by Kate Rudolph
His hand automatically reached for a weapon. He'd hid several throughout the room, despite the fact he wasn't supposed to be armed. But he curled his fingers into a fist before he got a blaster in his hand. This was the Temple of Peace. It was supposed to be safe. It was most likely something mundane. A counselor or someone he'd met in group meditation.
He didn't have enemies here. He didn't need a weapon.
The stranger knocked again.
He could ignore it. He didn't have to answer the door. But ignoring his problems, and his visitors, had caused him enough strife already. He had to face these things if he wanted to heal.
He crossed the room and put thoughts of weapons out of his mind. He was a Detyen. He always had access to his claws, even if he didn't have a blaster. And no one was here to hurt him.
Besides, he had a blaster hidden away on a shelf right next to the door. He could reach for it if he needed.
He placed his hand on the sensor to open the door and took a deep breath before fully engaging it. The door slid open and Deke forgot how to breathe.
Denya.
The bond blazed through him, white hot and surer than anything he had ever known. It was like a hook yanked deep within his chest, right under his heart and connected to a scorching silver cord between him and his mate.
Manda.
Her eyes were wide and her mouth set in an angry line. She was human. He didn't know if she could feel the bond as fully as he did. She looked ready to kill. It was a look he recognized well.
She was all grown up. She had to be twenty now, not the girl he had left behind.
Her curves had filled out, breasts swelling to fill out the shapeless outfit she was wearing, her dark hair held back and her face pale with cheekbones sharp enough to cut. There was no mistaking her for a child any longer; she'd left that behind and stepped fully into womanhood.
His body ached in ways he had forgotten. It had been four years since he'd laid down with anyone, four years since he'd even thought about it. But now all those wants and lusts flared back to life. His cock twitched in his pants and Deke had to clench his jaw to keep from letting a ragged noise escape his throat.
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to carry her to his bed and have his way with her. Every muscle strained to step forward and sweep her up into his arms. It hurt to not be touching her.
But he was pretty sure she would stab him if he got any closer. The last time someone had looked at him that way, he had gotten stabbed. And he had deserved it a lot less then than he did now.
He should probably hand Manda a knife and have it done with.
"Manda." The word came out on a breath, almost a prayer.
Her eyes flicked up and down, taking him in with a practiced air of indifference. "Are you going to invite me in?" she asked.
***
Oh.
Damn.
Dekon was hot. Manda knew that. She had known it for years. She looked at his twin brother every week. She knew what the guy looked like. But she hadn't realized that seeing Dekon would be different than looking at Braxtyn. She had to swallow back the noise that tried to escape her throat, and her body was doing things she didn't quite recognize.
How could this be so different?
Why did she suddenly feel like she was on fire?
She had tried to push those thoughts and sensations to the back of her mind. Four years was a long time. And all her feelings were mixed up with the miasma of anger and longing and abandonment.
Any attraction she might have felt had been shoved deep down and needed to be ignored for as long as she could.
How could she think about that after what Deke had done?
Some nights it was all she could think about. But she didn't want to get caught up in the way her stomach flipped over while she was looking at him.
She could kiss him right now. Her lips tingled at the thought, and she had to clench her hands to keep her fingers from touching them. From the way his eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open, he would be too surprised to do anything. But if anything physical were to happen, it would be verging on hate sex.
And Manda didn't want her first time to be hate sex.
But from what she had heard, that could be really hot. She wasn't completely ruling it out.
She stared at him and tried to think of what to say. She'd put together her plan to find Dekon and rode a wave of righteous fury to get halfway across the galaxy. She figured she could wing it after she found him. How hard could it be?
But now she was standing in front of him for the first time in four years and she didn't know what she was supposed to do or say.
For some reason, the plan had not magically manifested. And now she felt like an unprepared idiot, full of lust and anger and rooted on the spot.
Dekon recovered first. He managed to close his mouth and offered a polite smile. "How are you?"
"I'm well, thank you." Was that it? Banal pleasantries when she had alternatively thought of kissing him and stabbing him for the past few weeks? Or the past few years. But the stabby thoughts had only intensified since that message.
Deke was wedged in the doorway as if to keep her from barging in. "I didn't expect to see you here," he said. His other hand was hidden behind the door and Manda wondered why.
"I got your message." She was stating the obvious. Why was she doing that? She should have written down what she planned to say. This was a disaster. How did people talk to their mates and spouses? Everyone back home made it look easy.
Dekon wasn't going to give her any slack. "That doesn't explain anything."
"I was sick of waiting." If nothing else, at least she had honesty. She was so sick of waiting she'd been physically ill with it at times. There were nights she woke up, heart pounding, stomach roiling, sure that something had happened to Deke or to the bond between them. All she'd wanted to do was reach out and know he was okay. But that had never been an option.
Dekon swallowed hard and dropped his gaze, hurt. Manda refused to feel sorry for him. He was the one who'd left. He was the one who hadn't contacted her for years. He was the one who got scared.
