She didn't ask to be kidnapped. She definitely didn't ask to fall for the man who did it.

Jaide Calanarre is one of the best ship mechanics in the system — which is exactly why the Draconians want her, and why they're not taking no for an answer. Hustled aboard an alien warship with her partner, she's got plenty of reasons to be furious and zero reasons to trust the infuriatingly compelling soldier assigned to watch her.

But someone wants her dead. Her partner is falling for the wrong man. And the longer she stays, the harder it becomes to tell whether Skye is the danger — or the only thing standing between her and it.

She's spent years making sure no one could get close enough to hurt her. She didn't count on a Draconian who doesn't know how to quit.

Ride the Stars — a slow-burn sci-fi romance with sharp wit, real heat, and a heroine worth rooting for.

 

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CHAPTER 1

Lunar Base, 2785

The control panel beeped. Jaide shot it a look of pure dislike and closed her eyes.

"Your turn," she told her companion. Arms crossed, feet propped on a supply crate wedged beneath the console, she drifted in that grey nowhere between waking and sleep. Murderous shifts and a skeleton crew had drained them both. She had no energy left to care who wanted access to the shuttle bay.

The flight control computer beeped again, unanswered.

Jaide cracked one blue eye and nudged the sleeping Sesame none-too-gently with the steel-tipped toe of her boot.

Sesame grunted, half-awake. "It was my turn last time. Don't try to con me."

Jaide sent her a dirty look but dropped her feet to the floor and sat up anyway. Her tea had gone cold. She grimaced at the taste and set it aside, staring at the blinking blue light with the glazed focus of someone running on caffeine fumes and vending machine ramen. The control room's emergency strips threw everything in a flat, greenish cast — the kind of light that made everyone look slightly unwell, which tonight was accurate. After working two full shifts straight, going on three, she wasn't confident she could find her own numb backside without a map, let alone run traffic control for the entire lunar base.

Unfortunately, thanks to a particularly nasty run of Yabidian flu, there was no one else. Everyone who wasn't flat on their back was either hanging over a toilet or sitting on one, moaning. Pure luck — and an antisocial streak — had kept her and Sesame upright, but she wasn't feeling like a prizewinner after twenty hours of caffeine and junk food. She was ready to tell this captain to get lost just for having the nerve to call.

"Base control," she snarled into her headset, flipping the toggle like she had a personal grudge against it. "What do you want?"

Sesame muffled a snort. At least one of them still had a sense of humor.

A pause. Then a surprised male voice answered doubtfully, "Permission to enter."

Grumbling, knowing she was being unreasonable and not particularly caring, Jaide scanned the readouts. There'd been a rash of terrorist takeovers and sabotage lately, and the lunar governments had cracked down hard on safety protocol, even at remote postings like this one. The regular controller, Rob Jayckson, had drilled them to the point of tedium on the procedures — which meant, mercifully, she could run them half-asleep. Given the state of things, that was probably exactly what she was doing.

A blip crossed her screen and vanished.

She pushed a couple of buttons, but couldn't get it back.

"Great. Now I'm seeing things," Jaide muttered.

Sesame rolled her head sideways and fixed her with bloodshot eyes. "What?"

"I thought I saw an abnormality on the readouts. It's gone now." A quick sweep of the data turned up nothing.

More alert now, Sesame sat up and double-checked. "I don't see anything."

The ship's name and registry were unremarkable — a run-of-the-mill transport, a scheduled one at that. Still, the faint possibility of something interesting left Jaide fractionally more awake.

"Are we clear, control?" the voice asked, impatience sharpening its edges.

"Keep your shorts on," she snapped.

"What? Who is this?" the voice demanded.

Jaide swore under her breath. She was volunteer help. He could live with it. Her hand reached for the release switch. Something stopped her. She closed her eyes, argued with herself for two seconds, then opened a channel to security. "Whoever's on duty — I had a blip on my screen. Might be sleep deprivation, but I'm covering myself. Send someone to check it out." She toggled off, changed her mind, flipped it back on. "And send someone to take over up here. We're no longer competent."

Static hissed back at her. "We don't have anyone qualified! Everyone's still too sick to come back on duty. We're all just volunteers!" The voice on the other end had a recognizable whine to it — the base commander's pampered med-tech girlfriend. Gissie thought running low on nail polish qualified as a hardship situation. They were in serious trouble if she'd been assigned to security.

"Then let them rot outside the doors! I'm going to bed," Jaide roared. A click cut off Gissie's sputtering protests. Another code opened the shield doors.

