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  I stood my ground as Argen paced toward me purposefully. “I want you,” he murmured, and I smiled faintly and gave a slight nod as my whole body went on alert.

  He gripped both sides of my tunic and ripped open and off me, backing me up against the wall. I gasped looking into his eyes. I saw dominant alpha male asserting himself. I breathed just a little faster as arousal took hold in my body. I wanted him, too.

  He opened the fastener on my pants and pulled them down to my ankles, squatting in front of me, pressing his face into my mons and planting a kiss there. I was dripping almost instantly.

  Argen lifted one leg and slipped my boot off then my pants, the other boot, and the rest of my pants. He pulled his clothes off even faster and grabbed my wrists. Pressing them against the wall over my head, he and lifted me up and drove his hot hard cock into me. He held me there, and I stared into his eyes.

  “Mine!” he whispered.

  “Yes!” I nodded and wrapped my legs around his hips.

  He fused his lips to mine and seized the inside of my mouth with his tongue while driving his cock into me, asserting his claim with every thrust. I embraced his possession, both physically and emotionally, knowing he was working out his inner demons. He was taking control of our mating because he needed to be in control at that point.

  I had actually been expecting it at some point, the more time I spend with him. Perhaps in his mind, he was subjugating me, as a dominant would a submissive. I didn’t exactly feel submissive but more like I was taking what I wanted.

  I moaned and sobbed and murmured his name as he rammed his cock into me. I can’t even say how many times I came. Sometimes, he slowed, relishing the contractions around his shaft and others he just kept going. Eventually, he let my wrists go so I could grip his shoulders.

  It was hard and raw and emotional and liberating as well as sexually ecstatic. The final time I came, I took Argen with me, and he roared as he poured his essence into me. I repeatedly crooned as he throbbed inside me, relishing it all and pressing my short nails into his flesh.

  “Zoey, Zoe, are you okay?” he demanded breathlessly as he held me.

  I grinned at him, breathing as hard as he was. “More than okay. That was awesome,” I was still wrapped around him with his cock inside me and my breasts squeezed erotically against his chest. He moved just a little and throbbed inside me, touching off a new round of shudders through my body.

  “Ah, I’m, ah, just, ah, fine.” I managed to say. “It’s okay… How do you feel?”

  He frowned slightly, and I stroked his cheek.

  “Better. Was I too rough? Gods, sweetheart, I fucked you like a savage.”

  “My savage,” I laughed and planted a light kiss on his lips. “You needed release both physically and emotionally. I am glad I could give that to you.”

  We kissed tenderly, and I hugged his body while hugging him inside me. I knew then that I loved him. Accepting him as my mate was the right thing.

  In public, these warriors were reserved and aloof most of the time. If one didn’t know better, they would think the Uatu people of Farseek cold and distant, but they are just the opposite. I learned that from Harper and Scarlet before Argen came into my life. Solmatu changed all the norms for courtship. When I connected with Argen, I knew immediately he was the one.

  It was both elating and humbling that I could be Argen’s solace at the end of his gauntlet. Yet I wasn’t under any illusion that I was the cure---more like the icing on the cake. He was my icing. I was confident that Argen would be back to normal soon. Treatment of previous rescues had been successful, so I was expecting success with Argen as well.

  I had introduced him to the Harper, Scarlet, and Nora as we boarded the shuttle. I didn’t tell them we were officially mated yet because we wanted to savor it privately for a while longer. I never told them until about two weeks into the trip to Nadoo. I happened into the gym when they were talking slutty.

  “Hey, Zoe. Where have you been hiding? We’ve barely seen you since Argen got here,” Scarlet asked.

  I rolled my eyes. Scarlet has never been especially tactful. “As if you didn’t know. Wait till Harper gets here---oh here she is.”

  Harper strolled in and sat down beside me. “Hi ladies, what’s new?”

  “That’s what I was just asking Zoey,” said Scarlet.

  “Argen and I are officially mated,” I announced. “We have been bonding.”

