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“They still know we were in this location for a while,” I said.
“You’re right. Thank frek we’ve got a hoverspeeder now.”
“Can they track it?”
“Good question.” He waved his phone over the machine’s control panel and tapped at the screen. After a few minutes, his phone beeped. Wrin flashed me that smile again and held out his hand. “Not anymore, they can’t.”
Once he’d helped me onto the bike, he had Max jump onto my lap. Then Wrin climbed on behind me, his thighs bracketing mine, his chest a firm wall at my back. Reaching around me, he grabbed the handlebars and kicked the engine to life. We rose a couple of feet off the ground on a blast of air and took off.
I settled back into the warmth of Wrin’s body with my arms curled around Max. The glow of the valoree grove faded behind us as we escaped into the night.
Thank god for Wrin’s night vision. If I thought walking in the forest was hard, it was nothing compared to hurtling through a maze of tree trunks at speed. The familiar glow of valoree trees shone in the distance off to either side, but the way ahead remained too dark for me.
Cool wind rushed over my face, but my hands remained snug, buried in Max’s silky fur as I held him to me. And Wrin’s big body kept the rest of me warm.
Plenty warm. Hot even. I resisted the urge to squirm back into him.
He’d pounded asshole guard’s face to a bloody pulp. Forme. Wrin would have killed the other male if I hadn’t pulled him away—the guard wasn’t worth whatever trouble that would have brought Wrin. It couldn’t have been acting. And if it wasn’t acting, then…
Then everything he’d told me was real. My crew was out there, the majority of them already rescued and waiting for me.
And Wrin was a hero.Myhero. One I could feel things for without worrying he was one of my captors trying to fool me. It scared me how much I wanted that to be true.
Maybe you’re getting worked up over nothing, Viv. What if he simply hates asshole guard as much as you do?
The forest lightened with the oncoming dawn, the dark shapes of the trees turning blue as color returned to the world. The little lavender birds flitted overhead, their high voices audible over the whoosh of the hoverspeeder’s air cushion.
Max stirred restlessly on my lap, the end of his tail twitching. Thankfully, his stinger remained out of sight.
“You okay?”I asked, practicing talking in my mind.
“Tasty breakfast.”His head whipped around, his eyes tracking one of the closer birds.
I chuckled and almost agreed but caught myself, remembering the “present” he’d brought me the night before. I didnotwant him dropping a bird at my feet anytime soon.
Wrin’s arms squeezed my sides more tightly for a few seconds. His breath whispered hot over my ear as he leaned forward to say, “We’re almost there.”
“Okay.” I nodded, the movement a little jerky as my body tingled with renewed awareness of him.
Brighter light filtered through the trees ahead, and we rounded a clump of purple underbrush to burst out into a clearing bathed in morning sunshine. Short flowering plants resembling clover carpeted the ground with purple leaves and lavender flowers.
The two-storey “cabin” standing in the middle of the glen was easily twice as large as the apartment I’d grown up in. Did that kind of size mean wealth on this world or simply that everyone had more space? The silver-blue wood siding blended into the surrounding forest, and several large windows decorated the front. Irregularly shaped slate tiles covered the roof, adding to the natural feel. Humans hadn’t built like this for centuries, everything concrete, steel, and plastic.
Wrin flew around the side of the house to a smaller wooden building behind it. He pulled us to a stop and silenced the engine, his long leg reaching out to steady the hoverspeeder as it settled onto the ground.
Max leaped from my lap, a feeling of restless eagerness filling my mind.
“Don’t go far,”I called after him as he disappeared into the trees.
“Breakfast,”he said, as if that excused anything and everything he might do.
I huffed in amusement and shook my head. Clearly, a cat was going to do what a cat was going to do no matter where you found yourself in the universe.
One last thought of“Maximum Good Hunter”drifted across my mind, and I laughed out loud.
“The kreecat?” Wrin’s tone sounded dry as he dismounted, the warmth and pressure of his body disappearing from behind me.
I squashed my twinge of disappointment at the loss of contact and slid to the ground. “Yep.”
