Page 10 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

The question landed heavier than an invitation. Marina looked at the twin suns, at the red landscape, at the broken ship behind them that Rowan still couldn't fix without materials they didn't have.

"Let me talk to my crew," she said. "But yes. I'd consider it."

Toren smiled. It was the same smile from the day they met. The one that showed teeth and that he probably didn't realize he was doing. The one that made her chest do things she was choosing not to analyze.

"Thank you, Marina."

"Don't thank me yet. My sister's going to have a lot of questions about why you didn't mention the prince thing."

"I'm aware. I've seen the way she looks at people who annoy her."

"That's actually her neutral expression. When she's really annoyed, she doesn't look at you at all. She just starts cleaning her weapons."

"Noted," he replied, and she could hear the laugh underneath the word, and the laugh underneath it was the most human sound she'd ever heard from an alien.

CHAPTER 4

*** TOREN ***

The days settled into a rhythm that Toren hadn't expected and couldn't stop enjoying.

Mornings were for surveys. Marina took teams out to map the terrain, collect samples, and search for the metal alloys that Rowan needed to repair the Vulcana. Toren went with her. So did Auren, who'd appointed himself the expedition's entertainment director, and Athena, who'd appointed herself its bodyguard. Khrelan stayed near the ship, ostensibly to guard it, actually because proximity to this many humans at once made his skin crawl. Toren didn't push it. Khrelan would come around or he wouldn't, and either way, the truce held.

The afternoons were for talking.

That was the part Toren hadn't planned for. Marina asked questions the way other people breathed; constantly, instinctively and with no apparent awareness that she was doing it. She wanted to know everything. How Weredragon physiology worked. How the shift between forms functioned at a cellular level. What the Colony's power systems ran on. How their language was structured. Whether they dreamed. Whether they had art.

"Of course we have art," he'd replied, slightly offended. "We carve volcanic glass into sculptures. We compose resonance patterns that are played through crystal arrays in the deep caverns. We tell stories."

"What kind of stories?"

"Mostly about survival, overcoming enemies and building something from nothing." He'd paused. "They're not very happy stories."

"Earth has those too. We call them epics. They're usually about someone going on a long journey and suffering a lot and eventually getting home."

"That sounds exactly right."

Marina had smiled. Not the diplomatic smile she wore in front of her crew. A real one. Smaller, slightly crooked, and devastating in a way he was absolutely not prepared for.

* * *

The problem; and Toren was honest enough to call it a problem, was that he liked her. Not in the abstract, theoretical way he'd liked humans from a distance through their movies and books. He liked her specifically. He liked the way she chewed her lower lip when she was thinking hard. He liked the way she could explain complex scientific concepts in simple language without ever sounding condescending. He liked that she was afraid of the Drogs but went outside every day anyway because the data wasn't going to collect itself.

He especially liked the way she looked at him when she forgot to be professional. There were moments that were brief and unguarded. They were usually when he said something that surprised her; when the diplomatic mask slipped and he could see the person underneath. She was curious, warm, a little lonely, and interested in him in a way that had nothing to do with interspecies politics.

He wasn't supposed to notice. He definitely wasn't supposed to care.

He cared.

Auren, naturally, noticed before anyone else.

"You're staring," Auren observed on the fourth morning, as they watched Marina and Dr. Patel examine a mineral deposit near the southern ridge.

"I'm observing. It's different."

"It's really not." Auren was sitting on a rock with his gray scales soaking up the heat, looking entirely too comfortable for someone on an alien planet. "She's pretty and she's smart. She laughs at your jokes, which I find astonishing because your jokes are terrible. And you've been finding excuses to stand closer to her every day this week."

"I haven't."