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“Yes. I do.”
“Care to explain?”
“She’s a control freak. The more she feels like she’s losing control, the harder she’s going to fight to get it back.”
“Yes, and I would assume that’s a bad thing.”
“Except it’s not,” she smirked smugly. “If she ramps up her behavior, she’s likely to start making mistakes. More than that, if she makes things too bad for him, and people find out what she’s doing, they’re going to start sympathizing with him. He won’t be the kid who grew up acting out despite his loving mother, he’ll be the male who has been overcontrolled by his mother to the point where he had no choice but to act out. She’s playing a game of perception, and we have to play the same game if we want to win, so she has to get worse.”
Drevor shook his head, crest fully lowered. “I will have to assume that you know what you’re talking about, Tilla Sandy.”
“Trust me,” she smiled back at her male. He was laughing at something the host had said as he did his best to answer the questions. “I want her unhinged. It will make my life a lot easier, even if it doesn’t look like it in the short term. How’s that thing I asked you to look into?”
Drevor sighed, but he didn’t resist her obvious attempt to change the subject. “I believe, if you have lived here long enough, we might be able to get a tribunal for you waved in the event that you mate Rane.”
“Long enough? How long are we talking here?”
“I’m not sure. This kind of problem has never happened before. No offworlder has ever mated someone who has been put under adult guardianship, so there’s no real way to say what would happen one way or another. However, looking at those who have earned citizenship through ways other than mating, those that have already spent a year living on the planet can petition to avoid a tribunal and just have their rights as an adult immediately granted to them.”
“A year, huh…” she mumbled.
“If we can use that petition to keep you from being forced into Rane’s situation – and I’m not sure that we can – you would need to wait for a year at minimum. Our tribunal will use Levtiram years, not Coalition years – and ours are longer.”
“Well, dang,” she sighed. “So, we couldn’t be mated for a year. That’s not ideal. I don’t like the idea of giving Elffa that much time.”
“Another thing I found,” he continued. “You and Rane have been sexually active, correct?”
“Hard to ‘find’ that when we fool around in front of you,” she snickered, giving him a look that made him groan.
“Yes, I’m aware. And I’ll be taking my payment in the form of a long vacation when all this is over. But that’s not my point. When you came here, when you had our language imprint, did they offer to pause your ovulation?”
“Yes. They told me that a language imprint and the ovulation pause were part of the price included in traveling to meet my match.”
“Did you take them up on the offer?”
“Er, yeah,” she frowned, not sure she was comfortable with this line of questioning, but trusting he had a good reason to ask. “I did. I knew I was coming here to be someone’s mate, but I didn’t think it would be smart to have babies with him right away. Turns out, my intuition was exactly correct.”
“Actually, I think you should get pregnant.”
She started in surprise, facing him fully. Her immediate reflex – to demand he mind his own business about that – died at the serious look in his eyes. So, she forced herself to ask calmly instead, “And why is that?”
Drevor opened his mouth but before he could reply, his tablet went off. He frowned as he looked at the message.
“Ah,” he mumbled. “She responded.”
“Oh, great, what did she say?”
Sandy leaned over, blatantly checking the message on the screen. He tilted it, making it easier for her to read.
‘I’ll deal with them myself.’
Sandy frowned, a chill going down her spine.
That seemed entirely too calm and vague of an answer. She expected Elffa to rage or demand Drevor to do something. The only reason Drevor had even snitched on their location – with her permission – was because they wanted her to keep him in the loop by trusting him.
But this little message…
“What does she mean?” Sandy asked, looking at Drevor.