Jaide rolled her neck, popping out the kinks, then rose as the massive bay doors ground apart overhead, letting the ship bleed through the particle field that separated the lunar bay's breathable atmosphere from the void of space beyond. It settled onto the landing deck with minimal thruster use, showing the pilot's skill.

For a moment she watched from the control window, fatigue softening her brain at the edges. The emergency strips threw their flat greenish light across the bay below — illuminating nothing particularly, making everything look like it was waiting for something.

The ship was sleek and black, military in design, and it absorbed the bay's dim light rather than reflecting it. Whoever was hitching a ride in that thing had serious connections.

The blinking blue light on her console kept blinking. She hadn't answered it yet.

Then it clicked, and she swore silently at her own stupidity. "That's not a transport," she muttered.

Sesame heard her and glanced out the window. Her oath was considerably fouler. One agitated hand shoved the brown hair out of her eyes. "Another military ship." She shook her head in disgust. "That paranoid governor is burning through taxpayer money, sending ships out to sniff around a dinky backwater posting like this."

Jaide's answer was a grim nod. Their visitors had jammed the port's instruments to gain the element of surprise — same as the last two had done. Good thing she hadn't been on duty for those. Both captains had chewed out everyone on shift. As if anyone on a base this size had the equipment to detect a military-grade vessel running dark!

"We'd better move while we still can," Jaide said, snatching her jacket from the back of her cracked synthetic leather seat. She shrugged it on over her ratty t-shirt and helped lock down the controls. "I'm not sitting through a dressing-down for volunteering my time."

"Why do I feel like a guilty kid sneaking away from a lecture?" Sesame complained, digging through the pockets of her long-sleeved shirt, then her work pants. Both hands and the rough brown fabric were equally stained with engine fluids. They'd come straight from the shop to man the shuttle doors. Suckers.

Gum located, she popped the spicy stick into her mouth and punched in her shutdown code. "No good deed goes unpunished," she muttered.

As she finished, Jaide squinted through the plasglass separating the second-floor command center from the concrete-and-steel cavern below. A sneezing volunteer soldier in brown was already making his somewhat unsteady way toward the ship.

A stab of sympathy caught her. The poor volunteer was clearly somewhere in the lingering tail of the flu — not bad enough to be bedridden, just bad enough to look like he was navigating on autopilot. One of the walking dead, only he'd drawn the short straw and had to go deal with whatever was on that ship.

With a hiss of compressed air, the ramp descended.

Sesame and Jaide reached the bottom of the grated steel stairs at nearly the same moment the guard reached the new arrivals. The leader turned his head in her direction.

Murky light shivered off his standard-issue blast glasses. His black uniform ate the light, and he had a blaster at his hip. The way he carried himself left no room for doubt. Definitely military. The dark glasses nagged at her memory, tugged at something she was too exhausted to pin down. It didn’t matter, though. If he wanted to wear shades inside a docking bay lit only by emergency strips, that was entirely his business.

Muzzy with exhaustion, she shuffled in the direction of her room. She needed to be unconscious in the worst possible way.

Sadly, it wasn't going to be that easy.

Gissie lurked at the bottom of the stairs, and she lit into them immediately. "Don't think I'll forget this," she hissed, jabbing a finger at Sesame's chest. Her lips were twisted into a snarl, her long nails curved like claws. She couldn't make a fist without impaling herself, but the shriek of her voice was assault enough. "This is dereliction of duty, and I'll see you written up for it! The commander won't stand for this kind of behavior."

Sesame's sneer was slow and deliberate. "Look, sweetie, sleeping with the commander doesn't give you rank. You've got no authority here, so why don't you go find someone else to screech at?" She tried to walk on, but Gissie stepped directly into her path.

"Who do you think you are? I will not be talked to this way!" she shrieked.

Jaide groaned and flicked a glance back at the shuttle bay. Any moment now Gissie was going to get backhanded, and she genuinely wanted to be able to say she hadn't seen it happen. Sesame would handle it for her.

You'd think that being two of the most sought-after ship mechanics in the system would earn them at least a crumb of professional respect. Unfortunately, people like Gissie didn't move in those circles, wouldn't recognize Sesame as the engineering celebrity she was. To her, celebrity meant glitz and press coverage, not stained jeans and a contact list full of high-profile racing clients and military contracts.

A reality check was long overdue. If Jaide had known today was the day, she'd have sold tickets.

