Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
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Gannon & Willow’s Story
Uoria Mates V | Book 2
Ruth Anne Scott
Personal Note
Thank you so much for your interest in this book and the Uoria Series as a whole. Uoria Mates launched my career as an author in 2015. Since then it’s been a multiple time bestseller and read by thousands of raving fans. I’m truly humbled by your support.
This is the fifth and final Uoria Mates Series and should be read in order. If you’re a first time reader, worry not, I’m including the complete Uoria Mates I for your viewing pleasure to get you started. To read this book, please read the Uoria Series (now conveniently available in complete box sets) in the following order.
Uoria Mates I
Uoria Mates II
Uoria Mates III
A Uoria Christmas
Another Uoria Holiday
Uoria Mates IV
Again, if you’re brand new to Uoria, I’m including the complete Uoria Mates I to get you started. I’ve included some extras and goodies for you as well, don’t forget to check them out.
Buckle up and let’s go on this sci-fi romance adventure!
“Dreams and dedication are a powerful combination.” – William Longgood
Chapter One
Willow stared down at the cup sitting in front of her, her fingertip tracing the delicate edge. Nana tipped the teapot over it, allowing the shimmering amber tea to obliterate the dainty pink flowers and feathery green leaves painted along the nearly translucent white inner wall. This caused her to jump slightly and look up at the older woman, wondering how long she had been in a daze. Nana smiled at her and settled into the chair across the table. As Willow looked at her, she wondered, not for the first time, what this woman’s real name was. For as long as she had known her, everyone had called her Nana and had never questioned it. One day she might ask, but somehow it felt disrespectful to pry, and like if she did she would be breaking the comfortable connection that they had.
Nana reached forward and used tiny silver tongs to pick up a cube of pink-tinted sugar from the matching silver tray in the center of the table and rest it onto Willow’s spoon, then selected two more for herself. Willow stirred the sugar into her tea, watching the crystals disappear into the hot liquid and spread their sweetness and the hint of rose that was Nana’s signature through the drink. They sat in silence for a few moments, each tending to their tea in a way that felt choreographed as if they were trying to use up as much time as they possibly could augmenting their cups and taking their first, cautious sips. This was unusual for them. Their friendship was one built on years of knowing each other and a comfortable rapport that always led them into easy, relaxed conversations that could stretch for hours without either of them noticing the passage of time. Now, though, it felt like they were barely occupying the same space.
Instead, they were two individuals in their own separate bubbles, positioned near each other but not truly with one another. There was something happening, something that had changed in the home that was altering the way that Nana was thinking and acting. Willow took another sip of her tea and looked around herself. In the little more than a month since she had last been in the home visiting with Nana, the environment had shifted in a way that was obvious but not tangible. She could feel that there was something in the space that wasn’t as it had been, but she couldn’t specifically see anything that was amiss or that had been moved or added since her last time sitting at this table. She turned toward Nana and saw that she was holding a plate of pecan cookies out to her. Willow took one of the treats and rested it on the edge of her saucer.
“Something’s different,” she said. “Did I visit at a bad time?”
Nana had taken a bite of her own cookie and shook her head as she worked on chewing and swallowing the bite.
“No,” she finally said. “Now is perfect.”
“You just seem distracted. I don’t want to keep you from anything if there is something that you need to be doing.”
“No,” Nana insisted again, reaching across the table to rest her hand on Willow’s. “I’m happy that you stopped by. It’s good to see you. Things have just been busy the last few weeks. That’s all.”
“Busy?” Willow asked, taking another sip of her tea to help her look casual and not as though images of the gorgeous man she had just met were still flickering through her mind. “Anything exciting?”
Nana looked as though she were thinking as quickly as she could, trying to figure out how to respond. She settled her own teacup into the saucer and picked up another cookie.
“Well, Aubrey is back home…with her new husband.”
Willow was slightly taken aback by the explanation, though it seemed tacked on and not complete. She gave a slow nod.
“Wow,” she said. “I didn’t even know that she had gotten married.”
Though she tried hard not to let the sound of it seep into her voice, Willow was offended by the thought of Aubrey getting married without her even knowing about the impending wedding. She had been close with Nana for many years, and even though she hadn’t ever had a particularly meaningful friendship with Aubrey, Willow would have expected that if Nana’s granddaughter were getting married, she would have been invited, or at least told that the wedding was happening.
“It was very sudden,” Nana said. “I’m honestly still trying to get used to the idea myself. There wasn’t even time to plan a proper wedding. It was just a little ceremony right in the backyard with a few of the groom’s friends. That’s actually how I met Gannon. He is a friend of Jonah’s and is staying here for a bit.”
