Page 7 of The Alien Warlord's Fated Mate

Her belly growled, and she poked it. “It’s a fine time for you to show up,” she scolded it. “I’ve got bigger problems right now than an empty stomach.”

Shifting light caught her attention, and she moved her gaze back to the screen. It now displayed an image of the human body, straight out of an anatomy and physiology textbook. With a laugh, she forgot about her hunger and the alien who’d carted her off to his man cave, and began testing the limits of the database he’d opened to her.

Zoran paused outside his shipboard quarters and rolled his head back, closing his eyes to savor the feel of his female’s body fitted snugly against his. A pretense, he admitted to himself. Helping her had only been a pretense to hold her, to see how well they suited. Her scent lingered on his skin, some light daintiness never used by Xeruvian women. And her skin! It had been so soft against his own.

Despite her earlier anger, she had not objected to his touch. Did she then harbor the same attraction he felt for her? Would she again reject the pleasures of a physical mating?

How could he feel such for so slight and weak a female?

He heaved a great sigh and resumed his course down the ship’s narrow corridor, toward the cargo hold and the women held there. When the human government had refused to honor the treaty, Zoran and the other warlords had scrambled to refit the largely empty space for the journey back to Zephyria. Their women deserved better treatment. They deserved better than stark metal walls, blankets for beds, and dried rations and raw vegetation for food. This was what they had to work with, however, and it would have to do until they reached home.

Zoran found Nyklan standing guard just inside the cargo hold’s entrance, as if the humans could escape. The women had clumped into small groups on the far side of the space, huddling together and murmuring softly. Occasionally, one threw a narrow-eyed glare at the warlords.

“How are they?” he asked in his own language.

“Irritating,” Nyklan retorted. “Already the tall yellow-haired one has tried to push past me twice.”

Zoran sought out the woman Nyklan described and found only the one who’d been standing beside Mia before she’d run from him.

“Relax. I brought her no harm.” Nyklan lowered his voice and muttered, “She is not mine.”

Zoran glanced at the healer, surprised. “You have found a mate among these women?”

“I could never mate one of these females, not while the memory of my own beloved lingers in my blood.”

“My sister would not want you to mourn her, Nyklan, when you have an opportunity to honor her.”

“How is bedding one of these beasts honoring my beloved?” Nyklan snuffled out a breath through his nose, his expression full of the same bitterness he’d carried since the deaths of Kygana and their eldest youngling.

Zoran allowed Nyklan a moment to regain control of his emotions before continuing. “If you believe them to be beasts, why did you agree to breed with one?”

“Because we are dying,” Nyklan gritted out. “Because if we fail to act, we will cease to exist. Because I have an obligation to my people.” He drew in another breath, then lowered his head and turned his back on the women. “She is there. I shall do my duty and bed her, but do not expect me to bring her into my home. She can never replace my beloved. I will not allow it.”

He left before Zoran could counter him.

Zoran turned his attention to the women, studying them for signs of maltreatment, and yes, searching for the one Nyklan’s mating instinct had singled out as his alone. If sorrow filled him for the loss his sister’s mate carried, for the grief and shame he carried as well, he could never acknowledge it. Could not afford to acknowledge it. Nyklan was right. They were too close to losing themselves as a people, too close to dying out. They had to try mating with the humans, even if it meant diluting their own strength and culture.

But Zoran was right, too. Kygana would never condone Nyklan’s mourning in the face of inevitable extinction. She would want him to move on, to find another mate, to fill their home with the laughter and love of children. Never replace her, no. But to deny him love again? She would not wish it on even the meanest among them.

Just as their father would want him to move on.

He saw again the face of the man who had been friend and mentor, felt the desperate grip of his calloused hand on his own. Heard the words his father had whispered as he fell beyond Zoran’s reach.

Save your mother, Zoran. Save my heart.

Zoran’s hands curled into fists at his side, the claws digging deeply into his flesh, drawing blood. He had honored his father’s final wish. Would that doing so could ease his own shame.

Carefully, slowly, he cleared the torment from his mind. The dead could not be unburied. Nyklan would work through his torment in good time. Nothing Zoran said or did would aid him, nor would lingering on it clear the burden either of them carried.

Instead, he sought out the two women who were his own mate’s friends and, from a distance, assured himself of their well-being, then he retrieved enough rations, vegetation, and water to sustain Mia for the remainder of this day and the next, and left, carefully locking the hatch behind himself. Let the yellow-haired woman test the hatch’s security once he was gone. It would amuse the warlords if nothing else, and they could all use some levity right now.

When he reentered his quarters, he found Mia still seated at the console, her very human nose nearly touching the screen. It showed a view of the expansive jungle at the heart of the continent where hisjutjilay. She’d turned on the audio and was listening to an explanation of the ecosystem.

Good. She had discovered the encyclopedia. When they arrived at Zephyria, he would take her to the science center where she could indulge in deeper study. Perhaps she would even set up an office there, where she could, if she wished, continue her work, as his people so desperately needed her to. It would be easy enough to shoot any findings she made back to Earth, though he wouldn’t tell her that just yet lest it encourage her to believe she could return there after they mated.

No, for now it was best that the women believed themselves severed from their native planet, until they adjusted to their new lives among his people.

Zoran rubbed a palm over his chest. Just seeing his mate relaxed him, that and knowing she had found pleasure, however small, in one of his gifts. He had watched his own parents’ bond grow and strengthen, had witnessed their joy in each other, but never had he thought it would feel like this. Never had he understood the depth of their need to nurture and protect one another, until his littleklikahad so wisely allowed him to catch her.

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