“I don’t know if it’s safe.”
“Safe,” he affirmed.
“For humans?”
“Yes. Humans.”
Skeptically, she brought the food to her mouth. It was savory and rich, the texture surprisingly good for something she knew had come in a foil packet. She wolfed it down in a frenzy, training the device between each bite.
CHAPTER 7
Rentir watchedCordelia eat with helpless fascination. Her blunt, little teeth weren’t suited for anything tougher than rehydrated meal rations, so it was a good thing they had enough of the vacpacs to last for years. She was chattering away to her translator even while she ate. Humans were clearly single-minded in nature.
Haerune had stormed off, likely returning to his labs to wallow in anger privately. Rentir didn’t understand what was wrong with himself, but every time the other male came close to the human, he felt a bloodlust that he hadn’t experienced since the day they’d overthrown their auretian overseers.
Rentir had never been around a female before. If there were females among the Aurillon—and Haerune insisted there were—Rentir had seen neither hide nor hair of them.
He didn’t understand why his skin heated whenever Cordelia came near, why his claws were harder to retract, and his temper harder to control. It was as though his world was narrowing into a single point of focus: this human female he’d known for only a few hours.
She was frowning at the image on her comm. Tilting her wrist and her head, she studied it from every angle as the sunlightplayed brilliantly over her dark hair and her glittering eyes. The breath left his lungs in awe of her beauty.
“Fyoosillage,” she murmured.
Maybe she should have looked strange to him. After all, her nose and ears were all wrong, she was missing a finger, and her skin wasn’t any color he’d seen in nature. Despite all of that, he had the strangest sense that no other female could ever shine as brightly in his gaze.
Maybe Haerune was right. Maybe she was doing something to him on a biological level, and she should be quarantined until they knew more. He was sure she would object to that. Likely, she’d bloody her fingers raw trying to claw her way free, even if they put her in the nicest of the overseer apartments.
She may have been slight in frame, but she had the vengeful strength of a tolluru when she was angry. It amazed him that nature would give her such audacity without any of the natural defenses to back it up. Her blunt little teeth had been little more than a pressure around his knuckles, and as she’d struggled beneath him, he’d imagined her biting him in a very different context. His cock rose at the memory, straining against his pants for the hundredth time that day.
He didn’t even know what he wanted to do to her, only that he needed to do it urgently.
He studied her profile as she looked over the new image the device was showing her—a jump drive for bending distance in deep space. Her shoulders, swamped by the fabric of the smallest shirt in the facility, shrugged. He lost himself in the delicate curve of her nose, the bow of her lips, the full swell of her flushed cheeks.
What did he want to do...? He wanted to bury himself in her until she was all he knew. Fill his lungs with the scent of her, the taste of her. Would she taste the way she smelled? Would she smell like him if he rubbed himself all over her, so the otherswould know not to get close? Oh, he wanted that. Desperately. Need was a better word.
She glanced over at him as though she could feel the turn in his thoughts, and he choked on his own depravity, coughing to clear his throat as he looked away.
He did not want to risk scaring her—or angering her. Her trust in him was fragile still, and he needed it like he needed air to breathe. He would not do anything to sour it.
His eyes strayed to the window, where there were now two hovercrafts drifting lazily above the trees. His kin, collecting her people to return them to her. Were they struggling as he was?
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. Maybe the rest of her crew was male. The thought gnawed at him. They had no way of knowing?—
A siren blared, startling Cordelia so badly that the remnants of her meal tumbled from her lap as she sprang to her feet. His blood ran cold.
“No, not now,” he muttered, crossing to the window.
Cordelia followed, launching questions at him that were still only half translated. Her hand fell on his arm, squeezing. He knew what was coming next, and he couldn’t bear to look away.
A high-powered laser seared down through the atmosphere, rending a trail through the forest in the distance as it aimed for the hovercars. They were maneuvering, but it wasn’t enough.
Cordelia cried out, clamping her hands over her mouth as the laser clipped one of the vehicles, sending it spiraling wildly down into the trees. The other peeled away, narrowly avoiding the path of the laser as it finally ran out of charge. A wide swath of the forest was now aflame, smoke curling up to fill the sky.
“My crew,” Cordelia keened, clutching at the fabric over her chest. She breathed erratically, her eyes so wide that he could see all of the white around her irises. “Oh,gahd.”
TheZitharose up from the beach in the distance, the air wavering with heat as the engines worked to lift her off the ground. Cordelia grabbed his arm in a biting grip, sucking in a breath and holding it.
“It’s okay.” He pressed a hand over hers. “Lidan’s maneuvering is second to none. He’ll make it.”
