Page 28 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Kel scanned it before I could get within three feet. He tested the water, the mineral film along the rocks, and the air above the steam. Only after the scanner cleared it for my already-overworked biology did his shoulders loosen by half an inch.

"We do not have time—" Kel started.

"Non-negotiable," I said, already moving toward the pool.

I sat on a flat rock, unbuckled my precious tool belt, and set it carefully beside me before peeling off my boots and socks. My feet were a medical textbook of blisters and rawness.

I stood, grabbed the hem of my shredded t-shirt, pulled it over my head, and tossed it on the rock. Then the remains of my shorts. I was down to my bra and underwear, both of which had seen dramatically better days but were still intact enough to qualify as coverage.

Behind me, Kel made a sound.

It wasn't a word. It wasn't a cough. It was something between a choke and a growl, low and strained, and it came from deep in his chest. I turned to look at him.

His markings were blazing. Not the gentle glow I'd been cataloging for the last week. BLAZING. Every line on his forearms, his neck, his jaw, lit up like neon, bright enough to cast actual light on the surrounding vegetation. His violet eyes were wide and his pupils, those slit pupils — were fully dilated. His entire body had gone rigid, hands fisted at his sides, and as I watched, he spun around so fast I thought he'd heard a threat.

But there was no threat. He was just standing there with his back to me, shoulders locked, breathing through what sounded like gritted teeth.

Oh. OH.

The glow. The "various stimuli." The flickering when I was close, the brightening when I touched him, the way he'd turned away the morning I woke up warm. It wasn't general. It wasn't a medical condition. It wasn't about proximity in the abstract.

It was about me. Specifically. Like this. Without clothes on.

"Problem?" I called sweetly. Because I was petty and exhausted and he'd been freezing me out since that ridge and I had just been handed the most powerful piece of leverage in the known galaxy.

He said something in Valorian. He let his translator carry it, and it arrived in fragments: "You are... without adequate covering."

"It's called swimming. Very common on my planet." I stepped into the pool.

Sweet mother of God.

The water was warm. Not hot — warm in a way that was so perfect it felt intentional, like the planet had calibrated this pool specifically for a destroyed human woman who needed one good thing to happen. The warmth soaked into my muscles, my joints, my brutalized feet. I sank in up to my shoulders and made a sound that was borderline indecent.

His markings flared brighter, even with his back turned.

"How's the perimeter looking?" I asked innocently.

His response was clipped. One word in Valorian, and he did not permit the translation.

I floated. I soaked. I scrubbed my skin with handfuls of fine sand from the pool's bottom and watched a week of alien jungle grime dissolve into the water. I washed my hair, which had become a single matted entity, and worked the tangles out with my fingers until it felt like actual hair again.

I took my time. Partly because it was the first moment of physical comfort I'd experienced since Earth. Partly because Kel was standing guard with his back to me, rigid as a tree, markings pulsing in a rhythm I could time from thirty feet away, and I was enjoying that more than I should have been.

Finally, I climbed out and pulled my ruined clothes back on. The fabric was still disgusting but at least the body underneath was clean. I felt human again. Mostly.

"All clear," I said.

He turned. Looked at me. His markings were still elevated but beginning to dim. His jaw was tight. His eyes swept over me once, fast, as if checking for injury, and then locked onto a point somewhere above my left shoulder.

"We should continue," he said.

"We should."

I walked past him, close enough to touch. Light raced through his markings and he made that sound—low and strained, the sound of control fracturing.

"The marking pattern," I said over my shoulder. "We're going to talk about it. Soon. And 'various stimuli' is not going to cut it."

I kept walking. Southwest. Correct direction this time.