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“I will not!”
“Once she arrives, you’ll go pick her up from the station. It will cause quite a stir in the media, I think. I wonder, will people envy or pity her? I imagine she’ll be excited once she realizes she mated a famous, wealthy trikballer either way. Don’t you?”
“You cannot make me!” Rane’s fists were clenched tight, shaking with rage and tension.
His mother stood, slowly coming around the desk. And though she was a full head shorter than him, she was intimidating. Dangerous.
“Sweet, dumb, little Rane,” she chuckled. “I can. And you will. And once you’re mated, I won’t have any reason to put you through these little humiliations anymore. You can focus back on practice and the game, and I will control your mate and any younglings you have. I think that should be a tight enough leash, don’t you?”
Rane tasted blood in his mouth from how hard he was clenching his teeth. Because he could see the impending, ultimate victory in her eyes.
Because if Rane wasn’t considered a legal adult, and if his mate was not granted the status of a legal adult by the tribunal, then they certainly wouldn’t be allowed to be parents to their own young. That would instead default to their nearest, legal adult relative.
His mother.
She would control his young, his mate, him, so completely he wouldn’t be able to escape her grasp until he was cold and dead.
“Look forward to meeting her,” Elffa laughed, patting his arm. “And do put some pants on. The show is over.”
I’ve already won, he could practically hear her saying as she left the room, laughing. Leaving him there in the middle of the office, hating her.
No.
She couldn’t make him mate this female.
In fact, he was going to make sure that this female didn’t want to mate him at all. And that was something he could absolutely control.
Chapter 3
Sandy
He wasn’t coming, was he?
Nervously shifting her weight, trying not to draw too much attention to herself, Sandy waited in the concourse of the massive starship port on what was supposed to be her new planet. She was very close to panicking. It had been a full hour, and there was still no sign of her errant mate.
This was such a bad idea. She couldn’t believe she had agreed to this.
When True Mate called to inform her that they’d found her match, she’d been initially surprised, then excited. Her mate, it had been explained to her, had been scanned a long time ago, so her scan didn’t have to go far to reach his, that’s how they found him so fast.
Then, she’d been hit with the second punch that her mate was, actually, an alien.
Everyone who used True Match knew that was a possibility. Some nutso people even said that it was a conspiracy to harvest the best people from the planet to steal away. Most matches reported were human to human. But there were still a rare few, something like ten percent or less, that matched out into the universe.
And Sandy was one of those lucky few.
Space was definitely further than she had ever intended to travel. She had even been thinking about declining the match entirely. But then she heard her grandmother’s voice in her ear. Her giddy, excited voice, exclaiming that this was exactly what she meant by adventure.
So, Sandy had confirmed that she would go.
She sold off most of her possessions, keeping only clothes and the few knickknacks she had brought with her from her grandmother’s house, including her favorite blanket. She saved some of her grandmother’s ashes in a mini urn but spread the rest out to sea.
And she left Earth. Just like that. A small shuttle had taken her and one other person – a very feminine appearing man – up to one of the border ships that patrolled Earth. She went through an immigration process, got a new language imprinted into her brain, birth control, and was sent off with her tickets, instructions on how to get where she was going, and a ‘good luck’.
She had the contact number of her mate. She had exchanged some messages with him. By all accounts, he seemed excited. He had been encouraging her the entire way, promising that she’d have everything she needed and that he would take care of her.
Now, Sandy was wondering if maybe she had just fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Because she was standing, alone and confused, in an alien starship port, trying not to catch anyone’s eye as a bunch of unfamiliar species walked around her. Most looking at her in surprise, a few in concern. There was one guy standing off a ways that looked like he was in uniform who kept glancing her way, and she wondered if he was an authority here. Or if he was a kidnapper seeing if she would be missed. She had no way of knowing. That might not even be a uniform.
She didn’t have one of the fancy, floating computer things the other aliens did. A combot. She had seen them on the travel ships she’d ridden in, but she had used the ship’s communication to send messages to her soon-to-be-mate. And, again, they had all been encouraging and excited.
