Hawk: Sky Mates (Intergalactic Dating Agency): a Sci-Fi Romance

by Susan Grant

  One last plunge and Kelly’s body shuddered underneath his and around his cock, pulling him with her over the edge. “Ah, Hawk…”

  His climax was explosive, mind-shattering. Everything collided then: pleasure, joy, relief. He spun in a storm of sensation, hers and his, her inner walls clenching around him hard, as if she were claiming him even as he claimed her.

  Mine. My mate.

  He didn’t care in that moment what the facts stated. What the scientists said. Beyond any doubt, he knew in his soul she was his.

  They rested for a while, then made love again. Afterward, they soaped each other in the shower, fooling around until Kelly warned him the hot water would soon run out. He doubted he’d have noticed the temperature change or cared if he had. He’d been more focused on learning every inch of her body.

  “This probably can’t happen again,” she said, scrubbing a towel over her wet hair. She wore a clingy white T-shirt over a pair of floral panties. Her nipples were clearly visible through the fabric of her tee as she looked at him through the mirror in front of her sink. His cock twitched, and he walked up behind her and molded his hands to her breasts. Yes, he was definitely obsessed with them.

  He was instantly hard.

  “Hawk.” She laughed and groaned a little. “You’ve got superpowers I don’t have. My legs are so wobbly I’m going to have to go sit down.”

  “I’ll let you rest—at least until tomorrow.” Then it hit him what she’d said. “What do you mean, we can’t do this again?”

  She turned in his arms. “It has to be a onetime thing.”

  He kissed her. “It’s been three times already.”

  “Three and a half.” She kissed him back. “If we count what I did to you in the shower.”

  He laughed against her lips, then felt her smile fade.

  “I’m worried how it’ll look,” she said. “If I’m running this program and I do get the ADO job because of it, people will think it’s because I slept my way to the top.”

  How could that be? On Sky’s End, no one used sex to vault ahead in rank. They used deeds. “You are too well respected for others to believe that.”

  “It’s taken years of hard work. Years of proving myself. It’s hard for women in leadership roles in male-dominated professions, Hawk. You don’t know. Your world is much more advanced in that regard. Here it’s different. People can think those things.” She shook her head. “Tonight was amazing. Okay, more than amazing. But we have to be able to work together too.”

  “I will redouble my efforts to be aware of the risk to your reputation. I would be lost without my co-liaison to advise me.”

  They kissed again, and she sighed against his lips. “You’re not helping.”

  “You kissed me!”

  “Mmm.” Another kiss. “You’re leaving in a few weeks. So there’s that too.”

  He did not want to think of that yet. “I will soon be out of your hair then, as the Terrans say,” he quipped.

  “Way to go, Hawk. Good use of a colloquial expression.” Then she pouted. “I don’t want to talk about you going home. It’s too sad.”

  “Nor I.”

  Yet another kiss.

  His thumbs were moving back and forth over her nipples; he couldn’t help himself. “You say this can’t happen again. They don’t feel as you do.”

  Her mouth tipped, and she looked down at the two points. “Little traitors.” She exhaled, took his hand, and started walking backward like they were back in O’Malley’s and she was teaching him how to two-step. Except there was no quick, quick, slow, slow this time. Only quick—right through her bedroom door.

  Chapter Eleven

  It can’t happen again.

  Or so she’d told Hawk.

  Except it had happened again.

  Ugh, Kelly thought. Her resolve had lasted all of two minutes.

  After more great sex, they went outside. They cuddled, naked in the dark, on their backs in her grassy backyard, wrapped in a quilt large enough for two.

  “Look!” she called out as a shooting star streaked across the sky.

  The meteor shower was breathtaking tonight. The sky was like a living thing, filled with movement and stardust.

  Hawk snatched her hand and pressed it to his lips. “Do you feel a little better about us?”

  She rolled her head sideways. “I guess we can keep things on the down low.” There was nothing against them having sex or a relationship, but it could raise eyebrows. “Fun for now” sounded good, but she didn’t want to think about Hawk leaving. The looming separation made her heart hurt.

  She came up on her elbow. He was a large man, very fit, his body solidly muscled. His stomach had more ripples than the corrugated roof on her shed. As she walked her fingertips over the ridges, climbing to his chest, his nipples pebbled. They had a lavender tint to them, and in the starlight his skin glistened as if wet. Her golden-brown skin was a sharp contrast to his. She lifted one of his braids to her face, tickling her tender lips with the silky end. Her man from the stars. With the tip of the braid, she traced the half wing tattooed on his rounded left pectoral muscle, then the blank space where the other half would go. If he had one.

  Am I his other half?

  Her life was here, and that wouldn’t change. Hawk’s life was an unimaginable distance away. That was enough motivation to not get involved.

  We already are.

  And she was falling in love with him.

  Hawk rested on his side, his head propped on his hand, watching Kelly as she watched the sky.

  “Ooh!” She thrust out her arm, her finger pointing. “There’s another one! I’m so excited you’re here to see this. This is the best show in years. The stream of debris we’re passing through is from the comet Swift-Tuttle. We call this the Perseids meteor shower because it comes from the direction of the constellation Perseus. That name comes from Greek mythology. Medusa… snakes… people turning to stone. But that’s a whole ’nother discussion.”

