Alpha Star: Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #1 (Intergalactic Dating Agency): Intergalactic Dating Agency (2 page)

All this subterfuge and ridiculous courtship. Sin bit back an impatient curse. “Why is Gre-Gre insisting on this fringe-galaxy quest? If she wanted me mated, she should’ve just sent me one along with the writ to the solar system instead of a carafe of that foul coffee.”

Ivan tilted his head. “Would you have accepted her choice? I have never known you to take the easy route.”

Sin glowered at his navigator’s not-wrong assessment. “There are no easy routes in this universe. Must be why I have a judgmental pilot with a death wish.”

“True,” Ivan replied solemnly. “And if your mate is to help you conquer an uncharted solar system, that one too must be brave and devoted.”

“And well paid,” Honey shouted fuzzily. “Do it for the treasure!”

“Reckless would be enough,” Sin muttered. “Always worked for me.”

Always…until it hadn’t. He flexed his hand. The med-techs told him it was all in his imagination, but he swore he heard/felt the grind of servos and the squish of spliced organics. His own cells were supposed to migrate to the cybernetic limb, and eventually it would be his again, technically, but his Jaxian metal-lord biochemistry was fighting the replacement. Despite the time he’d spent in regen, his grip seemed weaker, his response time slower, the arrogance that had sent him to the stars against his clan’s traditions…

Shot to hell like his moon-dust hand.

The
Sinner’s Prayer
had been too lucky for too long. He’d accepted that even before Gre-Gre had railed at him after the Battle of Anglorn. When she’d dangled a solar system of his own in front of him… Well, a mercenary starship captain with only one hand and luck running out should probably grab whatever he could get.

His captain’s portion of the merc bonus from their last job would be just enough to start up an asteroid mining operation with a bit left over to launch a sustainable settlement on one of the system’s two habitable planets. It would be rough for awhile. Once he announced the new mission, some of the crew would no doubt sign on with another ship—not everyone wanted planetside life. Hells, he couldn’t bear to think of giving up the
Prayer
even for the good credit she’d bring in. He wouldn’t be grounded, not after all he’d done to escape into space.

But in truth, once he gave up his mating rings, there’d be
no
escape.

The recycled air in his lungs felt stale and shrinking, as if the wormhole was collapsing around them. The ship would be stranded, trapped in no space, no time. The fingers that were not his dented the arm of the command chair with the spasm of his grip.

“Captain, shall I send you the report on the data-cube recipient?” Ivan shuffled through his screens. “The cube is compiling public and private records, but it shouldn’t take long to collate. It appears your match is a young female from a place called Sunset Falls.”

“In space, the suns never fall,” Honey announced loudly. One bare, muscled arm decorated with drakling sky runes appeared over the deck divider, and he hauled himself up high enough to poke his head above the rail. His red hair bristled aggressively, and even from across the bridge, the fiery flicker in his eyes looked menacing. “Cap’n, I recommend we strafe from orbit to establish our dominance and then take our pick from the prizes.”

Ivan pursed his lips. “Earth is a closed planet. Manifest contact is expressly prohibited in the IDA approach codes. Also, you always recommend strafing from orbit.”

“I love the colors of plasma in atmo.” Honey sighed dreamily.

Sin scowled at his first officer. “Since when are ‘we’ picking prizes?”

Honey hooked his other arm over the rail and rested his chin on his crossed forearms. “Maybe you aren’t the only lonely one.”

Ivan made a choked noise. Oh double hells, Sin vastly preferred Honey setting fires to sharing feelings.

The scales on Honey’s cheeks flushed crimson. “Our Shining Lady of Perpetual Fire promises every drakling has one true mate somewhere in the universe. The
Sinner’s Prayer
has crisscrossed galaxies for lightyears in every direction and yet…” His quilled hair wavered like flames when he shook his head. “I don’t have much longer to find mine before the flame in my heart goes black.”

Sin stared at him. No more coffee for his crew. Ever. “I had no idea you were such a poet.”

Ivan said, “It is not poetry, Captain. It’s physiology. Draklings are violent and unpredictable”—he raised his voice over Honey’s snort of laughter—“even more so among their own kind, so they pair bond outside their genus and are thereafter linked physically, emotionally, and fatally to their mate.”

