by Kit Tunstall
His mate.
It was inconvenient and unexpected, but he couldn’t deny he’d experienced the mating flare. What else could such an intense reaction be? Orix certainly hadn’t expected to find a woman who stirred his mating instinct under the circumstances, at least not at this time. He hadn’t even considered in more than a passing fashion that one of the Earth women might be a possible mate for him. His primary concern had been security and doing the right thing, and while those remained focal points for his attention, he couldn’t deny he was quietly obsessing about the woman he had barely seen.
When the interminable meeting finally concluded, the first thing he was going to do was see if he could track her down and confirm his reaction. If it was the mating flare, Orix had no idea what to do next. Claiming a partner right then was inconvenient and more than a little dangerous. He couldn’t afford anything that cost him his focus, especially since he soon gleaned human technology would offer little resistance to Emperor Aryk and his remaining armada.
It was up to Orix and the rest of the defectors to protect Earth, particularly the human women, from the emperor’s machinations. The task was monumental and required his full attention. It would help if he knew what Aryk planned to do next, and if he could stop thinking about the woman with her golden-brown locks and wide blue eyes that had seemed to dominate her face during the brief millisecond they had locked gazes.
Mary Catherine, or Mac as she was commonly known, had been running late, an unintentional side effect of an unplanned nap in her quarters during her afternoon rest break. She had woken to furor in the consulate, everyone stirred up first by the biological attack yesterday, and now by the arrival of aliens with unknown intentions.
While she was interested and just as eager to know their motives as everyone else, her primary focus was where it had been since Dr. Wy had given her the nanotechnology months ago, and she had volunteered to stay at the consulate, first as a companion to the Earth women who had been impregnated against their will, and later as caretaker to the infants whose mothers had not survived.
She had literally stumbled to a halt when meeting the fierce gaze of the one-eyed man seated at the head of the conference table as she had rushed past the doorway. For just a moment, all thoughts had fled, and her mind hadn’t been on reaching the nursery or reviewing the tasks ahead of her. For that earthshattering second, her entire world had revolved around the alien male, and everything else had ceased to exist.
It had been only a brief moment in time, but even now, hours after it had taken place, Mac’s heart was still prone to racing unexpectedly whenever she remembered that moment. She’d never been drawn so intently to a man before, and she certainly hadn’t expected to have any kind of connection with the aliens. Not that she harbored prejudice toward the ones she knew and worked with on a regular basis, including Dr. Wy, Commander Darvig, and the contingent of Dazon caretakers who had arrived from Dazonia Major to assist with caring for the newborns.
However, she had endured a traumatic experience at the hands of Jorvak Ha, one that she would’ve assumed would predispose her to being unable to find any of the Dazon males attractive. Apparently, she had been wrong in her assessment.
The baby she was holding cooed up at her, forcing her to break her mental reverie, and she smiled down at the little boy. Unlike the typical Dazon male who wasn’t a human hybrid, baby Jake grew hair all over his head, including the sides, and didn’t have the sparse scrub that many of the men had on the otherwise-bare sections. Instead, he had thick curls, which had been a gift from his African-American mother, who had died birthing Jake and his two sisters, Carmen and Lily. He squealed at her, and she couldn’t help how her heart melted as she lifted him higher and bounced him gently.
She’d been appalled to discover the caretakers doled out only a minimal amount of affection to the infants, following the protocol established in their rearing facilities. It was a protocol she had quickly halted with the commander’s full support, but just because she encouraged the caretakers to interact didn’t mean they always did. Many of them still approached the task of caring for the infants as a job and avoided emotionally engaging with the children.
