Alpha Star: Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #1 (Intergalactic Dating Agency): Intergalactic Dating Agency (6 page)

“Hey,” she protested again. “You break it, you buy it.”

“Actually,” he muttered, “my motto has always been ‘You pay me, I break it for you.’” While she puzzled that out, he swiveled to face her again, shaking dust from his hand. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s a meteorite,” she said. And she’d been under the impression that meteorites were stone and iron, but this one had crumbled in his grasp like glass. If only he’d been around when that brick was flying at her head. “Got it from outer space.”

“I know that,” he said impatient.

“Then why’d you ask?”

He huffed out a growling breath. “
When
did you find these?”

“I didn’t,” she said snarkily, but when he glowered, she relented and added, “My boss brought them in this morning. He’s a…” Alien conspiracy nut was probably too harsh. “He’s an amateur astronomer and he tracked a meteor breaking up over Sunset Falls late last night.” She narrowed her eyes. “It’s twenty dollars.”

“I don’t have your money.”

“Then you don’t get my rock.” She whisked down the length of the counter and nipped what remained of the fragment from his hand. Sooty powder had fallen away, revealing a smooth, dull interior. It felt hot, as if it had warmed in his grasp despite the glove.

She froze when his long fingers wrapped around her wrist.

He’d crushed part of the rock, but his grip on her through the thin fabric of his glove was gentle. And inescapable. She strained back against his hold, her heart hammering, but he didn’t let go.

“I need this item,” he said.

She swallowed. “And I need to show my boss receipts at the end of the day.” That wasn’t strictly true. As far as she could tell, Mr. Evens had only a passing interest in profitability. But that didn’t mean she’d give the shop away out from under him.

“I’ll have someone bring you money,” her captor said.

“And then I’ll give you the meteorite,” Zoe said.

She couldn’t believe her boldness. There was not backing down from a bully, and then there was just stupid. Was she going to fight him over a rock?

Her pulse was racing like it was trying to get away from her. Like her sense of self-preservation apparently. He looked down at his hand on hers and frowned.

His fingers sprang open, releasing her and the rock. “I’ll be back,” he said with a warning look. “Don’t give it to anyone else.”

“No one wants it.” But she didn’t put it back in the box with the other fragments. Maybe it was the lingering heat of his touch that had melded the piece to her palm.

And for a minute, she almost envied the rock.

For the second time that solar revolution, Sin walked away from something he wanted.

He did not like the sensation.

Better to have just taken what he needed. Theft and abduction were both honorable merc pastimes. But as the future leader of his own world, he was trying to abide by the rules of this planet.

He didn’t like that sensation either.

He strode across the street and opened the door to the cruiser, careful not to put his injured hand through the patch over the hole he’d made earlier. In the lightweight protection of the glove, his skin tingled. Regenerating, probably. But something had happened when he touched Zoe.

“Was there trouble, Captain?” Ivan peered at him, his eyes once again hidden by the goggles.

“Yes.” Sin retrieved the data-cube from his pocket and thumped it on the dash in front of him.

Ivan glanced over his shoulder toward the shop window. “No strafing, I trust.”

“
Some
thing burned in orbit.” Sin settled in the seat with a grunt. “I found a chunk of the
Prayer
’s shielding for sale.”

Dark brows arched over Ivan’s goggles. “That could be hard to explain to uninitiated Earthers.”

“The tile was badly degraded, but I recognized the shipyard stamp on it. Not a symbol anyone here would even recognize as writing. I obliterated it, but engineering should see the debris. I want to know why a piece of my ship fell off. We came through the Battle of Anglorn in one piece.” Mostly. “I’m not going to lose the
Prayer
to slack maintenance.”

Ivan frowned. “Losing one tile wouldn’t ground the ship, but at the least there should have been an enviro warning. I will check the records to see what was missed.”

Sin nodded curtly. He’d disregarded more than his share of warning lights and klaxons in the midst of battle, but the entry to this Earth had been quiet enough that any discrepancy should’ve been noted, out of boredom if nothing else.

He hadn’t been
that
distracted at the thought of taking a bride.

Had he?

“I need currency,” he grumbled.

“Don’t we all?” Honey popped his head between the front seat, almost sending Sin through the roof in surprise. And then he’d owe the IDA a new cruiser roof. “That’s why we’re mercs.”

“Not me,” Ivan said.

Honey smirked. “Right. You’re in it for the gastronomical extravaganza.”

Ivan averted his face.

Sin scowled at his second in command. “What are you doing back there? I thought you’d returned to the ship.”

“I did. I forgot something.”

“You?” Ivan queried softly. “How remiss.”

Honey snorted at him, a puff of smoke rising from his nostrils to the roof of the cruiser. “Do you want fresh food on the flight home or not?” He put a fingertip to his lips. “Oops. My mistake.”

“Enough,” Sin growled. He’d survived lightyears of Honey’s teasing, but their vrykoly pilot seemed edgy, something Sin had never seen before even under the heaviest bombardment. “I need whatever passes for credit on this planet.”

Ivan straightened his goggles in Honey’s direction. “Maybe you forgot to tell us about losing a part of the ship.”

The first officer bristled. “I would never miss…” Then he smirked. “Got me, dark one.” He frowned again, emotions shifting like quickgold. “I want to see that tile. If we have a malfunctioning sensor, I want that fixed before we leave.”

“Not interested in flaming out in atmo?” Ivan mused. “What would Our Shining Lady of Perpetual Fire say?”

“That the loveliest fire burns within.” Honey put one hand over the sky runes above his heart. “I will not burn until I feel the spark of my mate between my claws and teeth.” His smirk flared back to life. “And around my—”

“No poetry,” Sin snapped. “Money. Now.”