  Hawk grinned at her animated explanation. It reminded him of their messaging while he was still on Sky’s End and the bright spot in his day that were her perky replies—even as he’d struggled to maintain what he thought was decorum.

  But she drew him out the way no one else ever could, the playful, private core of him he revealed to nobody else. The curious, adventurous five-year-old who’d begged to see the ground… That scamp, forgotten for years, still lived inside him. It had taken a decision to plumb the Terran gene pool for Sky Mates to set him free. It had taken Kelly.

  As if she’d suddenly realized he was focused on her and not the stars, she looked sideways. “Is that TMI?”

  “TMI?”

  “Sorry, it’s an acronym. It means too much information.”

  “Have you given me TMI in your explanation of the meteor shower? Absolutely not.” He laughed and shook his head. “You could explain the history of the universe and I’d be fascinated.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. Affection and emotions far deeper swelled inside him, and he thumbed aside a lock of her hair. “How it is that you’re not mated? Why haven’t you married?”

  She laughed. “Aw, geez. You sound like my mom.”

  He laughed too. “I sound like mine. Both my parents actually. I don’t care. I’m infinitely relieved no one claimed you before I had the chance to find you.”

  “Claimed.” Her dimple popped into view. “It doesn’t work quite like that—not in this country anyway.” She rose up on her elbow. “It’s not that I didn’t hope to find someone to go through life with. I did.” She traced the outline of his sky warrior mark, raising bumps on his flesh. “You never found your better half either. That’s what this means, your tattoo, right?”

  “Correct. It’s the symbol of a Solo. Sky Mates wear a full set of wings.”

  “Do you ever wonder if you might still become a Sky Mate?”

  Her innocent question released a swell of unwelcome memori
es—the failed match attempts since his childhood, his parents’ repeated disappointments. None of it was his fault, but he bore the weight of his genetic incompatibility on his shoulders nonetheless. He’d let everyone down. “I have often thought if it was possible, it would have happened already.”

  “That’s how I feel too,” she said. “About finding someone. Then sometimes I think maybe it’s not too late and there’s still time for someone to bowl me over.”

  With his fingertip, he tenderly followed the line of her jaw, stopping under her chin to tip her head up. “Tell me, Kelly, what does it take to bowl you over?”

  He met her suddenly soulful eyes. Moisture filmed her gaze. “You’re doing a damned good job so far, Major Hakkim,” she said and pulled him to her mouth.

  Before dawn, Kelly returned him to the Webber Inn. It was Saturday, a day of rest and recreation—both unusual concepts. Two entire days devoted to the pursuit of nonpursuits. The weekend, the Terrans called it.

  He had no complaints. It meant more time in Kelly’s company. Later, she would accompany him and the Solos to a squadron picnic where they’d participate in the sport of volleyball among other things.

  After another shower and a nap, he caught up to Falcon and the team in the inn’s eatery for breakfast. Huge platters of food sat on the table. Fruit, eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy. Juice and coffee too. He wished Kelly were there with him, but she needed to rest. He smiled to himself, knowing how she’d gotten so tired.

  Falcon, naturally, didn’t miss his expression. With a lopsided grin, he asked, “Do you think there’s a chance she could be your Sky Mate?”

  Leave it to Falcon to ask such a question. He answered with a scowl.

  “Sure about that, sir?”

  “Of course I’m certain.”

  Wasn’t he?

  “One will recognize their mate right away,” he’d told Kelly, repeating what he’d always heard. “I’d feel the rightness of it—of her—in my body and soul. We’d be mates in every way—as aviators and as lovers.”

  He did feel the rightness of Kelly in his body and soul. He’d fallen for her the moment they met, before they’d met, and he’d only fallen harder the longer he was with her.

  It was most likely only ordinary attraction. After all, most citizens of Sky’s End experienced this. They met, mated, raised families. No one complained.

  Or… Falcon was right. Kelly was his Sky Mate and their DNA had failed to reveal the bond. If so, it defied everything his world had taught him was true.

  “We should enter the Sky Mates study and submit our DNA,” Hawk said as he paced in a breezeway connecting the medical annex building to the base hospital where the Solos were undergoing their physicals.

  “What? Why?” Kelly wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. It had been three days, two motorcycle rides, and one really sexy slow dance under the last dregs of the Perseids since she and Hawk had become intimate, a relationship they’d so far managed to keep under the radar. Her life felt upended but in a good way. Throwing her genes back into the Sky Mates pool could have the opposite effect.

  “Maybe there’s something to this—to us,” he insisted.

  “There is something to us, but I don’t think it can be grown in a petri dish.”

  “Kelly…”

  “I was tested.” She scowled.

  “So was I.”

  “Well, there you go. Our answer. We’re not a match.”

  He exhaled. “What kind of test did they administer?”

  She tapped her cheek. “I was swabbed.”

  “No blood test?”

  “No.” She gave him a questioning look. “No one gets the blood test unless the cheek swab is positive.”