The only reason they were on this isolated rock in the first place was research — Sesame had turned down a lucrative military contract to be here, no less. If they'd been somewhere more populated, they might not have to put up with the Gissies of the galaxy, who were currently making a lot of noise about turning them into scapegoats for the latest security lapse.

Jaide narrowed her eyes at the spot-faced young soldier who'd gone to meet the new arrivals. He looked uneasy, and she couldn't blame him. This group radiated trouble the way a reactor radiated heat.

The captain spoke in what was probably, for him, a pleasant tone. It sounded like rock dragged across concrete— not quite soothing, but not hostile either. "Is there a problem?"

"N-no. No, sir." The soldier straightened, squared his thin shoulders, and immediately ruined the effect by sneezing hard enough to stagger himself. He rallied. "I mean, yes, sir. You were supposed to be a freighter. You jammed our sensors, so I need to inspect your ship. Standard policy. Sorry," he stuttered.

He looked sorry, but it was to his credit that he'd come out at all. Under normal staffing, a full security squad would be deployed for exactly this kind of situation. If these visitors had been what they looked like, the boy wouldn't have stood a chance. The captain alone — menacing and fit in his light-eating black — could have put him down, and he had two grim-faced companions who looked equally capable.

Gissie would have done better to back the kid up with a blaster than to waste time tearing into Sesame.

"At your convenience." The captain gestured to the ship, encompassing his two crewmates and the cool spectral glow of white light bleeding down from the open ramp. He smiled — and showed teeth that were slightly too sharp.

The soldier took one look and swallowed. "Ah. Right."

A meaty smacking sound pulled Jaide's attention back to Sesame. She looked at Gissie sitting on the floor with a hand pressed to her cheek, expression cycling rapidly through shock and outrage, and felt not a single flicker of surprise. "Finally." She stepped over Gissie's legs without breaking stride, ignoring the stream of invective that followed. Sesame had already moved off. Jaide gave Gissie a small wave. "Bye."

"Felt good," Sesame muttered as they walked toward their rooms. She massaged her hand.

"Probably shouldn't tell me that. I want to be as ignorant as possible when the commander tries to charge you," Jaide said, amused despite herself.

Sesame just grunted.

Jaide had her hand on the keypad to her room when a gravelly voice called out, "Sesame Calais."

Already at her own door, Sesame stiffened, then dropped her head against the cool metal with a soft, miserable clunk. Jaide heartily agreed with the sentiment. Within seconds of falling into bed, fate was already conspiring against them. Resigned, she glanced at the newcomers — and stiffened.

"Uh, Ses?"

"Whatever it is, the answer is no," Sesame mumbled into the door. With a huff of effort she straightened and punched in her security code, not even glancing at the men behind her. Jaide opened her mouth to warn her, but the leader of the arrivals beat her to it.

"It's about a job."

Jaide knew how Sesame operated. Right now she was betting that if she didn't turn around, she wouldn't have to deal with another arrogant captain demanding her services. Unacknowledged, the irritation would simply dissolve.

It didn't.

As Sesame stepped over her threshold, so did the men behind her. Alarmed, Jaide slipped in after the trio and moved to position herself behind her friend. Using Sesame's body as a screen, she palmed her stinger. The small laser gun wasn't as imposing as a blaster, but it could drop a man just as permanently. Her eyes locked on the leader. One wrong move and he'd be regretting it.

Sesame still hadn't looked at them. Grimacing at what she'd apparently decided was Jaide's paranoia, wearing an expression of monumental annoyance, she turned to boot them out. The door hissed shut at her back. She got her first proper look at the intruders and stopped cold.

About time, Jaide thought, a touch exasperated. Spiky fingers of alarm walked up her spine. She hoped it didn't come to a direct confrontation. Soldier she was not. Even if she were, three Draconians were long odds — and her luck had never run that hot.

They were clad in light-eating black, riddled with weapons, their large bodies carrying the easy, coiled stillness of men who didn't have to work to look dangerous. They stared through dark glasses that concealed their telltale eyes. One of them raised his upper lip slightly, showing the tip of a white fang.

Just the sort you'd want to bring home to meet the family, Jaide thought drily. Come see my charming new friends, they've only bitten a few people.

Sesame, apparently unimpressed by all of it, crossed her arms and stared up at the coldly handsome leader. "I'm listening."

"I'm in need of augmentation for my ship," he informed her in the deep, gravelly voice that was his people's trademark. "You are the best. Therefore, I require you."

