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I’m about to tell her I don’t care, that nothing will separate us, when she continues, “Shak and Juliet asked me to find you a mate. I told them I would. I even gave them names of some women.”
Women? What is she talking about?
“It wasn’t supposed to be me. I was supposed to vet these other women.” At my confusion, she hurries on, “To, you know, look into their backgrounds and make sure they weren’t crazy. To make sure they’d be suitable candidates as a mate. Part of that meant checking into their medical history.”
Ana runs her hands over the wheel even though we aren’t driving, her eyes straight ahead. “But I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted it for myself. I was selfish. I thought, for once in my life, maybe I could be something special. If I could help start a new race and be transformed like Juliet was? To grow wings? That would be the kind of difference my sister could never make even in her wildest dreams.” She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “God, I’m so self-involved. It was all about me.”
Finally, she looks my way and I grasp her hand, needing to be connected to her. I feel the anguish in her words and I want to ease the telling. Because I see she is not done.
“But then I met you.”
For a long moment she doesn’t say anything else, and our gazes catch. “And you aren’t just some opportunity to make me feel better about myself. You’re a person. An amazing, smart, fucking gorgeous person, inside and out. A man I’m lucky to know, much less mate.”
I squeeze her hand, wanting so badly to pull her back into my lap.
But then she shakes her head, the sadness returning. “So I think this is karma. I’m getting what I deserve for being such a selfish bitch.” She laughs but there isn’t any humor in it. “I won’t be able to give you the one thing you were sent here to do. I won’t be able to give you a baby.”
“Do you know this for a fact?”
She shakes her head. “But it’s karmic justice, don’t you see?”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she tosses her hands in the air, “that you reap what you sow. That if you do bad things, eventually, bad things will happen to you.”
I weigh her words. “Yes,” I say slowly. “It is logical that if you do wrong, there are consequences. But you did not do wrong.”
I see her about to argue with me and I lift up a hand. “Or at least not very much wrong. And it brought you to me, so I would not have you take it back. Do you wish you could go back and undo being my mate?”
“No,” she says immediately. “I don’t. I’d do it all again but only because I know how amazing you are. How much you mean to me. I’d be missing out on the…on the relationship of a lifetime if I hadn’t ignored what Juliet said and taken you for myself.”
Her words are passionate and her eyes bright with fire, and I want to fuck her. Right now. Maybe it’s wrong, but to have my mate claim me so vehemently, nothing has ever stirred my loins more deeply. I tremble with wanting her.
“I don’t care if we never produce offspring.”
Her face crumples. “I didn’t mean— I wasn’t trying to say all this so that you’d— I know it’s like your entire purpose to—”
“You are my purpose.” When she tries to pull her hand away from mine, I clasp it more tightly and reach for her other until I hold both of her hands captive.
“Do you doubt me, my Ana?”
“It’s not that, I just understand that you have responsibilities—”
“You are my only responsibility now.”
She breathes out hard and her eyes roll to the ceiling. “I don’t want to lose you, Ezo. Just the thought of having to give you up to some other woman—”
“Never!”
But it’s like I do not speak at all. “It guts me,” she keeps on. “I want to stab the eyes out of any bitch that even flirts with you, but we can’t always get what we want and—
“NO!” I finally shout.
Ana startles but finally stops speaking her poison words.
“There is none for me but you. I will capture you and steal another spaceship and we will leave both of our races behind if we must. No one will take you from me!”
She doesn’t say anything, only blinks. Have I scared her? I say everything wrong but I don’t know how else to communicate and I need her to understand. I cannot lose her, too. I will not. I refuse. Not when there is strength in my limbs and fight in my heart.
I take a deep breath. “I have learned of your family but you still do not know of mine.”