“Forever to eternity,” Honey murmured.

Sin studied his second in command, wondering whether his antics were fueled more by the coffee…or despair. “I didn’t know.”

The drakling shrugged. “Not something we boast about. Interferes with our intergalactic reputations as the fiercest fighters. And lovers.”

Rubbing his temple—carefully, in case the hand that wasn’t his tried to stave in his cranium—Sin asked, “How long?” Hells, hadn’t he just asked that about his own fate? Now he was responsible for his first officer too.

But really, he’d made himself responsible for all souls aboard the moment he won the
Sinner’s Prayer
. This was just another gamble. But despite all the times he’d led the crew into battle, somehow he’d never been so aware that he was playing with their lives.

And loves.

“There are no lonely old draklings,” Honey answered. He slipped down behind the railing, out of sight again except for a sad puff of smoke.

Sin sighed and glanced at his pilot. “How about you? Anything you want me to know about vrykoly mating rituals?”

Ivan straightened, and for a moment, his silvery eyes seemed to blacken with the infinite void of space. “No, Captain. Vrykoly do not seek mates.”

“Lucky you,” Sin muttered.

“Why would you,” Honey called, “when you can just eat ‘em?”

Triple hells, this was so much more than he wanted to know about his crew. Sin closed his eyes, once more blocking out the glow of the wormhole shunting him faster than light to his fate.

“Captain,” Ivan prodded. “The profile of your match is complete. Shall I send it to your utility device?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sin said. He wished he had another coffee to drown out the warning whispers, deeper and more insidious than the imagined sounds from his false hand. “Whoever she is, she’s the one.”

When the cool morning light filled her second-floor bedroom, Zoe woke with the fading tatters of a strange dream still clinging to her unconscious. She tried to force the dream into her waking mind as she washed up and dressed in the unofficial Sunset Falls uniform of jeans and a three-button Henley.

Something about stars…

Probably from the cookies she’d had for dinner last night. The coffee shop across from Odds & Ends had half price on their bakery rejects, including broken specimens of their signature Twinkle, Twinkle star cookies. Since Tisha had still been at work and Delaney had been already asleep when Zoe got home, it’d seemed pointless to make a real dinner. And now, since Delaney was already off to work and Tisha was still asleep, obviously the only way to achieve cosmic balance was to have leftover cookies for breakfast too.

Holding half a frosted star between her teeth, Zoe stuffed her arms into her bulky sweater and stepped out into the chilly morning to start her daily ten thousand steps. The wool kept her as warm as the Andean alpaca who’d donated the yarn, almost as warm as the memories of the villagers who’d gifted her team with sweaters as thanks for the construction training. A few months of instruction on well-to-septic best practices and the locals were able to take the knowledge to the next village over, exponentially expanding how much good her one little team had been able to do.

Aid work had been the perfect job for her, satisfying the wanderlust she’d inherited from her army brat childhood while letting her tease her overprotective Air Force brother about how somebody had to patch up all the holes he made. When Will had died—a car crash on a crappy Third World mountain road—she couldn’t find a patch big enough to fill that loss, but the unending work had still been there for her.

She’d focused on measuring, digging, pouring concrete, installing hardware, patiently explaining every step in triplicate—living up to her performance reviews that noted she was steady, dependable, maybe a little stubborn and lacking imagination, as if imagination mattered when it came to raw sewage.

And then came the brick to the head.

Oddly, she’d always had a fondness for bricks: brownish, dusty, boring, a little heavy, useful for lots of things. Much like herself. But she’d never cracked anyone’s skull.

When the bleeding had stopped and the swelling gone down, they’d told her she could expect six months of recovery and another eighteen months of regaining her life. Then they’d have a better sense of what she could expect. Now, halfway through those two years, she still wasn’t sure what had stayed in her head and what had been permanently knocked out.

Retreating to a slow, easy recuperation in Sunset Falls had seemed like a sensible choice at the time. But now… No one really needed her here. She wasn’t making any sort of difference.

