“Food?” he tried, gesturing towards the area where she’d prepared meals before. His healing body was ravenous, demanding fuel for the repairs it was still conducting.
Her expression shifted to something almost embarrassed.“Right. Yes. Food. You should eat. You need to eat, actually—you’re healing so fast, you must be burning through calories like crazy.”She moved towards the food preparation area, thenpaused and looked back at him.“Can you walk? Should you even be sitting up?”
He understood enough of that to respond. Slowly, carefully, he swung his legs over the side of the bunk and planted his feet on the floor. His body protested—his muscles stiff, his joints aching, and the wound in his side pulling tight—but held. He rose, one hand braced against the wall, and straightened to his full height.
The space was too small for him. He’d known that intellectually, but standing made it viscerally clear. His head nearly brushed the ceiling, and even with his wings tucked tight against his back, he still seemed to fill half the available room. She stared up at him with an expression caught somewhere between awe and alarm.“You’re really tall.”
Tall.Another word for his growing vocabulary. “Yes. Tall.” He took a careful step towards her, testing his balance. Another. His body cooperated, though not without complaint.
She watched him approach with wide eyes, but she didn’t retreat. She just stood her ground as he crossed the small space to where she stood, his shadow falling over her like an embrace.
He stopped an arm’s length away and looked down at her—so small, so fierce, so impossibly brave—and he felt something shift in his chest. Something that felt like the first crack in ice that had been frozen solid for as long as he could remember.
“Food,” he said again, softer this time. Then he carefully reached out and touched her hand. A gesture of connection rather than demand. “Please?”
The word tasted right. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did. Her breath caught. Her hand trembled slightly under his touch, but she didn’t pull away.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice strange and slightly breathless. “Food.Coming right up.”
She turned away, busying herself with the strange containers and devices that somehow produced meals, and he watched her with a focus that bordered on predatory.
He was going to learn her language. All of it. Every word, every nuance, every subtle shade of meaning. And then he was going to find out why his heart beat faster every time she smiled.
CHAPTER NINE
What the hell am I doing?
Jaz kept her back to Adjar as she rummaged through the emergency rations, her hands moving on autopilot while her brain spun in frantic circles. Protein bars. Hydration packs. The last of the freeze-dried eggs she’d been saving for a special occasion.
I slept with him. I actually slept with him.
Notsleptslept, obviously. Not like that. But she’d fallen asleep in his arms—in a stranger’s arms, in analien’sarms—and had stayed there for what had to have been hours. Her body still held the memory of his warmth, the weight of his arm across her waist, and the steady thrum of his heartbeat against her back.
She’d feltsafe.
That was the part that terrified her most. She hadn’t felt safe sleeping next to another person since… ever, actually. Her brief, disastrous attempts at relationships had taught her that sharing a bed meant staying alert. Listening for snoring, for restless movements, for the inevitable moment when someone else’spresence would become unbearable and she’d retreat to the couch or the floor or anywhere that was hers.
But with Adjar, she’d slept. Deeply. Dreamlessly. Like her subconscious had looked at the enormous winged alien with claws and fangs and decidedyes, this one’s fine, let’s absolutely let our guard down.
Idiot,she told herself firmly.Sleep-deprived, hypothermia-adjacent idiot.
She pulled out a self-heating pouch and cracked it, watching the chemical reaction warm the rations inside. Behind her, she could hear the soft pad of his feet on the habitat floor, and the rustle of his wings as he carefully navigated the cramped space.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about waking up. Don’t think about?—
But she was thinking about it. Specifically, she was thinking about that moment of half-consciousness when she’d registered something hard pressing against her lower back. Something that definitely hadn’t been there when she’d first lain down.
She’d assumed it was his tail. It had to be his tail. Except his tail had been wrapped around her leg, which she remembered with mortifying clarity because she’d had to untangle herself from it when she’d finally scrambled away.
So if it wasn’t his tail…
She risked a glance over her shoulder. He stood in the middle of the habitat, taking up far too much space, his attention apparently focused on the environmental controls panel. He was still completely and unashamedly naked which made it easy to see that the scales that covered his groin were completelysmooth. There was no bulge. No indication of anything beneath the iridescent surface. But if she hadn’t been imagining things…
Retractable.
The thought popped into her mind, accompanied by a surge of heat that had nothing to do with the ration pouch in her hands. Because of course his species would have some kind of internal sheath arrangement. It made perfect sense for a being designed for flight—external genitalia would create drag and would be vulnerable to cold and injury. Retractable was practical. Efficient. Logical.
And apparently responsive to body heat and proximity and probably scent and?—
