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  The bodyguards—there were three visible now, all armed and armored—fanned out, two slightly in front of him at each side, one behind.

  Rahal was all smiles, but his ears kept swiveling toward the slightest sound and his tail was stiff. He was genuinely happy to see Drax, Xia gauged, and guardedly pleased to meet the rest of them, but he was in a state of high alert.

  Grenades will do that to a person.

  At the same time, he seemed happy enough, as if he enjoyed the challenge. Buck was on perpetual alert too, even in the safety of the Malcolm, far from any threats, but it made his body constantly tense, his nerves ready to shatter at any provocation. Rahal, she sensed, was having a good time watching for danger.

  Handsome and crazy—she liked that combination.

  Drax made a sweeping gesture, one of those smoothstyle things that reminded Xia that, even though he was a thief and a spy (retired from both professions, officially, though Xia and Rita had a private bet about how long that retirement would last), he’d also played diplomat on occasion. “Captain, it is my honor to present Rahal Mizyar, Warlord of the Siantana District of Cibari, my sworn brother and our host for the duration.” He paused dramatically as Mik extended his hand. “Warlord, this is Mik Suarez, the captain of the Malcolm. I’ll let him do the introductions for the rest of his crew.”

  He didn’t look like how she’d pictured a warlord. To the extent she’d thought about Drax’s mysterious friend, she’d figured a warlord would look like Buck might if he’d lived through the same brutal battles on the winning side—just as beat up and rough, but with confidence and swagger, instead of just scars and trauma. Rahal was elegant, like something out of the swashbuckler and history-flash holos Mik liked. And dead sexy. Xia realized she was bouncing up and down, tried to stop herself, then decided not to bother. Warlord or not, sophisticated or not, this Rahal was one of her people. He’d appreciate a good enthusiastic bounce.

  “Captain.” The warlord bowed low over Mik’s hand.

  Swashbuckling, like she’d thought. And her dad was blushing. It wasn’t easy to see with his dark complexion but Xia could tell.

  And Gan was about to detonate. Only someone who knew him well would pick it up, though. He looked so calm, a seven-foot-tall tattooed statue, like he was doing that Furagi meditation on the Light. If he were meditating on the Light right now, though, it was so he didn’t start tearing people’s arms off. Xia and Buck weren’t the only people with poorly controlled violent tendencies on the Malcolm, but Gan, being of the Furagi priestly caste despite the Warrior Path tattoos on his face, was embarrassed by his. He was supposed to be able to control them. But he couldn’t. Hence the warrior markings and the fact he didn’t even visit Furag, but stayed where he could find legit outlets for his rage.

  Rahal looked up from his bow. His eyes met Xia’s.

  He smiled a smile that opened doors to the sort of mischief and merriment bound to wind up as a naked tangle of limbs in a large, luxurious bed. Or maybe a convenient patch of grass if they couldn’t find a bed fast enough to suit them. His tail cocked. His spectacularly tight pants became even tighter in strategic places. He bounced slightly in place, echoing her own excitement, then took a step toward her.

  Unfortunately, he was still holding Mik’s hand, and her father, being a big enough flirt someone should just stick ears and a tail on him, didn’t seem too eager to let go.

  Gan let out a small noise that Xia recognized as a Furagi version of a growl.

  Marl. If Gan got all fierce and possessive now, it could ruin everything. They needed to hide out here. There were assassins after the whole crew, and someone with enough clout to hire multiple assassins who had a particular hatred for Drax. Considering how dangerous this place reputedly was, and how people had tried to kill Rahal in the few minutes they’d been dirtside, she figured Rahal had more bodyguards than the three she’d seen. Going after him would end poorly.

  Besides, even if Rahal did nothing worse than kick them off the planet, it would mean she didn’t get to know him. That would be a shame.

  Frantic, she rolled her eyes toward Gan and cocked her tail subtly toward the Furagi at the same time. A human might not pick up on the tail movement, but Rahal should, being not just a felinoid but a hotshot warlord.