  “Fucking each other senseless, you mean,” Scarlet giggled. She was always straight to the point.

  “Scarlet,” Harper said. “Must you be so crass. Of course, she’s fucking him. She’s fallen in love with him.”

  “Will you both shut up!” I admonished. “He is solmatu, and we have said the mating vows. It’s way more than fucking, and you know it. So, stop with the slutty girl talk.”

  “I’m sorry, Zoe,” Scarlet said. “It still gets me that it’s so simple and straightforward. No guessing whether he loves you and wants full spectrum relationship or he just wants to stick his cock in you a few times until someone better comes along.”

  “Right, they just know by your scent, then they exude pheromones to make you want them and bam you’re mated for life,” Nora said. “With felines like Sahvin, it’s even faster.”

  “I’ll say,” Scarlet said. “But, I think I knew Pyrr was it when he picked up my hand and kissed it, never taking his eyes from mine. It was like I saw my future there.”

  “I will be glad when we can go Farseek for good,” Harper said. “Sometimes, I get scared it’s never going to happen. That we’re going to get in over our heads and either be killed or captured.”

  “I think that’s in the back of all our minds,” Nora said. “But what choice did we have? We could be sex slaves in some brothel to creepy aliens or forced into hard labor somewhere.”

  “Just because bad things could happen, doesn’t mean they will,” I said. “Back on Earth, there were no guarantees that some third world country wouldn’t get nukes and blow us all up.”

  “Or we could get run over by a truck crossing the street,” Harper said.

  “No, we had to do it up right,” Scarlet said, “We got kidnapped by alien slavers and taken so far from Earth no one knows how to get there from here.”

  We all laughed just as Commander Maktu strode into the room. He frowned slightly. I think he was wondering if the joke was on him.

  Harper grinned up at him. “Hey, Zare. We were just laughing about how things could have turned out so much worse than being kidnapped by aliens.”

  He gave her a look that said so much more than words. I think we all knew exactly what he meant. What seemed like the worst thing that ever happened to us brought us to them---our soul mates.

  A few minutes later several more from the ship’s crew entered. With so many people already onboard, we needed help getting to everyone before the shuttles started coming up from the planet with more rescues.

  The meeting was short. Our duty assignments were the same as with the other rescues, identify them and register them in the AI census with their family lines if they were Uatu. Those who were not would be given a choice to settle on Farseek or be transported to one of the Consortium worlds to live somewhere else.

  We were taking an indirect route to Nadoo in the hope that the Sargus Empire would not anticipate our next target. It actually took longer than expected due to avoiding Sargan patrols and the fact that we needed to capture the ship for the rescue on Nadoo. But we weren’t worried. They may have been new to piracy, but they were getting good at it.

  In just a few days, the gene therapy was giving Argen relief. I asked him about what some of the officers were saying about him being a hotshot.

  “That was when I was younger and a fighter pilot. I took chances and flew my missions aggressively,” he admitted. “A couple times I put other lives in danger. I was only reprimanded because I was lucky enough not to get anyone killed except the enemy. Dreads don’t use fighters. They are the fi
ghters.”

  “Are you going to be flying the Dread?” I asked.

  “Probably not. I’m going to pilot whatever passenger freighter we steal which is the ship you will be on it with me,” he said with one of his sexy grins.

  I gave him a hug and a kiss then one thing led to another, and we ended up in bed for a few hours. We did a lot of that those first few weeks when we were only on duty half days. That left us ample time to entertain ourselves, which we mostly did with each other. It was after all essentially our honeymoon. I had more sex those first weeks than I’d had in years.

  I swore off men after my last boyfriend before Argen. I was tired of cheesy lines and lies. Not that I’d had that many, but none of them were even comparable to Argen. They certainly weren’t solmatu.

  Chapter Seven

  Argen

  Dreadnaught Five had gone on ahead to recon Nadoo before we arrived. On their way, they stumbled on to the ship we needed for the mission. I was a little disappointed, to say the least. The ship they found for me to pilot was a junk pile compared to the Kurellis. It was a Pican slave ship called the Redid Rauner. Not only was it a poorly maintained ship, but it also smelled terrible. Zoe said it stunk just like the slave ship that took her and her friends from Earth.

