Page 26 of Kiss of Fury

“In joining Cosmic Mates?”He does have regrets!

“In saying I intended to invoke the escape clause at the end of the year. I would like to give our marriage an honest try.”

Warmth suffused her from the inside out. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“I-I would like that, too. We’ve come this far; it would be a shame not to go all the way.” Heat flooded her face at the double entendre, a Freudian slip. A real marriage would lead to sex, wouldn’t it? Her stomach fluttered. Sleeping with him wouldn’t be a hardship.

“My thoughts exactly,” he said. She made out a flash of white. He was smiling.

“I’ve, uh, told you quite a bit about me.” All the important stuff anyway. “I don’t know much about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

Where to start? Where had he been born? Where on Earth had he lived? What school had he attended? What was his occupation, his favorite food? Did he like sports? Did he prefer dogs or cats? “What brought you to Refuge?”

He chuckled. “That’s the first question everybody asks.” He paused. “I worked for a government subcontractor who operated in a morally gray area,engaging in shady practices I no longer wished to be associated with.”

“And you blew the whistle?” she guessed.

“Nothing as noble as that—I tried to leave. It wasn’t permitted. They came after me.”

“What company was it?”

The pillow rustled, and she surmised he was shaking his head. “Nobody you would have heard of, fortunately.”

He didn’t wish to tell her. Why? And why would it be fortunate she hadn’t heard of them? “But they did jobs for the government? Was there fraud involved?”

He laughed. “They did the government’s dirty work. Enabled plausible deniability.”

“Sounds…covert.” And not just morally “gray” but downright illegal. It didn’t surprise her though. After experiencing how the Dorns’ wealth and power had influenced the judicial process, her eyes had been opened. There were two tiers of justice—one for the rich, one for everyone else. That Brody would be handed over to the president’s top campaign donor had been a foregone conclusion; they’d been going through the motions to make the kidnapping look legit. She wouldn’t put anything past the government or any of its contracted agencies.

She had a flash of insight. “You and Steel worked for the same company, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but we didn’t know each other then. Independently, we’d decided to leave but found ourselves on the same spaceship.” He paused. “Now I know where Brody gets his inquisitiveness.”

True, but wouldn’t any woman be curious about the stranger she’d married? And likehe’dsaid, finding out what had brought a person to Refuge was the first thing everyone asked. “Am I too intrusive?”

“I was teasing.”

But she sensed he hadn’t been.

“Any other questions?” He diverted the conversation under the guise of being open.

His caginess aroused her curiosity, but she’d let him off the hook for now. “How old are you?” An innocuous question.

“Thirty-two,” he said.

“Same age as me. We have something in common.”

“I think we have a lot in common.”

“You do?” she asked.

“We both left a bad situation. We’re both starting over. We met through Cosmic Mates. We both decided to give the marriage a genuine try.”

She smiled. “I’ll bet neither one of us has lived or worked on a ranch before.”

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