The Intergalactic Duke's Inconvenient Engagement Read online

  At the far end of the table, the other interests had risen and were clustering around her. He should probably assign her a guard from her own self-assigned guardians… But then she stiff-armed the hovering Earth envoy, and he remembered she knew perfectly well how to push people away and keep them at arm’s length.

  Still, he caught the hivre’s glance and jerked his chin to one side. Ignoring his mother’s mutterings, he joined Jinn away from the uproar around Rayna.

  “I’ll assign a sec-off detail to you for the length of your stay,” he told the hivre. “Just in case any of her prospective partners think they can pull another Blackworm.”

  Jinn cocked his head, feathers bristling. “Like you did?”

  Raz stiffened. “She chose me.”

  “For the night of the ball only.”

  Apparently she’d talked to her sister and this birdman more than she’d talked to him. “Indeed,” Raz drawled. “Which is why we are here. If you don’t need the security detail—”

  “Her sister and I are all she needs,” Jinn interrupted. “And her own legal team.”

  Raz nodded. “Yet the offer stands.” He gathered himself and turned to walk away, but he couldn’t force his gaze off Rayna, holding her own against all the factions, her sister glowering impressively beside her. When stabby Lishelle and sweet Trixie joined them, Raz had no doubt they’d be a force to reckon with.

  “Tell her,” he said softly, “she doesn’t have to be strong all the time. The point of not being alone is to share what you need with others.”

  Jinn watched him with a raptor’s keen stare. “And she would’ve been not alone with you.”

  Lifting one haughty eyebrow at the hivre, Raz twisted on his heel. “I told her that already.”

  He strode out of the great hall, not responding to the dowager’s call or the nagging sense of eyes watching him go. It was be Rayna watching—he retained enough blood champion in his heritage to sense that threat. Not a threat to his body, maybe, but to his heart.

  He’d kept his promise to her for one night of protection, one night of passion, and though he knew that had been his duty, it was cold comfort. As cold and dark and lonely as space.

  ***

  He sent Nor to take charge of her security detail over the days of her haggling with all the interested parties, and he didn’t give a larf what Dejo Jinn or Vaughn felt about it. They might think they were defense enough for Rayna and her friends, but with envoys and representatives and the Octiron crew following them around, they needed all the shielding they could get. And if Rayna thought that was arrogant of him, so be it.

  Having the pirate captain in her entourage as a spy might’ve also been part of his intent.

  Annoyingly, the half-blood captain refused to gossip about his ward.

  “If you want to know something, ask her,” Nor growled when Raz commed him.

  “I know she’s busy.” Raz had seen the clips from Octiron’s celebrity show, deliberately but stylishly staged and with a clear sign of his mother’s managing hand.

  “So am I busy,” Nor complained. “That other Earther chit is a menace. And you should be occupied with more important matters.”

  “I am.”

  Those more important matters were never-ending, even though his tour of the system had given him some solid direction on mastering the duchy’s finances. He’d eaten every meal with different Azthronos interest groups, reconnecting with his people and their needs, and he thought he’d done an admirable job. Even his mother admitted as much over pixberry tea one morning—somewhat grudgingly, so he knew he must be doing well indeed. He visited the shrine of the God of Eternity where his sire and all the previous dukes were interred and he poured the traditional cup of ghost-mead into the river, wishing he might’ve had more time with the man whose footsteps he followed. He attended another ball at the estate, and an Octiron news clip proclaimed him the galaxy’s most eligible bachelor.

  Which didn’t make missing Rayna any better.

  In his quarters, he kept the small icestone crystal that he’d found tucked into a fold of the crumpled cravat he’d worn to the ball. It must’ve come off her dress, miraculously surviving her dramatic public court presentation—and their later private unveiling. It was unbearably delicate between his fingertips, and he feared to crush it with his wretched pawing. But it was all he had left of her.

  How had she become so important to him in—cosmologically speaking—zero amount of time?

