God, this was a nightmare. Word of me being mated was no doubt spreading like it was middle school, not the Coalition Academy. I’d been odd when I was thirteen, and I felt the same way now.
I didn’t say more, because I couldn’t go back into the meeting. That would stir up even more confusion and talk. I turned and walked toward my quarters. As vice admiral, I had the perk of my own house. It was set back from the main dormitories and classroom buildings, with trees surrounding it. While I didn’t share the space, it wasn’t large. That suited me fine because I didn’t collect things, didn’t need much and I lived simply. I was content.
Until now. Now, I was pissed.
“This works,” Quinn said, looking around the inside of my quarters. The wood floor, the white walls. Plain furniture. The bed in the other room. “Good, now you won’t have to be quiet when I make you come.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” I shouted.
He grinned. “There she is.”
I looked around. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“My feisty mate.”
I pointed to the floor. “You come here, out of the blue, and pull me from an important meeting. To what, argue?”
“I came here for my mate.”
I thumbed over my shoulder. “Yeah? Well that was your mate back there in the meeting.”
He slowly shook his head, looked me over from head to toe as if remembering me naked. I shouldn’t be wet, but I was. Why did I want to strangle and jump him at the same time?
He moved over to me in the blink of an eye, then slowed, stroked a knuckle down my cheek. My eyes fell closed at the touch, but I popped them open, grabbed his wrist and torqued it. How dare he lure me with sweet gestures. He leaned to the side to alleviate the pressure of the lock, but spun the other way, taking me with him in a circle so he was behind me, his arm about my waist. I felt the heavy prod of his cock against my lower back.
“I came for you.” His breath fanned my ear.
“You came to piss me off.” I dropped my weight so his arms held me up, stomped on the top of his foot. His hold loosened, and I moved across the room at a Hunter’s pace. He didn’t follow.
“I came because you’re mine.” He curled his finger, beckoning me back over to him.
I set my hands on my hips. “You can’t pull me out of a meeting.”
“You shouldn’t have taken away my kill.”
My gaze narrowed. “So that’s what this is about? You’re fucking with my job because I took the Nexus unit away from you?”
“It was my right to destroy him.”
“That meeting is my duty. We weren’t discussing cookie recipes. We were discussing training protocols, changes in Hive fighting strategies, how to keep more fighters alive. Training cadets so they don’t panic on the battlefield, so they can hold their own in this war. That’s my job. That is my right.”
“I’m your mate. They can plan and gossip without you for a few hours.”
“I’m the vice admiral! That was my meeting.”
His jaw was clenched, his muscles tense. And from across the room, I could see the thick bulge of his cock pressing against his uniform pants. Attraction wasn’t our problem. Everything else was.
“I’m not going to repeat our argument from Latiri 4,” I said. “You have to understand, Quinn, that my job is my life.”
“It shouldn’t be. You need more than meetings and duty. We are mates. It’s my job to take care of you now.”
I sighed. He wasn’t behaving this way to be annoying. He sincerely believed everything he was saying. Maybe he was too used to operating in a small unit of Elite Hunters with nearly complete autonomy. The Hunters chose which missions to accept and which to refuse. Once on a hunt, they lived by their own code of honor, their own rules. They served the Coalition, and Everis sent regular fighters to the war, but the Elite Hunters were a whole different level. They were not normally in the direct chain of command, didn’t report to someone like me. They bypassed the bureaucracy, the red tape. The meetings. I sighed.
“How do I make you understand? No one does, that’s why this is so hard. No one has ever understood me. On Earth, I was so different. Everything I did screamed freak. Then on Everis, I didn’t fit in. I behaved like a human. I didn’t like Everian food. I didn’t know the customs. So I left. When I joined the Coalition, I finally felt like I had a place where I belonged. Everything I did was accepted. My differences made me better. I understood what to do, how to do it. When, where, why. It was all laid out for me. I thrived. Excelled.” I pointed at the shoulder of my uniform. “Vice Admiral at thirty-six.”
“And now you have me,” he repeated.
I nodded. “I do, but in order for you to have me, you get a vice admiral, too. Do you know who I report to?”