Chapter 1 #2
Not dead. She wasn’t dead. Why wasn’t she dead? And where had the wall gone? She wasn’t in the flyer anymore. She was in what looked like a hospital room, on a hospital bed. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the fuzzy feeling. What had happened? Where was she?
“Easy.” A voice said from her side. It was deep and calm. Male. “You’re safe. You’re on Devan Station. You’ve been in a medical coma. You’re going to feel disoriented for a few moments. That’s normal.”
She dragged in another breath and forced her eyes to focus as she looked around.
Then utterly forgot how to breathe.
The man standing beside the bed was not human.
That was the first thing her brain managed to process, and it didn’t even begin to cover it.
He was huge. Easily the biggest person she’d ever seen, broad-shouldered and built like someone had designed a sexy as sin man and then decided the blueprint wasn’t intimidating enough.
Silver hair fell past his shoulders in intricate braids, shot through with something that caught the light, and his face…
Okay. Okay, yeah. Wow.
She’d never used the word stunning for a man before, but there was no other word.
Sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, and eyes that shaded from violet into blue like a stormy sky.
He wore a leather outfit, the jacket fitted across broad shoulders and open to show hardened cobblestone abs.
A teal sash wrapped across his chest, cutting off her view, which was irritating.
Then she realized she was staring and yanked her gaze up to his face.
Shit, she knew that face. How did she know that face?
Frowning, she tilted her head. “Do I know you?”
A strange expression flickered in the back of his eyes, but it was gone before she could name it. “No,” he said. “But you may recognize my voice. I’ve been monitoring you since the crash.”
“The crash.” The nightmare surged to the front of her mind again, but she shoved it back down. “Harper. Where’s Harper? Is she okay? She was in the flyer with me, we were—“ The words tangled in her throat, and she couldn’t get them out fast enough. “Where’s my sister?”
The doctor held up a hand. Bloody hell, it was huge. “Harper is fine. She wasn’t injured in the crash.”
Relief hit her hard and fast. Blinking, she fought the tears back. “Then where is she? Why isn’t she here?”
“Your cousin was mated recently. To War-Commander Kirr M’Aab.” He paused, gaze sharpening on her face. “They’re off-station at the moment.”
“Mated? You mean married? Oh my god!” She gasped. “Harper is married? To an alien?”
He inclined his head. “To a latharian War-Commander, so yes, for you that would count as an alien.”
Delilah blinked as the words caught up in her brain.
Harper was married. Harper, the sensible one, the one who did the budget, while Delilah never thought about the end of the week after the money had run out.
Harper, who had shouldered everyone else’s burdens for as long as Delilah could remember, had gone and married an alien while Delilah was in a coma.
And then the rest of it came crashing back.
Signing up for the Mate Program. Running out of the LMP office when she’d panicked, because she’d looked at the paperwork and the stern-faced officials and the reality of what they’d signed up for had hit her hard enough to steal her breath.
She’d persuaded Harper that they needed one last night of freedom before they shackled themselves to Alien husbands for life.
And then she’d hired the flyer, and she’d been drinking, and she’d…
Oh god.
Biting her lip, she looked up at the alien doctor. “How much trouble am I in?”
He blinked. “I don’t understand the question. “Trouble? Why would you be in trouble?”
“For running.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.
“From the LMP office. I was supposed to stay there, and I didn’t.
And then the crash, I hired the flyer, and I’d been drinking and I—“ Forcing herself to stop, she took a breath.
“I made a mess. A really big mess. So how much trouble am I in?”
The doctor’s expression softened a little. If she hadn’t been staring at his face, she wouldn’t have caught it.
“Neither situation requires your concern,” he said. “Your cousin’s new mate resolved both. A war-commander’s authority covers a… considerable amount of territory.”
She winced. “Harper’s husband cleaned up my mess?”
“Yes.”
“That’s…” She shook her head, a laugh bubbling up that had more to do with hysteria than humor. “That’s so Harper. She finds the one guy in the universe who can fix everything and marries him before I even wake up.”
