Page 25 of Star Mates

“I won’t bite,” he replied, accurately reading her thoughts. “Not unless you want me to.”

His challenge worked. She went and got her glass.

“Do you often come here and sit in the dark to drink?” she asked, ignoring his innuendo as she sat down opposite him.

Raiden straightened and put his feel back on the ground. He reached for her glass and poured each a generous helping of the homemade drink. “Only when I can’t seem to get a certain blonde hair blue eyed Earthling out of my head.”

“And does that happen often?”

“No,” he replied and took another swig. “Never have before, so what is it about you that I can’t seem to shake?”

His words caused butterflies in her stomach. “I’ve been thinking the same about you.”

“Hm,” he intoned blandly. “What are we gonna do about it, Miss Tice?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Not really,” he muttered, downing the remaining contents in his glass. “Could be.”

“We ignore each other,” she reasoned crisply. “Since I’m not from your world and I don’t plan to stay here too long-”

“Where are you planning on going?” he interrupted. “It isn’t like there’s another city to move to. Sparta is the be all and end all for the human population.”

“I was thinking more along the line of returning home.”

He blinked. “To Earth?”

“Well, I don’t live on Jupiter.”

“No need to be a smartass.” He snapped his empty glass sharply on the table. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you and Logan that there wasn’t a way back to Earth. If I could get you back, I would. If I could get all of us there, I would.”

“There is no other way to get back to Earth except for this Slip Gate?”

He shook his head. “The Merloni are superior engineers. I thought the hub was blown up. Sucks that it wasn’t.”

“Who was killed on that raid?”

He stared at nothing for a moment. “My parents,” he finally answered. “I was four, I think, maybe five. I still remember them. They left me with Leona’s mother, piled into a ship, and I never saw them again.”

“I’m so sorry,” she told him sincerely. “My parents died when I was fifteen. Needlessly and stupidly.”

“Yeah, so finding out that the hub, the very reason why they died, is still operational, is a kick in the guts. All I can think about is how do we know there hasn’t been a slew of abductees before you? How many have they already transported back?”

She thought for a moment. “What caused the Merloni ship to crash on that asteroid?”

He blinked. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe this had been their first test run. Maybe it took them this long to rebuild.”

“That’s a lot of maybes.”

“Perhaps the answer in making sure the Slip Gate stays permanently dead is finding out why their safety protocols didn’t work.”

He got a faraway look in his eyes as he thought over her words. As if he were analyzing something and not finding all the answers.

“There were eight others that died on that ship,” she said.

He blinked and refocused his gaze on her.

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