Though she had a few human volunteers who stopped by often on random schedules to help out and cuddle any baby in need, her determination to ensure that each of the infants received the necessary attention and affection often meant she worked long hours in the nursery and had an erratic sleep pattern. It was a small sacrifice to ensure the sixteen children whom Commander Darvig had entrusted to her care received the best upbringing possible, considering they had no mothers or fathers. Their mothers were dead, and their fathers were either part of Ha’s original crew of scientists or had been uninterested in their human-hybrid offspring when Dr. Wy had informed them of the conception, births, and subsequent deaths of the human mothers.
To her knowledge, only Valkor Tosh had claimed his offspring, and that fortunately had a happy ending, because he’d also claimed the mother of said offspring. She had only seen Jessminda Patel and Valkor Tosh on a handful of occasions, but they always struck her as happy and content despite the rocky start to their relationship.
It was difficult not to envy them, or the ambassador and the second prince. She knew of at least one other match that had been made during the debacle, but she had not spoken with Jada Washington since the day of the rescue, nor seen Inquisitor Ryland Breese in the intervening time despite living at the consulate. Perhaps they visited the consulate, but she wouldn’t know for sure. She spent seventy percent of her time in the nursery, another twenty-five percent sleeping, and perhaps five percent mingling with others who lived at the consulate or visited for different purposes.
Jake tugged on a strand of her hair, wrapping it around his pudgy golden fingers and bringing it to his mouth. She shook her head at him and brushed it back, making him whimper in protest. “Shush, little man. Hair isn’t good for you.”
“I’m not surprised he’s drawn to it, having never seen anything so beautiful in all my life,” said a deep male voice behind her.
Without even turning to look, she knew on an instinctive level it was the scarred warrior from earlier who spoke to her. Her nerve endings felt raw, and she shivered with anticipation, not anxiety, when she turned to face him.
Being so close to him, and the focus of his attention, was even more earthshaking than their brief encounter earlier. Her mouth was dry, and she jiggled the baby to have something to do, and as a way to divert her attention from him for a moment, just to compose herself. “I…” How very eloquent of her.
He gave her the tiniest of smiles before his attention drifted back to the little one in her arms. “He’s a beautiful child. Is he yours?”
The maternal side of her softened toward him, even though the feminine side of her was still uncertain—or at least uncertain about how long she could keep her clothes on around him. Suppressing that thought, and knowing it was not going to happen, because she wouldn’t let herself be so irresponsible, she waved a hand around the facility, where ten cribs formed a row. A couple of the babies preferred to sleep alone, but most preferred to be with their sibling or siblings, depending on how many had survived the births. “I guess you could say they’re all mine.”
His brow ridge, minus eyebrows as was common to his race, inched upward slightly. “How is that possible, Earth woman?”
“Mac,” she said through lips that wanted to stick together from their sudden dryness. “My name is Mac Jones, and I’m the head caretaker for the infants who were orphaned from Ha’s irresponsible and illegal experiments.”
He grimaced, looking disgusted. “That was a tragedy, and it clearly remains one.”
She stiffened slightly. “What he did was a crime, and what happened to the mothers was a tragedy, but each of these little babies is special to me, and to your people. They represent a new future and a new hope, but only if we can find an amicable way to help each other.”
His one eye
, a startling lilac color, darkened at her words. “I know you speak in generalities, Mac, but the idea of the two of us working together makes my hearts race with anticipation.”
“Oh,” she said softly, once again cursing her lack of eloquence in the face of such an admission. Her physical and sexual interactions with the opposite sex had been minimal, leaving her with little idea how to proceed. She might be thirty-seven, but she had the experience level of a teenager. Kaiser’s Syndrome had struck her down when she was seventeen, because she’d had a particularly rapid onset and severe level of debilitation.
If it hadn’t been for the Dazons coming to Earth so Ha could experiment illegally on Earth women, she might have been dead by now. She certainly would have wished to be, having spent the last two years before her kidnapping wishing she would just die, but not having the physical ability to initiate the process herself.
