Love Is Always Write Volume 4

hours to come back before we need to contact the Council."
    "Those two are a couple?" Kekoa inquired.
    Darien refrained from eye rolling. "Yes."
    "You seem like you don't approve." Kekoa sounded uncannily amused.
    "No comment. I need to let them know I'm okay. A prisoner but okay."
    "You are not a prisoner," Kekoa thunder-purred, sending chills down Darien's spine.
    "Then why can I not return to my base?"
    "It's complicated." Kekoa paused as if weighing something up. "Your people must leave the planet at once and never set foot on it again. I'm going to make a deal with you. We are going to contact them and tell them to exit the planet, and you will stay with me here for sixty standard days as collateral. If you refuse, I'll obliterate them."
    "That's coercion. What assurance do I have you will not kill me as soon as they're gone?"
    "I could have done that by now, don't you think?"
    Kekoa had a point there. "Even if I accept, they won't."
    "They will because I'm going to threaten them with your life."
    "How can I trust someone who speaks of killing others as he talks about the weather?" Or sex as if it were the same thing.
    "Your death is not in my plans."
    Darien growled, "Oh, just contact them and shut up."
    They moved to a different room, this one looking more like the bridge of a spaceship. Kekoa hailed Darien's base. "Greetings, invaders. I am Kekoa Wana'ao, guardian and priest of the sacred places you are defiling."
    "How can it be so if this planet is deserted?"
    "It is not. I have your Darien Muselet in my custody, and I request your immediate departure of this planet or he will be exterminated."
    "We want to see him."
    Kekoa allowed Darien to show himself on the screen.
    "Captain, are you all right?"
    "Yes, I am fine. Accept this bastard's demands and leave the planet." Darien scowled at Kekoa for good measure. His crew—or Kekoa for that matter—didn't need to know he was staying willingly.
    "But, Captain, we cannot leave you behind."
    "I'm not asking you, Jacques; I'm giving you an order. Inform the Council they are not to send more expeditions to this wretched planet because next time there will be a massacre. We don't want an incident."
    "What about you? All intergalactic laws abhor the taking of hostages."
    "This priest says he will let me go in sixty standard days. For now, we have no other option than to trust him."
    "Captain, this is madness."
    "I gave you an order. See it through."
    "Aye, aye, Captain." Jacques disappeared after a sharp nod.
    "I didn't know you were the captain of the expedition." Again, that amused tone.
    "You never asked." Darien felt like blowing a raspberry in Kekoa's direction.
    "True," Kekoa murmured. The smuggest grin decorated his insanely distracting face.
    Back in the previous room, Darien observed the swift dismantling of his excavation area. His androids lay scattered like the abandoned corpses of a bloodless battle. Frederick and Jacques' team worked to retrieve them. "You're gonna pay for those androids," he hissed to disguise the anxiety possessing him with each passing second.
    ****
    Kekoa chuckled. "I just discharged them; they are not damaged." He noticed the boy was restrained but twitchy. He was more than sure it wasn't the fact that his people were packing, but that he still had his virginity intact.
    I will take care of that, but there's no reason to rush now. He's all mine.
    In reality, Kekoa didn't know how he'd summoned the control to avoid becoming all paws over that creamy, vestal body. He knew the boy was young, perhaps only a quarter of the average one hundred years humans lived. Almost exactly the equivalent of his well-enjoyed six hundred standard years.
    He always thought humans were pretty; what he couldn't have foreseen was his mating to one of them. Even if he didn't have irrefutable proof yet that the boy was his mate, something in the way Darien scanned his body became an insanely potent pull. He put a hand over the young man's shoulder, doing his best not to squeeze it. "I'll take good care of you."
    Darien looked his way with that sexy narrowed scowl of his. "If you think I'm going to stay here passively waiting for you to take care of me , you're delusional." He paused, maybe trying to find the courage to say something else.
    No, not the courage, this youngling didn't strike him as a coward. That, in turn, launched Kekoa's imagination into all sorts of oh-so-not-passive scenarios, including his face burrowed between those round, delicious