Page 48 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

But some things you should get to say out loud, in your own time, with your own words. Not because your biology told you to.

We lay tangled together by the dying fire, the thermal blanket over us and his light spilling out around the edges, and I fell asleep feeling safe for the first time since Earth.

20

KEL

Ihad made a tactical error. The error was that now that I had touched her, been inside her, felt the resonance bond surge fully to life between us, I could not think about anything else.

My mission focus was destroyed. My legendary composure was ash. My ability to scan for threats, maintain pace, and calculate supply margins had been replaced by a single, all-consuming awareness: Taylor. Asleep against my chest. Her breath warm on my skin. Her heartbeat synced with mine through the bond, a dual rhythm that my biology had decided was the only sound in the universe that mattered.

Dawn light filtered through the thin canopy. The bioluminescence faded. I had slept in slivers, nothing that deserved the word since the crash, and the debt of it sat behind my eyes like grit. Her hair was a mess against my shoulder. I could see individual strands, golden-brown in the morning light, and the resonance was cataloging them. I was counting hairs. I had built my identity on discipline, extraction work, and mission focus, and now I was counting the hairs on my bondmate's head.

This was catastrophic.

She stirred. Stretched against me. The movement pressed her body along mine and the light along my skin, which had dimmed to a resting glow overnight, surged back to full luminescence. She opened one eye. Looked at my chest. Looked at the glow.

"Morning, Glow Stick," she murmured.

Something in my thoracic cavity restructured, as if a system that had been operating at partial capacity had suddenly received the component it was missing and every process accelerated at once. It was an engineering sensation. It should not apply to a being saying your name in a sleepy voice. It applied anyway.

"Good morning, Taylor."

She smiled against my skin. Through the bond came the loose, sun-warmed ease of someone who had nowhere else she needed to be, and my biology received it like sunlight after a long winter. Then she sat up, looked around the plateau, and said, "Please tell me Zhara didn't come back while we were..."

"She returned midway through the night. She is sleeping near the rocks."

Taylor's eyes widened. "She came back and we were⁠—"

"Asleep. We were asleep by then."

"Oh thank god." She pressed her hand to her chest. Then narrowed her eyes. "But we were still naked."

"The thermal blanket was covering⁠—"

"KEL."

Zhara appeared from behind a low outcropping, stretching. All four eyes found us and her expression arranged itself into something I could only describe as aggressively innocent.

"Good morning," she said. "I notice the emotional tension has resolved somewhat."

"I hate you," Taylor said, pulling on her shirt.

"You do not. I am the reason you found out about the resonance."

Taylor paused mid-dressing. Looked at Zhara. Looked at me. "She's right. I hate that she's right."

We broke camp. Moved out. The outpost was only a day's walk away now, and I needed to reassemble my tactical focus. The Saurok hunters were behind us but not gone. Draxis was not the kind of opponent who accepted loss. Every hour in the open was a risk.

But the bond was a distraction I had not anticipated. The third tier had opened overnight — consummation made permanent what proximity had only hinted at. Taylor walked beside me now, not behind, not ahead, and I could feel her constantly. Not just broad emotional states anymore. The channel had widened. Her fatigue had a texture, her healing scrape a specific ache I could locate on her body without looking, the blisters on her feet a dull throb that mapped onto my awareness like a second set of nerve endings. This was what the clinical resonance literature described as "full bond integration." The literature had made it sound manageable. The literature was wrong.

"You're staring," she said.

"I am monitoring the terrain."

"You're staring at me while theoretically monitoring the terrain."

"Valorian peripheral vision is significantly superior to⁠—"