  Then Rahal proved he was worthy of all the fuss. He stopped in midstride, pressed Mik’s hand between both of his, released it and said to Gan, “And you must be the mate.”

  “In both senses,” Gan rumbled.

  “Obviously.” He extended his hand toward Gan. “I didn’t catch your name.” It hadn’t been offered yet, but he glided right over that.

  “Gan Pyar-Suarez.” He stressed the human last name, which he didn’t always use.

  “My pleasure. Really. For all I live in a zelacxi nest, I like a good love story. It’s good to see a couple who cares, and can work and live together.”

  Gan visibly relaxed.

  Drax went to introduce him to Rita at the same time Mik, his arm now around Gan’s powerful waist, started to introduce the others.

  Rahal gravitated toward Rita and Xia. “Drax! You were holding out on me!” His voice was filled with mock menace, just enough of an edge to it that Xia glimpsed the dangerous man underneath the sleek, playful exterior. “You mentioned your own lady, Rita, who must be this charming human—” under Drax’s watchful gold gaze, he shook Rita’s hand rather than kissed it, “—but not this beauty.”

  Drax opened his mouth, but Xia beat him to the punch, extending one small hand and saying, “I’m Xia. Xia Suarez. And you are one pretty-pretty man.” And obviously not queerbent one hundred percent. Thank you, Cat Mother.

  “Thank you, beautiful Xia.” Her name sounded different when he said it, with the accent on the second syllable and a delightful lilting music to it.

  It was the correct pronunciation, she realized. But it had been years since she’d heard it said that way, so long ago she really couldn’t remember. She listened to felinoid language lessons sometimes. She had nagging memories of knowing the language fluently when she was a kitten and she wanted to retain the little she recalled. Hearing her name on his lips, pronounced the way few nonfelinoids could get right, even her own family, thrilled her at the same time it made her want to cry.

  Rahal made an even bigger show of kissing her hand than he had with Mik, bowing low, bending one leg and extending the other straight before him.

  His lips were soft and hot against the top of her hand. He locked her gaze with his, pupils wide with curiosity and desire.

  A raspy but soft tongue licked, drawing a delicate path from her knuckle to her wrist. It was almost as powerful as if he’d traced a similar path along her labia to her clit. She began to tremble. She never did that, not even when Nitari Belesku held a knife to her throat and she’d known she was about to die. Now, she was quaking all over.

  The warlord turned her hand over gently as if she were valuable and breakable. As if she weren’t Xia Suarez, tramp freighter crew member, petty criminal, slacker and sometime assassin. He studied her hand intently then met her gaze again. “You have strong hands, Xia. Hands that know how to work and play, maybe even kill. I like that in a woman.”

  Still maintaining eye contact, he brought her hand to his mouth. Then he bit into the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. His eyes closed in ecstasy as he lapped at the blood welling in the small wounds made by his eyeteeth.

  In her peripheral vision, Xia could see Drax, Rita and even Gan holding Mik back from getting all fatherly on Rahal’s tail. Gan was muttering under his breath like he was once again ready to explode. Buck was shaking his head, a strange look that might have been amusement or worry on his scarred face. Xia couldn’t spare much thought for them, though. All her energy was focused on the sudden, keen connection between her and the warlord.

  He was tasting her blood the way smoothstyle types tasted wine.
And the combination of the bite and the clever, raspy tongue simultaneously soothing the wound and drawing out more blood aroused her more than most of the foreplay she’d experienced in a not-exactly-inhibited life. She’d been with a few cat-boys before, but they’d been boys, her own age or younger, and most of them straight off Mrrwr. Innocent, though they wouldn’t like to hear themselves described that way.

  Rahal was a man, an adult, playful but not innocent. Like her. He knew blood and pain, she sensed, even more intimately than she did, and he still knew how to use those things for pleasure.

  Xia had wanted plenty of men in her short life, not to mention some women, a few transpeople and a couple of beings whose gender wasn’t easily described in Standard. And for the most part, she’d taken what she wanted, everyone involved had fun, and after they had their sexytime, she moved on. Simple. One night was safe, because if you shared one night with someone, you didn’t bother with sleeping. If she spent more than one night, even a good-looking fluffhead might notice the way she whimpered in her sleep.

