Page 184 of Tamed By Her Touch

“What?” Clair demanded. “You can’t make that face and then say nothing!”

“I am seeing something I do not entirely understand,” she said slowly.

Kaelus rose from his bed despite another protest from the physician and came closer. Clair tried not to notice that he was still shirtless…but she couldn’t quite manage it. Even wounded, exhausted, and currently acting like the galaxy’s most irritatingly secretive male, he was mouthwatering.

“What are you seeing?” he asked Maera.

Maera enlarged two neurological scans. One belonged to Clair and the other belonged to Kaelus.

“Look,” she said simply.

At first Clair didn’t see anything unusual—then Maera overlaid them and several regions lit simultaneously.

Clair frowned in confusion.

“What does that mean?”

Maera shook her head.

“I am uncertain.”

Kaelus frowned.

“That is not reassuring,” he rumbled.

“The patterns are not dangerous,” Maera said quickly. “Quite the opposite—your autonomic responses appear unusually synchronized.”

Clair looked at Kaelus and saw that he was staring at the display with a worried frown on his face. It was as though he knew something—something he wasn’t sharing with her.

“What kind of synchronized?” Clair asked.

Maera enlarged another set of readings.

“Heart-rate variability…stress response…certain neurochemical cycles. There is also a pheromonal component I cannot fully interpret because Kindred physiology is not my specialty, but your bodies appear to be responding to each other in ways I would normally associate with a permanent mating connection.”

Silence filled the medical room and Clair looked slowly toward Kaelus.

The big Hybrid refused to meet her eyes, but she felt a deep feeling of guilt coming from him. How was she able to feel that?

Okay, enough was enough, Clair thought. She’d been trying to wait and have this conversation later, but the evidence that something had happened between them kept piling up and she wanted answers!

“Kaelus,” she said softly. “What does this mean, this ‘permanent mating connection?’”

He shrugged evasively.

“It may be nothing.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Clair snapped, losing her patience.

“Clair—” he began…

“No. You have been acting strange ever since we had sex!”

Her cheeks were hot, but she kept going.

“I keep feeling your feelings and hearing your thoughts when you very clearly are not speaking, but every time I ask what’s happening, you shut me out. Now Maera is telling me our brains and bodies are doing some kind of alien synchronized mating dance, so I would very much appreciate it if you would stop treating me like an idiot and tell me what the hell happened.”

Kaelus looked stricken—not angry or annoyed—more worried and afraid.