The doors hissed open, and they stepped out into the corridor.
Bureaucratic trallshit awaited, but he wasn't worried. He had fought lizard men, space pirates, and krin. And one thing was for sure…
A few administrators with dataflexes were not going to take his female from him.
10
The LMP held her life in their hands. One decision. That's all it would take to throw her back to Earth, back to poverty… back to nothing. It was a hard contrast from ten minutes ago when she'd been wrapped around Kirr in the command center, his mouth hot on hers.
Even now, her lips tingled from his kiss while her stomach churned with ice water, which was unsettling to say the least.
Kirr's palm pressed against the small of her back, steering her through the maze of station corridors. It was a good job he was here, because she wouldn’t have been able to find her way even with a map. Not with her thoughts as scattered as they were. She focused on the warmth of his hand like a lifeline. His touch. His presence… they were the only things keeping her from flying apart.
They turned a corner, and the Mate Program’s administrative wing spread out ahead of them.
"Breathe." Kirr's voice was low enough that only she could hear.
She let out a shaky exhale. "I'm breathing."
"You're turning purple."
"That's my natural color when facing bureaucratic execution."
His fingers flexed against her spine, a silent acknowledgment. They stopped outside a set of heavy doors marked with the LMP insignia, and for one insane moment, she thought about running. Just bolting down the corridor and hiding in some maintenance shaft until everyone forgot she existed.
His hand tightened as if he'd read her thoughts, and he announced them to the woman at reception. Was it her imagination, or did she look at Harper with pity in her eyes as Kirr herded her past?
They walked down a featureless corridor and finally stood in front of a set of double doors. Her heart pounded in her ears so loudly she wouldn’t have heard the alarm if the station had been attacked.
This was it. They were going to send her home. Well, back to Earth. Away from Delilah… away from Kirr…
The doors slid open.
The panel meeting room was as intimidating as she'd thought it would be. A long, curved table dominated the far wall, elevated on a low dais so that whoever sat behind it looked down at those in front of them. She swallowed. Hard.
Six Lathar sat in there, their expressions ranging from neutral to openly skeptical. Dataflexes glowed in front of each of them.
And at the center sat Duke Kaarigan.
She'd seen him on screens before, during the program’s orientation holos. In person, the duke was taller than she'd thought, with silver hair and a face that looked like it had been carved from granite. He watched as she and Kirr walked in, his expression cool and assessing.
Shit. This was definitely a trial.
Kirr guided her to a pair of chairs positioned in front of a small table in front of the dais.
She sat, trying not to think about what she looked like. Her clothes were rumpled from the mad dash to medical, then the crisis in engineering, and somewhere along the way, her hair had escaped its tie and wound itself into rat’s tails around her neck. Everyone else in the room looked immaculate, and she looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge backward.
Great. Just fucking great.
Kirr settled into the chair beside her, his massive frame making even the latharian-built furniture creak. His thigh pressed against hers under the table's edge, warm and solid. She wasn't sure if that was deliberate or just because he was so big, but she didn’t care. She needed it. Needed any form of comfort she could get as she fought to sit up straight and not shrink against Kirr’s side and try to hide.
"Ms. Sawyer." Duke Kaarigan's voice carried across the room without effort. "Thank you for joining us so promptly."
Yeah, right. Like she'd had a choice.
"The panel has reviewed preliminary reports regarding the station crisis." He lifted a dataflex and scrolled through something. "Your actions during the recent event have been noted."
A male to his left leaned forward. He was younger than Kaarigan, with sharper features. "Noted favorably. She found what our engineers couldn't. The station is safe because of her."
