Chapter 2
MAISIE
If I let myself look over at the giant bull of a man for more than exactly three seconds, I'd never stop staring. He was at least seven feet tall and seemed about ready to burst out of the minotaur sized truck that was currently making me feel fun-sized, and not in the good way.
I counted the seconds the way I used to count the steps from the front door to my car when I needed to keep my hands from shaking.
One: the slab of his forearm where he'd rolled the flannel to the elbow, dark red skin laced with thin silver lines.
Two: the gold ring hanging from his nose, catching the light.
Three: the way his hands swallowed the steering wheel whole, knuckles gone pale like the thing had personally offended him.
I snapped my gaze back to the window.
My skin felt too aware of him, prickling and warm along the side closest to where he sat, like I'd been standing too near a fire and only just noticed. It was annoying.
It was also the first thing I'd felt in weeks that wasn't nausea or dread, so I let myself have it for exactly one more second and then made myself stop.
"Here we are," Kazan's voice rumbled over my skin as he brought the truck to a halt in front of a huge cottage. "It's not much, but it's home."
Not much? You could fit three of my childhood home inside of it.
The thing rose out of a clearing in those wild, unplanned trees, all dark timber logs stacked thick as my torso, a roof that pitched up high enough to make me crane my neck. Smoke curled from a stone chimney wide enough to walk through.
Everything about it was scaled for him, for them, for a species that measured doorways in horns instead of heads.
I was going to spend the rest of my life reaching for cabinets I couldn't touch and climbing into chairs like a toddler.
The thought should have been daunting. Instead, a hysterical little laugh tried to climb up my throat, and I swallowed it down before it could embarrass me.
I still couldn't quite believe I was here, that I'd really gone through with it.
When I'd gotten up the courage to whisper the broad strokes of my plan to Chloe last month, she'd been stuck between excitement at the opportunity I was seizing for myself and dread at the thought that I would chicken out at the last minute.
Again.
James always said I wasn't brave.
No, don't think of that butt-face.
Too late. His voice was already there, that smooth reasonable tone he used right before he took something away from me, telling me I'd never make it on my own, that I didn't have the spine for it.
I pressed my thumbnail into the seam of my leggings until the little crescent of pain shoved him back out of my head. Light years, I reminded myself. He was a galaxy of light years away, and he doesn't even know which direction I went.
I didn't like to jump out of one man's bed and into another's, well, metaphorically. If there was anything good I could say about James, it was that he'd never pressured me into sex.
In the four years we'd dated, he had never once pushed for more than kisses and a bit of stroking.
Always stroking him, I should say. I never got stroked.
Ugh! I couldn't think about stroking when a man with the most strokable horns I'd ever seen was smiling at me with a weird mix of kindness and intensity.
Because, of course, my brain went there.
Of course, it conjured the whole ridiculous picture in vivid detail: those massive hands that had nearly crushed the steering wheel moving over me instead, slow and unhurried, like he had nothing better to do for a week.
Those gold eyes fixed on me the way they'd fixed on me in that office, like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
Heat pooled low in my belly, sudden and unwelcome, and I clamped my knees together and stared very hard straight ahead.
That was it; space travel had officially driven me insane. I'd shared three freaking words with a minotaur and I was ready to give him my virginity like it was a gift and not a patriarchal construct.
"It's really nice," I jerked my gaze back to his house. "I guess minotaurs have a different idea of what big is," my cheeks flamed as I thought of what else I could be talking about.
Kazan chuckled low, and I nearly squirmed. "Come on," he said. "Let me show you the place. You can leave your things in the truck, I'll get them later."
I was tempted to grab my bag just to prove that I could, not that there was much to grab. I had a week's worth of clothes and nothing sentimental. James would have noticed if I'd squirreled away anything I cared about. But even he wasn't psycho enough to care about a load of laundry.
Kazan came around to my side, and for one horrible second I thought he might try to lift me down like I was luggage.
Instead, he just stood back and waited, one hand braced on the open door, giving me room to climb out on my own.
I half fell the last foot to the ground and pretended I'd meant to. He didn't comment. Small mercies.
