Star Mate Matched

by Margo Bond Collins

  I swallowed down the fear trying to crawl up my throat.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, you know,” he said.

  Since he hadn’t made a move toward me, and since I apparently didn’t have any way out of wherever I was, I decided to take him at his word. Slowly, I stood up. “That really was you outside, wasn’t it?”

  He inclined his head gravely. “It was.”

  “You killed that guy. Why?”

  His frown suggested my question confused him, and I found myself wanting to reach over and smooth away the lines between his eyebrows.

  Jesus, Nora. Put it back in your pants.

  But that urge had firmly drawn my attention to two salient facts.

  Number one: The green alien catman in front of me was drop-dead gorgeous.

  And number two: He was also absolutely bare-ass naked.

  Have I mentioned fuck my life?

  It’s not like you’re engaged anymore, a voice inside my head pointed out.

  I wanted to note that the same voice had been telling me to keep it in my pants just a few seconds earlier. But I was afraid that talking back to the voices in my head might make me realize that I had totally gone insane.

  Maybe that really was it. I glanced around what Catman had called the medbay. Maybe this was a hallucination. All of it. Everything.

  I turned the idea around in my mind. Trying to move surreptitiously, I tapped on the metal table in front of me.

  It felt completely solid.

  Anyway, if this was a hallucination, how far back would I have to go? To the park? That’s when the giant psychedelic cat had shown up and started killing people.

  What about before that? I wouldn’t have expected to find William fucking a wedding guest in the bathroom, but it didn’t seem quite as insane as neon-green tigers. Could seeing him with someone else have broken my mind?

  “Maybe that’s when I lost touch with reality,” I murmured aloud.

  Catman gave me a sharp stare. “You believe you are not experiencing reality?”

  I shrugged. “Seems possible. I mean, why should I be the first person on Earth to have extended contact with aliens?”

  Catman snickered, and it sounded remarkably like the chuff he’d given outside when I pointed out how dangerous he was. “Who says you are the first?”

  True. There were plenty of stories about alien abductions.

  “Was Roswell real?” I asked, suddenly eager to know.

  “What’s a Roswell?”

  “Shit. Of course I get one without a high enough security clearance.”

  “I’m not at all certain what you’re talking about. Perhaps the translation matrix hasn’t had time to fully integrate with your neural system.”

  “Maybe not.” As I glanced over at him again, he stepped out from behind his end of the metal table, and my eyes instantly dropped to his midsection.

  Holy cow. He was huge all over.

  His face and hands were bare skin, much like mine except for the color—he was still a neon green. The rest of his body was covered in a fine layer of fur, a light covering somewhere between the kind of hair a male human might grow and the coat on… well, on a cat.

  A blush crawled up my cheeks, and I glanced away quickly. “Could you maybe put on some clothes?”

  Catman looked down at his body assessingly, and then cocked his head at me. “Am I inadequate to you in some way?”

  I blushed harder. “It’s not that. It’s just—on Earth, we prefer to wear clothes with people we don’t know very well.”

  Unless, of course, we just picked them up in a bar and are taking them home.

  Which was how I had met William.

  And look what that got me.

  No, better for everyone if the giant gorgeous alien catman covered up.

  He shrugged. “Very well. My people are less formal about clothing.”

  “Apparently,” I muttered, unable to tear my eyes away as he turned around to pull some clothing items out of a nearby cabinet.

  The green skin and black stripes were a little distracting, but even so, his ass was perfect.

  In fact, as far as I could tell, all of him was. He was broad and muscular—and strong, I remembered from the way he had scooped me up and carried me inside.

  And a cold-blooded killer, the voice in my head reminded me.

  Shut up, I told it, or I’m going to lock you away in a cage or something.

  Oddly enough, even the memory of the bloody pile of rags Catman had made of the mugger didn’t stop my fingertips from itching to reach out and touch him, to feel that skin under my hands.

  Yeah. It was official.

  I had totally lost my mind.

  Chapter Six

  Dax

  I was beginning to worry there might be something mentally wrong with my new mate. She said the oddest things, most of which made no sense at all.

  I suppose I could have chalked it up to the translation matrix, but every so often, something she said made technical sense—just not in the context of our conversation.

  A thumping sound came from outside the ship.

  “Oh, flark,” I cursed.

  I’d been so fascinated by my mate that I had completely forgotten our current position—parked in the middle of a nature preserve presumably full of indigenous wildlife.

  “Computer, external visual, please. One-way.”

  A comscreen wall in the medbay shifted from its standard calming green to show an image of two Earth males outside the ship, one of them pounding against it with a confused frown. A third male lay stretched out on the ground next to them.

  “Computer, outside audio.”

  “There’s definitely something here,” the fist-pounding male said.

  The other male crouched down next to the third. “Yeah, well, whatever it is, it gave Brandon a hell of a bump. Knocked him out cold.”

  “Computer, query: can we lift off without damaging the males outside?”