It wasn't her fault that he hadn't come home.
He opened the door a bit more and the overhead light shined on him. His cheeks were hollow and his blue skin had a sallow undertone. Was he sick? And were his claws out on the hand he'd had behind the door? He looked haunted. This wasn't the gregarious man she had known four years ago.
What had happened to him?
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, but she managed to scrape the words back. It wasn't her place to ask. Not yet. Not when they were just meeting again for the first time in so many years.
This whole encounter was a disaster, and Manda needed to step away for now. They could try this thing again later. Or never. "I need to go book a room." The second she'd gotten off the shuttle to the Temple she had hunted down Dekon's room. She hadn't taken time to see if there would be a place for her to stay. The place was huge, so she was sure she could manage, and it would be a welcome reprieve from this awkward conversation.
"You can stay with me." Deke's eyes got wide and he looked like he regretted the offer as soon as he said it, but several seconds passed and he didn't take it back.
Manda didn't think she should agree. She was as liable to slap him as to kiss him at this point. And things felt awkward between them.
Really awkward.
But it had been four long, lonely years. She wanted to be near him. She wanted to know what it felt like to be his mate. She wanted to see if there was actually any possibility of a relationship or if the denya bond was too tattered to link them together. And the only way that was going to happen was if she stayed close to him. If she got to know him.
"Okay," she agreed.
Deke's eyes flicked up and down, taking her in. But she didn't think he was looking at her sexually. There'd been a moment of that when he first opened the door, but his expression had since
closed off.
If she had to guess, he was assessing her threat level. Her? Sure, Doryan and Vita had spent a bit of time teaching her self-defense moves, but she wasn't exactly a warrior. Why would Dekon think she was a threat?
He opened the door and stepped back. He resheathed his claws so his hand looked normal and non-threatening. She set her bag down beside the door and looked around. Then she noticed something.
One big thing.
There was only one bed.
That was going to be a problem.
Chapter Seven
The bed thing was less of a problem than Manda expected. By the time she was ready to fall asleep, Dekon wordlessly grabbed a blanket and laid on the floor. She didn't argue, even if some very deeply buried part of her had been excited at the thought of laying down next to him.
In its own way, it felt like he was taking a small step to pay her back for the pain and suffering he had caused by staying away for so long. It probably wasn't that. She was overthinking it.
But she was so tired that she didn't care. She barely got her shoes off and the covers pulled over herself before she was falling fast asleep.
The dream came fast. Dreams like this always came fast.
She had a strange hyper-awareness of her surroundings. She could touch anything and memorize the texture. The smells in the air were sharper than she'd ever smelled when her eyes were open. And it was so bright. The light should have hurt. But there was no pain in a dream like this.
Dreams like this used to be rare. Once every three or four months. Maybe longer. But over the last year they had happened more and more frequently.
At first she had been scared. Would her therapist think she was regressing?
Manda kept them to herself.
Well, mostly to herself.
She wasn't the only one in the dream.
She should have expected a dream like this as soon as she'd found Dekon. After all, he was the one who shared her dreams.
She walked down a densely wooded forest path and came to a clearing which had a four poster bed right in the center. The mattress and sheets and comforter were all covered in brown and green material that somehow blended in with the woods all around her. The whole thing smelled woodsy and fresh, like she was in the middle of an ancient forest that had once been visited by long dead beings.
Deke didn't blend. All that blue skin was as alien as it came.
He wasn't wearing a shirt. It was the first thing she saw. With all those rippling muscles on display how could she notice anything else?
Between one blink and the next, she was across the clearing and right next to the bed. That was another thing that happened in these dreams. It was like she gained the ability to teleport, though she didn't control the teleporting by conscious thought. Maybe it was unconscious. Some part of her wanted to be on that bed, wanted to be next to Deke.
Deke smiled when she got close. It was a good smile, bright and open, but a little rusty. It was like he had forgotten what it felt like. She wanted to see more smiles on his face, even if she was upset with him. He used to smile all the time.
That was what she'd liked about him.
That and so much else.
She hadn't realized how much she liked him until he went away. And it hurt to think about it now. What would have happened if he'd never left?
It was useless to think about that. She couldn't change the past.
"I should have known you would be here," he said. He patted the bed beside him as he sat down. There was plenty of space for both of them. There was plenty of place for an entire platoon of soldiers. But Manda didn't need a platoon. She just wanted Dekon.
And so she sat. She memorized the look of his face, the high cheekbones, the darker blue of his lips, his dark eyes that she knew would flash blue if he was feeling strong emotion. He didn't look so haunted in this dream, not like he'd looked while she was awake.
She knew a lot about Detyens now. She had spent four years and more learning. But Deke wasn't just a Detyen. His mother had been Oscavian. It made him and his brothers unique among a race that was already unique in its rarity.
But she didn't care about his brothers or the Oscavian Empire. This dream and the hyperreality all around them belonged just to her. And to her imagined version of him. This Deke couldn't hurt her. He wouldn't reject her. He was the perfect mate that she'd never been allowed to have. The one she'd journeyed halfway across the galaxy to find.
