Page 31 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

None of them were adequate. None of them deserved her.

Eleven days to the outpost. I was running out of time and I was running out of courage, and I was not accustomed to lacking either.

14

TAYLOR

Iwasn't going to ask again.

I'd made the boundary clear. The next time the glow came up, he would answer or admit he would not. Until then, I was done asking. If he wanted to walk through an alien jungle lit up like a Times Square billboard every time I got within arm's reach and pretend that was normal, that was his business.

I was not going to think about the way his skin had felt under my fingers. The warmth. The way the markings had responded to my touch like they were alive, like they recognized me. The sound he'd made, barely audible and dragged out from underneath every layer of Valorian composure, when my fingertips grazed the glowing line along his shoulder.

I was not going to think about the look in his eyes when he'd caught my wrist. The way his thumb had found my pulse with unerring precision, as if he knew exactly where to press. The way his eyes had held mine with an intensity that made my chest tight and my brain blank.

Definitely not thinking about any of that.

I had theories. I'd been building theories for days, and last night's data had narrowed the field considerably. The markings responded to me specifically. Threats, weather, food, fire, and jungle did not affect them the way my proximity, my touch, and my skin did.

If he were human, I'd call it attraction. Clear, unambiguous physical response to another person. But he wasn't human. And alien biology could mean anything. Maybe his species glowed around potential food sources. Maybe I smelled like something important on his planet. Maybe it was an allergic reaction.

But the way he'd looked at me last night wasn't allergic. And the way he'd held my wrist wasn't clinical. And the sound he'd made, that low and helpless sound when I'd touched his markings, that wasn't anything except exactly what it sounded like.

I was in trouble. Capital-T Trouble. The kind of trouble where you're stranded on an alien planet with a gorgeous and glowing alien man who won't talk about his feelings but whose body broadcasts them in bioluminescent HD, and you're developing feelings right back despite every survival instinct telling you this is a spectacularly bad idea.

So. Day eight. Walking. Not talking about any of it.

We'd been moving in tense silence for about three hours when a rhythmic, mechanical whine cut through the ambient jungle noise. Not an animal. Not weather. I recognized it because I'd heard it on the slave ship — the whine of technology.

I stopped. Kel had stopped two seconds before me, already in combat posture, weapon drawn, his entire body transformed from walking companion to lethal professional in the time it took me to blink.

He held up a hand. Stay.

For once, I stayed.

He moved into the undergrowth without a sound. Literally without a sound. A man that size should not have been able to move through dense vegetation silently, and yet he dissolved into the green-purple foliage like he'd never existed.

I stood alone in the alien jungle, my heart hammering, a six-inch multitool in my hand that would be about as useful against alien technology as a strongly worded letter. I turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line, listening for anything that wasn't birds or insects or the distant rush of water.

Sixty seconds passed. Ninety. Two minutes. I was about to abandon the "stay" instruction and go find him when a figure emerged from the undergrowth to my left.

I spun, multitool raised, teeth bared, ready to go down fighting⁠—

"It's me, human. Put the tiny knife away."

I nearly collapsed.

The blue-skinned alien from the cell. Standing in front of me in what looked like scavenged clothing and a pair of boots that were too big for her, with a fresh scar along one of the knobs on her forehead and an expression of exhausted amusement. A compact sidearm rode in a patched holster at her hip. All four of her eyes were on me — two large ones, and a smaller pair set higher and wider on her temples, angled to take in everything the front pair missed that I'd apparently been too busy panicking to notice in the cell.

"You," I said, my voice doing something embarrassing. "How — what are you doing HERE?"

"Zhara," she said, tapping her chest with two fingers. "Since we are apparently still alive enough for introductions."

I'd been calling her "her" in my head since the cell, on the strength of absolutely nothing. Nobody had corrected me yet, so it stood.

"Zhara," I repeated, because my brain needed one concrete fact to hold on to. I tapped my own chest. "Taylor."

"I've been tracking you for two days." She looked me over with the appraising directness I remembered from the cell. "You look terrible. I was already heading toward Vel'kari — the outpost is the only place on this continent with a functioning repair dock, and my shuttle needs one badly. I picked up the ion trail from your pod's descent where it tore through the canopy, then found residual thermal blooms from your first camps. Messy trail at the start. After that, whoever chose your sites got disciplined — shielded fires, cold ash, water crossings, false turns. I followed the older traces and projected your line toward the outpost."