Snow and wind blasted her as she stepped outside, and she nearly slipped twice on her way back to the truck. If circumstances were different, she might’ve welcomed a good fall, just to have a reason to sue the stuck-up bastards in the hotel.
When she reached the truck, she yanked the door open, climbed in, and slammed it closed. Snow fell from her hair and shoulders to melt on the seat around her. She was freezing; her fingers were stiff and numb, and her clothing was soaked. Though her time outside had been limited to trips to and from hotel lobbies, the effects of the weather had cumulated into this misery.
“They have rooms, but they are asking too much for them,” Zoey said, stretching and bending her fingers to coax some feeling back into them.
Rendash frowned. He cranked up the heater before closing the vents on his side, increasing the airflow to her. The gesture was a small one, but it was so thoughtful and heartfelt that it eased away most of her annoyance.
“So what options are left to us?” he asked.
She gratefully held her hands up to the warm air. “I don’t know. This is a resort town. Everything is outrageously overpriced, and they’re only making it worse because of the storm. The interstate is getting shut down because it’s unsafe, and people have nowhere else to go right now.”
“Can we stay in the truck tonight?” he asked.
“We could. But we’d need to keep it idling all night so we don’t freeze, and if a cop decides we’re mucking up the scenery… The last thing we need is for me to have to lie to a cop about borrowing the truck from a relative or something like that.”
“Is there anywhere in the mountains?” Ren gestured beyond the hotel, where the dark form of a large hill was barely visible through the snow and gloom.
“There are probably a bunch of cabins up there. Vacation homes and places to rent. But if I can’t afford a couple nights in a hotel, I definitely can’t afford to rent one of those places.”
“And if we can find one where no one is staying?”
Zoey tilted her head and arched a brow. “Ren, what are you thinking?”
“Sometimes, survival must be placed before honor.”
“What does that mean?”
“Stay here, Zoey.” He pressed the button to lower the passenger window, letting in a blast of cold air and stinging flakes. “I will scout the area and return as soon as I am able.”
“But it’s freezing out there!”
“I know. You will have to make it up to me when we find a warm place to shelter.” He reached out the window and opened the door using the outside handle before pulling himself out of the cab. His eyes met hers as he closed the window. “Be safe. I will return soon.”
He shut the door and vanished. She stared out the window, unsure if the faint disturbance she saw in the flow of snowflakes was a trick of the wind, a trick of her eyes, or Ren moving while cloaked.
You will have to make it up to me when we find a warm place to shelter.
Had he realized what his words implied? There was no way he could’ve known…
But what if he had?
Zoey shoved those thoughts away and locked the doors. Now was not the time to think of the way he’d held her, touched her, and looked at her.
She kept her hands in front of the heater as she scanned her surroundings. The glow from the hotel and the nearby light posts was swallowed up by the storm before it reached the boundaries of the parking lot, leaving the area beyond shrouded in darkness.
Time crawled. Zoey glanced at the clock often, counting the minutes since his departure. She turned on the radio to distract herself, but nothing held her interest — not even songs she normally sang along to could break her thoughts away from Rendash. Was he okay? Had he been spotted?
Would he come back?
If he didn’t, wouldn’t that be easier for her? She could continue to Des Moines, move into Melissa’s apartment, and start over like none of this had ever happened.
Except I abandoned my car in Utah, and a man is dead and I’m driving the dead man’s truck, and how am I going to explain any of that away when it catches up with me?
Zoey dropped her gaze to the instruments on the dashboard.
I don’t want Ren to leave me.
It wasn’t because of his promise to protect her, even though she did feel safe with him around. She liked him. A lot. He made her laugh, listened to what she had to say, made her feel like she mattered.
He made her feel good. Desirable, even. She hadn’t felt that way in…well, she’d never felt that way. When he looked at her, she felt like she was enough, like she was more than enough. Like she was everything.
But Rendash was leaving. As soon as they reached his ship, he would fly away from here — and out of her life — for good. There was no sense in getting attached or hoping for anything more. He had a home somewhere out there, and she wasn’t part of it.
Over an hour had gone by when a large, dark figure approached the truck from the passenger side. Zoey’s eyes widened, and her heart skipped a beat. The figure stopped beside the passenger window, raised an arm, and pressed a now familiar four-fingered hand against the glass. Zoey immediately unlocked the doors.
Ren tugged the door open and climbed into the truck. Even with the cab being so high off the ground, he still had to fold himself to get in. She shivered against the cold air that followed him in, but he quickly pulled the door shut.
“Where have you been?” Zoey demanded, at once angry and relieved. He’d been gone far too long. She reached across him to open the passenger-side vents. “It’s an ice storm out there!”
“I’m aware,” he replied, brushing crusted snow off the shoulders of his coat.
