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He frowned, his expression confused. “You’d be my consort,” he said as if that explained everything.
“That doesn’t sound much better.” I considered all the things I knew about consorts on my planet.
I considered all the things I knew about consorts on earth. They were concubines. Outsiders. Never really part of royalty. Right?
Kaio let out a soft chuckle. “It’s not like that on my planet. You would be my mate, my…” He frowned, searching for a word that would make sense to me. I could almost feel him rifling through my mind.
“Stop that,” I said, just as he said, “My spouse. Wife.”
I froze for the second time in the last few minutes.
“Are you asking me to come back to your planet and marry you?”
“I suppose so?” He spread his arms out in an all-encompassing gesture. I wasn’t quite certain what it meant—I had already figured out that nodding and shaking his head were gestures that were new to him, something he had picked up from me.
“If we mate, whether it’s here or on my home planet, then the mating bond will take effect and you will be my consort—my mate, my spouse, my wife—no matter where we go.”
I held my hands out in front of me as if to ward him off. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. If we have sex, it’s the equivalent of getting married? I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I mean, you’re hot and all, but I’m not certain I’m ready to sign up to have and to hold forevermore until death do us part and all that shit.”
Kaio chuckled. The sound ignited something deep in my belly, a yearning like nothing I had ever felt.
“If it’s merely sex you want, tiny one, we can do that right now.” He began unfastening the Velcro at the shoulders of his uniform.
“Wait! Wait.”
Was that what I wanted too? I was so confused by this enormous, beautiful, possibly psychotic alien male who had chosen me for this fight.
“Are you declining sex with me?”
I swear he looked like a crestfallen five-year-old who had just been told he couldn’t have a new toy.
I had to laugh. “It’s not that—but I’m not saying yes yet, either.” I sat down next to the low fire, feeding another stick—what Kaio had called a Jivanjun branch—into it, then drawing my knees to my chin and wrapping my arms around them, crossing my feet at the ankles. “I need more information.”
After all, it was a terrible idea to enter into any kind of negotiation—including buying into some hot new salesman’s pitch—without all the facts.
“Tell me more about this mating bond thing.”
Kaio inclined his head slowly, deep in thought as he sat down across from me. I could almost catch the things flickering through his mind, but they moved too fast for me to get more than the barest glimpse. Two other aliens who looked remarkably like Kaio. His parents. A swirling wide slash of purple light. And an elderly alien of the same type as Kaio, explaining the mating bond to him—the kind of memory that seemed like it came from childhood, maybe.
“It would be easier to simply share my thoughts with you,” he finally said.
“Maybe so, but I’m a human—we prefer words.”
“Very well.” He peeled off a strip of the fladi lizard meat and threaded it onto one of the sticks he had sharpened earlier. I didn’t interrupt him—it was clear he was gathering his thoughts. That was good—everything I could read at the moment was an incoherent jumble.
After a long moment, he began speaking quietly. “The mating magick is one of the few examples of magical power that remains active on my planet.”
“Magical power? Like what you used earlier to get rid of those two who attacked us?”
His expression turned troubled, and I felt more than saw his mind shy away from that topic. Then everything in his mind went dark, as if a wall had come down between us.
I guess he figured out how to keep me from listening in on him.
“No.” He did that funky head waggle from side to side that I had learned to recognize as his people’s gesture for a negative, and it took me a moment to realize he was still talking about magic. “That was… something else.” He paused again for a long moment before speaking again, turning the alien lizard kebab around in his hands to brown over our fire. “There are some planets where magick is common. The fae of Danicka, for example, have a kind of power they gain from their planet’s special chemistry—as I understand it, the fae soak in pools where the combination of liquid and plant life gives them certain abilities.”
“Sounds kind of cool.”
My mouth was beginning to water from the smell of the meat, as much as the thought of alien lizard meat had not appealed to me earlier.
