“Jaz?”
She jumped, nearly dropping the ration pack. “What?”
She tore her eyes away from his groin and looked up to find him watching her. Those ice-blue eyes seemed to miss nothing, and she had the uncomfortable suspicion that he knew exactly where her thoughts had wandered. One corner of his mouth quirked up—not quite a smile, but something adjacent to it.
“Food?” he asked, and the word came out almost perfect this time. The harsh accent that had characterized his first attempts was softening, smoothing out, like his tongue was remembering how to form sounds it had once known.
“Right. Yes. Food.” She thrust the heated pack towards him, grateful for the excuse to put some distance between them. “Here. It’s not much, but it’s calories.”
He took it, his clawed fingers brushing against hers in a way that felt entirely too deliberate. The texture of his scales wassmooth, almost silken, and warmer than she’d expected. She kept forgetting that his metabolism ran hotter than hers.
That’s probably why I slept so well,she told herself, but she knew it was more than that.
She quickly retreated to the far side of the habitat, putting the fold-out table between them like a flimsy barrier against her own inappropriate thoughts. He lowered himself to sit on the floor—the bunk was too small and the single chair couldn’t support his weight—and examined the ration pack with what she was starting to recognize as his analytical expression.
“Food,” he said again, tapping the package. Then he looked up at her. “You? Same?”
It took her a moment to parse the question. “Am I eating the same thing? No, I already ate. Earlier.” She was lying—she’d given him most of her breakfast ration—but he didn’t need to know that. His metabolism clearly needed the fuel more than hers did.
His eyes narrowed slightly, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he’d somehow seen through the deception. But he didn’t press, just tore open the pack with his claws and began eating with single-minded focus.
He’s healing,she reminded herself.Growing back from injuries that should have killed him. Of course he’s hungry.
She watched him while he ate, studying the details with the same clinical attention she’d give a geological survey. His jaw had a wider range of motion than a human’s, probably due to the slightly different bone structure. His teeth were sharper, clearly designed for tearing meat but clearly capable of handling reconstituted protein paste. She noticed the way his throatworked when he swallowed, and the way the muscles in his broad shoulders rippled beneath scales that caught the lights and threw back iridescent sparks.
God, he’s gorgeous.
The thought surfaced before she could stop it, but she immediately shoved it down again. Gorgeous was irrelevant. Gorgeous didn’t matter when you were trapped in a habitat during a polar storm with limited supplies and a mysterious alien who might have been frozen for god-knew-how-long.
Except it wasn’t entirely irrelevant, was it? Because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, her perception had shifted. When she’d first dragged him through the airlock, he’d been an unknown creature, dangerous and potentially hostile. A problem to be managed. A threat to be neutralized.
Now he was…
Adjar.
A person with a name. With expressions she was learning to read, a voice that made her stomach do strange things, and hands that had pulled her close in his sleep and held her like she was something precious.
“Jaz.”
She blinked. He’d finished the ration pack and was watching her with that intense blue gaze, his head tilted slightly to one side.
“Sorry. Zoned out.” She shook her head, forcing herself back to the present. “Did you need something?”
He pointed at the window, where the storm continued to rage in all its fury. “Storm. How long?”
The sentence structure was off, but the meaning was clear. Her eyebrows rose. “You’re learning really fast. Like, unnaturally fast.”
Something flickered across his face too quickly for her to identify. “Remember,” he said slowly, like he was testing the word. “Not learn. Remember.”
“Remember? What do you mean?”
He frowned, visibly struggling to express something complex with his limited vocabulary. His hand rose to his temple, his fingers pressing against the scales there. “Words… here. Your speech…” He made a frustrated sound and gestured between them. “Feels same.”
Same?
Her scientific mind immediately latched onto the implication. “Are you saying you’ve heard a language like mine before? That you’re remembering words instead of learning them from scratch?”
From his expression he’d understood more of that than she’d expected. “Not heard here.” He pointed to his ears. “But here.” He pointed to his head.