Manda's fingers twitched, and she couldn't stop herself from touching him. His naked chest was right there, blue and rippling with muscles. Muscles and scars.
The scars were new.
New to her, at least. Some of them already were fading, a history written in his flesh that she hoped one day he would tell her all about. Though whether the scars actually existed or her own subconscious was creating them, Manda didn't know. She hoped they weren't real. She didn't want to think of him in pain.
She meant to touch his muscles, but she found a scar that ran up his side and traced her fingers over it.
Deke shivered under her touch and hissed out a breath.
"Does that hurt?" She stopped moving her finger but couldn't bring herself to pull away. His skin was so warm and real, and she'd never touched another person like this before.
"No," he said. "Keep going." His chest rose and fell with deep breaths as her fingers rested on him, and his heartbeat kicked up.
She didn't like to be commanded, but there was a dark promise in Dekon's eyes, the kind of promise she had only read about in stories and imagined coming from him. It was a promise she wanted, needed, him to keep. And so she kept touching him, tracing one scar and then the next and biting her tongue to keep from asking him where he got them.
After several minutes, she moved on to his muscles, her fingers tracing a map over his body. She had somehow ended up right next to him, one leg slung over his so she was right on top of him.
It was intimate, more intimate that she'd ever imagined being with anyone else. Her whole body felt heavy with want. She wanted to press down onto Deke's thigh to relieve the pressure that was building up. She understood arousal, she knew what this was. But was she ready to take it another step further?
To Deke it was probably nothing. He'd had a whole life before her. He knew what this felt like.
She was jealous of every person he'd ever been with before. She wanted to demand names and hunt them down. It was feral and a bit crazy.
There was a dark part of herself that she had accessed at a young age, that she had needed to rely on to survive. And that animalistic girl inside her would never fully go away. But she took a dark satisfaction in knowing that Deke belonged to her now.
Maybe they still had a lot to figure out. Maybe it wasn't a done deal yet. But she was sitting on his lap. No one else got to do that.
She could almost forget that this was just a dream. She could almost pretend this Deke was real.
Her fingers dipped lower, teasing the button of his pants. Apparently she wasn't ready for more, not even in a dream.
He sucked in a harsh breath and she looked down, noticing the growing bulge right there.
Could she touch it? Should she? She glanced up and Deke's eyes blazed blue.
Her body burned and she wanted to see what it would feel like to touch him there. She wanted this little bit of him, well, not so little, but still she hesitated.
Deke reached out and placed his hand on top of hers. He didn't force her to move, but the weight of his hand was enough to have her inching down. She felt the hard length of him through his pants and heard the animalistic noise that Deke made.
She wanted this.
She wanted more.
She curled her fingers just as a slamming door woke her up.
Chapter Eight
Another dream like that would kill him.
Or drive him insane.
Deke winced as the door of the room slammed behind him. He headed towards one of the meditation c
hambers, and hoped he hadn't disturbed Manda's sleep. But he didn't want to think about what it felt like to be with her in the dream. His cock was already uncomfortably hard and it wouldn't take much to finish him off.
He didn't know if they were sharing the dreams. He'd heard stories that some mates could share them. He hoped not. He was vulnerable in a way he couldn't hide while sleeping. He had no defenses against Manda.
He needed defenses. If he gave into the desires that were burning within him, he could ruin her life. He had enemies in most corners of this quadrant and nightmares that would never go away. He wasn't worthy of a mate.
There was no coming back from the things he had done.
And she was still too young. Sure, she was twenty now. But the eight years between them had never seemed longer.
He needed to clear his mind. The meditation chambers were free to use to anyone staying on the Temple of Peace, and he needed some centering right now. Centering or a slap upside the head. Anything to get him thinking straight.
Manda showing up like that had surprised him. He didn't like surprises. Surprises usually led to bloodshed. But this should have been a good surprise. If he was being honest, she was displaying a kind of initiative that he was too much of a coward to show. He wished he could be as brave as she was.
If he was going to let her go, if he was going to ignore the mate bond and eventually pay the denya price, then she deserved to hear that from him. It was wrong to just ignore her.
But he couldn't say it yet.
He closed himself into the chamber, a room painted a soft beige with a padded floor and neutral scent. He could program the computer on the wall to play any kind of music he wanted or to display a variety of soothing scenes. He ignored it. He didn't need any cheap tricks.
Deke sat down, legs crossed, and closed his eyes, breathing deep. This was what he knew of meditation. He just had to sit there and let his mind empty as his muscles relaxed. It was so easy a child could do it.
It didn't work.
He gave it time. One minute, and then another, and another. A full quarter of an hour had to have passed with him sitting there, body relaxed, eyes closed, mind racing. His thoughts wouldn't leave him be. Visions of Manda, of the dream, and of violence flashed behind his eyes, a war for dominance where there was no clear winner.