Page 25 of Tamed By Her Touch

“You're something, all right,” she said.

Kaelus scowled at her.

“Eat.”

“Excuse me?” she raised an eyebrow at him.

“Eat your food, Doctor Donovan,” he ordered. “Your blood glucose is almost certainly low, and you have been making increasing numbers of minor errors for the past hour.”

“What errors?” Clair demanded.

“You attempted to place a used pipette into the sterile container.”

Clair frowned. Had she done that?

“And ten minutes ago, you spent almost a full minute searching for the stylus which was tucked behind your ear,” Kaelus continued.

Clair reached up automatically. Sure enough, the stylus was still there.

“All right, fine,” she muttered.

“Eat,” he repeated.

“You're extremely bossy, you know that?”

“Yes,” he said, apparently completely unperturbed.

The simple answer made her laugh again.

“Fine, big fella.” Clair picked up her fork. “I'll eat.”

“Good.”

Kaelus turned back to his work.

Clair took a bite of the pasta—it was delicious.

She ate the entire plate.

The next afternoon, another meal appeared beside her elbow. And the afternoon after that and the one after that and so on.

Kaelus never asked what she wanted, and Clair never asked him to bring anything, but somehow he always managed to come back with something she liked. Sometimes it was the blue curry-flavored pasta. Sometimes it was a kind of roasted alien bird that tasted remarkably like rotisserie chicken. Once it was a bowl of rich, creamy soup filled with vegetables she couldn't identify but liked anyway.

After a while, Clair stopped asking why he was feeding her. Instead, she started making sure there was always a cup of coffee waiting on his workstation when he arrived in the morning.

Neither of them acknowledged the exchange—it simply became part of their routine. She made the coffee, and he brought the food. And though Clair would never have admitted it aloud, there was something strangely comforting about knowing that every afternoon, no matter how absorbed she became in her work, Kaelus would make sure she ate.

It was perhaps another week before the third thing happened. This time, however, Clair was the one doing the caretaking.

She had received a shipment of botanical samples from a newly contacted planet called Luuria and had spent most of the morning cataloging them. Some were seeds and spores sealed inside sterile capsules, but several were living plants transported inside miniature environmental chambers. Clair was particularly interested in one specimen—a beautiful fern-like organism with deep violet leaves edged in silver.

According to the accompanying notes, the plant was called a Zillarian velvet fern, though technically it wasn't a fern at all. It had an unusual vascular structure unlike anything Clair had ever seen, and she was eager to examine it more closely.

“Aren't you pretty?” she murmured, leaning over the environmental chamber.

Across the room, Kaelus made a low sound of disapproval.

“You are talking to your plants again,” he said.