After a few days to recover in safe Federation space, get my health check-up, and sleep in while surrounded by Earth patrols, I feel much better. I just wish I could stop thinking about Jorusk. He lingered in my thoughts during the day as I tended my backup supply of plants on my smaller transport, Gypsy Star. And he has been in my dreams for the last three nights.
He was nice. I really hope he finds a place where his kind can live in peace.
The day of the race finally arrives. After checking in, I’m sent to a round room with thirty other women all being monitored and tested by the doctors to determine our band colors, so the males have a way to identify us.
The sleeping meds kick in, and I forget about the sterile scent of the medical bed to rest in a safe place, one last time before the race. Heavy darkness presses in around me, taking me to a realm of deep sleep.
As I sink away from consciousness, embers float up from my bed, dancing like little fireflies across the black sky. I imagine I’m camping with my family again in the back pasture behind the farmhouse.
“Ahna Rae?” I call for my sister even though I know she married a Xarthrin years ago to get as far away from our dirty little world as she could. I’ll never hear from her again. I know that much. She loves her crystal castle and her lavish life.
I never wanted that.I never wanted to lose you.
When I sit up from the blanket and look around for anyone else in my family, I find I’m alone by the campfire, flames rippling the night air.
I tuck my knees up and think of the Drathious serving Talhuskins, then finding freedom just to be annihilated all over again on their barely civilized new world.That’s a hard, dirty life if I ever saw one. Ahna Rae had no idea what difficult was.
You always were a spoiled brat.
Something darts overhead.
I look up and catch movement. It glides by again. I get up and chase it instinctively. “Hey!”
“Hey, yourself,” a man says right behind me.
I whip around to see a dark figure among the shadows of night. His red eyes burn as they travel with hunger over my body. Cinders rise from his skin, stirring up in little lazy tornadoes.
“Do I know you?” I ask.
He tilts his head. “Do you? You made me. I am your darkest desire.”
“My… No, that can’t be.”
“You feel it in the meds. The heat they force into your veins, and the required rest by the doctors. Come on, Brynna. You’re smarter than this.”
My subconscious is playing dirty tricks on me, impersonating a Drathious. “Look, I’m not interested in being spit-roasted, torched to ash, or clawed to death. So you’re not a good match.”
“But you want me.”
“The hell I do.” I cross my arms and try to tear my eyes from him, but deep down, desire simmers in my core just looking at him in all his radiant, muscled glory. His dark wings are bound behind him and twitch like they’re uncomfortable.
“You don’t have to keep them tied up around me. I’d rather you be comfortable.”
“I am never comfortable. My people are dying.”
As he comes closer, I try to sharpen his face, but all I see are red eyes, orange fiery veins, and a great expanse of wings that open around me. He’s so close I can almost feel the heat from his body.
He’s a large, hot male, and I’m curious what bonding with an alien of his magnitude would feel like. Wings close in, and he reaches for me. My heart thumps faster, and my pussy slicks with intrigue.
Light washes through his image. A nurse rouses me before I’m ready.
“Brynna, how are you feeling?”
I blink and push up from the bed. “Disappointed I couldn’t have more rest.” Secretly, I want to know where things would’ve gone had he captured me.
A woman three beds down moans in erotic pleasure.
“Why didn’t you give me what she got?” I ask.
