Page 59 of Alien Healer’s Mate

Kellat smiled in the darkness.

It wasn’t a loud snore… the kind that would wake anyone up. It was just a tiny, little kitten-soft sound at the back of her throat every so often. There and gone again before he could be sure he’d heard it at all.

And it was perfect. Completely and utterly perfect. The kind of sound he could listen to his whole life and never get irritated.

She was draped across him like she’d been made to be there, with one leg thrown over his thigh, and her cheek pressed against his chest. Her hair spilled across his shoulder and chest, but he didn’t care even when it tickled his lip.

He stroked his hand through her hair, gently working out the knots from her captivity and the battle with Z’Saai. Kellat’s jaw tightened so much his teeth ached. That draanthic had put her in a cage. The moment he’d seen her behind those bars, something in him had snapped. Had gone so quiet and cold that even now, with her heartbeat steady against his side, he couldn’t think about it directly in case it tipped him over the edge again. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and stroked her hair. Used her to ground himself.

His heart. His kelarris.

Sighing in her sleep, she nestled against him, and that trusting little move made his heart ache all over again. Her hand lay against his ribs, right over the bruising from one of the prototypes that had caught him. He hadn’t felt it at the time. The need to get to her had blotted out everything else. All he had been capable of thinking of was getting her out of there, and getting her to safety.

When she’d looked at him in the aftermath of the battle, her eyes wide and bright, and told him he was an idiot…

He leaned down to press a kiss to the top of her head, his lips curving into a smile.

He was an idiot. He’d been a monumental, prize-winning idiot from the moment she’d woken up and he’d decided not to tell her they’d been matched. Fortunately, she was far wiser than he was and now she was here.

In his arms.

In his bed.

Snoring.

He rested his chin on the top of her head and breathed her in. She smelled like smoke and machine coolant and underneath it, pure Delilah. The scent he’d memorized in his medical bay all those weeks she lay under his care.

“Kellat?” she mumbled, half awake.

“Here.” His voice was low and rough. “I’m here.”

She burrowed closer, her nose pressing into the hollow of his throat, and went still again.

He closed his eyes.

He’d spent decades learning the body. Every system, every structure, every way flesh could break and be mended again. None of it had taught him anything about this. About the way holding one small human female could feel like the center of the universe clicking into place.

She’d told him she loved him. She’d forgiven him. She’d taken everything he’d done wrong and every stupid, cowardly word he’d said, and she’d looked at him with those bright eyes and kissed him anyway.

He was never going to get over that. Not if he lived a thousand years.

She shifted in her sleep, her leg sliding higher across his hips, and the possessive heat that rolled through him was tempered now — banked, not extinguished. She needed sleep more than she needed him again. Her body had been through hell, and he was a healer before he was anything else. He knew the toll the last hours had taken. He’d let her rest.

But later, when she woke…

He smiled into her hair.

Later, he was going to take his time.

But for now Kellat lay in the dark with his mate in his arms and let himself be happy.

EPILOGUE

The sun was warm on her skin, and for once in her life her head was completely empty.

Delliah sat on the white sand with her legs stretched out and her hands braced behind her as she listened to the lap of the waves against the beach. Her lips curved as she watched her little robot, her drakeen core, down at the waterline losing a war against the local birdlife.

It had been chasing them for ten minutes. It had caught none of the birds, but it didn’t care. The happy buzz through the link she had with it told her that. It waved its forelimbs in big, excited arcs as it skittered across the wet sand. The birds had stopped flying away and started circling it instead, the way kids circled the weird new kid once they’d decided he was harmless.