Chapter One
Toni
“He’s not coming? What do you mean Aton’s not coming? The ship from Dakon isn’t arriving on Tuesday?” I stared into my picto-phone at Jessie.
“The ship will land on schedule, but he won’t be on it.” Her mouth compressed into an unhappy line. “I’m so sorry. The Intergalactic Dating Agency accepts full responsibility for the snafu.”
I leaned my elbows on my desk and rubbed my throbbing temples. This was turning into a very bad day. First, there’d been the unpleasantness in the courtroom with Phillip, and now this. When my assistant had said I had a call from Jessie Hancock, I’d expected good news from the IDA match coordinator.
“I’ve waited three months!” After signing up with the agency and completing the personality and readiness assessment, I’d been matched with an alien named Aton right away but had to wait for his ship from Dakon to arrive.
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
“So, when will he get here? When’s the next ship?”
Jessie’s professional composure slipped, and she looked pained. “Another one lands in two weeks, but he won’t be on that one, either. He’s not coming at all.”
“What?”
“Extraterrestrial Immigration didn’t approve his visa.”
“Why?” Mentally, I ran through the possible reasons immigration would deny admission to Earth: criminal activity, poor physical or mental health, drug abuse, terrorism, species discordance. A couple of tragic incidents of spontaneous combustion had revealed the biological incompatibility of some alien species with humans. However, that didn’t apply to Dakonians. Quite a few had already arrived—my own sister was engaged to one. Nor could I believe anyone from Dakon was a criminal, a drug abuser, or a terrorist.
“They didn’t say. I appealed, but I doubt anything will come of it. They’re not exactly cooperative over there.” She sighed. “Their bureaucratic red tape and general obstructionist attitude complicates my job.”
“What happens next—wait a minute…” I sat up straight in my chair. “Visas had to be approved by immigration before the aliens boarded the ship, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“So the whole time you were telling me you had a perfect match for me, you knew full well Aton wasn’t coming!” I was getting steamed.
“The Intergalactic Dating Agency only found out today. Immigration had informed us his visa was granted. This morning they sent us a redacted passenger list. The IDA promised you a date, and we guarantee our matches. We will find you someone else.”
“It won’t be Aton.” It was crazy to mourn for a man I hadn’t met, of whom I knew the barest details: name, age—thirty (five years older than me), and planet of origin—Dakon. But, I’d hoped, dreamed, planned. In my head, I’d spun romantic outings, intimate dates, and fun trips to welcome him to my world, to make him feel at home. I felt like an adoptive parent who’d expected a baby for nine months to learn two weeks before the due date, they weren’t getting one after all.
Note to self: Don’t count your aliens before they land.
“No, it won’t be Aton,” Jessie admitted.
“Will he be a Dakonian?” I’d had my heart set on a tall, horned alien hottie.
“I can’t say off the top of my head. We’ll need to rerun your assessment tests through our system.”
“You should still get the same results. My personality and needs haven’t changed.”
“But the list of available men has. Your results are matched against their results.”
“Oh.”
“I promise you’ll be pleased with the selection.”
“Didn’t you say Aton and I were a 100 percent match? Who could be better for me than him?” On our compatibility test, we’d scored the same on seventy-two out of seventy-two points.
She winced. “It’s a violation of agency policy to give actual numbers. I never should have shared that information with you.”
Loose lips sink ships. Good thing she wasn’t employed in military intelligence because she’d spilled the beans on a lot. “You told me no couple had ever scored the way Aton and I had.”
“True,” she conceded. “However, I’m hopeful we can get you 90 percent or better. That’s very good. Few Earth couples achieve that degree of compatibility. Usually it’s around 60 percent—at best 75 percent.”
“Which might explain the 50 percent divorce rate,” I said dryly. And that stat only applied to couples who got married. Population demographics had shifted so women outnumbered men by quite a bit. With an overabundance of female fish in the sea, men were disinclined to settle down with one woman, let alone get married.
Hence, when you got a man, you did your best to hang onto him—even if he was an emotionless stuffed shirt thirty years your senior. That was, until you saw the alien hunk your sister brought to your wedding, discovered you had options, and realized what a huge, huge mistake you were about to make.
My sister had met her alien beau through the Intergalactic Dating Agency. The service recognized the need for marriage-minded men and rose to fill it with aliens willing to emigrate and commit.
“It’s possible to be too compatible. Like ions—opposites attract, likes repel. Now that I think about it, you two were too similar, and finding someone more dissimilar will be better for you,” Jessie said.
She was trying to cover her butt. After saying the agency would match me with someone almost as compatible, now she claimed compatibility was overrated. Was she lying then, or was she lying now? I hated being so suspicious, but as an attorney, I could recognize a song and dance a mile off, having performed a little legal soft-shoe myself.
Jessie shifted her gaze away from me and squinted off to the side, as if she’d split her computer screen and was scrolling through and reading. Her brows furrowed. “Yeah…the whole maverick assessment worried me anyway,” she muttered.
“Maverick? What you talking about?”
Pursing her lips, she leaned back in her chair. “Nothing,” she said brightly.
She was a terrible liar. On a witness stand, she’d crack in seconds. I folded my arms and let silent skepticism do the work for me.
Jessie wet her lips and dropped her gaze. “I can’t share any more of the results with you. It’s against agency policy. I’ve said too much already.”
I arched an eyebrow and waited.
She fidgeted.
“He’s not coming here, anyway, so it’s not like you’re sharing information about a client.” She needed only a little coaxing because she wanted to tell me.
She glanced left and right, and then leaned forward. “This is the last bit I can tell you. I can’t reveal anything more,” she whispered. “Aton’s personality assessment results showed he had a penchant for nonconformity. If the rules don’t work for him, he’ll go around them or set his own.”