Jaide managed to keep her expression neutral. Barely. Mentally, she sneered. Of course, your Greatness. We'll just drop everything and scrub your hull on command, shall we? It was the attitude more than anything — that absolute, unquestioned assumption that the universe would arrange itself around his schedule. She was sick of it. Jerk captains never learned to ask.

Sesame stifled a jaw-cracking yawn and blinked her bloodshot eyes. "Come back after I've had a day's sleep, all right? I'm in no mood to discuss—"

"There is nothing to discuss. I understand you have a standard contract. Produce it and I'll sign it." He pulled off his glasses and stepped into her space. "We're pressed for time."

His eyes were vivid topaz, sharp with purpose and absolutely unmoved by the possibility of refusal.

Sesame didn't seem cowed by the evidence of his race. If anything, her expression soured further. Maybe she didn't believe the rumors. Maybe she was simply too exhausted to care. Either way, she wasn't backing down.

Jaide turned the newcomers over in her mind. What were three Draconians doing this far from Antarctica? Unless they were rogue. She sincerely hoped not. A rogue Drac was a uniquely unpleasant problem, and she'd heard enough stories to know she didn't want to be in the same room when one finally lost patience. Her pulse ticked too fast in her throat — a beacon, she was certain, to those gleaming fangs. She steadied her breathing and braced herself.

Sensing Jaide's unrest, Sesame reached behind her and gripped her arm without looking — a quiet signal. She had it handled.

The adrenaline was already fading, her body running on fumes. Fear was quietly ceding ground to plain grouchiness. Fatigue dulled her focus, and she had to fight a yawn of her own. Trying to stay sharp, she shifted her attention to the others.

The first was a little shorter than his companions, though still striking. His short black hair curled like fleece but gleamed like silk, and a gold ring caught the light in his earlobe, matching the warm amber of his Draconian eyes. She blinked. When had he removed his glasses?

She looked to the second — and stopped.

Ruthless topaz eyes with amber facets stared back at her, lit with an inner glow that had nothing to do with the bay's fluorescents. He was the same height and build as the captain, but she couldn't have explained why she'd stopped looking at his superior entirely. Sure, the man was sinfully attractive, all clean angles and dark coloring. Unlike the others with their close-cropped cuts, his midnight hair fell freely to his shoulders, unbound. His jaw and cheekbones were carved with masculine precision, and his lips held the ghost of an amused curve.

She yanked her gaze back to his eyes and fought down the flush rising in her face. Some bodyguard she was.

He seemed amused by that. His eyes flicked briefly to her hidden hand, acknowledging the gun with a knowing ease that said he'd known it was there the whole time.

Unnerved, she took a half step back, then held her ground and set her jaw. So he knew. Fine. She needed to stop letting him get to her. She was not a flustered teenager.

Sesame was still holding her ground. "I have five captains already standing in line—"

"I'll double your fee."

That got Jaide's full attention. He was talking about an amount of money that didn't fit comfortably in her head. Even with the generous rates their clients paid, figures like that still had a way of making the room tilt slightly.

Sesame studied him with a long, hard look. "It's not pocket change, pal." His expression didn't shift, didn't offer anything to read. Sesame finally glanced away. She moved to the desk jammed in the corner of her small living room and called up the contract on the terminal screen.

Jaide frowned as she was left holding a gun against three men and finally slipped the stinger back into her pocket. It didn't seem like she'd need to cook anyone today.

The Draconian captain barely glanced at her. His gaze swept past, dismissive.

The long-haired one's lips twitched.

Jaide returned a cool look, entirely unbothered by the judgment. She was not embarrassed to have been prepared.

Sesame stepped back from the desk and gestured to the captain. "Look it over. It's non-negotiable. I'm going to get cleaned up." She headed for her room, Jaide on her heels.

As soon as the bedroom door clicked shut behind them, Jaide rounded on her. "Are you out of your mind?" she demanded, keeping her voice low. "You watch the news. You know what they say about Draconians — so why are you standing there like they're a minor inconvenience?"

Sesame grabbed clean clothes and headed for the shower. "Well, I asked them nicely once, but they just didn't leave," she retorted. Through the hollow door she added, "Besides, I smell like Igerian cheese. I doubt even Dracs are desperate enough to bother with that." The water turned on, and a moment later came Sesame's long, heartfelt moan of relief as the hot spray hit her.

Since she'd managed to sneak away for a quick shower earlier, Jaide had other things on her mind. She shuffled to the bed, settled with her back against the headboard, and set her jaw. Sesame might be too wrecked to care what their visitors got up to, but Jaide wasn't taking chances.