  It was fortunate that they found me when they did because all their extra pilots had gone to the Kurellis. I agreed with everyone else that Redid Rauner was a piece of refuse, but that made it a challenge to fly. I didn’t really mind.

  When Dread Five snagged the Redid Rauner, we got more than just a ship. It was carrying two thousand slaves and making delivery of them to various worlds. When the Rauner locked into orbit at Nadoo, I shuttled over with Commander Maktu’s team, and we forced our way in when they opened their landing bay to shuttle slaves down to the planet.

  In the face of armed raiders in full combat armor, the Pican’s surrendered. While looking for a place to secure the slavers, Commander Maktu’s team discovered the two thousand slaves already on the vessel, and some of them were Uatu. With the ship secure, Admiral Degatu sent over two guards and Zoe’s team to register the captives on the Rauner. I requested that he send an engineering team to evaluate the air filtering system to do something about the unpleasant odor that permeated the ship.

  The rest of the pilot team came over with the engineers. The Picans were then loaded on that shuttle and sent down to the planet. They would be marooned there, but unharmed.

  For the next few days, the pilot team just had to maintain an orbit around Nadoo while the shuttles brought up the rescues. Most of the captives on the Rauner when we seized it were females. One of Maktu’s combat team even discovered his solmatu. A few found friends and family.

  While I monitored the AI autopilot, Remar Gedlatu perused the navigational records. We both felt sure they must have some data on the coordinates for Earth because the Picans had apparently been stealing people from there for some time.

  “I found it!” Gedlatu shouted. “This has got to be Earth. Fuck! I can hardly believe they took this piece of space junk way the hell into the seventh quadrant!”

  “Are you sure?” I asked him, and it took me a moment to realize I hoped he was wrong.

  “I’m pretty sure. It’s on the far side of the Sargus Empire.”

  “That’s where the Narovian thought it was.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone until we talk to command. Just because we know where it is, it doesn’t mean we can get there.” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get Zoey’s hopes up.”

  We got the slaves evacuated from Nadoo, okay, but Sargan battlecruisers were waiting for us at the rendezvous point where we were meeting Kurellis as it was returning from Farseek. I tried to evade them as they fired on us, but the Rauner was sluggish. She hesitated at engaging the secondary drive and moved off too slowly to avoid getting hit. The shields were a joke, and that blast blew out our stardrive. So, we had to abandon ship and transfer to the Kurellis. We didn’t have parts or funds to fix the Rauner.

  Before we left, we did a memory dump from the AI into Kurellis. They had records of all of the slaves they had collected from various worlds and where they were delivered. That included the many people taken from Farseek. They also had detailed star maps of the seventh quadrant where Earth and Narova were located.

  I was disappointed I’d lost my ship already. Engineering had got the air handlers fixed, and the captives had pitched in to help clean things up. It might have shaped up to be a good backup transport. But there was nothing I could do against Sargan battlecruisers. Rauner was not fast enough to run from a battlecruiser nor did it have weapons enough to defend itself against one. We were fortunate the Kurellis arrived in time for us to evacuate before life support failed.

  Four of our Dreadnaughts held off the battlecruisers while we docked with Kurellis and evacuated the Rauner. Our ships took a beating, but the damage was not severe enough to keep them from blinking out once the transfer from the Pican vessel was completed. The Dreads blinked out as soon as the Kurellis did.

  Because of the massive damage to Dread One, we didn’t get to transfer back to it at the rendezvous as planned. The Dreads went off to make repairs on their own while we headed to our next target.

  A few days later, we had third meal with Commander Maktu, Pyrr Avantu, Sahvin Kazza and their mates from Earth. Maktu chose to reveal that we had discovered the coordinates to Earth on the Pican ship.

  Commander Maktu explained that he was reluctant to tell them because we were afraid they would all want to go back. They didn’t. They really only wanted to let their families know they were alive and well.