  His mother asked him the same question over tea. “You gave up a space station for what?” she grumbled. “A magnanimous gesture to a pretty girl?”

  “I am a noble male,” he reminded her. When she’d just fixed him with a gimlet stare, he sighed. “And Rayna reminded me that even when you’re trapped in a situation not of your own making, what you do under duress defines who you are—and who you’ll be even after you are free.” Rayna had just wanted to get away and instead she’d become accountable for an Earth enclave in a distant galaxy. “You sent me from home to learn new ways, to take Azthronos in a new direction. And that means not being a replica of my sire. Or of you.”

  She stared down into the dark stain of the pixberries for a long moment before lifting her gaze to him. Her eyes glimmered with tears he knew she’d never shed. “I missed you while you were gone.”

  “I missed you too.” He reached across their cups—one of the changes he’d like to add included Earther coffee on their morning trays—to soften any accusation she might’ve heard in his voice.

  “You were always such a good child, so clever and well-spoken, the perfect heir and future Duke of Azthronos.” She curled her lips inward. “I didn’t know you felt so trapped by our expectations.”

  “By my own,” he corrected. Poor little rich boy, Rayna had teased him. “But I am still the Avatar of the God of Oaths, so believe me when I promise you that I am committed to our worlds and our people. Even if I did give up a space station on the edge of our system.”

  “You gave up the girl too,” the dowager muttered. “What was she thinking, walking away from us?”

  He leaned back in his seat. “Probably thinking she didn’t need the headache.”

  His mother sniffed into her tea. “The headache is what you plead when you don’t have a tall, virile, noble Thorkon male in his prime holding out a ring.”

  He winced. “I love you too, Mother.”

  He spent the rest of the day deliberately buried in reports and comms from around the system. His staff informed him that the deluge wasn’t always so severe—mostly the managers and stewards whom he’d met on his tour were eager to display their acumen—but for now he was glad of the flood that kept him preoccupied.

  Otherwise, he might just storm down to the Earthers’ suite and assert his ducal prerogative to ask the question his mother had asked, with maybe a few more plaintive words thrown in.

  What are you thinking, walking away from what we might have? In all the vast universe, do you think these feelings happen with just anyone?

  Because he knew she’d be going soon. Nor had told him the talks were wrapping up with many petabytes of agreements having negotiated and signed. With nothing more of interest to see—and a new season of the Great Space Race to promote—the Octiron crew had already departed. Raz wondered if they’d consider a Despondent Duke as one of their Great Space Racers…

  But he had promises to keep.

  So he stayed at his desk long after the last of his staff had peeked in, asking if he needed anything else—a subtle suggestion that he go away.

  Go home, he told them all. No, he didn’t need anything.

  Only her. And she had chosen her freedom, fair enough.

  When the dat-pad screen in front of him blurred to a haze of seemingly alien symbols, he admitted defeat and rose from his desk to stretch. Wandering out to the balcony for fresh air, he leaned on the railing.

  If only he had someone to join him…

  His office balcony overlooked the fr
ont courtyard and the long sweep of the lawn that spread farther yet to the estate valley. He tracked the winding road that led up to the mountains far away where the ducal household spent a month in the summer to relax. He’d probably not have time for that during this rotation around the sun. Anyway, it would be too much time to be alone.

  He lifted his gaze to the first stars glinting in the evening sky. The slowly roiling energy of the protective dome turned all the pinpricks of light to arced traceries, as if every one was a shooting star.

  Some of his reading the last few days had been about Earth, and he knew the land where the Black Hole Brides called home made wishes upon shooting stars. How sad that the Duke of Azthronos had all the shooting stars in the heavens but couldn’t demand his one wish come true.

  A low rumble from the courtyard brought his gaze crashing down.

  The ship that had brought the Earth envoy, the council delegates, and the OWFA representatives had ignited its atmospheric engines. He wouldn’t mind seeing the last of them.