“I need to run some tests,” the doctor said, his voice calm.
But there was an edge of something underneath.
Interest. But not in her. Why would a guy who looked like sex on legs be interested in her?
Come on, Delilah, you know better than that.
No, this wasn’t the man-woman kind of interest; it was the clinical kind.
“To test your neurological function. You sustained significant injuries in the crash. The fact that you’re awake and coherent this soon is… ”
He stopped, like he’d cut himself off.
“A good thing?” She raised an eyebrow. Please let it be a good thing.
The corner of his lips quirked. “Yes. A remarkable thing.”
Okay, we are not going to read into that. He’s a doctor. He’s doing doctor things. The fact that he’s the most gorgeous man in the known universe is irrelevant.
He moved around the bed, and she tracked him without meaning to as he came to stand in front of her. He was huge, but his movements were precise and careful.
“Follow the light.” He held up a small light, and she forced herself to follow it with her eyes instead of staring at the way the room’s lighting caught the silver in his hair.
“Good. Any dizziness?”
“No more than usual.” The answer came out before she could stop it, and his eyebrow rose a fraction.
“Usual?”
“I’m a disaster,” she said, and it came out brighter than she felt. “Dizziness is sort of my baseline. You should have seen me before the head trauma.”
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even crack a smile. Just made a note on a floppy piece of plastic he produced from somewhere and moved on to the next test.
Tough crowd.
But she kept doing as she was told because what else was she going to do? Every test he ran, a tracking exercise or a memory quiz, bought her a few more seconds where she didn’t have to think about the fact that Harper wasn’t here and that everything had changed while she’d been lying in this bed.
“Is Harper okay?” The question slipped out between a finger-tracking exercise and a verbal memory test. “Like, actually okay? Not just not-injured, okay?”
The doctor paused. “She’s in good health. The bonding with her mate was successful. By all reports, she’s adjusting well to life among us.”
She nodded quickly, like one of those little nodding dog ornaments.
“And her husband… is he nice? Because Harper deserves someone nice. Like, really nice. Someone who will look after her. She’s been looking after everyone else—“ Me. “—her whole life, and she deserves someone who’s good to her.”
He looked away from his data-flex thingie and right at her. Then he gave a small smile, speaking while she was stunned. God, he was so handsome.
“Kirr M’Aab is a war-commander of the Latharian forces,” he said. “He is not, by most definitions, ‘nice.’” He paused, then inclined his head. “But he would die for her without a thought, and she is his whole world now. She is well looked after.”
He would die for her. Well looked after.
Delilah let out a breath. “Okay. Okay, that’s… That’s good. That’s the important thing.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap.
The sheets were some kind of pale material she didn’t recognize, impossibly soft.
Alien sheets. Shit… the reality hit her hard and fast. She was in an alien hospital, on an alien space station, being examined by an alien doctor who looked like a god and had the bedside manner of a brick wall.
A polite brick wall, but a brick wall all the same.
And Harper had moved on without her. Not just moved on… but she’d gone and gotten married, moved on.
“I’m sorry, I never asked your name,” she said, looking up.
“Kellat V’Raav.” He didn’t look up from his notes. “I’m the Lead Healer on the station.”
“Kellat.” She tried the word out. The word sat foreign on her tongue. “I’m Delilah Sawyer. But you probably already knew that.”
“I did.”
“Right. Coma patient. You’ve probably got a whole file.” She laughed, and the sound came out hollow. “Bet it makes for exciting reading.”
He looked at her then. Actually looked, his gaze settling on her face instead of tracking through whatever medical checklist was running behind his eyes.
“Your file,” he said, “is considerably more interesting than most.”
And there it was again. That little flicker of interest. But not the kind she was used to. Not the kind that meant someone thought she was pretty, fun, or just a good time. This was sharper, harder, as if she were a puzzle he was trying to solve.
Don’t read into it. He’s a doctor, and you’re a patient. This is not a romance novel.
But the way he was looking at her made it really, really hard to remember that.