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a unified family. Instead, she’d gone to the other extreme after Raia’s birth and relegated him to the male barracks, summoning him to the mating bed only when she desired another babe and her body was ripe for conception. Her coldness had taught him a bitter lesson, one he should have learned in his fifth year, when he was evicted from his mother’s residence along with his father. He’d made his resentment plain enough that after Lstel’s birth, Antani had banished him permanently from her bed and taken her pleasure from the household servants.
    It was just the opening salvo in her campaign to punish him. Mere weeks after allowing his sons to join him in the barracks during their fourth and sixth years, she’d had him assigned to a deep-space exploration crew, keeping him away from the planet for months at a time. He’d remained a virtual stranger to their young until Antani finally obliged him by dying a quick but unpleasant death, and then the Narthani biowar attack had claimed both Raia and Lstel just as he was beginning to know them.
    He’d missed too much of all his children’s lives, and the urge to hold his new babes, to smell them and bond with them and enjoy them in ways he’d never been allowed to before, was suddenly overwhelming.
    It was time to join the council and make his claim to Shelley Bonham official.
    Giving Portia’s round hips one last fond squeeze, he climbed off the bed. “Congratulate me, Portia. I’ve just become a father again.”
     
     
    “Lights eighty percent,” a masculine voice commanded.
    Clinging to the haze of drug-induced contentment, Shelley decided against opening her eyes when the infirmary lights went bright on the other side of her eyelids. She didn’t want to see the alien who belonged to that voice.
    “Good afternoon, Shelley. Can you hear me?” he asked.
    She nodded slowly.
    “You know who I am?”
    “Shauss,” she whispered. Her heart thudded uncomfortably at the sound of his name on her lips. She hadn’t seen him since that awful day Monica was kidnapped. She’d thought he was going to rape Jasmine right there in front of them all—he probably would have raped her if Commander Kellen hadn’t thought to track Monica with her biometric implant.
    “You have nothing to fear, Shelley—Dr. Tiber is here to attend you,” he told her. “Open your eyes, please.”
    She obeyed with considerable reluctance, blinking against the infirmary’s blue brightness. Dr. Tiber and Lieutenant Shauss stood beside her bunk, both in full uniform. Tiber gave her an encouraging smile as he laid a hand on her shoulder, while Lieutenant Shauss looked inscrutable—which beat the hell out of coldly furious, the way she’d last seen him. His black eyes were calm, and his straight black hair, striped with thick streaks of ice blue, draped over his broad shoulders like a silken curtain. How could someone so dangerous be so damn pretty?
    His lips curled. “It does seem an unfair advantage, doesn’t it?”
    Shelley blinked at Tiber, whose smile had widened. “Did I say that out loud?”
    He nodded. “You did.”
    Truly scared now, she asked, “Where’s Monica?”
    “She’s tending to your young while I ask you a few questions,” Shauss said. “Tysan has infused you with corai serum to ensure your honesty, so you will answer me calmly and completely, without dissembling. Do you understand?”
    “Yes.” Her heart thumped harder. Shit, he was interrogating her? With some kind of truth serum?
    “Very good. Were you married to Mark Bonham?”
    “Yes.” The word spilled off her tongue before she had time to think.
    “Was Mark Bonham his real name?”
    “Yes.” Her eyes widened. “I mean, I think it was. That’s what he told me and that’s the name on our marriage certificate, so it must be, right? How would I know if it wasn’t?”
    “When did you first discover he was Narthani?” he asked without replying.
    “Yesterday, when Monica and Commander Kellen told me