Read Online Lunar Lovers by Emma Abbiss - Free Book Online Page A

alternating see-all screens that covered
the front wall flashed scenes of celebration, joyful shouts and relieved tears.
Sam’s eyes burned from staring at the monitors too long—really, he wasn’t
crying like the little blonde girl in the see-all on the bottom left corner who
was overjoyed to see her mommy alive.
    He rubbed at his eyes, hoping his brothers would give him a
break—the last cycle had been a hell of a ride and exhaustion was the culprit
for his overemotional state. With the mineworkers safe and accounted for and
the collapsed section of the mine secured, Sam could finally allow his mind to
focus where it wanted to—on Achelle. Hell, at this point, he couldn’t even
block thoughts of his mate from his brothers, who were mentally bitch-slapping
him each time his imagination became sexually graphic.
    “We can handle it from here.” Cannan shuffled reports on the
interactive touchtable before looking around at all his brothers in the
standard meeting room—a dozen narrow hoverchairs, scrolling info walls, the
usual—to rest his gaze on Sam. “Get out of here. Your three-day bonding bed
awaits.”
    Sam gave a grateful nod before hitting “lock” on his files
and heading out.
    In the aftermath of the media raid, the halls were
shockingly quiet, as though resonating with the whoosh of silence heard after a
great storm. The garage now stood empty but for their family-sized ship. He
stopped and looked around the empty room, needing to take a moment to collect
his turbulent thoughts before sitting in the pilot’s chair.
    He hated flying at the best of times.
    The relief that had reached into his stomach and loosened
his gut when the last miner rose up from the shaft and reunited with her family
had nearly brought Sam to his knees. As the CEO of their company, he took his
duty to protect his workers seriously—his brothers often thought too seriously.
But he knew even if they didn’t that any one of them would behave exactly as he
did if they had to shoulder responsibility for the lives of the men and women
who worked for them.
    Time after time he’d thought how thankful he was that
Achelle was safe at home. Just knowing she was in their room waiting for him
made the brutal hours he’d spent working to recover his people bearable.
    With a sigh, he boarded the ship and left for home, mentally
reaching out to Achelle as he sped across the moon’s uneven surface. He was met
with a vague mishmash of thoughts, the kind that spun through a sleeper’s mind.
A smile broke over his face as he imagined how he would wake her when he
returned to their rumpled bed but when, several minutes later, he made it to their
room, she was nowhere to be found.
    He activated the all-know with the punch of his fist.
“Locate my mate.”
    “Mar Achelle is off-moon, having taken the one-man flip
ship,” the feminine voice stated without emotion.
    “How long ago?” he asked as he ran out of the room and down
the hall toward the nearest chute to return him to the garage.
    “Eleven hours, fourteen minutes, twenty-two seconds.”
    Damn. Talk about a head start. “Trajectory?”
    “Unknown.”
    “Probability that the destination is Ploice Two space
station?”
    “High.”
    Sam ran through the garage and activated the streamer, the
fastest ship in the garage, a personal egg-shaped transport made of living
metal that warped around his body, crackling as it morphed from liquid to
solid. Encased in the claustrophobic ship, he pressed his palms against the
empathic inner skin of the craft and thought, Ploice Two .
    The low, singing engines engaged to propel him out of the
garage and off the moon. As claustrophobia spun his thoughts and emotions out
of control, he gritted his teeth, trying to push the memory of his parents’
death out of his mind. But the fear he felt for Achelle seemed to meld to the
memory of his parents’ accident and sear his frontal lobe, acting out for
attention like the child he’d been when they’d