  She had a feeling that nothing about Rahal Mizyar would be as simple as her usual flings, and that one encounter would be far from enough to satisfy the ache.

  This time, while she felt the familiar wet yearning between her legs, it didn’t originate there and spread outward to inflame the rest of her body. It seemed to come from somewhere deeper inside her.

  Not her heart. She knew about hearts. Knew, despite what human romantics said, hearts had nothing to do with emotions, except to the extent that if you ripped someone’s heart out they wouldn’t be loving or hating anymore.

  She knew anatomy. But she didn’t know where feelings came from.

  If she did, she would rip this feeling out at the roots because it was more dangerous than Nitari Belesku and her ugly San’balese counterpart, more dangerous than a lasercannon in the wrong hands, more dangerous than her own secrets.

  She didn’t just lust after Rahal. After knowing him for only a few minutes, she wanted him to share her life, her darkness as well as her light, wanted to trust him as if he were Rita or Buck or her father.

  And that was crazy. Dangerous enough that even Rita and Drax, who got turned on by brushes with death, would think pursuing it was a stupid idea. He was a stranger, not to mention a warlord, which meant he probably combined the worst aspects of a syndicate boss and a politician.

  Sure, he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, way beyond pretty-pretty and right on to sex on legs. But that didn’t mean anything. Right?

  She almost made herself believe it.

  But then, in a spaceport full of fuel fume and smoke—the boomer must have set something on fire or maybe things were always burning on Cibari—Xia caught the scent of Rahal’s skin. Rahal smelled like musk and sunshine.

  Rahal smelled like everything Xia had ever desired.

  Like something she’d forgotten she’d lost.

  That meant she should say something snarky and find an excuse to be somewhere else.

  But she couldn’t make herself move away from Rahal’s delicious pheromones and tempting touch.

  Chapter Five

  Rahal took a deep breath, drinking in Xia’s personal perfume, the flavor of her skin and blood. The young woman, probably ten years his junior, was an aphrodisiac. If he could bottle her scent, the nuances of her blood, he could make enough credits to repair all the damage to Siantana and get started on the rest of this poor, beat-up planet, while treating himself to a first-class vacation somewhere that didn’t smell like burning.

  No, just the scent of her skin, delectable as that was, wouldn’t be enough. He’d need to capture the grace of her tail, the charm of her posture—meltingly sensual, yet alert to the danger around her and ready for action—the blooded velvet power of her hands, the exact cock of her ears and especially the left ear’s one adorable white tip.

  If they’d been alone, he’d be halfway to seducing her by now. Maybe farther along than that because she smelled of heat, of need, as well as all the other delicious things that were permanent parts of who she was. She might already be as wet under her short skirt as he was hard in his pants. She might be willing to hit the ground on hands and knees and cock her pretty tail for him right now, then talk later.

  And there would be talk, once the first urgency passed, because everything about her screamed there was far more to Xia Suarez than her undeniable tawny beauty. Intelligence, passion, danger.

  If he believed the old granny-and-grandpa tales of knowing your mate at first sight, he’d think she was fated to be his.

  Stars, he half believed it anyway, or at least wanted to believe it.

  Then something processed in a brain so drunk on hormones he was thinking about as clearly as an adolescent. Suarez. She shared a last name with the dark, very human captain and his huge, humorless (but handsome, in a big, beefy, heavily decorated Furagi style) husband. She pronounced her name like a human would.

  She’d obviously been adopted off-planet as a kitten.

  Even if she was his mate, she might not know about mating, how it overcame all rationality and better judgment—not that their species had a lot of either on an ordinary day.

  He’d just have to make sure she fell for him fast and hard, and explain the rest later.

