The tears came down faster. She wanted to lie and say no. Wanted to make that true. But she couldn’t.
She nodded miserably. “I’ve never come alive the way I do with him. Not just sexually, but as a being. I feel real when I’m with him. Not a slave. Not a pet. Like there’s more to me than just my body. He cared about what lay beneath it all.”
She rubbed the center of her chest as if she could make the ache go away.
“Then just tell him the young is his. Give him some time to adjust to the idea and see what happens.”
“No.” She shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not going to tell him and I forbid either of you to tell him, either. Using the baby would be trapping him. If he wants to be with me, it needs to be without dangling a child in front of him.”
Her friends looked at her like she’d gone mad.
“Promise you won’t tell him.” She screwed up her face into a severe expression.
“Only if you promise to get out of this sleepdisk and get into the washtube,” Mina said.
She sighed. “Fine. Yes. I’m getting off.” She dragged her heavy limbs to the edge of the sleepdisk and stepped off. “I’m going to the washtube.”
She hoped to the stars it would wash off the darkness weighing down her very soul.
Paal smashed his fist through the wall of the flight deck. He’d already punched three holes in the wall in his chamber. It hadn’t done a thing to take the edge off his nerves.
Leti had disappeared entirely. She’d moved out of his chamber and he hadn’t seen her since. For the first planet rotation he’d been too vecking stubborn to ask where she was. But after another sleepless night without her—with her scent fading from his hoverdisk sheets—he was going mad.
He couldn’t help but believe he’d made a terrible mistake.
If having Leti leave him—yes, she’d vecking walked out on him—made his chest feel as if it had been sliced open by a vecking laser gun, then would being trapped by her have been any worse?
It couldn’t be.
Because, veck, at this point, he wished to the Zandian sun he’d been ensnared by that wiley female. He wished to the Zandian sun she’d sunk her claws deep into him and refused to let go.
Wouldn’t that be far better than this? The empty ache of having her gone and not
even understanding what had gone wrong?
Except he had a nagging, itchy sense he should understand what went awry.
Whatever it was, it had been his vecking fault.
The door to the flight deck slid open and Lady Taramina strode in, mouth tight.
Alarm rocketed through him. Had something happened to Leti? Did something go wrong with the pregnancy? Stars, humans were a weak species, what if the pregnancy killed her?
Lady Taramina just looked at him, cocking her head to the side as if she might decipher some deep meaning from the set of his horns.
“What?”
“You think you’re too good for a human? Is that your hang up?”
He nearly choked on his own spit. “No! What are you talking about? Is this about Leti?”
Pure scorn danced across Taramina’s face. “Of course this is about Leti. I want to know what your objection is to her. I see attraction between you two, sometimes affection. But it’s like you fundamentally hate who she is. Is it because she was a sex pet?”
His throat tightened at the word hate.
He didn’t vecking hate Leti. How could she say that? He loved her.
Holy Zandian star. Was that true?