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PROLOGUE
Human females were everywhere. Well, everywhere in the Latharian Mate Program section of the base.
Vaarn growled under his breath as he walked through the crowded corridors, heading for his workshop. His new workshop. Since it had gotten out that he’d been the creator of the bracelet that had allowed Kaas V’aant to track down his mate on Earth, Vaarn had been inundated with work and given a new workshop.
The first he liked. It was validation that his inventions weren’t the waste of time both the engineers’ hall and his father had labeled them. That his creations still had value. Were useful.
The second, the workshop, was beyond his wildest dreams. He’d had to tinker with his inventions in the corner of barracks or cramped personal quarters for many years. Although the latter had afforded him a little more room, the need to pack everything away if he was reassigned had limited the size of his creations. He’d become a master at miniaturization because of it, but now he relished the opportunity to create on a larger scale.
But… he turned the corner, and his jaw tightened when he spotted the familiar form of a human female waiting outside for him… he wished they’d put him somewhere that wasn’t so accessible.
“Lady Sadie,” he said as he approached.
Sadie was the sister of his friend Kaas’ mate—the female Vaarn and his training group had helped rescue from an Earth healer who had been intent on selling off her organs. The fact that it had happened and how easily the delicate little female standing in front of him could also have become a victim made his blood ice over.
“Vaarn!” Sadie turned, treating him to a bright smile. It faded a little when he didn’t smile back, and she held out a basket warily. “I made these for you.”
He looked at the basket with human-style cakes inside. His stomach rumbled a little, but he ignored it, looking at her face again.
“Why?”
She looked down, and her knuckles went white on the basket handle. “I-I wanted to thank you for the bracelets you made for Ollie and me.”
“You are welcome.” He nodded. For some reason, Sadie had not registered with the Mate Program yet, which meant she wasn’t eligible for a tracking bracelet. So he’d made her and her child one each—a private commission.
“Was there anything else?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “If not, I have work to do.”
She shook her head, paling at his hard tone. “No, nothing. Sorry to have bothered you.”
He grunted as he swept past her into his workshop. As soon as the door closed, he leaned against it, his head thudding back into the metal as he groaned.
He felt a complete and utter draanthic for speaking to her that way, but she hadn’t registered for the Mate Program yet. The instant she did, she would be matched; he just knew it. If he let himself get close to her, allowed her soft smiles and charm to worm their way past his defenses, and she were given to another…
He wouldn’t survive it.
1
“What do you mean ‘the secondary power couplings in the routing matrix on deck seven are draanthed’?” Vaarn tried to keep the growl out of his voice as he stalked through the corridors of the human section of the station, equipment belt slung over his shoulder and toolbox in hand.
As if he didn’t have enough to deal with today, what with the handover between the B’Kaar who had built the station and the new station crew, they also had outages in the section that housed the human mates before they were mated. Usually, that wouldn’t be a problem… apart from the fact that the mate section was restricted, and only two engineers were cleared for access. One was Jaayn, who was off station, visiting home after his father had passed away, and the other was Vaarn himself. The new chief engineer of the station, who did not have time for this trall today.
“Looking at the logs, it looks like the couplings in that matrix fried when the station was undergoing conversion from its original ship form into the station configuration,” Maax, his second in command, said. He was no-nonsense and had graduated from the engineers’ hall with the highest honors, so Vaarn had no reason to doubt his word. Transforming the Devan’kra, a huge destroyer-class B’Kaar ship, into the station had been a massive undertaking. Some… issues were to be expected.
He turned a corner and stepped back to avoid being flattened by a group of human females. They were new, in standard-issue LMP joggers and hoodies, and watched him with wide eyes as they skirted around him.
“Ladies.” He offered a smile, trying to make his expression and body language as non-threatening as possible. Some new mate-potentials were as skittish as hell around warriors. He didn’t blame them. Compared to human males, latharian warriors were huge and, as he’d been told, scary as draanth. It probably had something to do with the fact that most human males he’d come across were soft and pathetic creatures, scared of their own shadows.
There were a few notable exceptions. He wouldn’t like to tangle with Murphy, the Earth president, or General M’rln’s son-in-law, but, looking at both those males, he assumed they’d inherited a larger level of latharian DNA from the expedition that had crash-landed on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago.
“Just here to fix the power,” he said when some of them still eyed him with fear, lifting his toolbelt to prove that he meant them no harm. “I will be finished as soon as I can.”
He carried on down the corridor, ignoring the whispers behind him. Most were comments about his size and how scary looking he was… but there were a few speculating on the size of his family jewels. He had half a mind to tell them that his family’s bonding necklace was held to be one of the most intricate and beautiful pieces from the Kravlor period. But he didn’t. Instead, he just kept moving down the corridor. The only female who needed to know about his family jewelry was… well, she wouldn’t be interested. He was sure of it.
“So…” He picked up the conversation with Maax again. “If the couplings have been blown since the conversion, how has the matrix been operating?”
As soon as he asked the question, he knew the answer. He didn’t want to know the answer, but he did.
Maax sighed. “One of the B’Kaar had a subroutine running to keep it operational.”