With the credit left over from Honey’s supply excursion, Sin stomped back toward the shop where Zoe Nazario, his would-not-be bride, waited.

Anticipation quickened his steps. It had been a long time since he interacted with anyone not of his crew or at the waystations that serviced ships like the
Sinner’s Prayer
. Which was to say, borderline places, dangerous places where he could never quite let down his guard, even at the most intimate moments. This small planet in an unremarkable solar system on an outer curve of a middling spiral galaxy was as close to peace as he’d found since leaving his clan. Yet all he’d been doing here was fighting with the little female.

His steps rocked to a halt as he faced the shop door with the brusque black-and-white sign centered in the window.

“Closed,” his translator whispered in his head.

That sneaky little star harpy.

He waited for dark, since theft and abduction were entertainments best saved for the shadows. Tracking Zoe to her shop had been easy enough, even with the difficulties caused by the EM repulsor, since Honey’s drakling senses didn’t care about repulsing. This time, Sin didn’t even need his first officer; he just put his fist through the back door of the closed shop.

Maybe a fake hand was good for something after all.

The space was quiet, missing the tingle of energy that had left him twitching before. Missing Zoe. He rumbled to himself under his breath as he stalked through the clutter. The thin beam of light from his utility device swept the gloom, reflecting off the glass counter. The strong scent of the food machine in the corner made him pause. Though it was wiped clean, the smell remained.

“Exploded grain kernels,” he murmured. It seemed unnecessarily aggressive, but so did Zoe, for that matter.

He stepped behind the counter. Here, the smell of the popped corn was less intrusive, and a more delicate fragrance drifted to him. Zoe’s perfume, light and sweet. He didn’t know the flowers of this world. Would the blossoms that scented her skin and hair grow on his as-yet-unseen planets?

Setting his jaw, he aimed the beam of light toward the box with the glitter-speckled sign. “Get Your Own Piece of Big Sky!” The idea of holding the sky in his hands pleased him. Maybe Honey understood instinctively, but most of the crew of the
Prayer
relied on the ship to give them the freedom of flight. Sin reached for the box. He’d had more sky than most of his clan—he should count himself lucky.

His fingers brushed the bottom of the box.

The empty box.

A bark of laughter escaped from him. Much as Zoe had, with the piece of his ship.

“She wants to play.” He whirled back to the door he’d broken. The anticipation that had rushed through him before was white-hot zeal now, every nerve ending flaring to life. Time to hunt.

He strode back to the cruiser. “Honey, I need your nose again.”

With Ivan at the wheel, they cruised slowly along the dark streets. The vrykoly’s silver eyes were bare to the night while the drakling hung his red head out the open window.

“This way.” His nostrils flared. “She was just here.” After another turn, he pointed. “There. Scent trail ends there…at the Sunset Saloon.”

Sin didn’t need the instant translation of saloon. Almost every language in the universe had an equivalent to a saloon, and most of them included a slurred sound like –s and a howling like –ooo.

If Zoe Nazario thought she could hide from him in some rough place, she was oh so wrong.

“No need for you two to accompany me,” he told his bridge crew. “I’ll make my own way back to the ship.”

“Aye, Captain,” overlaid with “Aw, Captain…” followed him out of the cruiser, but they let him go.

A bite of cold air whispered across his belly where he’d torn his shirt to bind his wounded hand earlier, and the sensation brought his mercenary instincts to the fore. His own senses weren’t refined enough to pick Zoe’s scent from the whiff of smoke and some sort of ethanol-based accelerants filtering into the street, but he had his own ways of zeroing in on a target.

A primitive beat thumped against his eardrums, and his pulse ramped up in response to the threat level. Definitely a rough place.

As he stepped through the doorway, his translator caught up with the music.

“We danced so slow,

Like it was the last dance,

Like it was our last chance.

We ran through the fields,

Bright with wildflowers,

Counting down the hours

Until we're together,

You and me forever.”

Huh. Maybe his pulse had overstated the threat.

Still, he held himself at the ready as he surveyed the patrons inside the saloon. With some very slight variations in hue, they all looked very much alike, a blur of bipedal humanoids in a typical Earther uniform of jeans, t-shirts, and flannel. Never had he missed the churning diversity of a waystation more.

It would be worse once he was bound to a single planet, or even two. He had to make this last voyage count.

He paced through the loud, packed room, careful to make neither eye nor physical contact, since he knew both were frowned upon among suspicious, irritable Earthers. He scanned the crowd from the advantage of his height.

And almost jumped out of his skin—real and regen—when a hand slipped under his coat and up his spine.

The IDA report on Earthers said pickpocketing was more of a problem in larger urban areas. He hoped the criminal element there was more effective than this fumbler.

He spun, grabbing the hand at his back.

The unknown female lurched into him with a too-wide smile. “Oh hey there, big guy. Wanna dance?”

Just as there were saloons in every part of the universe, there were locals like this one, who demanded nothing more from their companions than perhaps the cost of their mood-enhancing indulgences. For a moment, he was tempted. This one had the bold look he favored, and her flesh pressed against him was soft and full. And—Battle of Anglorn aside—he was tired of losing.

But he needed that chunk of his ship. And he needed a bride.

At that moment, his gaze landed on Zoe, sitting on the far side of another counter. She seemed to use counters are barriers, and he would delight in going around this one too. Careful of the unpredictable triggers in his hand, he nudged the unknown female out of his way.

She followed the direction of his focus and shook her head. “Sorry. Didn’t know you were taken.”

“Taken? I’m not—” He frowned down but she was already slipping away.

He let her go, although the urge to object to her assessment lingered. He’d never let himself be taken. That was why he’d left his clan. How he’d won the
Sinner’s Prayer
. Why he only had one hand left. And anyway, Zoe Nazario hadn’t taken him—she’d
left
him.