  But the smaller ship—the Onoffon registered to Dejo Jinn—also fired up. In preparation for the launch, a hole parted in the energy dome, revealing the clear night sky and unblinking stars.

  Raz’s heart stopped then slammed upward into his throat, knocking loose a harsh gasp. “Rayna.”

  She was leaving. With his ring? But without a word.

  Incensed, infuriated—inconsolable—he gripped the stone balustrade, staring down. The figures were too far away and the lighting too low for him to identify her. She was just another one of eleven billion in this system that he’d been responsible for. But no longer.

  Leaving him behind. A wild grief, worse than watching Azthronos disappear in the viewport behind him as a child, seized him.

  But he wasn’t that child anymore, set on a path not of his own choosing. He was a duke—the duke, larf it. And he had saved her. She had to at least give him the courtesy of a goodbye.

  He slammed out of his office and raced for the main doors. Why did the estate have to be so larfing huge? The pounding of his boots echoed hollowly in the empty ballroom

  Hollow and empty as his life would be if she left.

  Thrusting open the doors, he hurtled out onto the steps.

  Just as the Onoffon wheeled upward into the darkness, stringing behind in the wash of the larger cruiser. Both ships cleared the dome, and the hole in the energy shield contracted again, closing out the stars, trapping him alone on the stairs.

  He staggered back in physical shock, his heel striking the step behind him so he almost stumbled. “My ray of light,” he murmured.

  She was gone.

  Chapter 15

  Rayna wandered through the ballroom, feeling a little freaked out. Where had everyone gone? Where was Raz?

  She hadn’t realized it was so late. By the time she’d said goodbye to her sister and Dejo and good riddance to all the factions interested in influencing what became of Blackworm Station—temporarily billed as Earth Interstellar Holding #04 until they came up with a snazzier moniker—it was almost dark.

  Peeking into the empty dance chamber, she saw only a few of the glowing globes casting pools of pearly light upward to the sky far above visible through the open roof. Staring up at the watercolor wash of stars with her neck cricked gave her a touch of vertigo. It reminded her a little too much of waking up in the glass coffin. Was she a ghost wandering through an impossible dream of being rescued from her own loneliness?

  “Rayna.”

  His voice, rasping, almost broken, brought her whirling around, and her heart lifted as if gravity meant nothing at all. “Raz.”

  “You’re here.” He stood frozen on the edge of the ballroom. The light from the nearest globe barely reached him, leaving half his lean face in shadow. “You didn’t leave.”

  She took a step toward him. “Not without seeing you again.”

  He retreated an equal step. “So…you are leaving? On what ship? I just saw the Onoffon and the council cruiser depart.”

  “The council and the Earth envoy were peeved that I wasn’t open to more of their suggestions.” She snorted. “I mighta channeled a certain smug nobleman to get through the worst of that. Vaughn and Dejo are heading to the station with the secret data gels on the Onoffon to see if they can learn more about what Blackworm was doing out there on the edge of the singularity. They’ll be back in a week or so. An Earth week, not a Azthronos week which I know is longer.” She lifted one shoulder in an awkward shrug, uncertain of his continuing silence. “I hope…you don’t mind me staying here.”

  “Staying until they come back,” he said after another long, awkward beat. “And then leaving.”

  “I…don’t know.” She stared at him miserably. He was so far away, just across the room, but the way he stood with his arms over his chest, his chin set over the high asymmetrical collar of his formal tunic, reminded her he was an alien, a duke.

  A man she’d let closer than any before.

  He stared down at her, the lights turning his gaze frosty. “I don’t know if I can help you this time. What do you want from me, Rayna?”

  She fisted her hands in the soft Thorkon skirts over her churning stomach. Vaughn had scoffed at the day gowns, saying they were too flimsy, but Rayna remembered how they had lifted both her and Raz with a bit of hidden power. She needed that power now.

