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It was a breathtaking view and the question of why Commander Sylvan, the head of the Kindred High Council, had summoned them to a meeting aboard the huge white ship was an intriguing one. But as always, Sev found that his attention was drawn more to his partner than anything else.
Mia was tiny, even by human standards. She stood just five feet two inches and the top of her head just barely came up past Sev’s elbow. Despite her petite stature, she had a full, pleasing figure—she was definitely what the Kindred called an “Elite”—a female the Goddess had blessed with extra curves.
She also had long, wavy hair that was the color humans called “strawberry blonde.” To Sev, it looked like burnished copper with threads of pure gold running through it, though he seldom got to see it down around her shoulders. She usually wore it in a style called a “French braid” pulled tightly away from her face and braided down the back into an orderly bun pinned at the nape of her neck.
Her eyes were a pure, clear gray and she had tiny little dots of pigment the humans called “freckles” but which the Kindred called “Goddess kisses” across her pert little nose. Curving pink lips completed her face—a face that could only be called “adorable”—though Sev had never dared to say so to her.
He and Mia had been paired together as a unit in the HKR Detective Force in Tampa several years ago and one of the first things he’d learned about his partner was that she was fiercely independent and completely professional. In fact, she hadn’t even batted an eye when the Captain had first introduced him. She’d simply said,
“So you’re my new partner? Okay, big guy—try to keep up.”
Sev wasn’t used to humans not staring at him the first time they saw him—or the second or third time, for that matter. He looked so different from them, it really wasn’t surprising.
As a rare, Dae’mon Kindred, he was a muscular seven feet tall with reddish skin and glowing, golden eyes—and the two curving horns protruding from his forehead added another foot to his height. Humans seemed to think he looked like an evil deity and several times human children had burst out crying and started screaming that “The Devil” was coming after them when they saw him. He’d even seen grown human males turn pale when they first laid eyes on him.
Sev was so used to all the fuss and confusion his appearance caused, that the blasé look on his new partner’s lovely face had nearly unnerved him. Later she had grudgingly admitted that their first meeting had startled her, but she had what she called “an excellent poke-her face” so she’d been able to hide her reaction.
Since Mia had taught him how to play the human game of poke-her—(which was in fact a card game, and not some kind of strange diversion where you took turns actually poking a female)—Sev could attest that this was true. His partner could look perfectly calm and serious on the outside, no matter what might be going on inside—which made her damned hard to read sometimes.
Though at the moment, it was fairly obvious that she was feeling some concern about their upcoming meeting with Commander Sylvan.
He flew the shuttle through the transparent atmosphere membrane and landed neatly in the Docking Bay at the end of a row of sleek silver shuttles almost identical to his own. Then he got out on his side and went around to open the door for Mia.
“Wow…” His partner looked around with wide eyes. “This place ishuge.”
“The Mother Ship is about a fourth the size of your Earth’s moon,” Sev told her. “This is your first time seeing it, right?”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded, still looking around the vast, echoing Docking Bay.
“Come on,” Sev told her. “There’s more to it than just the Docking Bay, you know. You want a hand down?” The shuttle, which was usually in car mode down on Earth, was in flight mode now—which meant the drop from the passenger side door to the floor below was a good meter.
Sev’s hands itched to wrap around his diminutive partner’s waist and lift her down, but he had learned early on not to assume that Mia needed help. She tended to get irritated if he took the upper hand without asking. Which was why he waited patiently for her answer instead of just picking her up and setting her down on the ground.
“Hmm? Oh yes—I guess that would be all right. Thanks, Sev.”
Mia held out her arms for him and Sev felt like his heart might burst as he lifted her carefully, feeling her small hands resting lightly on his shoulders. He secretly wished he could cradle her in his arms, but he knew Mia didn’t think of him that way. As far as he could tell, she didn’t think ofanymale that way—not even her ex-husband, whom she was currently in the process of divorcing.
So though he wished he could prolong the process, he set her gently on the polished metal floor of the Docking Bay instead.
“Now which way—do you know?” Mia asked, looking up at him as she straightened her navy-blue pantsuit and ran a hand over her sleek French braid.
She always dressed like a male, Sev thought—but he didn’t blame her. With her lovely face and cute, curvy-petite figure, his partner would never have been taken seriously by the human males she had to work and live among if she hadn’t taken pains to masculinize her appearance.
This was the fault of her culture—for some reason, human males refused to see females as their equals and often treated them as inferior beings. This effect was multiplied when the female in question was small or cute or extra feminine. Mia simply did everything she could to be taken seriously.
In fact, it was because of the way that human males treated their females that it had taken Sev so long to get his partner to trust him. She seemed to think at first that he would be twice as bad as a human male to get along with, just because he was so large.
“It’s always the biggest guys who are the biggest assholes,” she’d told him, once the ice between them had finally thawed. “I’m sorry if I judged you wrong, Sev—you’re okay.”
Those words had done wonders for their partnership and the fact that Mia now felt comfortable enough around him to show him what she was really feeling—and to accept help from him—meant a hell of a lot to Sev. Mia was what the humans called “a tough nut to crack”—meaning it was difficult to get past her shell and really know the person within. But he considered her worth the effort—morethan worth it.
They’d had few misunderstandings at the start—mostly when he tried to protect her from aggressive perps when Mia didn’t feel like she needed protection. After all, she wore a gun on her hip, the same as him, as she’d pointed out to him several times.
It was hard to hold back and not step in front of her during a confrontation—she was so tiny and fragile and his natural instinct as a Kindred warrior was always to protect any female he perceived to be in danger. And that instinct doubled in intensity when the female in question was one he cared about, like Mia.
But once he’d learned to hold back, he’d found that his petite partner could handle herself quite well. And it had done wonders for their relationship because Mia finally realized he was seeing her as another officer and not just a helpless female.
Sev felt they were on even footing now. Mia trusted him and even joked with him sometimes and called him “grumpy” when he was in a bad mood—which wasn’t often when she was around. Mostly he just looked “grumpy” because of his frightening appearance. Also, he rarely smiled, believing it was better to present a stoic face to the world—that was the way of his people, The Dae’mon Kindred.