  Instantly, the ship responded. “Negative. Takeoff will result in severe burns and possible death.”

  Well, we couldn’t do that. Unlike the male who had attacked my mate, these three had not done anything dangerous.

  “You won’t hurt them, will you?” my mate asked. The scent of her anxiety floated off her, mixed with her own natural scent. Under any other circumstance, I might have found it charming.

  Right now, though, I didn’t have time to be charmed. “No,” I replied. “But I will need them to leave.”

  “You might be able to roar at them and scare them away,” my mate suggested. “Open the door and stick your head out and yell at them.”

  Not a bad idea, but I could almost see her mind twirling as she plotted something.

  “And what would you do?” I asked.

  She stared at me for a long time, holding my gaze defiantly before finally dropping her eyes to stare at the deck. “Wait until you open the door and run away, probably,” she said sullenly.

  “I thought as much.”

  “You’re not going to let me do that, are you?”

  My inner beast growled. Never.

  “No,” I managed to say mildly, shoving the beast down for the moment. But her suggestion had given me an idea. “Computer, external projectors on.”

  “Projectors activated.”

  I closed my eyes and fell into a half-shift—maintaining my current form’s arms and legs, allowing my hands and head to change. Then I let out a giant roar.

  I knew from experience that outside the ship, I would appear as a giant hologram, bigger even than my natural feline form, floating in the air above them.

  The two conscious men screamed. The one who’d been knocking on the ship’s hull dashed away. The other grabbed his unconscious friend under the arms and began dragging him in the same direction as the one who’d run.

  “Computer,” I said, my words blurry from the interference of my fangs, “as soon as they reach a minimum safe distance, please get us off this godforsaken ro
ck.”

  “Acknowledged.” The engines rumbled beneath us, and as soon as I felt the stabilizers kick in as we lifted off, I said, “External projectors off.”

  Once the computer acknowledged the command, I dropped back into my primary bipedal form. It was always harder to hold the half shape than it was to maintain either my primary or my feline form. Both of those felt natural. There was absolutely nothing natural about my half-shift.

  I turned to face my mate. She held her hands over her mouth, and her eyes watered. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked from behind her hands.

  “Home,” I told her, pulling on my tunic and lacing up my boots.

  “I don’t think I have a home anymore,” she said in a tone that suggested some sort of confession.

  “Of course you do,” I tried to reassure her. “Your home is with me.”

  All signs of potential mirth dropped from her face. “Wait. What? What do you mean my home is with you?”

  “We’re destined to be together.” I headed toward the bridge, and my mate hurried after me. I loved watching her move. She was so round and soft and delectable. I wanted to pick her up and impale her on my cock right now, make her my own.

  Make sure she could never run away.

  But I at least needed to get the coordinates for our next stop into the computer. High Command insisted that both homeworld and all military space station coordinates be entered manually. Keeping that information in our computers made us vulnerable should the Karlaxons attack one of our ships for information.

  “Seriously. You can’t take me with you,” my mate insisted.

  I moved to the nav control on the bridge. “Of course I can. You’re my mate.”

  “I’m your what?”

  I turned to move to the captain’s chair, only to find her blocking my way. Her anger and fear added a spice to her scent I could not resist. Leaning toward her face, I rubbed my cheek against hers, marking her with my scent.

  Mine, my inner cat agreed, purring in satisfaction.

  “What the hell are you doing? Stop that.” She pushed me away. “You can’t take me with you. This is kidnapping.”

  I brushed past her to drop into my command chair.

  “Yes, I can. You are mine and I am yours. We belong together.”

  “I’ve been abducted by aliens,” she said disbelievingly.

  “Alien,” I corrected her. “You have been abducted by one alien. Females are not allowed multiple male partners on the Drovekzian homeworld.”

  “Oh my God. Of course I couldn’t be abducted by an alien from a nicely civilized matriarchy. Nope. Right back into another patriarchal shitshow. You are such a… man!” She nearly spit the last word at me.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It’s certainly not good,” she said, her face scrunching up in anger. “I cannot believe I’m on a spaceship with a sexy alien catman who has just kidnapped me and is just like every other male I have ever dealt with. It’s like I can’t get away from your type.”

  “You think I’m sexy?”

  She sputtered for a moment—and when it became clear she wasn’t going to answer, I spoke again.

  “I promise, sweetheart, soon enough you will never want to get away from me.”

  She squeaked in frustrated outrage, but it only served to make me want her more. I liked her spirit—she was feisty, this mate of mine—but the sooner she figured out who was really in charge here, the better off she would be.

  The better off we’ll both be.

  Chapter Seven

  Nora

  It took everything I had not to march over and smack the smug smile off his face. Only the memory of the bloody mugger dead on the ground stopped me.

  That and the fact that the deck underneath my feet suddenly seemed to fall away into nothingness.

  “Better hang on,” the infuriating alien catman said. “We are about to jump into hyperspace.”

