I sighed. Of course he had to come bother me while I was preparing for the most important research of my career.
“Sure,” I conceded.
He waltzed inside. I noticed his hair wasn’t a jumbled mess anymore and he was actually wearing clothes now.
“Finished with your afternoon activities?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes, I am.” He raised a brow at my stack of papers. “It looks likeyou’renot, though. Can’t you take a break for once?”
“No,” I said bluntly. “I’m in the middle of something important. What did you want to discuss?”
Levi lounged against the wall. “What are you doing that’s so important?” His mouth suddenly twisted into a grave frown. “You’re not trying to send an SOS to Earth, are you?”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”
He instantly relaxed. “Oh. Never mind.”
Rolling my eyes, I returned to organizing my papers. Levi was utterly smitten with Zat’tor and the entire planet since he crash-landed our spacecraft. The mere idea of leaving Eukaria sent him into a panic.
“We’ve already had this conversation, remember? We all have our reasons for staying. Yours is that you have a partner and a child. Mine is that I have plenty to research.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” Levi asked, nodding at my notes.
“Yes. I’m preparing for tonight.”
He started with a frown. “What’s happening tonight? And why wasn’t I invited?”
I shot him a pointed look. “I have anappointmentwith Linn’ar. It’s private.”
“Appointment? What kind?”
I swallowed an exasperated groan. He was clueless. I might’ve suspected all the hot alien sex eroded his brain, but thiswas the ex-captain who crashed our ship, so I doubted the sex had anything to do with it.
“I’m exploring human-Maeleon physiology, how they affect each other, and investigating what it means to be a Maeleon’s filum,” I stated.
As Levi took that in, his eyes slowly narrowed. “Wait. You’re going todo itwith a Maeleon? For science?”
“Crude terms, but yes.”
He barked out a laugh of disbelief. “No way. Are you serious?”
I gave him a deadpan look that conveyed that, yes, I was serious.
“Who?” Levi demanded. Recalling our earlier visit, he asked, “Linn’ar?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.” He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up again. “That isnotthe kind of research I expected.”
“Somebody has to do it properly, since you’re an unreliable source,” I commented.
Levi shrugged, unoffended. “Fair enough. At least this way you’ll trust your own knowledge. But what about Linn’ar? Did he agree to this?”
I frowned at the implication that I’d rope someone into an experiment against their will. “Of course he did. He made a firm point that he didn’t want anybody else involved. Just the two of us.”
Levi raised a brow, then broke into a smarmy grin. “Oh, really?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not what you’re thinking,” I assured him.