  With luck, before her fathers tried to kill him. A pissed-off nonfelinoid parent was one of the universe’s deadliest forces. (As long as everyone involved was having fun, felinoid parents laughed and gave you a high five. If everyone wasn’t having fun, they’d help hide the bodies. Literally, if need be.) From what he’d heard from Drax, Xia’s fathers were sneaky and highly competent. Traits he admired, and traits that had prompted him to suggest that Drax bring all his new friends along when he sought refuge on Cibari.

  Traits that meant if he really pissed them off, they might cause him serious inconvenience before he killed them.

  And killing them would spoil all his plans for using their skills to help clean up Siantana.

  Not to mention any chance of making the lovely Xia his.

  He was pretty sure her fathers couldn’t kill him, but she might be able to. Something about the way she watched the horizon even as she flirted with him. Something in the way she moved. Petite and beautiful though she was, she smelled like danger.

  Which was a notion hot as the core of a star.

  “Cibari, cesspool of the galaxy,” Cal muttered to no one in particular. The navigation robotics of his shuttle made a confused noise, as if it wanted to respond to him, but had no idea how.

  A few seconds later, the pleasant mechanized voice, which was supposed to sound like a human female, but didn’t, came back with, “Estimated time to Siantana Spaceport, Cibari, is one-point-four-six Standard hours.”

  As private law enforcement, Cal technically needed the local government’s approval to do anything other than the kind of investigative work he’d been contracted to do. He couldn’t arrest anyone without a specific commission, unless he actually caught them in the act of committing a crime. As a PL, though, he was on the side of law and order, and that was enough to be problematic on anything-goes Cibari.

  So he was coming in with a cover story and fake ID ready. He was pretending to be someone looking for an engineering job in one of the planet’s mines and down enough on his luck that he’d put up with the danger in exchange for the possibility of profit.

  He had a moment’s anxiety that the fake ID wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny. Then he laughed at himself. Half the people who landed on Cibari had dubious papers and were on the lam from someone or something, and the other half were openly up to no good. People didn’t go there for legit business or scenic beauty. There’d been scenic beauty there once, but after years of nonstop feuding over the planet’s mineral wealth, most of it was destroyed. Siantana was a little more civilized these days, but still not a vacation spot. What passed for a
government in Siantana, run by a felinoid warlord and his cronies, wasn’t going to look too closely at one human’s identity.

  “The warlord’s at the Spaceport,” the Delebrian working Siantana Spaceport Control said, not hissing any more than you’d expect a Delebrian to do, but sounding miffed at the interruption of his porn watching or online gambling or whatever he’d been doing when Cal arrived.

  “And that means…?” Cal’s normal impulse was to be polite to people working in an official capacity, but everything about the scaly purple bastard’s body language and attitude so far suggested that would be a wasted effort.

  A burst of laughter followed. “That means it’s a good time to land. Something blew up a little while ago, followed by a big burst of gunfire from the warlord’s party, and since then it’s been quiet. The warlord did what the warlord does, so you can get in and go about your business.”

  “I’d like to meet him,” Cal said, because he had to admit he was curious. Not curious enough to push the issue, but enough to make conversation.

  The Delebrian squinted his already narrow silver eyes and pretended to scrutinize Cal. “He does like blonds, from what they say, but unless you’re secretly an arms dealer…” Then he glanced down at his terminal.

  Back up to Cal.

  Back to the terminal.

  When he looked back up again, his smile seemed genuine, or as genuine as a Delebrian smile could look, considering they had no lips to speak of. “Welcome to Siantana, Karn Anders. There must have been a miscommunication. The warlord’s staff would normally inform us when such an important visitor is traveling incognito, and you were actually expected later in the day. Please forgive the jokes earlier.”

  Karn Anders?

  The customs agent thought he was Karn “the Viking” Anders, one of the most notorious arms dealers in this end of the galaxy. Who, as of two days ago, was in a prison on Denguay awaiting trial, which Cal only knew because he’d been involved with some of the background investigations leading to Karn the Viking’s arrest. Since the commander in chief of the Denguay military had gone down with him and the Denguay government was keeping the arrests quiet so they didn’t scare off the rest of the corrupt officers before they could be rounded up, it wasn’t public knowledge yet.