The windows spilled out a golden light and through one window he saw Vixron, standing watch. He didn’t see the females. He assumed they were sleeping.
That buzzing curiosity returned full force, but he tamped it down, stomped it out like a fire, remembering that Vaxa’an didn’t take well to betrayal.
He thought he saw a flash of red on the terrace in front of the dwelling, but when he refocused his gaze, he saw nothing out of place.
Kirov landed the hovercraft smoothly in front of his own dwelling and powered it down. The gentle hum of the technology he’d helped create faded into silence and he was met with the calmness and coolness of a Luxirian night.
After he jumped down off the hovercraft, he stood for a moment, looking over his home planet, brightly illuminated with a silver light from an almost full moon. He looked towards the east, towards his own outpost of Troxva.
A familiar tightening encased his muscles and he closed his eyes.
Troxva and all the weighted responsibilities and old guilts that came with it.
Troxva, where Kirov was not a technology advisor, where he could not spend his spans in his labs, but rather…he had to be a leader.
Troxva, a place he both loved and loathed.
Troxva, where his sire lived.
A sigh escaped him, though it sounded more like a rough growl to his own ears.
A soft sound near the human females’ dwelling drew his attention, his eyes snapping open, his body tensing, preparing. Peering into the darkness, he scanned the terrace, listening, completely still.
But he heard nothing else, sensed no other Luxirians except Vixron.
Kirov shook his head, taking one last look in the direction of Troxva, one last longing look at the human females’ dwelling, before turning to go inside his own.
Frustration made his shoulders ache and he rolled his head around his neck, trying to ease the pain. Once inside, he remembered he was supposed to find a female to mate that night, to help ease that frustration before it drowned him.
With a curse, Kirov closed the door behind him. He would just release some tension manually. Maybe then, he’d finally be able to sleep.
Chapter Four
There were moments when Lainey knew her life had changed forever.
Like sitting down at a piano for the first time at four-years-old. Like hearing thunderous applause reverberate in her ears after the completion of an old, beautiful concerto at fourteen.
Like the moment when she caught her father cheating on her mother. Like the moment when her mother acted like nothing was wrong for her socialite friends.
Like moving out of her parents’ house the moment she turned eighteen, feeling freedom and relief and genuine happiness for the first time.
Like the moment when her best friend, the person she loved most in the entire universe, died of breast cancer at the age of twenty-five.
Like being abducted by aliens for a human trafficking ring.
And like this moment, hiding in the shadows between two domed houses with bated breath, watching a Luxirian male climb down from his hovercraft.
When he turned to look out over the same view Lainey had been admiring before she heard a hovercraft approach, her heartbeat tripled in speed. His skin looked silver in the moonlight, his sharp features almost regal. His obvious strength, the bulk of honed muscles, made her breath hitch.
Her eyes were drawn to him like her fingers were drawn to ivory keys: unavoidable, a compulsion, aneed.
Lainey reached out to the wall of the house next to her to steady herself when her head spun with dizziness, when her knees shook. To her mortified surprise, arousal arrowed down her body, pooling between her thighs. So intense and sudden that Lainey thought she might orgasm right there and then.
Her hand slipped on the wall, but she caught herself at the last moment to keep from falling on buckling knees. When she snapped her widened gaze back to the alien, she froze. His body was turned in her direction, his eyes—the color of which she couldn’t determine—seemingly right on her.
She only breathed again when he turned away and bright relief made her sag against the wall. She craned her head to watch as he entered into the dwelling at the very end of the terrace, three houses down from the one they were staying in.
Vaxa’an said only Ambassadors lived on this terrace, she remembered. Whatever ‘Ambassador’ meant. Washeone of them?