She grabbed one of his upper hands. It was freezing.
“Jesus,” she said, snagging hold of the other. Without thought, she shoved them up her shirt, placing them high against her sides. His fingers brushed the bottom of her bra. She clenched her jaw to hold in her cry of shock at the chill of his palms against her bare flesh and caught his other hands, placing them below the first pair. When they were in place, she tugged her shirt down to lock in what body heat she could offer.
“What are you doing, Zoey?” he asked, voice tight as he pulled back. She had a sense that the slight trembling in his hands wasn’t because of the cold.
She grasped the wrists of his upper arms and held them in place. “Warming your hands.”
He frowned, but his fingers clutched her a little tighter. “They will warm easily enough on their own. You’ve only managed to make yourself cold.”
“This is faster,” she said, trying to ignore the way her body was reacting to his touch. A combination of cold and desirous anticipation made her nipples tighten. “Everyone knows that body heat works best.”
He watched her skeptically with all four eyes but didn’t withdraw. After a short while, his hands slid a little higher, the slight roughness of his scales grazing her sides. Zoey’s breath quickened as her skin heated.
Rendash released a heavy breath. His hands stilled before he abruptly pulled them away. “We should go,” he said hurriedly. “I found a place for us to stay.”
Zoey stared at him. He’d curled his hands into fists and dropped them onto his thighs as though that were the only way to maintain control of them. No one had ever acted that way with her before, no one had ever struggled not to touch her. But she wanted his hands on her. She’d been so close to lifting her bra and leaning forward to press her breasts into his hands.
But he was right; this was not the place, not the time, and she obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.
It’s been way too long…
Skin pulsing with the lingering effects of his touch, Zoey took hold of the steering wheel and backed out of their spot. Rendash directed her out of the parking lot and onto the main road. After a few minutes, they turned onto a side road that led higher into the hills. Between the thick snow, the trees on either side, and the darkness, she was lost after a few more turns.
“How did you get this far?” she asked. “You were on foot.”
“I was sped on by my nyros. Fortunately, my control held long enough for me to find a place and return.”
Though there was snow on the roads, they had clearly been plowed recently — one thing to be grateful for, at least. Even the single-lane road he told her to turn onto looked to have been well-maintained, though it couldn’t have been more than a long driveway.
They turned off that path and onto another, passing through a thick copse of fir trees. Zoey’s jaw dropped as the headlights finally hit the building at the end.
“This place?” she asked, unable to look away.
The cabin before them was something out of the movies — specifically, movies about rich families that went to their fancy getaway homes in the mountains to ski and wear matching sweaters by the fire. It was two stories tall, with vertical wood siding on the top that only appeared weatherworn and old, and gorgeous stonework on the lower floor. The windows were wide and generous, without a curtain in sight, but who would look in? The place was surrounded by trees, a private little slice of the Rockies.
“It appeared to be unoccupied,” he said, “and there is some sort of computer system handling its security. I was able to interface with the system and deactivate it.”
Zoey tore her gaze away from the cabin to look at Ren. “You did what? How?”
“My nyros holds a great deal of information within it to aid me on alien worlds, which happens frequently. Its energy can be used to interface with various systems and disrupt their operations in a variety of ways. The technology on this planet is relatively simple compared to what it must usually interface with, so it was not difficult to override the security.”
“You can do that? Like, with your mind?”
He nodded, an amused smile on his face.
“And we’re just going to walk in there? Just like that? How do you know it’s unoccupied? What if the owners come back?”
Any more questions, and even I’m going to be tired of them.
“None of the lights are on, inside or outside, but the system was set to activate the lights in ten days.”
Zoey looked back at the building. “So, they’ll be here in ten days. Hopefully not sooner, though the weather should probably prevent that. We should be long gone before then anyway.”
Rendash settled a comforting hand on her thigh. “We are doing what we must.” His gaze shifted to the cabin. “And I would guess the owners of this building have plenty of your money to spare, to have a place such as this.”
“Just because they have money to spare, doesn’t mean they’d part with it willingly, or that this is right.” She inhaled deeply. What other choice did they have right now? “Okay, let’s get inside.”
Despite her misgivings, she thrummed with excitement.
They climbed out of the truck together. Rendash retrieved her suitcase from inside the tool bin in back, and Zoey followed him to the front door. There were no visible key holes on the handle, only some sort of touch-screen on the right side of the door frame.
Before she could ask how they were going to get in, he touched a finger to the pad. The screen lit up and flashed wildly in different colors. There was a click, and Rendash took hold of the handle and swung the door open.
“That’s some high-tech shit,” Zoey muttered. “I thought hacking was only that easy in the movies.”
“Most of it is automated.” He stood aside to allow her entry. “I simply provide commands, and my nyros do the rest.”
