"What kinds of weapons does Jaal have?"
"Besides his winning personality?"
"Funny guy."
He grinned at Tracy and looked ahead again. "From what I saw on the ship, energy rifles, concussive explosives, and flash-bang grenades."
"You guys sure know how to throw a party."
"The miners looked well protected there. Jaal might be thinking of using explosives. He's going to take his time planning this out."
"Why wouldn't he just go in?"
"Because by now, Bris would have to
ld him that the entrance is very narrow, only wide enough for a single person to walk through."
"That doesn't sound like it would facilitate shipping ore."
"You're right. So there must be another entrance."
"Maybe it's hidden, and he's looking for it."
"That's why he's hovering. He's trying to make a visual sighting."
"Makes sense," said Tracy. "How many men will he take on his assault?"
"Not many. There are only twenty crew on the ship, and not all of them qualify for weapons use. Depends on who he can enlist to risk their lives."
"He could have told them anything, like the miners are keeping you prisoner. The disguised version of you."
"That's a possibility."
As they talked, they watched the transport sink to the ground.
"Looks like he found something," said Rev.
"Hey, does your disguise still work?" Tracy asked.
"It's proven unreliable in the past, but I think it's working now, yes."
"Well, that gives us one angle, don't you think? It could get you close enough to the transport to hijack it."
"That won't help the miners or the women, though, and we can't make any decisions until we see how many people we're up against." Rev frowned. "Let's circle around to the right and see if we can learn anything else."
Tracy nodded her agreement. They broke to the right and walked a wide circle paralleling the rocks that rose above them. The sun was above the peaks now, and heat rose up from the sand in currents. Rev scanned the area, on the lookout for Jaal and his men, while Tracy kept her eyes on the ground.
"Rev!" Tracy whispered, excitement in her voice. "Look!"
There were very faint depressions in the sand, obviously tracks of a land vehicle, leading into the rock face.
Unfortunately, Tracy's whispers were quite loud.
"Well, look here," said a familiar voice. "The tracker. He lives!"
Rev turned to face Bris, who was pointing a laser rifle at him.
"And who's this?" Bris nodded towards Tracy. "Wait, is that one of the women we picked up on that backwater planet?"
"Leave her alone," growled Rev.
Chapter Twenty-Eight