“In that case, you are welcome to refresh yourself, stranger.”

Noelle hesitated. All she really wanted to do was race home—strip off everything that reminded her of Drak and then crawl in her bed and cry her eyeballs out. These people were their neighbors, though, and it was a chance to offer friendship—not just for herself but for all of the colonists. She nodded, therefore, instead of making her excuses and, after punching the keypad to close the hatch, followed the woman and child down the gangplank and into the village.

She really, really hoped she wasn’t going to end up being a captive again!

Drak was too stunned when the ship shot skyward even to think. His mind went perfectly blank, barely even capable of recording anything with his senses. Dimly, he was aware of his men milling around him, some cursing, some speculating, many of them simply as shocked and dismayed and unable to grasp the full implications of the situation as he was.

Slowly in sank in upon him as he watched the ship become no more than a dark spot, and then a dot and then vanish altogether that he had lost them.

He had lost the child dearest to his heart and he had lost the woman. He’d lost Noelle.

He felt as if someone had just ripped his heart out of his chest.

There was so much pain for many moments that he couldn’t catch his breath.

They were gone. Dead. Or as good as dead. There was no way the ship could reach the sister planet at this time of the year.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

He couldn’t save them.

For a few moments wild thoughts circulated in his mind as he considered which of the other clans might have a working ship. They all kept their ships carefully hidden and well protected ….

That thought brought his guard to mind. Rage engulfed him as he turned to look for the man. “Where is Dolf?”

The men around him simply gaped at him and then began to look around. “He is not with us,” the nearest man finally responded.

“Find him!” Drak roared. “And then bring him to me!” With that, he turned his beast and rowled it into motion, racing back toward the fortress with as little regard for life and limb as he’d had when he’d raced to try to catch Noelle to save her. Less. Except for the pain, he felt dead inside.

The beast seemed to beat out that refrain in the rhythm of its hooves against the ice—lost, gone, dead.

He had nothing but the fires of rage to keep the cold from spreading outward from his heart to completely envelop him.

Dolf was not to be found. Apparently, he’d had enough sense to realize he was very likely a dead man for losing the ship and when the men had tore out of the fortress to try to stop the ship from taking off, he grabbed a few of his belongings and some supplies and took off to try to find shelter with another clan.

Drak did not take the news well. He wanted someone or something to vent his frustration on.

Tossing the reins of his beast to a stable hand, he stalked inside, up the stairs … and slammed face first into the door of his room again. That time he was caught completely off guard and bloodied his nose. He let out a roar that could echoed through the halls of the fortress. Half the men turned around and left the hall again, figuring it might be better to hunt for the missing man than face Drak’s wrath. Kulle had more balls than the rest. He and a handful of men raced to their Prince’s side.

Kulle looked around in confusion when they reached the Prince’s suite and discovered he was standing at the door nursing a bloodied nose. “What happened?”

“The door is barred from the other side,” Drak growled.

Kulle gaped at him in disbelief, blinking while he tried to assimilate that news. “But … who took the ship?”

Drak stared at him, struggling with a surge of hope. “Break the door down!”

It took several men pounding against the panel before they finally managed to break through. Then they had to shove the furniture out of the way. Drak shoved in first, searching the room.

He was both puzzled and deflated when they found it empty.

“Witchery!” one of the men muttered.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot!” Drak growled. “She had no magic. She went out another way. Find it!”

They all surged toward the only window and looked out, but there was absolutely no way, they decided, that the woman could’ve scaled the side of the fortress at that point. Since that ruled out the only two openings, they turned and looked at the fireplace. But there was a smoldering fire on the hearth and had been, constantly, since Drak had brought Noelle to his home.

Drak glanced around. “Check the walls for a secret passage.”

It took them twenty minutes to find it and another twenty to fetch an ax to open it when they couldn’t find the latch.

His own damned fortress and it hadn’t occurred to him there might be a secret passage! It should have. The old bastard that had built it had made secret passages all over the fucking thing!

But his own suite of rooms?

He supposed the old man had thought he needed an escape route.

Gathering several torches for light, Drak and Kulle and the men followed the stairs down and then made their way along the tunnel. When they arrived, they discovered just how Noelle and Jules had managed to get into the ship without the guard stopping them. He’d stationed himself at the entrance to the cave.

Drak still wasn’t inclined to let him off the hook. “When you find Dolf—twenty lashes,” he growled. Turning on his heel he headed back the way he’d come.

His fury had deserted him by the time he reached his suite again. After standing in the middle of the room, staring at nothing in particular for a while, he left the room and headed to his solar.

He didn’t think he could bear staying in the room anymore even if not for the fact that it was hardly secure with the passage now known and the both doors shattered.

When he reached his solar, he grabbed a bottle of brew, dropped onto the padded couch the room boasted near the large window, and proceeded to get as stinking drunk as he could manage in the hope of drowning the pain that simmered just at the fringes of his mind.

Noelle didn’t make a huge push toward diplomacy. That wasn’t her strong suit. She stayed long enough to be polite, extended an invitation to Jules and his mother, whom, it transpired, was the village queen, to visit the colony ‘someday’ and then bid them farewell.

When she was airborne again, she considered the safest way to handle her return and decided that it might be best to land the ship far enough from the colony to prevent them from seeing it. She didn’t feel up to explaining how she’d gotten it and there was no place within the colony where she might land anyway. They had a small landing field and a few hangers, but those had been designed and built for the small shuttles they used to travel between the mother ship in orbit and the colony. They wouldn’t accommodate such a large ship.

Beyond that, they were liable to shoot first and ask questions when they were scraping her off the rocks.

Unlike the Amazons, they had the means to shoot her down.

In any case, the walk from where she hid the ship to the gates of the colony gave her plenty of time to decide what she wanted to share about her adventure and what she didn’t.

She thought they weren’t going to let her in. After making her identify herself five times, they made her wait while they sent for Monica to verify.

She was so thrilled to see that Monica was alive and safe and well, she burst into tears.

Monica, naturally enough, took that to be a sign of distress over her experiences and she was taken directly to the med center for a thorough examination and mental evaluation.

She was pregnant.

She’d worried endlessly that that might happen, and she was still stunned absolutely speechless when the computer informed her that she was gestating.