Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
What the hell am I doing?
Jaz kept her back to Adjar as she rummaged through the emergency rations, her hands moving on autopilot while her brain spun in frantic circles. Protein bars. Hydration packs. The last of the freeze-dried eggs she’d been saving for a special occasion.
I slept with him. I actually slept with him.
Not slept slept, obviously. Not like that.
But she’d fallen asleep in his arms—in a stranger’s arms, in an alien’s arms—and had stayed there for what had to have been hours.
Her body still held the memory of his warmth, the weight of his arm across her waist, and the steady thrum of his heartbeat against her back.
She’d felt safe.
That was the part that terrified her most. She hadn’t felt safe sleeping next to another person since…
ever, actually. Her brief, disastrous attempts at relationships had taught her that sharing a bed meant staying alert.
Listening for snoring, for restless movements, for the inevitable moment when someone else’s presence would become unbearable and she’d retreat to the couch or the floor or anywhere that was hers.
But with Adjar, she’d slept. Deeply. Dreamlessly. Like her subconscious had looked at the enormous winged alien with claws and fangs and decided yes, this one’s fine, let’s absolutely let our guard down.
Idiot, she told herself firmly. Sleep-deprived, hypothermia-adjacent idiot.
She pulled out a self-heating pouch and cracked it, watching the chemical reaction warm the rations inside. Behind her, she could hear the soft pad of his feet on the habitat floor, and the rustle of his wings as he carefully navigated the cramped space.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about waking up. Don’t think about—
But she was thinking about it. Specifically, she was thinking about that moment of half-consciousness when she’d registered something hard pressing against her lower back. Something that definitely hadn’t been there when she’d first lain down.
She’d assumed it was his tail. It had to be his tail. Except his tail had been wrapped around her leg, which she remembered with mortifying clarity because she’d had to untangle herself from it when she’d finally scrambled away.
So if it wasn’t his tail…
She risked a glance over her shoulder. He stood in the middle of the habitat, taking up far too much space, his attention apparently focused on the environmental controls panel.
He was still completely and unashamedly naked which made it easy to see that the scales that covered his groin were completely smooth.
There was no bulge. No indication of anything beneath the iridescent surface.
But if she hadn’t been imagining things…
Retractable.
The thought popped into her mind, accompanied by a surge of heat that had nothing to do with the ration pouch in her hands.
Because of course his species would have some kind of internal sheath arrangement.
It made perfect sense for a being designed for flight—external genitalia would create drag and would be vulnerable to cold and injury.
Retractable was practical. Efficient. Logical.
And apparently responsive to body heat and proximity and probably scent and—
“Jaz?”
She jumped, nearly dropping the ration pack. “What?”
She tore her eyes away from his groin and looked up to find him watching her. Those ice-blue eyes seemed to miss nothing, and she had the uncomfortable suspicion that he knew exactly where her thoughts had wandered. One corner of his mouth quirked up—not quite a smile, but something adjacent to it.
“Food?” he asked, and the word came out almost perfect this time. The harsh accent that had characterized his first attempts was softening, smoothing out, like his tongue was remembering how to form sounds it had once known.
“Right. Yes. Food.” She thrust the heated pack towards him, grateful for the excuse to put some distance between them. “Here. It’s not much, but it’s calories.”
He took it, his clawed fingers brushing against hers in a way that felt entirely too deliberate. The texture of his scales was smooth, almost silken, and warmer than she’d expected. She kept forgetting that his metabolism ran hotter than hers.
That’s probably why I slept so well, she told herself, but she knew it was more than that.
She quickly retreated to the far side of the habitat, putting the fold-out table between them like a flimsy barrier against her own inappropriate thoughts.
He lowered himself to sit on the floor—the bunk was too small and the single chair couldn’t support his weight—and examined the ration pack with what she was starting to recognize as his analytical expression.
“Food,” he said again, tapping the package. Then he looked up at her. “You? Same?”