But the brick that had left her seeing double to the point of puking for weeks—that had been a great weight loss plan—and had stolen her peripheral vision, apparently forever, had also let her see her work in a new light. She’d
never
made a difference. Yeah, she’d brought toilets to places where the only cultural commonality was fart jokes—give her a damned gold star. But really, all she’d done was find a way to make shit roll downhill. The world was falling apart faster than she could fix it. And she couldn’t even hold up her end of it anymore.

More than the early chill, the loss of innocent enthusiasm for her worldwide adventure left her fingers numb, and the last bite of cookie clung like crumbling mortar in her throat. Maybe she’d swing by Twinkle, Twinkle for a cup of coffee. She shoved her hands into the sweater pocket and bumped her knuckles on something hard.

Oh yeah, the little box she’d found last night. She’d meant to listen to the message again to see if she could figure out who it belonged to, but when she’d gotten inside, she’d been distracted by the cookies and a case of Star Trek DVDs Delaney had left in the living room. The Enterprise crew were almost as earnest and well-meaning as she’d been on her own five-year mission after college. A mission cut abruptly short. She shoved her hands deeper into the pocket as if she could push the negative thoughts away. When she’d ditched her physical therapy a month early to move to Sunset Falls for the tourist season, her therapist had warned her of the risk of depression following a traumatic brain injury.

She didn’t need a reminder of that warning; she just needed coffee.

She turned her steps—ten thousand minus a couple hundred now—toward Main Street. Sunset Falls was a big town during the summer camping season and the winter sports season but shrank to a small town during the shoulder seasons like now. Even so, the autumn aspen leaf-peeper crowd seeking food, lodging, and a decent artist community kept downtown reasonably bustling in the daylight.

One of the big SUVs from the private resort was parked outside the grocery, its enigmatic purple mountain logo emblazoned on the black paint. She’d asked Tisha and Delaney about the resort, and they’d explained that it was
very
private, like no one knew anyone who’d been a guest there. Sometimes the SUVs rolled into town for supplies, but that was it. Folks in town speculated it was a luxury spa for famous people recovering from addiction or cosmetic surgery or whatever, but the eleven-foot security fencing kept anyone from confirming.

Zoe joined the short line waiting to order their morning jolt, idly eavesdropping on the couple ahead of her. They’d apparently been out birdwatching at Sunset Lake before dawn and had seen what sounded like an impressive meteor.

“I’m telling you, it was way too big to have all burned up,” the woman was saying as she poked at her cell phone. “It must’ve struck
some
where, and
some
one must’ve tweeted about it… Ugh. Why can’t I get any bars?”

“Remember, the guy at the gas station said the coverage out here is really bad, even in town.” The man checked his phone. “Yeah, I got nothing too.”

“I’ve never heard of magnetic rock interfering with wireless signals,” the woman grumbled. “How are we supposed to figure out where it hit?”

The man shrugged. “If you can’t Google it, it never happened.”

She huffed then turned the sound into a laugh. “Oh well. The loons were pretty.” She leaned against the man’s shoulder and smiled up at him.

Zoe averted her gaze, but the fog of their happiness seemed to blur her vision as bad as when she’d first awakened in the hospital after her bricking. Delaney had offered several times to take her out on the lake, but when she’d first moved to Sunset Falls, her balance and double vision had still left her feeling queasy and the thought of being stuck on a boat for hours hadn’t sounded like fun at all. Then the tourist season hit and they’d gotten too busy. Now soon the lake would be freezing over, and there’d be no point going out…

Oh jeez, when had she forgotten how to have fun? Apparently that had been knocked out of her noggin too.

She got to the front of the line and greeted the barista.

“Whatcha having?”

“Just a regular, black,” Zoe said.

“Cookie to go with it?”

She shuddered. “No more this morning, thanks.”

She got it to go, to escape the happy loon couple and the too-sweet scent of royal icing. Wandering down the street to the little park tucked into a bend of Sunrise Creek, she swiped her sleeve along the dew-dampened seat of a swing and sat.

A hard lump poked into her belly. Oh, the box…

“Duh, space cadet,” she muttered. Well, she wasn’t going back to the lost and found until her coffee and the loon couple were gone.

She wondered about the meteor they’d seen. How cool. If she saw a shooting star, she would wish for…