Page 25 of Alien Healer’s Mate

He opened his mouth. Then closed it.

“You hauled me out of there like I did something wrong.” She took a step toward him. “I was talking to him. That’s it. Talking. And you came over there looking like you wanted to put him through a wall. So what is it? What are you so angry about?”

The answer burned a hole in his chest. Ninety-nine point eight percent. Five words, and she’d know everything. But the moment he said it, there would be no taking it back. And she was still healing…

She took another step forward, close enough now that he caught her scent, warm and floral and his, the gown shifting and clinging to her curves as she moved.

His gown. He’d bought it years ago on some festival concourse, the day he’d heard the empire had finally found compatible females.

He opened his mouth to answer, but then the primal need and the jealousy all collided at once, and he was there. He cupped her jaw with a big hand, his thumb brushing the line of her cheekbone. Her breath caught. Her eyes went wide, her lips parting.

He looked at her mouth.

And stopped.

His control caught again, hauling him back from the edge like a hand fisted in his collar. He dropped his hand from her face and stepped back, his breathing rough, pulse hammering like he’d run a combat circuit.

She stared at him, her chest rising and falling. The confusion in her eyes was already turning into hurt, and draanth it all to hell, that was worse than the fury.

“Kellat—“

“I can’t.” The words came out harder than he meant them to. “I can’t do this.”

He turned, hitting the door release, and walked out on her. Left her standing alone in the middle of the medical bay and kept walking.

The passage was empty and cold, the way this class of ship always ran cold away from the engines. Bracing a hand against the bulkhead, he let his head drop forward, dragging in a breath.

He’d nearly kissed her.

He’d wanted to. Wanted to more than he’d wanted anything in a very long life of wanting very little, but he’d stopped. Back on the station, he’d have called that caution, or clinical judgment… the correct course when dealing with a recovering patient.

But standing alone in a cold corridor with the ghost of her scent swirling around him and the memory of her soft skin under his fingertips, it didn’t feel like caution at all.

It felt like cowardice instead.

Men were an absolute fucking mystery.

Delilah sat on the edge of her bunk, staring at the closed door as the last five minutes ran in a loop in her head. Kellat’s hand on her face, so careful it made her chest hurt, and the look in his eyes. She knew that look; she’d spent enough years in bars watching men decide things about her to know hungry when she saw it… But then it was like a wall had slammed down and he was gone, leaving her standing alone like the punchline of a joke she hadn’t been told.

She was not going to cry about it. No way, no how. She was also not going to sit here picking the whole thing apart, because that road ended with her deciding it was her fault, and she’d been down that road so many times she might as well have a loyalty card.

Something nudged her ankle gently. She looked down, and the little robot chirped, a small questioning sound that cracked her emotional doom-spiral clean in half.

“Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Walkies.”

Walking the dog, walking the bot. Whatever. It didn’t judge her for being a disaster, and right now that made it her best friend in the entire galaxy.

Digging the little rubbery ball out of the supply bin she’d checked earlier in the room, she headed for the door. She didn’t change out of the dress. It was pretty, and she wanted to feel like a princess for a little longer, even if the only being to see her in it was the little bot. She wanted to be the woman in the porthole reflection for one more hour before she went back to being the girl in the borrowed hoodie.

Flicking the ball down the corridor, she watched as the bot went after it like its life depended on the outcome, all six legs scrambling, claws clicking and skidding on the deck plating. It ricocheted off the wall, completely overshot the ball, and had to reverse. She giggled, the sound bouncing back at her off the metal.

“Get it! Go on, get it. You can do it!”

The bot batted the ball ahead of itself, chasing it around a corner, and she followed, the skirt swishing around her legs. It was only when the corridor opened up, and the air went electric against her skin that she realized where they’d ended up.

The bay with the big war-robots. She stopped at the threshold, her skin prickling. The ball had rolled in under the shadow of the big robots, and they hadn’t gotten any smaller since her last visit. They crouched in their rows, all dark metal and don’t-touch, and she was about to call the bot back and write the ball off as a casualty when she noticed it wasn’t going for the ball at all.

It was creeping toward one of the big machines. One she hadn’t noticed the first time she was here, because it was folded down small, its massive limbs tucked in tight against its body and its lights dark. Every other machine in the bay stood ready. But it was like this one had shut itself down… or had been shut down.