Grace Goodwin - The Rebel and the Rogue

I used to be one of those people. Respectable. Now I was what I’d once reviled. I wasn’t Coalition any longer. Obviously I hadn’t returned to Earth after my discharge. No fucking way. I was a rebel in space, a Han Solo of sorts. It was funny how the will to survive could change one’s opinion on just about anything.

I owed it to my unit—my dead friends—to see this through. I’d survived when they hadn’t. I would not stop now. I would meet with the Rogue 5 operative, make the trade and get what I wanted: onto his home planet where I could hunt down Gerian Eozara like the animal he was.

Transport Station Zenith was a little rough, but I knew it had nothing on the infamous moon base my contact hailed from.

The meet wasn’t for several hours. I had time to admire the huge male at the bar once more. The dark green band circling his biceps had the Astra Legion’s symbol emblazoned in the center. I’d studied up on Rogue 5, knew the history.

Hundreds of years ago a Coalition ship of a few hundred fighters crash landed on Hyperion, a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. It wasn’t part of the Coalition; therefore it lacked all advanced technology. From what I understood, the native Hyperion population had been a few steps up from Neanderthals, unskilled and lacking any advancements the rest of the universe utilized.

For some reason I couldn’t fathom, some of the survivors from that crashed Coalition ship—Atlan, Forsian, Everian and more—mated with the Hyperions. Their ship was eventually repaired, and the survivors and their descendants rose from the surface, at least far enough to make it to Hyperion’s moon, Rogue 5. There, the Coalition crew, plus those Hyperion they mated, created a base to be their new home.

In the centuries since, they had survived by their wits, doing whatever was necessary to protect their home. They were little more than pirates and rarely allowed outsiders into their midst, but their Coalition and Hyperion ancestry remained. Because the survivors there isolated, almost all who lived on Rogue 5 now had Hyperion blood. But they were all mutts and Rogue 5 was the pound. Some were Hyperion and Atlan, Hyperion and Viken, Hyperion and Forsian, depending on who mated with whom in their ancestry.

To make it even more complicated, the moon base was broken into five legions. Everyone was part of one legion. At Transport Station Zenith—which was probably the only place they comingled with others—I’d come across dozens of members from all the legions, could tell them apart by their uniform colors, the insignia. Astra was one of the more respectable, as criminals went. Styx and Kronos as well. But the other two legions—Cerberus and Siren? They were ruthless. Assassins. Murderers. Thieves. They trafficked everything from weapons to slaves with no conscience or remorse. I had a feeling the operative I would meet later would be wearing one of their two colors.

The Astra Legion’s male at the bar was a forbidden fruit that I suddenly wanted very much to taste. Maybe I’d been wrong in my thinking. Maybe I could be here for my meeting and a little fun, too. When I’d been in the Coalition Fleet, we’d been told to steer clear of anyone from Rogue 5, regardless of their legion. They were rogue, just like the name of their moon base. Wild. They’d be called bad boys on Earth. No way could they measure up to Coalition standards.

But when it came to sex? Screw rules and regulations. I had no doubt he’d be as wild as his home world. The bad boy from Rogue 5 would be really, really good. I had no doubt he’d be up for a good time. A quickie. It had been a while since I’d had a male-induced orgasm, and based on the size of him, I had to assume he was proportional. Everywhere. My pussy clenched at the thought.

As if he knew I was thinking about him—and what he could do if we found the nearest horizontal surface—he turned and met my gaze.

My breath got trapped in my throat, and a flush of heat went through me as if I’d downed a few shots of the tequila. Holy shit, he was hot.

I pegged him at six-nine, two seventy. Easily. He was the largest male I’d ever seen, and I’d fought alongside Atlans in beast mode. He put football players, human strongmen competitors, hell, even mythical Vikings to shame. He had black hair and eyes so dark I couldn’t see the difference between iris and pupil. From across the room I couldn’t miss the sharp cheekbones and square jaw. Regal nose. Full lips. If he had on glasses and a tie, I’d rip open his shirt and find a giant S emblem on the shiny suit hidden beneath. His superpower would be panty destroyer, because mine were ruined.

The latest version of a superhero movie had come out just before I’d left Earth and volunteered for the Coalition, and this guy was a darker alien doppelgänger of my favorite ass-kicking hero.

He was going to fuck me. I was confident about that. Besides womanly instinct, his gaze didn’t falter, only raked over my face, my mouth, what he could see of me sitting down.

One look from him and lust burned through me until I trembled with it. I’d eyed a guy across a bar before, on Earth. Flirted. Fucked. I was a woman and I had needs, nothing I was ashamed of. But I was more aroused by just eyeing the alien before me than I had ever been from any guy on my home planet. Hell, any guy I’d ever slept with.

The alien was… potent, and that was at twenty paces. If he touched me…

I licked my lips, trying to imagine what he would taste like on my tongue, feel like beneath my hands. The small flicker of my tongue over my lips made his gaze narrow, and he moved toward me like I’d tied a rope around him and yanked on my end. Hard.

No one got in his way. No one dared.

He stopped on the opposite side of the table. Looked down. Pheromones pumped off him. He exuded sex, even smelled like it, and I had to plant the soles of my feet onto the floor in a conscious effort to keep myself from standing. Because if I stood, I’d move. And if I moved, I’d be wrapped around him in half a second flat. I’d climb him like a monkey, and that wasn’t the way to go unnoticed around here.

“You shouldn’t be here, female.” The deep rumble of his voice rippled across my skin like the bass beat through a speaker, and my nipples were instantly hard as rocks.

As they said on Earth, those were fighting words. Now that I was out of the Coalition, no one told me what to do.

“I can take care of myself,” I countered with a snap, eyeing him. Hell, eye fucking him. I took my time, inspecting every perfect inch. Those lips. So full. So firm. His disapproving gaze encouraged me to defy him all the more. I didn’t see fangs, but then I’d heard they only came out when these Rogue 5 hybrids took a mate. Since I definitely wasn’t his mate—I belonged to no one—it meant I wouldn’t get that experience, which was just fine with me. I liked sex a little wild, but fangs and biting?

He studied me in silence, and I stared back, refusing to look away. The standoff made my pussy wet with heat.

“Hey, Lieutenant? You all right?” One of the humans from the ReCon unit nearby called out to me and I frowned. Damn it. I’d been honorably discharged from the Coalition Fleet, but my neural implants were still active and could be scanned by other fighters if they were wearing their Fleet uniforms loaded with active tech. That tech in the newest outfits constantly scanned for friend and enemy alike, picking up Hive frequencies no matter how subtle.

When Prime Nial of Prillon Prime, the leader of the entire Coalition of Planets and the big boss in charge of all the military, said veterans contaminated with Hive tech could go home, well, figuring out who was going to be dangerous and who wasn’t had become a pretty big priority for the Coalition Intelligence Core. No one wanted a warrior, fighter or warlord with implants to get pinged with Hive signals and go on a killing spree.