Inside, the cottage smelled like wood-smoke and something warm and resinous, the timber itself I guessed, and underneath it a faint sweetness that reminded me of the air outside.
The front room had a hearth I could have parked a car in, a long table built for shoulders twice the width of mine, and a single enormous armchair set near the fire with a folded blanket over the back.
Everything sat at the wrong height. The table nearly came up to my collarbone.
I'd need a stepladder to drink a glass of water from it.
Kazan walked me through, naming rooms in that low rumble: the kitchen with its iron stove, a pantry stocked with jarred fruit that glowed faintly violet on the shelves, a mudroom hung with coats big enough to hide a circus.
He moved carefully through his own house, I noticed, tucking his elbows, ducking under beams he could have cleared by inches anyway, like he'd taught himself a long time ago to take up less space than he did.
So, this was my new home. If Nezara could figure out whatever "paperwork issue" had nearly stymied Kazan's... claim.
Oooh, I didn't like that word. Kazan seemed nice and all, but I didn't want to be owned by anyone.
So why'd you go and sign up with the Alien Matchmaking Agency? A nagging voice in my head asked.
They were the only free ship leaving the planet.
Great, now I was justifying myself to my inner monologue.
We turned down a hallway lined with closed doors, and he steered me past one of them so quickly that I almost missed it.
The door was ajar, and through the gap I caught a glimpse of the biggest bed I'd ever seen in my life, a low platform of dark carved wood heaped with wool blankets, easily wide enough to sleep four of me and tall enough that I'd have to vault to reach the top of it.
The whole room was him, blunt and masculine and unfussy, a pair of heavy boots by the wall, a chest of drawers built like a fortress, the air thick with that warm resin-and-rain scent that I was beginning to understand was just Kazan.
His bed, my brain supplied unhelpfully, and the heat from the truck came roaring back.
I'd held that one line with James. My virginity. He'd called it old-fashioned, sweet, sometimes pathetic when he was in the mood to be cruel, but I'd kept it, and somewhere along the way it had stopped being about purity or any of the things my mother used to lecture about.
It had become the one square inch of myself that he never got. The one surrender I refused to hand over.
And now here I was, three words into knowing a seven-foot alien, and that careful, hoarded thing was sitting up and paying attention like it had never met a closed door it liked the look of more.
What would I do if he told me I was staying in his room?
A jolt of heat shot through me, but honestly, I'd probably run screaming.
"Here's your room," said Kazan, as if he could read my thoughts.
He pushed open a door at the end of the hall, and relief and something stupidly close to disappointment fought it out in my chest.
The room was still enormous, still scaled for someone three times my size, but somebody had clearly worked to make it mine.
A set of low wooden steps had been built up against the side of the bed, sanded smooth, so I'd be able to climb in without a running start.
A footstool sat beside a chair that was otherwise far too tall.
There was a lamp on the nightstand at a height I could actually reach, and a stack of folded blankets in soft, human-sized weights.
Someone had thought about this. Someone had measured a problem and quietly solved it before I ever arrived, and I didn't know what to do with the lump that put in my throat.
"Did you do this?" I asked, gesturing at the little steps.
"I built them last week." He said it like it was nothing, like it cost nothing, his tail giving one slow sweep behind him. "Wasn't sure they'd be the right size. You're smaller than I figured."
Then he shifted to let me past him into the room. The hallway was narrow, and he was so very large, and his arm brushed against my shoulder.
I went rigid. It was the old reflex, the full-body freeze, the part of me that had spent four years learning to read a man's mood from a single point of contact and brace for whatever came next. My breath stalled. I waited for the flinch in him, the tightening, the turn.
It didn't come. He'd gone still too, careful, holding himself like he was afraid any movement might spook me. The warmth of him radiated through the worn cotton of my sweater, and after a moment, without deciding to, I felt the tension bleed out of my spine.
I leaned in. Just slightly. Just enough to let myself rest against the heat of his arm for one breath, and he let me, not pulling away, not pushing, just there.
Kazan stepped back. "I'll let you rest," he said and hurried down the hall like I'd burned him.