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I sat back to look him in the eyes and waited. He seemed too happy, too content, to make me fear the worst.
“I love you,” he announced, his cheeks pink. “I know I, like, stayed. And it’s maybe clear already, but I wanted to say it. I love y—”
With a kiss, I swallowed the admission, letting it settle like a bright star in my chest. I purred when our lips parted, dropping my forehead against his.
“And I love you, my Lucas, brightest light on all of Thorzan.”
He rolled his eyes, but at the same time, his arms wound around my neck.
“Yeah, and, like, if you want to talk about, you know, kids or whatever, once things calm down, we could maybe do that. Slowly. Like, baby steps toward having babies, right?”
I nodded. “As slowly as you wish, my Lucas.”
But already, even with the idea that we could wait many revolutions before he was ready, he was open to the idea—to our family. Nothing had ever sounded better.”
His small hands brushed my shoulders. “Then you and me, and them, and, uh, maybe your mom? I think your dad would stand out too much... Anyway! We can go to Earth. I’ll show you pizza. It’ll be great.”
“Peetzah?” I echoed.
Lucas laughed. “Yeah, Kaelum. You’re gonna love it.”
And he was right—anything Lucas shared with me, I would love. But not half so much as I loved my mate.
DECLARED
STAR MARKED WARRIORS BOOK TWO
CHAPTER1
WES
The moon was dark, but the night in the valley was anything but. The lack of light just made the stars shine that much brighter from my vantage point on the roof outside my bedroom. A shooting star zipped past overhead and on a leftover childhood whim, I threw a wish into the universe.
Please get me out of this rut. Give me something new, something different, something other than living hand to mouth in my pitiful childhood home. Anything.
It was a great paycheck, the one I’d gotten that afternoon. Maybe my best ever, with a big bonus for all the last-minute work I’d done before release, going through endless bug reports and rewriting lines of code until my hands had gone numb.
The deposit hit my bank, and an hour later an email came through from my boss—former boss—thanking me for all my hard work and wishing me the best of luck on future projects.
Because of course, a game that’s been released doesn’t need nearly as many programmers as one that’s being made.
It was expected.
I wasn’t being fired unjustly or treated in a way other than I’d expected.
Okay, maybe I’d hoped that this one time, I’d done well enough that they would want to keep me on the team. Even if I spent the rest of my life hunting down bugs, that was fine.
Mind-numbing, but fine.
It would have meant I could pay next month’s mortgage payment, and not just this month’s.
Sure, maybe I should have let the house go when Dad died. I mean, it was more of a shack than a house, really, and it wasn’t worth anywhere near what the mortgage was costing me.
It was just... it had been my only tie to anything at the time. Mom died when I was a kid, and I was an only child, so losing Dad the year before was the end. It had cut the only tether I’d had in the world.
Because clever, clever me, I’d gone into a field of piecework, where all jobs were temporary and all peer relationships were fleeting, unless a chat room was enough.
And hell, sometimes online messagingwasenough. I’d never been the most social guy. I treasured my alone time, and if I had to pin down what ended every one of my short, sad attempts at relationships, it was guys going clingy on me.
