Page 65 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"Weddings. Rings. Wedding nights." I patted his glowing sternum. "Two out of three. The ring is the one Earth custom you missed."

His arm tightened around me. "The declaration was binding this afternoon. The ring I will investigate. Tonight, I believe, we needed no custom to instruct us."

"We really didn't." I was already half asleep — warm, married, impossibly far from home and exactly where I was supposed to be. "That's what made it perfect."

26

KEL

Renn's expedited ship arrived the next morning, a full day ahead of the transport Veska had scheduled. A Valorian diplomatic shuttle, sleek and powerful, with the Authority seal on its hull. Station security lifted the pad lock for it inside a minute — nobody argued with that seal — and it landed on the outpost's largest pad while the outpost residents stopped to stare. Valorian ships didn't come to frontier stations. The message was clear: this was now officially important.

Renn came with it.

He descended the ramp in Authority dress uniform, shorter than me by a head, broader in the shoulders, with the dark-gold markings of the Sorath clan's allied house. He looked at me. Looked at Taylor. Looked at my markings, which were doing their now-permanent glow in her proximity.

"You absolute disaster," he said.

"Renn—"

"Congratulations." He pulled me into the warrior's clasp — forearms gripped, a brief collision of shoulders. Then he released me and turned to Taylor with the assessing look of a man who had known me for fifteen years and was now meeting the being who had undone me.

Taylor, to her credit, stuck out her hand. "Taylor Jennings. Human. Recently married. Currently terrified." My translator carried the rendering straight to Renn's interface — her language profile had gone out with my first report, one more thing he'd handled before landing.

Renn looked at her hand. Looked at me. I nodded. He took her hand and shook it — an awkward, cross-species handshake that would have been comical under other circumstances.

"Renn Kaelthar. I'm the one who's been yelling at him through the communications relay." He glanced from Taylor to me. "He is nearly twice your size, and somehow you are still the intimidating one."

"I'm standing right here," Taylor said.

"I know. He talked about you for approximately forty-five seconds on a damaged comm line and I was able to identify that he was completely gone. In fifteen years, I've never heard him emote. You did this in ten days."

"Renn," I said.

"Twelve if you count the outpost."

"Renn."

Taylor was grinning. She liked Renn immediately. I felt it instantly: amusement and relief and the comfort of encountering someone who could give me a hard time. She and Zhara had been the only ones doing it for twelve days. She was glad to have backup.

We boarded the shuttle. Zhara came with us — she had intelligence on the Saurok operations that the Authority wanted, and she had refused to be left behind. "I was in the cell too. I have a stake in this."

The shuttle's interior was Valorian standard, clean lines, dark materials, advanced tech quietly humming. Taylor walked through it touching everything. Every surface, every panel, every viewport. Her face held the expression I was learning to love most, the archaeologist's wonder, applied to living technology instead of dead civilizations.

"This is your people's tech," she said, running her hand along a console. "Kel. This is beautiful."

"It is a standard diplomatic shuttle."

"It's beautiful and you're wrong."

Renn caught my eye from across the cabin and made an expression that roughly translated to: I understand now.

The journey to the rendezvous point took six hours. During the first two, Renn briefed me on a closed channel routed to my interface — nothing on the cabin air for a guild disc to catch — while Taylor was occupied with the shuttle's viewport, watching stars streak past with her breath fogging the glass.

The short version, delivered while she was still at the glass: the Council was convening, and some of them wanted to take her from me.

They would not use those words. They would use words like "processing" and "evaluation" and "uncontacted species protocol." But what it meant — the thing underneath the procedural language that Renn was careful to deliver in a neutral tone — was that there were people in positions of power who believed this bond was impossible and wanted to separate us long enough to prove it.

I held still and gave the bond as little as I could to carry — sitting on it the way I had been sitting on it since the jungle, so that my fear would not arrive in her chest before the facts arrived in her ears. It cost me. She glanced back once, the way she did when something brushed her from the wrong direction, then let the stars take her again. While Renn outlined the threat, the bond delivered Taylor's emotional state with the clarity of a second heartbeat. She was at the viewport, face pressed close to the glass, and what I felt from her was not fear or political calculation but wonder — pure, uncomplicated, the joy of a woman seeing her first interstellar transit. She had no idea what Renn was telling me. She was watching stars and feeling happy, and the distance between her happiness and my dread was a physical ache in my chest.