Her darting eyes made it clear she didn’t understand his words, but some of the tension in her shoulders eased. He turned his attention back to their flight path. The base wasn’t far from where her ship had crashed, which was why he and Lidan had been able to reach her so quickly.
Rentir pressed the button to release both doors. Cordelia startled as it whirred open, leaving her exposed to the elements. He gave her a reassuring smile before sliding out on the other side, circling the transport to stand before her. She wrestled with the latch for her safety harness, baring her flat little teeth in obvious frustration as it refused to come loose.
“It can be tricky,” he said, ducking into the cab. “Here, let me help.”
He reached between her thighs to grip the latch, fingers brushing her bare skin. She shivered, her body going rigid as a faint scent flooded his senses. It set something churning within him, making his cock even more painfully hard. The scent clung to his sinuses, eclipsing the metallic tang of the transport and the cold, chemical scent of its recycled air. It was all he could think of, and he did not understand why. His hand trembled as he twisted the latch and popped it loose, carefully retracting the harness over her head. She murmured something, squeezing her thighs together as she edged away from him. He cleared his throat.
“I’m, ah, just going to do a patch job on this propeller. You can stay here, or you can stretch your legs if you want.”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, making him feel like a fool. He ducked back out of the transport as he cursed himselfsilently. He had never thought of himself as a particularly awkward male, and yet he could not keep a grasp on his social graces around her.
He made his way to the back right propeller. The ateela had managed to bend the frame and break two blades off. The frame would need a mechanic’s touch, but the blades he could fix. He popped the trunk of the transport and shoved one of the two back bench seats forward, revealing the compartment of spare parts. Carefully, he pulled a spare propeller out along with the emergency repair kit.
Cordelia walked past him, distracting him from his task. Her long, dark hair whipped in the wind. The sun shone through where the fabric of her minimal outfit sagged away from her, offering a clear silhouette of every soft, unfamiliar curve. She stood at the shore with the tide lapping at her bare feet and stared at the water that had threatened to consume her only moments before.
He set his tools down in the sand beside the spare prop, helpless not to follow her. He stood a few steps behind her, following her gaze, wondering what she was thinking as she stared at the place where the endless waters met the horizon.
“Cordelia?”
When she glanced over at him, her eyes were unfocused. Concern lanced at him.
“Are you well? You don’t look?—”
She swayed on her feet and collapsed to her knees with a splash. He crouched and caught her upper body before she could fall face-first into the waves. She murmured something that sounded slurred even to his unattuned ear. Maneuvering her until he could scoop her up into his arms, he carried her away from the water.
Her head bobbed limply, and her arms dangled. He pressed his face to the column of her throat and breathed deeply of her,hoping his sensitive nose might tell him something of use. There was something chemical burning in her veins, weeping from her pores. Haerune would have known more about it, might have been able to guess at its provenance just from the scent, but Rentir had not been schooled in such things.
The scent of her beneath the brine, something feminine and unidentifiable, sang to him even through his concern. His chest was tight, and his head was muddled. He clutched her closer, murmuring reassurances he knew she couldn’t understand. Gingerly, he set her down in the front seat of the transport, laying her along the bench.
She took a deep breath, struggling to sit up, but he pressed a hand over her chest to force her back down.
“You’re not well. Just rest. You’ll hurt yourself.”
She shoved weakly at his hand, whining something, but he wouldn’t let her up. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes as they rolled in her head, and the sight pained him like a needle in his heart. It had been such a long time since empathy had besieged him like this.
It’s been a long time since I could afford the weakness.
“Shhh,” he murmured, smoothing over the wet tracks running down to her temples. “It will be alright.”
Tentatively, he began to purr; he had only ever done so to soothe himself, but he was relieved to see it seemed to have the same effect on the female. She sighed, and the hand that had been trying to knock him away smoothed over the back of his, holding him in place instead. Her eyes fluttered closed, limbs going slack once more as her breathing evened out.
The strangest thought surged through him as he watched her lying there, soothed to sleep by his purr.
I don’t want to take her back.
He pulled his hand away, startled by the vehemence of it. The thought of the other hybrids seeing her like this, being near her… it crawled beneath his skin like a legion of insects.
He brought the fingers that had smoothed away her tears to his lips and licked them clean. The salt and sweetness of her burst across his tongue, and euphoria surged in his veins. Rentir loomed over her, driven by instincts he didn’t understand, desperate for another taste. His muscles trembled as he fought the compulsion to drag his tongue along the bared column of her throat. Disturbed, he shook his head hard and pulled away, smacking one of his horns against the frame of the door in his haste to retreat.
With a ragged breath, he turned his attention back to the task at hand. Whatever his strange, conflicting feelings about returning to the base with her, she would not be safe unless he did so. She needed a medpod, food, and rest. He wasn’t some guide from the lodge to be able to procure everything she needed from the wilderness.
It took all of his strength to get the damaged propeller loose, a task made all the more miserable because his stupid cock would not subside. He’d never had such a problem before. An itch he needed to scratch, sure, but one that persisted even when his mind was on other things? That was new and unpleasant.
He was rougher with the installation than he needed to be, nearly damaging the new propeller in his clumsy distraction. When it was done, he packed up his tools and dropped the back bench seat into place once more.
By the time he was ready to climb back into the driver’s seat, Cordelia had roused. She was sitting up, leaning heavily against the backrest and blinking blearily at him. She muttered something, sliding over so he could sit down.
He shut the doors, ensconcing them in the silence of the transport. He let her try clumsily to put her harness on a fewtimes before reaching over to help. His first attempt missed because of his haste to get it done before any other strange impulses sprang up. Yanking his hand away as though the brush of her soft skin had burned him, he pressed his palm to the biolock on the dash. The transport purred to life once the scan was complete.