It took her a moment to parse the question. “Am I eating the same thing? No, I already ate. Earlier.” She was lying—she’d given him most of her breakfast ration—but he didn’t need to know that. His metabolism clearly needed the fuel more than hers did.
His eyes narrowed slightly, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he’d somehow seen through the deception. But he didn’t press, just tore open the pack with his claws and began eating with single-minded focus.
He’s healing, she reminded herself. Growing back from injuries that should have killed him. Of course he’s hungry.
She watched him while he ate, studying the details with the same clinical attention she’d give a geological survey.
His jaw had a wider range of motion than a human’s, probably due to the slightly different bone structure.
His teeth were sharper, clearly designed for tearing meat but clearly capable of handling reconstituted protein paste.
She noticed the way his throat worked when he swallowed, and the way the muscles in his broad shoulders rippled beneath scales that caught the lights and threw back iridescent sparks.
God, he’s gorgeous.
The thought surfaced before she could stop it, but she immediately shoved it down again. Gorgeous was irrelevant. Gorgeous didn’t matter when you were trapped in a habitat during a polar storm with limited supplies and a mysterious alien who might have been frozen for god-knew-how-long.
Except it wasn’t entirely irrelevant, was it? Because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, her perception had shifted. When she’d first dragged him through the airlock, he’d been an unknown creature, dangerous and potentially hostile. A problem to be managed. A threat to be neutralized.
Now he was…
Adjar.
A person with a name. With expressions she was learning to read, a voice that made her stomach do strange things, and hands that had pulled her close in his sleep and held her like she was something precious.
“Jaz.”
She blinked. He’d finished the ration pack and was watching her with that intense blue gaze, his head tilted slightly to one side.
“Sorry. Zoned out.” She shook her head, forcing herself back to the present. “Did you need something?”
He pointed at the window, where the storm continued to rage in all its fury. “Storm. How long?”
The sentence structure was off, but the meaning was clear. Her eyebrows rose. “You’re learning really fast. Like, unnaturally fast.”
Something flickered across his face too quickly for her to identify. “Remember,” he said slowly, like he was testing the word. “Not learn. Remember.”
“Remember? What do you mean?”
He frowned, visibly struggling to express something complex with his limited vocabulary. His hand rose to his temple, his fingers pressing against the scales there. “Words… here. Your speech…” He made a frustrated sound and gestured between them. “Feels same.”
Same?
Her scientific mind immediately latched onto the implication. “Are you saying you’ve heard a language like mine before? That you’re remembering words instead of learning them from scratch?”
From his expression he’d understood more of that than she’d expected. “Not heard here.” He pointed to his ears. “But here.” He pointed to his head.
“That’s…” She paused, running through the possibilities.
Could his language share roots with hers?
Some early contact somewhere in the distant past?
But even common roots wouldn’t explain his rapid familiarity with modern English.
The nanites, she thought again. Could they have some connection to the cyborg’s nanites?
Except everyone knew that only Earth Government controlled that technology.
Even GenCon had never gotten their hands on it…
“Jaz.”
She’d zoned out again. “Sorry. It’s just a lot to think about. If you’re right—”
“I am right,” he said with such conviction that she couldn’t help but believe him.
She laughed. “Okay, but that would mean… I don’t know what it would mean. That your people and mine had some kind of connection in the past, maybe? That you’re accessing information that’s stored in the nanites?”
He stiffened, his eyes narrowing. “Nan-ites.”
“You recognize the word?”
He tilted his head for a second, then nodded.
“The scanner shows that you have them in your bloodstream. They’re what’s helping you heal so fast.”
His expression darkened, and he stood abruptly, his massive frame filling the room in a way that made her instinctively want to back up. She held her ground, but her heart rate kicked up a notch.
“Who?” he demanded.
“Who what?”
He gestured to himself. “Who put… inside?”
“You’re asking who put the nanites in you?
” At his nod, she shook her head. “I don’t know.
As far as I can tell, you were trapped in some kind of chamber far beneath the glacier, one that must have been there for millennia.
I don’t know how you could have had any contact with that type of modern technology. ”