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“I was going to suggest you might want to keep one dry change of clothing, just in case we needed to leave quickly.”
“Oh.” I glanced down at the floating clothes around me. “Good idea.” I shrugged. “Too late now.”
Kaio took his own advice, though, and left one change of clothing out of the water while he cleaned the rest.
I suspected that packing newly cleaned clothes into a bag with the old, filthy ones would defeat the purpose of washing anything. I was pretty certain my dirty clothing would’ve been able to stand up on its own at this point.
When we were done, we wrang out our clothes as dry as we could get them, then draped them over rocks in the sunlight.
Of course, that left us naked in a pool in the most romantic setting I had ever experienced.
I watched as he walked out of the pool, water streaming down his back, losing myself in the smooth interplay of muscles under his midnight-dark skin.
Kaio moved as comfortably as if he had been brought up in a nudist colony.
Not that I could blame him. Anyone as beautiful as he was should be proud to walk around bare-ass naked.
Preferably at all times.
He turned and caught me watching him, and a hot blush stained my cheeks. God, had he heard my thoughts? His face stayed neutral, impassive. I could only hope he hadn’t heard me…
“If you stay in the water too long, you’ll get cold,” he called out as he began arranging sticks and kindling in a makeshift fire pit he’d dug out in the loose sand above the pool.
“I’m fine,” I replied, sinking down to my neck in the water.
But he was right. Within an hour, the sun began to sink below the horizon, and as darkness gathered, I started to shiver.
Finally unable to stand it any longer, I got out of the pool and made my way self-consciously over to the fire, where Kaio sat working on something with his hands. I wanted to stride confidently, the way he had, but all I could think was how my thick thighs rubbed together as I moved and how my breasts sagged a little more than they had ten years ago. Shoulders back, determined to love my body every second I was on this strange new world, I squashed down my fears of how I looked. When tomorrow could bring a sudden, agonizing death, who cared that I wasn’t some human magazine’s version of perfect.
When I moved up next to him, I realized he had been weaving mats out of the giant leaves that surrounded us.
I leaned over to watch what he was doing, marveling at how dexterous his large hands were as he twined and knotted the pliant strips of leaves. My shoulder bumped against his tricep, and a spark of awareness zapped through my body, followed by a little shiver.
I glanced up at him out of the corner of my eye to find him watching me, his dark gaze smoky and hot. Turning my head, I held his gaze. Almost unconsciously, I licked my bottom lip, tasting the remnants of the flower soap.
“Could you make me a grass skirt while you’re at it?” I muttered under my breath, moving away to avoid the electricity he sent through me with only the barest of touches..
Kaio frowned and then apparently plucked an image of my mind. “I could,” he said with that funny waggle of his head, “but I don’t think it would provide much protection from the elements.”
“It might help preserve my modesty—what’s left of it.”
“I think this will be better suited to your needs,” he said, plucking one of the two cloaks off the rocks we had stretched them across. He tossed it to me, and to my surprise, the fabric was completely dry.
“Already dry? That’s impressive.” I wrapped the cloak around my naked body, trying to feign nonchalance about my own nakedness.
By the gleam in Kaio’s eyes, I suspected I’d failed spectacularly.
“I dug a latrine out behind that plant,” Kaio told me with a wave of his hand.
I had to wonder exactly how a translator managed a word like latrine when I hadn’t even been aware that I knew the word.
“But you will want to put on shoes,” Kaio warned me. “It looks like there are finton serpents around—I’ve seen their tracks, anyway.”
“Poisonous snakes?” I asked, my gaze darting around nervously.
“Venomous. A bite from one wouldn’t kill me—but I don’t know about its effect on humans. Especially not humans as small as you are.”
Small. I glanced down at myself. It had been a long time since anyone other than an alien had considered me tiny.