Now, she was grateful she hadn’t been able to end her suffering at the time and oddly thankful for the results of her kidnapping, at least on a personal level, but the resulting fallout was mind-boggling. She had barely begun to process that roles had drastically reversed now, and the women who had once been healthy were now the ones who were ill, while most of the sufferers of Kaiser’s Syndrome had received nanotechnology over the intervening months since Dr. Wy had set up his clinic at the consulate on the Moon.
The only remaining healthy women had either been at the consulate during the deployment, or were in isolated pockets of the Earth where the technology hadn’t reached. Those areas were scarce and few. Even trying to think at that scale gave her a headache and made her grateful for the comforting confines of the nursery and her clearly defined role within it.
There was nothing clearly defined with the man standing in front of her, a man whose name she still didn’t know. She licked her lips, finding it necessary in order to speak, and she didn’t miss the way his gaze flared with heat, and the mimicking motion of his own tongue across his lips, which made warmth fill her stomach. “It’s difficult to work together when I don’t know your name, sir.”
“General Orix Monash at your service, Mac.”
A general. Wow. “What’s happening here, General Monash?”
He took a surprising step forward, swallowing the space between them. She held her breath when his hand lifted, releasing it in a jerky fashion a second later as he simply smoothed his hand down Jake’s full head of curly hair. “That remains to be determined, Mac.”
“General—”
“Orix.” He practically growled his name, but not in a menacing fashion. Rather, it had a smoky undertone of sexual excitement that even her naïveté couldn’t fail to discern. “I wish to hear you say my name—loud, long, and often.”
Her cheeks heated, and she gave him a look full of bewilderment. “Why, Orix?”
He visibly shuddered with pleasure when she spoke his name in velvety tones. “The moment I saw you, I felt it.”
“It?”
“The mating flare. It’s an instinct that has faded or disappeared among most of the Dazon males, and I never expected to feel even the faintest stirrings of it, and especially not for an Earth woman I saw only in passing. It was an inconvenient surprise to want to mate with you.”
She’d been on the edge of breathlessness, but now she glared at him. “If it’s that inconvenient, perhaps you should just ignore it?”
Orix laughed, a deep and hearty sound. “I would love to, belisa, but I don’t think I could even if I tried. To be honest, the timing is terrible, and I shouldn’t be distracted, but I don’t wish to ignore what I’m feeling.” He took her free hand, the one not cradling Jake, and brought it to his mouth. It was an intimate gesture, far too intimate considering the short length of their acquaintanceship, but she didn’t protest or try to pull away when he pressed his lips against her knuckles. “Do you want me to try to resist the pull I feel toward you, Mac?”
She surprised herself by shaking her head, even as she pulled her hand away from him. “This is… I don’t how to deal with this, Orix. I don’t know much about male and female interactions, but I know it’s certainly not common for Earth men to just blatantly declare they want to mate with women who interest them, so I need time to sort it all out and figure this out.”
He nodded, looking unsurprised by her words. “I shall do my best to give you the time required, but I can make no promises that I’ll stay away from you. There’s a compulsion there, a force with which I am unfamiliar, or was until today. It’s pushing me toward you and driving my need to claim you. I give you fair warning, Mac Jones, that I will claim you.”
Her mouth dropped open, but she had no time to form a reply as he inclined his head just once to her and disappeared from the nursery, moving surprisingly quickly and gracefully for a being who was over seven feet tall and almost as broad-shouldered as the doorway. Her mouth was still open, and she closed it with an audible click as she looked down at Jake, who was smiling up at her.
She wished she could smile, and on one hand, she had the urge to grin like an idiot. The sensible part of her tried to rein in that reaction, reminding her of all the reasons why it was a bad idea to get involved with an alien, especially an alien general who would likely be involved in battles and might not survive the unfolding conflict with Dazonia Major. The last thing she needed was to get her heart broken, or lose the love of her life. It would be better to steer clear of him and dissuade his stated intentions than risk that outcome.
