“We can,” Sylvan assured her. “And we’ll take you straight back to the Mother Ship—I know you’ll be relieved.”
“I will,” Bobbi admitted. She cast a glance at Keelah, who was still curled in one corner of the couch looking scared. “But Commander, can we please make a quick stop along the way? There’s someone else here who is longing to go home.”
“Of course we can.” Commander Sylvan nodded. “Come on, let’s go.”
65
“Whew! That’s quite an adventure, doll!” Kat shook her head and took another sip of her drink. “It’s certainly a lot more than you bargained for when you first set out for Avria Pentaura!”
“It certainly is,” Bobbi agreed and sipped her own Margarita with relish. “Mmm, this is good. I missed Earth food so much!” They were sitting in a little Tex-Mex restaurant having lunch and catching up and the chips and salsa and endless pitcher of Margaritas were really hitting the spot.
Bobbi had been back aboard the Mother Ship for a week and she was still getting used to being back to normal—and being warm instead of chilled to the bone all the time.
Not that she didn’t have some fond memories of Saurous. She still got tears in her eyes when she remembered the happy reunion she’d witnessed between Keelah and her family on the Northern Continent. She had promised to come visit her friend sometime in the future, but now that Keelah was safe with her parents and siblings, Bobbi wasn’t in any hurry to go back to the frigid, violent planet.
“So how did Sylvan find you, anyway?” Kat asked her. “I mean, since you were supposed to be on Avria Pentaura and you wound up on Saurous instead?”
“Oh, it turns out he had put a tracking device in the injection of translation bacteria I got before I left the Mother Ship,” Bobbi explained. “It was a safety measure, because I was going beyond the Blind. Commander Sylvan didn’t tell me because he didn’t want me to feel like he didn’t trust me.” She frowned. “In other circumstances, that would have upset me a lot. But as it turns out, having that tracking device was the best thing ever—the minute they found out I had been taken from Avria Pentaura, it led them right to me.”
“Do you still have it?” Kat asked, raising her eyebrows.
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Bobbi nodded. “It’s completely removable but I elected to keep it in case I want to go on any other interstellar research gathering trips.” She smiled.
“So what about Dragon?” Kat asked, changing the subject. “You’ve told me so much about him, but I’ve barely even met him once! Why isn’t he with you? Aren’t the two of you bonded yet?” She winked at Bobbi suggestively and grinned.
“No, we’re not,” Bobbi said honestly, not rising to her friend’s bait. “And to be honest, I’m not sure we’re going to be.”
“What? After all that drama?” Kat demanded. “He killed half his family for you, Bobbi! How can you not get bonded to him?”
“Well, to be fair, it was his Drake who killed them,” Bobbi reminded her. “And they only took him in and adopted him after they killed his real parents. So they kind of had it coming, you know?”
“Okay, I can see that.” Kat nodded. “But what I don’t see is how you can not get bonded to him after the Goddess so clearly put you together.”
Once, Bobbi would have declared she didn’t believe in the Goddess…but she wasn’t so sure now. She remembered the soft voice and the warm feminine presence that had encouraged her when she was afraid she was about to be killed and Dragon had told her that he had heard the same voice on several occasions when he was trying to find and protect her.
So maybe the Goddess was real—maybe she even wanted Bobbi and Dragon to be together and would help them bond, despite the fact that he was a Hybrid. But the fact was, she and Dragon had been raised very differently and Bobbi wasn’t sure they could come together enough to have a happy marriage—or ‘Joining’ as the Kindred called it.
“It’s not that I don’t love him—because I do, I really do,” she told Kat earnestly. “But he was raised on Saurous with some pretty awful ideas. I’m talking about extreme misogyny—like the Patriarchy on steroids.”
“Like, ‘women should be kept in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant and never think for themselves’? That kind of thing?” Kat raised one auburn eyebrow.
“Exactly.” Bobbi took another big sip of her Margarita. “And honestly, I just don’t know if I can live with a man who thinks like that. I mean, I pretty much believe the exact opposite.”
“Of course you do, doll,” Kat said comfortingly. “So did you tell him all that?”
“I did.” Bobbi nodded. “And I asked him to take some time to think about it and also maybe look around the Mother Ship and see how people live here. Then, if he thinks he can treat me the way other Kindred warriors treat their wives, we can talk about the possibility of bonding.”