“Staying here?” Willow asked in surprise. “He’s living with you?”
Nana laughed and leaned back in her chair, looking more like the woman who Willow knew.
“You make it sound so lascivious,” she said. “I could only hope that something that exciting would happen in my life with a man like that. No. He had to move out of his former home pretty unexpectedly and hasn’t quite settled into a new place yet. I’m just rattling around in this big old house all by myself when Aubrey isn’t home, so I figured that I might as well offer him some of the extra space that I have.”
Willow nodded, involuntarily letting out a sigh of relief.
“Oh. That makes sense. That’s nice of you to help him out.”
Nana laughed again and took a last sip of her tea before filling up her cup again. She leaned back in her chair and took a long sip as she evaluated Willow.
“So, what’s making you so curious about Gannon?” she asked.
Willow could feel heat burn over her cheekbones and she looked back down into her teacup at the pink flowers that were starting to appear over the tea again.
; “I’m not curious about him,” she said. “I just noticed that things around here seem a little different and so I was curious about that.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Nana said. “It seems to me like you were all too happy to meet him and to ask him to help you out with your plants.”
Willow’s eyes snapped up to her.
“I didn’t mean anything by that!” she said, knowing that her desperation to cover her tracks was incredibly obvious even though she was trying not to let it be. “He has just done such a good job helping you take care of your plants and I’ve been struggling with some of mine, and I thought that if it was alright with him and with you that he might be able to help me fix the problems that I’ve been having with them.”
“And it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s tall, built, and gorgeous?”
“Nana!” Willow gasped.
She knew that the elderly woman tended to be bawdy, and usually she found it delightful, but hearing Nana talk about Gannon like that was shocking. Nana laughed and waved her hand at Willow as if to calm her.
“Alright, alright,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’ll stop.” She took another sip of her tea. “But I did see the way that you were looking at him.”
“Nana!”
“Alright. I’m sorry. I’m done.” She settled her cup onto the table. “So, tell me about these issues that you’re having with your plants.”
Willow drew in a breath and leaned forward on the table, starting to describe the puny strawberry plants that she had been trying to nurture and cajole into bloom. Though she was relieved that Nana was no longer teasing her about Gannon, it didn’t take the thoughts of him out of her mind. The attraction to him had been immediate and powerful, completely unexpected in its intensity, but also simply that it was there at all. It had been so long since she had felt anything like this for anyone, and she wouldn’t have expected to feel it so strongly for someone that she had just met, someone who she had never even seen or heard of until that moment.
There was something about Gannon that made him completely different than any of the men she had ever known or been attracted to. She could sense the shyness in him, but there was also a vague distance that at once made her even more intrigued by him and made her feel nervous. She had asked him to come help her with her plants impulsively, but now she couldn’t decide whether she really wanted him to come so that she could spend more time exploring the feelings that had come on so strong and so insistently, or if it would be better if she didn’t let it happen at all. There was a reason she had done everything that she could to try to avoid any of these types of feelings, and she feared that if she let herself get too far, it would only prove itself even further.
Chapter Two
Gannon sat on the window seat in his bedroom staring out at the grounds. The afternoon sun was slipping lower in the sky but he knew that there was still plenty of time for him to be out in the greenhouse working on the plants that he had been cultivating since just a few days after their arrival at Nana’s house. The plants were his refuge, his comfort, and the way that he was able to escape from the thoughts and memories that tortured him when he allowed them to slip into his mind. Now, though, it wasn’t thoughts of the facility or of Ryan that were forcing their way into his mind and causing the wave of emotion that was pushing against his chest and making him feel almost breathless.
Instead, it was the image of Willow that was still so clear in his mind that he could see every detail of her lovely face and the brightness of her smile. He could still see the strands of her coppery hair that trailed along the side of her cheek and the way that her long, slim fingers ran back through the rest of her thick mane when she was talking to them. He was drawn to her in a way that he had never been toward anyone else, and the feelings were both new and strange. They had come over him the moment that he turned and saw her, and they seemed to only get stronger with every moment that he spent near her. Even now that they were not near each other, the feelings were pounding within him, making it impossible for him to get her out of his mind.
He wished that he could go back down into the greenhouse, but he knew that in order for him to do that, he would have to go through the back door of the kitchen, and the ladies were sitting there drinking tea. As much as he would like to look at Willow again, the emotions that he was already experiencing were confusing Gannon and he didn’t know if he would be able to handle being that close to her again so soon.