That was the sensible course, but for the rest of her shift, as she held babies, interacted, played, and changed diapers between bottles, she was preoccupied by thoughts of Orix Monash, and what he had meant by claiming her. The physical part was easy enough to imagine, but she wondered if he meant something more than a simple fling. The only way to find out would be to embrace the madness, and she already decided that was a bad idea.
When she left the nursery later in the evening, preparing to get a few hours of sleep before returning, all her common sense and stern mental lectures didn’t keep her from looking for the general on the way to her quarters, or from feeling disappointed when she didn’t see him in the halls before she entered her assigned room, the hydraulic door closing behind her with a soft hiss that seemed to announce what a fool she was.
She was smitten with the general, and no amount of common sense could prevent that reaction.
Chapter Two
Orix had a pounding headache from two relentless days of little sleep and countless meetings with the commander, Second Prince Ysaak, and various Earth officials. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he said very clearly to Jordan Saunders, “I have no idea what the Emperor’s intentions are, Ms. Saunders. No matter how you phrase the question, the answer will always be the same. I don’t know his motives or his objectives. I don’t have any insight to share with you on what possible methods he might use to attack, and I don’t have a concrete or foolproof plan that will prevent him from abducting the women whom he infected with the retrovirus.”
Her relentless suspicion was starting to get to him, and his stirring temper was only making his throbbing head that much more noticeable. It throbbed roughly in time with his cock, which made him think of Mac, which only intensified the throbbing in both his groin and his head. It was a vicious cycle, and he was becoming convinced the only way to break it was to see her again.
He’d given her two days. That was all the space he could manage, and he probably wouldn’t have been able to hold out for that long if it hadn’t been for the demands on his time. Everyone was in a panic, and rightfully so, but they were just covering the same ground again.
Deciding he’d had enough, at least for the time being, he stood up from the table where he’d sat for far too long—long enough to make his ass numb—and looked at the three people spread out farther down the table. “All we can do is be ready for an imminent attack and attempt to work together as seamlessly as possible. I’m attempting to establish contacts within the rem
aining military, Dazons whom I’m certain don’t agree with what the Emperor is doing, but perhaps lacked the conviction or opportunity to defect. My hope is they can provide us intelligence from that side. In the meantime, I plan to take a brief rest from this.”
Saunders’ mouth dropped open, and she looked outraged. “You can’t just take a break and walk away until we know what we’re doing here.”
Orix flexed his shoulders in an attempt to loosen them, though the president’s daughter seemed to take it as a sign of intimidation from the way her back stiffened, and her outraged expression deepened. “You’re not a soldier, Liaison Saunders, so you don’t understand how this works. We can have all the plans we want, and it’s a good thing to plan for all contingencies, which I’m certain Sash, Ysaak, and I have done for the past two days, but in the end, you have to expect the unexpected and remain prepared for anything.
“Planning will only take you so far. In the interim, this is exhausting and futile work, and we need all our soldiers rested and ready to fight, myself included. Now if you’ll excuse me...” He didn’t wait for further reply from the younger Earth woman or his other Dazon companions at the table. With an abrupt nod in their general vicinity, he turned on his heel and marched out of the conference room.
He’d only been at the consulate for two days, and he still rested in his own quarters on his ship, but rather than fold back to the captain’s quarters on the Nembria, he allowed his brain to set the path, his feet complying instantly as he mentally plotted the route to the nursery from the conference room.
Fortunately, the consulate was laid out in an easy design that facilitated quick adaption to its layout. There were also maps at each turn that could visually or audibly guide a visitor who was lost. He needed no such assistance and soon arrived at his destination.
For a moment, his stomach felt like it was curled into a tight ball that was twitching, like the way a Veluvian hand mine pulsed milliseconds before it exploded. A mental image of his gut exploding and painting the walls around him with his viscera had him grimacing, almost as much as the sudden bout of nerves. He was ridiculously excited, yet anxious, at the idea of seeing his mate again.