The room was as lived-in as a rental unit on its first day of occupancy — not a sock on the serviceable grey floor, not a stray mug on the desk. The resin furniture sat in its correct positions, undisturbed, offering exactly zero distractions to someone trying to stay awake on a flat mattress in the quiet hum of a lunar base.

An enormous yawn crept up on her, and she smothered it with her fist. Something nagged at her — some half-formed thought about the Draconian captain, something she ought to be connecting. Whatever it was refused to surface through the fog.

Closing her eyes and making herself comfortable — just for a minute — she turned over what she knew.

The Dragon Lords, as Earth had taken to calling them when their ship had crash-landed on Antarctica roughly twenty-five years ago, were a complicated proposition. Named for their glowing eyes and rough voices, they had set up camp on the ice-locked continent and declared themselves permanent residents without consulting anyone. The Earth governments had been appalled, and thoroughly unable to do anything about it. They'd been forced to abandon their southern arctic outposts, leaving behind vast reserves of oil and methane hydrate — a frozen form of methane locked beneath the ocean floor — along with immense mineral concentrations and fishing rights that had been generating revenue for decades. The loss of the arctic tourist trade hadn't helped the mood either. Human authorities and big business had been hostile at best ever since.

The general population was a different story. The press found the Draconians' desperate voyage across the stars quietly romantic. Scientists were hungry to learn everything they could about the new species and its origins. And a few sharp-eyed entrepreneurs had been studying the situation from the first moment, looking for the angle.

For their part, the Draconians had no intention of being moved. Their home world had been rendered uninhabitable by an asteroid the size of a small moon, and they had arrived with nothing to spare. Bartering technology for food and supplies, they had transformed their commandeered chunk of ice into a beehive of activity. Reclusive and indifferent to human politics, they had proven to be surprisingly tolerable neighbors.

So long as they weren't riled.

Jaide jerked awake with a start, annoyed with herself. She listened, catching the low, sibilant tones of their guests' language seeping through the door from the living room.

The shower clicked off.

The last thing she registered before her eyes gave up entirely was Sesame, dressed in pajamas and toweling her hair, gloating that tomorrow would be soon enough for the Drac to discover that a signed contract didn't obligate her to move quickly. After all, she had priorities.

Unfortunately for Sesame, Draconians had very sharp ears.

***

Nemesis' eyes narrowed as Sesame's words filtered through the cheap door. The hollow resin concealed nothing; they'd been able to hear her perfectly well.

Skye had been conducting a quiet inventory of the apartment's barren interior when he stopped to consider the closed door. They had no time to waste on delays — lives were depending on the swift conclusion of their mission. Even now, Draconian families were suffering. He said, "We have no time to indulge her preferences, Nemesis. I say we take the women and go. We have a contract." In Draconian law, and given their orders, the argument would hold. Human governments might see it differently, but that was rarely a priority.

Nemesis considered him. A slow, roguish smile curved his mouth. "Women? Our orders concern one woman. What exactly would we do with the other?" He had the particular smugness of a man who had been patiently making a point for some time and finally saw it landing.

He was baiting him, of course. He wouldn't actually suggest Skye had any interest in an alien.

Skye let his gaze drift across the sterile room — a tough sell as a distraction. For the fees she charged, you'd think she could be bothered to hang something on the walls.

The faintest haze of electric blue flickered at the periphery of his vision as his thoughts turned, without quite meaning to, to Jaide. It was novel enough to give him pause. He had no memory of ever registering the remotest pull toward a human woman before — not toward any woman not of his own kind. He turned the fact over with detached curiosity.

She was attractive, but not outrageously so. Latin coloring, good skin, nothing that would have stood out to him under ordinary circumstances. He'd always been drawn to taller women, dark-haired and built on a generous scale. Jaide Calanarre's slight frame and quiet curves had no business holding his attention, and yet here they were. Something about the directness in her gaze — blue as the cold Atlantic — and the intelligence in her expression. Her nerve hadn't hurt either. He'd come close to laughing when she'd been caught with the blaster; she’d thought she was being so sneaky.

"The orders did say to secure her assistance by any means necessary," he said, in a tone calibrated to sound bored. "She might cooperate more readily if her helper comes along. They work as a unit anyway — it'll move faster with both of them."

Nemesis and Lore exchanged looks of barely suppressed satisfaction, as if some long-running wager had just paid out. "Solid reasoning," Nemesis said pleasantly.