“Could that have been why immigration denied his visa? Does the agency share test results?”
She shook her head. “No. Our assessments are internal documents held in strictest confidence.”
Not so confidential. If she’d told me, who else might she have squealed to? Immigration probably had the info.
“It could be he didn’t obey their rules in applying for the visa,” she suggested. “You have to follow the procedures to the letter. If you miss dotting a single I or crossing one T, they’ll deny the application. They seek ways to keep people out rather than letting them in.”
“Do you have any idea what sort of rules Aton might have broken?”
“I don’t know if he broke any,” she said. “The assessment only showed a high degree of potential for nonconforming behavior.” She folded her hands. “Listen. I promise you, we’ll find you another date. It’s possible there’s a match on the ship from Dakon arriving in two weeks—or in a group of aliens from a different planet.”
“Aren’t they already spoken for?” I’d been informed of my match’s identity months ago.
“Not all of them. We don’t throw humans and aliens together willy-nilly. That’s not how we operate. There could be a man arriving who didn’t match any of the profiles in the existing female client database. Not everyone gets matched immediately. However, we get new applicants all the time. The program is very popular.”
Suddenly, she was all business. “Don’t worry. Your match will be expedited. I’ll be in touch as soon as your date is identified.”
The picto-phone screen blanked out.
Aton, a maverick? That sounded…exciting. Sexy.
If our personalities were supposed to be alike, and he was a rule breaker, didn’t that imply I was a nonconformist?
Well, that punched a big hole in the accuracy of the agency’s testing. Nobody adhered to the rules more than me. My whole life, I’d conformed to what other people expected of me—and by other people, I mean my mother—to the extent my life wasn’t my own.
Jilting Phillip at the altar was a minor aberration. Okay, not so minor, but still an exception. Joining the Intergalactic Dating Agency was my boldest move, but it didn’t violate any rules, other than pissing my mother off to the extent she’d nearly disowned me. And I’d opted out of the partnership at my old law firm to open my own office. Anomalies every one. I was no rule breaker.
My sister Lexi, on the other hand… check maverick in the dictionary, and you’d see her picture. I tapped her number into the picto-phone.
Giggling, she appeared on the screen while Darak, her Dakonian husband-to-be, nuzzled her neck.
“This is how you answer? What if it had been Mother?” I said.
“I recognized your ringtone. If it had been Mother, I would have made sure we were naked,” she replied.
See? I worried about proprieties, and she delighted in flouting them. Maverick all the way.
“Darak…” She laughed and squirmed in his arms as he continued to kiss her.
A pang shot through me. I’d never seen a happier couple than those two. I was thrilled for her, but envious. I wanted my own alien who would be as devoted to me as Darak was to my sister.
“What’s up?” she said.
“He’s not coming,” I replied.
“Who’s not coming?”
“Aton. His visa didn’t get approved.”
“Oh no.” My sister was all concern. “Wasn’t he supposed to arrive this week?”
“Tomorrow.”
“And you found out today?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing like a little notice, huh?”
“The Intergalactic Dating Agency claimed they just got notified by immigration there’d been an error.”
“So, what happens now? Are they reprocessing his visa application?”
“The IDA has filed an appeal, but the coordinator said they’re going to find me another match.”
“Still a Dakonian?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” I shrugged.
“Aton will come,” Darak spoke up. “He’s your mate, and he won’t abandon you. The Fates have chosen him for you.”
My sister and I exchanged a glance. Dakonians believed an energy in the universe guided people to their Fated partners. Of course, Lexi and I put no stock into those superstitions. “Even if that were true—”
“It is true,” he insisted.
“He still wouldn’t have a way to get here. Without a visa, he won’t be allowed to land on the planet. Everyone on the ship has to have the proper authorization, or Transit Authority won’t clear the craft to land. The Fates may provide mates, but they can’t issue visas.”
“He will find a way to get here,” Darak contended.
A nice sentiment, but Aton hadn’t met me. I was a name on a faraway planet. He might be disappointed at being banned from Earth, but it wasn’t like he would fight through hell or high water to get here.
“We’ll see,” I said noncommittally.
“Any more trouble with Phillip?” my sister asked.
“When isn’t there trouble with Phillip?” Funny—not—how a little public humiliation could transform an emotional cold fish into a vindictive adversary. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
Because we now worked for two different law firms, we sometimes faced off against each other in court. Opposing counsel should be able to duke it out, laugh it off, and go out for a drink. Not Phillip and I.
My ex turned every case into a personal attack. He went for the jugular—mine. No motion was too frivolous to file, no objection too ridiculous to lob. He bogged down my cases and his, cost his clients and mine money, and wasted the court’s time.
If my former fiancé had exhibited as much passion for me as he did for revenge, we’d be married.
I shuddered at the close call. While the animosity complicated my professional life, it would have been worse to be married to Phillip. No matter how well you knew a person, he could surprise you. Finding true love was just a crap shoot—even with supportive “scientific data.”
Maverick, me? Ha! If the IDA was wrong about me, then maybe they were wrong about Aton, too. But, why had his visa been denied? What could he have done?
“Am I rebellious?” I asked my sister.
“Yes.”
“How can you say that?” I gaped.
“Uh…Phillip?”
“One time!” I waved my arms. “One time I acted out of character. And it wasn’t that spontaneous, because I’d been shoring up the courage to do it for a long while.”
“So, you had rebellion in your heart.”
“Fantasizing about rebelling isn’t the same as rebelling.”
“Hey, you asked me!”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m just…bummed.”
Darak hugged my sister, wrapping his arms around her waist. “Nobody can keep a Dakonian from his mate. Aton will come for you.”