  “Are you disappointed that we can’t get you back to Earth?” I asked Zoe as we left the meeting with Commander Maktu.

  “I wanted to go back to Earth after we were taken and spent months on that horrible slave ship,” Zoey told me. “But that was over two years ago. I don’t want to go anywhere without you.”

  “Now that we have spatial coordinates that we recognize, perhaps we can make contact with the Alliance and get news of Earth, as Sahvin suggested.”

  “That’s what we are all hoping, I think,” she said. “We’ve all made new lives for ourselves with your people.”

  “I am a pilot,” I told her as we headed back to our quarters. “Perhaps, we could go there one day. I’m not half bad at navigation either.”

  “Yes, but there’s the part where we’d have to cross the entire Sargus Empire to get there.”

  “And they really don’t like us, I know,” he said.

  “If I have a choice to never go back to Earth or become a slave in the Sargus Empire, I don’t need to attempt it,” she said. “I’m just hoping we can find a way to communicate with Earth.”

  “I think it will be possible with Sahvin’s help,” I said.

  As we arrived at our cabin, the door opened automatically on recognizing us, and we entered. Finally, we were alone, and I could take Zoe into my arms for a long slow kiss. We had third meal at the meeting, so we were in for the night. I thought we could play naked. Zoe was getting that same idea as she melted against me and our tongues teased. I cupped her buttocks and lifted her so I could press my cock against her center through our clothes.

  By the time our lips parted, I had made her forget whatever else was on her mind. She wound her arms around my neck and rubbed her breasts on my chest. I knew that mean her nipples had grown hard and sensitive and needed my attention. I let her down and gripped the hem of her tunic and pulling it up and over her head to bare them. The taut rosy buds were exquisite.

  I lifted her up to I could take one into my mouth and gently squeeze her erect nipple between my teeth. She crooned in delight and wrapped her legs around my waist, holding on so I could easily balance her against my arms as I pleasured her. I paused a moment and carried her into our bedroom before I resumed seducing her. It had been almost six months, and we still hungered for each other as much as when we first bonded.

  In that time, I ha
d learned her body well. I could make her wet for me with a long slow, tongue-tangling kiss. If I nibbled and sucked on her nipples long enough, I could make her come without even touching her pussy. Which she did momentarily, murmuring my name between oohs and ahs, and convulsing with her inner contractions. She came long and hard as I kept pleasuring her breasts.

  Then she gasped, “Argen, darling I need you inside me!”

  “And I want to be, sweetheart.” I let her down and toed off my boots and stripped off my trousers and tunic. She toed off her shoes and shoved her pants to the floor and stepped out of them.

  Zoe turned and braced herself on the bed with her legs spread, offering her ass with her glistening pussy wet for me. This was her invitation to ravish her hard and fast, and I couldn’t help grinning to myself.

  I slid into her effortlessly, and she cooed, “Ah, Argen! You’re wonderful!”

  “And so are you,” I murmured as I started stroking in and out of her slowly, teasing her. Her labored breathing and whimpers of pleasure told me I satisfied her. Gradually I thrust into her harder and faster going for my own release, knowing I would take her with me when it came.

  It didn’t take all that long, but it was sweet when it happened.

  Zoe screamed with the first surge of my seed into her and contracted hard on my cock. Gods, nothing felt so good! I stayed inside her even after my seed was spent and touched her clit, so she went into a new round of shudders massaging my cock. Zoe sobbed in ecstasy as we went on for quite a while before I finally withdrew from her.

  Before she could collapse on the bed, I scooped her up into my arms and carried her into the shower before my semen could drip out of her onto the floor.

  I didn’t call for the water to turn on right away after I set Zoe on her feet. I pressed her against the wall, skin to skin, squeezing her breasts against my chest, holding her hands against the wall above her head.

  She looked at me with a little smile, her brown eyes dark with passion. Her eyes flicked to my mouth, and her lips parted as she arched her back to rub her breasts over my chest. She whispered my name as an endearment, waiting for whatever I would do to her.