Honour is a horticulturist who has been blackmailed into handing herself over to Raiders. She had no idea that they were trading her for cold, hard cash. Trapped on a strange world, being groomed for a male she had yet to meet, Honour had to admit that even the alien races of the Nyal Imperium had begun to feel like home.
The host lives to serve the forest of Yalki and all the worlds in the Yalki system. He is out to choose a bride that not only matches his personal frequencies, but also compliments his personality. It is a search that he is willing to put a lot of attention into, especially when his chosen finds ways to avoid him on the dream plane. That is the kind of woman he is looking for, intelligent and sneaky. He might be in love.
“Damn it.”
This was not how she had planned to end her vacation.
They put her in a cushioned tube and knocked her out. It must have been the easiest way to deal with her. As darkness swelled around her, she knew that when she woke, she wanted some answers.
Nausea was the only thing that sprang to mind when they released her from the tube. The gas that they had used didn’t mesh with her biology.
A hand produced a cup of water. “Drink.”
She grabbed the cup with shaking hands and tried to get the liquid down. It reversed direction as if her stomach had bounced it. Honour hung over the side of the tube and lost the only thing she had consumed since she had been at the base.
Hands lifted her from the tube, and she was put on a floating gurney. She looked up at her captors, and four very heavily armed men in some kind of royal livery had replaced the grubby Raiders.
They didn’t speak; they simply pushed her gurney along through some very thick gates and down a hall. Honour wasn’t up to much analysis; her body was twisted with cramps.
The guards brought the gurney into a room with the unmistakable tang of a medical facility.
A voice spoke to her in soft tones. “They tried to give you water?”
She turned and looked at the man who wore the standard medical tunic over his trousers and a mask over his features.
“How did you guess?” She clenched again as another cramp twisted her.
“Your species specs indicated that they should keep you awake instead of gassing you. When they arrived, they notified us of the manner in which you had been transported. It detracted markedly from their payment.”
“They were paid to attack the research station?”
His dark brows knit together. “No, they were paid to bring a Terran here. What is this about an attack?”
She gave him the story in bursts while he hooked up IVs to her body, and two of the guards lift her onto an exam bed.
Honour had spent her vacation at the Eericourt Research Station. She had been interning and learning about Nyal protocols for processing horticultural samples. The alarm sounded and the inhabitants of the station had scattered, including Honour. She had been instructed to keep running, and she had until the messages had begun to come out over the loud speaker.