The longer that he sat there thinking of her, the more he wondered if this tightening, pulling feeling in his belly was anything like the emotion that drew Jonah and Aubrey together. Though he hadn’t known either of them for very long, he had known Jonah for longer than he had known Aubrey, giving him the opportunity to recognize the difference between the man when he was on his own in the basement with Gannon and the others, and now that he was with Aubrey. There was a distinct change that had come over him in just the few weeks that he had been with Aubrey, something so powerful that it had led them to get married in a very brief time. The idea of marriage was something that he didn’t understand. He had never heard the word and he never would have considered the idea of people coming together and choosing to share their lives together.
Watching Jonah, though, he had seen the powerful change that came over him when he was able to be with Aubrey. The man seemed stronger and more determined, happier and more optimistic even when he was facing incredibly difficult moments. The two of them seemed to fulfill in each other something that was missing and now that they had been together for some time, Gannon had a difficult time imagining them without each other.
He wondered if what he was feeling now could be like that draw that had brought the two of them together and that had empowered them to bring the survivors out of the laboratory building and here where they had been safer and more comfortable than they ever had in their lives. The thought was thrilling. This was his chance, an opportunity for him to live the life that Ryan had taken from them from the moment of their birth. These feelings were his and his alone, something that no one had forced him to have or could control. In these feelings he was able to experience something that was totally within himself and that was another step in living a life outside of the facility, outside of Ryan’s grasp. Though he didn’t know if he would ever be able to understand the feelings that he was having, or act on them even if he did, just experiencing them showed him that he was more than just the living machine that Ryan had seen them as. There was more to him and he was beginning to find it.
As exciting as this was, though, Gannon also felt afraid. Breaking free of Ryan’s control and being rescued by Jonah and the rest of those who had come down into the facility was the turning point in his life. While lying in the reprogramming chamber, suffering the extreme consequences of the mistakes that he had made in the battle that they had fought in the main corridor of the laboratory building, his mind had spun with thoughts of what had bought him into this position yet again. He tried to think through the battle that they had fought and the efforts that he personally had put forth. He had struggled to understand what mistake he could have made, what order he didn’t follow, or what misstep he could have possibly made to cause him to be among those who were captured and forced into the brutal reprogramming. As he had thought about it, he realized that he had done the same thing that he had always done, putting him through the same horrifying paces that he always did when training, drawing the same blood, pushing himself into the same exhaustion. He knew that he had been chosen purely for the purpose of the Valdicians earning the favor of Ryan.
Ryan relished the idea of the hybrids going through reprogramming. He said that it made his soldiers stronger and more effective, but Gannon believed that he simply enjoyed the power that came from administering the suffering that came from the torturous process. As he lay there in between sessions, waiting for another wave of the pain and grotesque images that would be forced into his mind, he had felt h
imself changing. He felt a sudden surge of realization, an awareness that he had never experienced before. When Eden, Pyra, and the others had come into the room and released them, ushering them down into the basement and showing them concern and kindness, that awareness increased and he committed to himself that he wasn’t going let his training control him any longer.
Forcing their way out of the building was the first time that he had fought with the conviction that was within his soul rather than the training that had programmed him for violence and brutality. He had fought against the Valdicians and those hybrids still under the control of Ryan with everything that was in him, fueling himself with the anger and bitterness that had built up within him over his years of captivity, though he had never allowed himself to be fully aware of it until then. Gannon felt that he was in control of himself for the first time, as if he were starting to experience what life really was.
Now that he was thinking about Willow and the powerful feelings that were starting to brew within him, though, Gannon worried that that wasn’t enough. He had been transferred with the rest out of the facility and into the basement, then watched as those who were able to leave were brought out and onto the ships that would transfer them off of Earth. When they were ready he had followed Aubrey and Jonah’s guidance out of the basement and here to Nana’s home where they had been recovering and learning what it was to simply live. That didn’t mean, though, that they had been living real life. They had been living in a protected, controlled environment that allowed little to influence them. Though he had been able to start processing the emotions that he was experiencing and explore what it was to live without the tremendous controls, Gannon worried that he hadn’t yet experienced enough of the real world to challenge the training that was so deeply ingrained within him. He was afraid that there would be a time when something would happen and the training that he had undergone since he was just a child would rear back. There was a chance that he wouldn’t be able to control the impulses the training had created, and that if he was ever able to get close to Willow, he may hurt her. The thought was unnerving and he didn’t know how he was going to move forward.
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