  I reached out and pulled myself into a chair not far from his, similarly bolted onto the floor but without a control panel in front of it. The seatbelt-like straps were far too big for me, but at least I wasn’t likely to float up to the ceiling when we lost gravity.

  Assuming losing gravity actually happens.

  I could not believe I was having thoughts like that.

  Jumping into hyperspace was horrible. Everything around me seemed to stretch out, as if the ship went on forever in front of me. I was afraid to glance to either side, worried that I would vomit if I did.

  When this is over, I promised myself, I will get back home. What Catman didn’t know was that ever since I’d followed him into this control room, I had been carefully watching to see what buttons he pushed.

  I figured if I wanted to get home, I would have to learn how to fly the ship.

  And yes, that was quite possibly the most arrogant idea I’d ever had. I hadn’t even driven a car since I moved to New York. But if this was really happening—if it wasn’t a hallucination and I actually was being abducted by an alien to become some sort of breeder (God, that sounded creepy, even inside my head)—I was going to find a way to get back home.

  No matter what it took.

  I stretched my hand out in front of me, and for just an instant, it felt like I could touch infinity as my fingertips disappeared in the distance. I had to force myself not to vomit all the way through that trip.

  Just when it felt like reality had stretched out to its absolute limits, like it might break at any moment, suddenly everything snapped back into place, like a rubber band popping.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked Catman.

  “Hyperspace.”

  “Yeah, you said that part already.”

  He shook his head and muttered something rude. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled in a long-suffering sigh. “Hyperspace allows us to travel from one spot in the galaxy to another almost instantaneously.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Theoretically, we are passing through every point in the universe simultaneously. In reality, it doesn’t work quite that way. I could show you the equations, if you think you could follow calculations.”

  “And I thought mansplaining was bad. God save me from aliensplaining.”

  “Is that a common prayer of your people?”

  “It would be if enough of them spent time around you.” I glanced at him to gauge his reaction, but Catman wasn’t paying attention to me. Instead, he was frowning at his control panel and muttering.

  “Something wrong?” I asked brightly, almost hoping there was.

  “These coordinates are incorrect. We are not where we are supposed to be.”

  “I bet that happens sometimes when you’re everywhere at once in hyperspace.” Apparently, I couldn’t keep my sarcasm in.

  He shot an irritated glance at me. “Computer, analysis. How did we end up at these coordinates?”

  There was a long silence before the computer finally answered. “Conducting self-diagnostic.”

  “That doesn’t sound very good.” A hysterical giggle escaped me. Some part of me knew I should probably be worried, but I was in a spaceship with an alien who could turn into a giant green tiger. There really wasn’t much else I could do other than laugh.

  Of course something had gone wrong during my alien abduction. That was the kind of week I was having, after all.

  Finally, Catman spoke again. “Computer, report.”

  “Attempting to complete self-diagnostic. Please hold.”

  Catman tapped his fingers impatiently against the armrest of his chair.

  I desperately needed to do something, anything. I began fiddling with the straps on my chair.

  “You should stay strapped in, my mate,” Catman instructed me.

  Which reminded me…

  “What’s your name?” I couldn’t simply keep calling him Catman forever.

  “Commander Lutro Dax,” he replied absent
ly, still tapping away and staring intently at the console, as if he could will the computer to respond more quickly.

  “I’m Nora, in case you want to call me something other than human girl. Or mate. Mate is such a creepy word. Plus, it makes you sound like some British dude out with his friends.”

  “What is a who-man?”

  “Human,” I corrected his pronunciation. “It’s my species, I guess.”

  “And you think ‘mate’ is a strange word…”

  I couldn’t really argue with him.

  After another long silence from the computer, Dax began unstrapping himself.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “There is something seriously wrong here. I am going to go to check the computer feeds and see if I can determine why this is taking so long.”

  “Have you tried turning it off and rebooting?” I asked in a faux-cheerful voice.

  He frowned but didn’t answer me. I waited until he was gone, then scrambled out of my own straps, dropping down to the floor. Only then did it occur to me that the seats were so large my feet dangled in the air like a child sitting in an adult’s chair.

  Quickly, I moved to the control panel—the one against the wall, not the one by Dax’s seat that he had just been looking at. I stared down at it, trying to remember how he had put us into hyperspace.

  Apparently, my translation matrix didn’t extend to reading. It looked like a series of symbols, but none that I recognized.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered. “Hope I don’t blow myself up.” I held my breath and reached out, then jerked my hand back in a fist and held it next to my body. “This is stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “It certainly is.” Dax’s voice came from the doorway into the corridor, and I jumped.

  “Gah. I didn’t hear you return.”

  Dax moved into the control room. “What did you plan to do?”

  “Go back home?” I meant for the statement to come out more forcefully, but instead, it had sounded like a question.

  Dax shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. The control panel is keyed to my DNA, the computer to my voice. No one can fly the ship but me.”