  “You must get one. It’s run through a different analysis. A more advanced sequencing using Sky’s End tech.”

  “Why? So I can hear my DNA isn’t worth two shits to your world either?” she said, grinning.

  “Humor me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Maybe I don’t want to find out what we have is genetic. I want it to be real. It feels real. But if it’s just—”

  “It’s real.” His tone gentled. “We are. Either way.”

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Good.” It seemed real to her. She was glad he felt the same. And yet he wanted them to get tested. What if the results were positive? Unease rippled through her. Everything was so nice with them right now—why did he want to upset the balance they’d found?

  She folded her arms over her chest and watched a lizard scamper across the rock garden outside.

  He took her by the shoulders and turned her around. “What is it? What holds you back?”

  Her chest squeezed with his earnestness. “The whole thing is a little scary.” Then she winced, embarrassed by her admission. She was a combat veteran, for crying out loud. Not some weenie. Hawk was the only person to whom she’d ever admit such a thing—a telling development all on its own. “I hate not feeling in control of what might happen to me. Like if I became a Sky Mate.”

  “You’d be my Sky Mate, Kelly.” His jaw hardened, his gaze fierce. “Mine. I would care for you. I would keep you safe and secure for the rest of our lives.”

  The rest of their lives? Talk about serious—a serious relationship. How did this happen? They’d been together only a short time, but things were moving fast. While they hadn’t yet talked about anything permanent, they’d begun tiptoeing around how they might continue to see each other once he left.

  The first inklings of there being more to life than just wanting to be good in her profession had snuck up on her. Her priorities were shifting, grating like tectonic plates under pressure. She wanted her career—and also what she might discover with Hawk. But she also feared a major seismic shock, the Big One, would topple her off her feet and leave her shattered.

  It’s just a DNA test. Likely it wouldn’t amount to anything. But if it did… “It’s not like you’re going to abandon me in Ohio.”

  His brows lowered, then his facial muscles softened as he appeared to process what she meant. “It will not be a repeat of your childhood. We would be connected in a way where you’d never feel alone again.”

  Via a neural implant. The surgical procedure was completed during Sky Mate training. Afterward, the bond was even stronger, and it allowed them to connect via a neural web to fly the Dragon ships. It sounded freaky, but it could also be reversed. It was rare that it ever was, but that it could be did comfort her.

  “You would be the center of my life,” Hawk said. “And yet your freedom, your independence, wouldn’t be lost.”

  “I know.” She leaned into him, closing her eyes for a few seconds as she inhaled his scent. My Hawk. She hadn’t forgotten the intoxicating feeling of sheer power melded with a willingness to surrender that she’d experienced that first time riding with him on Michael’s bike. As a Sky Mate, she’d experience that a thousandfold. She’d get to have Hawk and fly the best ships in the galaxy. Pretty much a win-win.

  Until she thought of being uprooted and having to leave Webber again.

  None of that had to be decided now. “All right, let’s do it.” It was important to Hawk. “We’ll enter the study officially. At least then we’ll know for sure.”

  Hawk stood at attention in his room at the inn as he addressed his commander, Fleet-Commodore Ertugreth, via a secure comm line. The vast distance between them caused a lag in the conversation, and a series of still images took the place of a video, but it still was better than messaging on a data-vis. He wanted to look his commander in the eye.

  Under the new Triad consolidation rules, the woman would be known as an admiral, just as Hawk now used the rank of major. At home though, he was still Commodore Hakkim. Then again, on Sky’s End they stuck to the old ways—their ways.

  Outside the clear wall of his leader’s mile-high office was a stunning vista of Cloud City. A twinge of homesickness caught Hawk by surprise.

  “To confirm, you want to be entere
d into the Project Sky Mates study and retested?” A still image captured the woman’s expression of surprise. Her posture was flawless. Her hair was pulled severely back from her sculpted face, but it flowed like falling water down her back. On her uniform she wore the full wings of a Sky Mate.

  “Yes, Commodore,” he insisted. “How do I expect my charges to do something I’m not willing to do?”

  That was his public response. That he was hopelessly in love with a Terran, was having intimate relations with her well out of established parameters and hoped she was his true mate, was something best kept private.

  “I assure you, I intend to approve your request. But…” He could imagine Ertugreth’s penetrating regard. “I fear you may be setting yourself up for more disappointment.”

  He flinched and hoped his reaction hadn’t transmitted across the light-years.

  It tugged at him, the old, familiar sense of having failed his government and disappointed his parents by not being genetically viable. “I have nothing to lose by being retested against the Terran gene pool, Fleet-Commodore.”

  And everything to gain.

  “Of course.” An image showed her smiling with her eyes. He knew that look well. The last time he glimpsed it was at the farewell party in his parents’ aerie. His parents and Ertugreth had come up through the ranks together. Trained together. Fought together. “The squadron misses you, Hakkim. I know your parents feel the same. All of us value the efforts you have made for our people’s future. Go with the Goddess, you and your Solos. May they be matched, and soon.”

  She didn’t remark on his matching. No one believed anymore it would happen, and he didn’t blame them. He was nearing his fourth decade of life.