  She lifted her chin. “I have a space station I don’t know how to run. A universe I know basically nothing about. A couple friends who aren’t sure what they are doing with themselves.” With each word, she took another step toward him. He didn’t retreat this time, but his gaze bored into her with an expression she couldn’t decipher—yet another unknown to add to her baffling collection. “None of that has anything to do with you. You don’t have to save me again.”

  “I never minded saving you.” He angled his head away from her. “You were the one who wanted to stand on your own.”

  “I do.” Her voice cracked, and he flinched, as if it had pained him. “I did. But I get it now. Since I met you.”

  “Now? Because so much time has passed?” His lips quirked harshly. “I understand why you ran from me after the ball. I didn’t tell you about the space station, and you thought I was using you, just as the others want to use you now.”

  She shook her head. “I know you weren’t, and aren’t. I knew you weren’t like that even before you stood up at that meeting and said you’d give me whatever support I needed to claim the station. But I want you to know that I’m not using you either. Not to save me, not to guide some clueless closed-worlder.” With only an arm’s length of space between them, she halted. Though she ached to reach out to him, to gap that small distance, she knew she’d hurt him. She wished she could blame the fact she’d just woken up from an alien abduction, but really, her whole life she’d been afraid to rely on anyone and he was a man who took pride in his commitments.

  She closed her eyes and let out a slow breath before looking up at him. “I don’t want you to save me or guide me. I want…I want to take this chance together, you and me, with what might happen next.” Unable to hold herself back anymore—even though she felt she’d been holding back for so damn long—she lifted her hand to touch the hard set of his jaw. “I want to be together, not as a destitute duke and a lost lady, or an alien and an Earther. But just…you and me. Raz and Rayna.”

  Under her palm, the grind of his teeth felt harsh. “I wouldn’t hold you back, if that’s what you needed,” he said gruffly. “Poor little rich boy though I am, I know what it means not to be free.”

  “Oh, Raz.” She let her hand slide down his chest, bumping over the ceremonial insignia on his broad chest, feeling the powerful beat of his heart buried underneath. “Trying to get away from it all took me to Nowheresville where I was hiding when Blackworm found me. That wasn’t freedom; that was fear. Fear that I’d care again, be left again, cry again.” She swallowed hard. “But I’d risk that all again. For you.”

  She r
eached into her pocket—Thorkon day gowns had lots of convenient pockets, she’d discovered—and held up the ring.

  In the uncertain light of the ballroom, the gemstone’s dazzling core was muted, all its sparkle restrained.

  But as the Duke of Azthronos slowly lifted the ring from her palm, his royal blue eyes had all the fire she needed to see.

  “Ask me again, please,” she whispered. “Only this time, ask not for one night. Ask for forever.”

  His dark lashes veiled his eyes for a moment as he studied the ring twisting restlessly between his fingertips. She looked at it too—a vow in the shape of a black hole. All her insides were afloat with terror…and hope.

  “Lady Rayna,” he said softly as he lifted his gaze to hers. “Would you take me and my planets and my people and all our possibilities? Would you be my guide in the darkness, mine to cherish? Will you be my ray of light through all eternity?”

  He spun the ring toward her, an offering and a dare.

  “Yes. Oh, Raz, yes!” Released from the deep freeze in her bones, she leaped for him.

  With a laugh, he caught her—as she knew he would—and managed somehow to slide the ring onto her finger in the same motion. He swung her around, and even though they weren’t wearing the anti-grav dancing boots, she felt him lifting her toward the heavens.

  When his mouth descended on hers, hungry and demanding and wild, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held him fast while the very blood in her veins zoomed as if rocket-boosted.

  Forever was a very long time—she understood that better than ever now that she owned and managed a space station on the edge of a singularity. But the risk to her heart was worth it for him.

  “I love you,” she whispered against his mouth when the claiming kiss eased.

  Slowly, he let her slide down his body to her own two feet. But he didn’t let her go. Instead, he framed her face with his big hands and leaned down for another kiss, gentler this time but no less intense. “As I love you,” he answered in a low voice that she knew was an oath he’d never break.