Page 41 of Guardian's Destiny

The black of her pupils nearly pushed all the green away until it was nothing but a small sliver, a halo, fascinating me with the way they did that. But it was her parting lips, the pink tip of a tongue running over her lips, that did me in.

"Sloane," I groaned in warning. I hoped she would understand because there was no turning back from this once my mouth conquered hers.

She regarded me with a desire matching mine, and I was ready to lose myself in her the way I had wanted since first laying eyes on her. I knew she wanted me as badly as I did her, but I felt the stiffening of her spine first; my lips were so close to hers, I felt their heat, I was so close to tasting her. But her stiffening distracted me enough to look from her lips to her eyes where I read her rejection.

"I'm as up for a good tumble as you are, Vraax," she said, still in my arms. "But I'm afraid we're more than that. If we did this now, we would both regret it."

Regret? The only thing I regretted was letting her speak instead of sealing her lips the way my body demanded.

"Not like this. Not now," she rose to her tiptoes, and I finally got to taste her incredible lips, only to retreat after a quick peck. What the frygg?

"Right." Anger churned inside me. "Have it your way." With that, I stormed out of our quarters straight for the training room. I dared the stupid mating marks to act up. I nearly willed them to do so, but for once, they decided to stay silent.

SLOANE

"That one,"Vraax pointed at a large blip on theradar. It wasn't really a radar, not like what I was used to, but in lieu of calling it anything else, that's what I had named it. Vraax called it a spectral grid, but that was too much of a mouthful for me. No matter how technologically advanced it was, it still showed Ohrur and many ships in its orbit.

Vraax tapped on the ship he had picked until it zoomed in, giving us detailed information. It was a transporter with a crew of ten, which seemed laughable to me since the thing was twice the size of a skyscraper. Just flying through space. Un-fucking-believable.

Vraax had even been able to pull up its cargo, ranging from fabric and food to furniture. Nothing too valuable like the one he had picked first, before deciding against it. "Too much of a risk," he said, because it had been filled with comms and other valuable electronics. That ship's cargo had been a few billion credits, whereas the one he had decided on wasonlyone billion.

"Fine," I agreed, not caring which transporter he picked to hitch a piggyback ride to Ohrur.

That was our grandiose plan. Vraax would maneuver our ship to attach to the transporter's belly. Thus, we wouldn'tappear on the Ohrur's radar, as long as the Ohrurs didn't do a full hull analysis, which Vraax assured me they wouldn't. They wouldn't expect a threat coming in. Not like that anyway.

I wasn't so sure about that. "Not even after Tharaax took Possedion right from under their noses?" I pointed out. Had I been in charge of security and had that happened under my watch, I would have utilized every trick in my book to make sure nothing like that would happen again.

"They don't know that I've gone rogue," Vraax argued.

"Maybe not you, but I bet they've already recalled the remaining Space Guardian who was assigned to finding humans. Maybe others, too." Something else I would have done.

Vraax scoffed, "They won't expect anybody to repeat what Tharaax did."

I hoped he was right, but I had my doubts. I didn't want to argue with him, though. Not since I rejected him last night. He had been distant ever since. Fine. I had spent enough time with men to know that they got pouty when they didn't get what they wanted.

And Ihadwanted him. I had been so close to giving in. But it had been a bad idea timing-wise. He had been through an emotional trauma with my attempt of sleep hypnosis. I worried he only wanted to bury the emotions that had welled inside him, and I… well, I wouldn't have said no to a quickie, but just like I said, I worried there was much more between us than a quickie—starting with the cursed mating marks and how he was growing on me.

No, giving in last night would have been a mistake, and we would have both regretted it in the morning. Plus, we already knew that today we would start Operation Moddekdum stakeout. We both needed to be on our top game and not weird around each other.

Yeah, way to go on that, Sloane!

Well, the weirdness was there, in the form of tension, so yeah, that hadn't worked out the way I planned. But I was certain it would be a hundred times worse had we given in to our primal urges.

So I was willing to let Vraax make some of the decisions this morning, and really, what did I know about the Ohrurs? He had worked for them for nearly twenty years.

We closed in on the large freighter that seemed to dwarf us. "Won't they see us on their rad—er spectral grid?" I asked.

"Probably, but they won't think anything of it. We're flying a Space Guardian ship."

I wanted to point out that, according to him, Space Guardians didn't visit Ohrur, but again, what did I know?

Vraax did some fancy maneuvering that left me pretty speechless and then opened a magnetic field that pressed us against the monstrous hull, and I finally understood what he meant. As large as our ship appeared to me, compared to the giant transporter, it was as insignificant as an ant clinging to a cruise ship. I doubted our presence would warrant one raised eyebrow.

We broke through the atmosphere with no problems, but when Vraax disengaged the magnetic field and brought us on our own course, all hell broke loose.

"There are at least five of them," he cursed as several smaller jets bore down on us.

Vraax increased his speed, but the fighters were on us like a wet rag.

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