No wonder the government was so driven to get Rendash back. They’d be desperate to replicate his capabilities. He was a tool, a weapon to be reverse-engineered, and if what she’d seen was only a taste of what he could do, they’d stop at nothing to obtain him.
Rendash closed the door and walked further into the dark foyer. Another touchpad came to life, and lights flared on overhead.
She’d never been in a smart home before, and her first thought was an odd one: what the hell do people have against light switches these days?
The foyer had a lovely area rug draped over the stone floor, and a wooden bench to one side where guests could remove their boots. Zoey hurriedly kicked off her shoes and entered the room ahead.
“Oh my God. This is gorgeous!” she cried as she entered the open living room. The wood of the walls gleamed in the golden light, and the stonework on the lower portion ringed the room to meet on the far wall in a huge fireplace.
A long, brown sectional sat in a semicircle in the center of the room, facing the fire. The polished coffee table in front of the couch looked like it was cut out of a large tree, granted additional beauty and uniqueness by its asymmetrical shape. The wood-framed chairs arranged near the floor-to-ceiling window to the right were all draped with cozy-looking throw blankets. Large snowflakes fell in a constant stream beyond the glass.
Moving closer to the fireplace, she swept her gaze over the obligatory flat screen TV hung over the mantle before following the naked wooden beams up to the ceiling. She turned to see a second-floor walkway over the foyer side of the room.
She continued farther into the house, entering the kitchen, which was just as open and spacious as the living room. Wide windows with a pair of glass doors lined one wall with open wooden shelves mounted beside them. The counters and island were topped with black, sparkling granite. A bottle of wine stood on the island.
Zoey picked up the bottle, and her eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when she saw the label. “This stuff has got to be at least two-hundred dollars a bottle!”
She had a sudden urge to open the wine and was soon wrestling with herself on whether to pop the cork. This wasn’t her home, these weren’t her belongings. She’d already added trespassing to her list of crimes by being in here. Did she want to push that into burglary, too?
Biting her lip, she looked at Ren, who’d entered the kitchen behind her. Her suitcase stood beside him.
He offered her an exaggerated shrug. “I do not know what that bottle contains or what two hundred dollars is. We are here. There is no reason not to enjoy it.”
“You know, you sound like criminal activity is a regular thing for you.”
“The humans hunting me aren’t going to let me go either way. I wish the owners of this building no ill will, but if they are likely able to easily replace food and drink…why should we worry about it?”
Zoey chuckled. “Okay, let’s just go with your logic.”
She opened and closed drawers one at a time, working her way around the kitchen, until she found a corkscrew. After some wiggling, the cork came free with a loud pop. Zoey raised the bottle to her nose and inhaled.
Her eyes nearly rolled back into her head. “It’s been so long since I had good wine…not that I’ve ever had anything like this.”
She brought the rim to her mouth, tilted her head back, and drank straight from the fucking bottle. The thought of how hard wine connoisseurs would’ve lost their shit if they saw her now only urged her on.
Rendash searched the kitchen while she enjoyed a prolonged sample of the wine, checking every drawer and cabinet, seeming to take stock of everything inside each of them even though she was pretty sure he couldn’t read the writing on anything. He stopped longest at the refrigerator.
“There are many provisions in this place,” he said, lifting three packaged ham steaks from the freezer.
Zoey set the wine bottle down and joined Ren. There were plenty of items inside that wouldn’t go bad over a short amount of time — mostly condiments in the fridge, but meat and vegetables in the freezer. No milk or fresh produce, but that was expected for a vacation house. The pantry was a bit more lucrative, brimming with canned, powdered, and dried goods. She took out a couple cans of green beans and a bag of biscuit mix, placing them on the counter.
“Let’s get cooking,” she said, taking the ham from Ren.
He scrubbed the foundation off his face at the sink while Zoey prep
ared the ham, green beans, and biscuits. Her search for plates turned up wine glasses in one of the cabinets, so she decided to show the wine a little respect by using one.
“You want any?” she asked Rendash.
He took a tentative sniff from the bottle, seemed to consider it for a few moments, and declined. She shrugged; that meant more for her. The alcohol was already warming her from the inside out. Tomorrow was uncertain, but tonight, they’d live in luxury.
When the food was done, they stood at the island counter and ate together. By the time Zoey finished her first plate, Rendash had almost demolished all the rest of the food; he scarfed down helping after helping like he hadn’t eaten for weeks.
Zoey smiled and gathered up the empty plates, taking them to the sink to rinse off. It required a surprising amount of concentration to hold the plates steady while she washed them.
“Hungry, I take it?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Yes,” he said around the biscuit in his mouth — not a bite of biscuit, but an entire biscuit. “Certain functions of my nyros burn excess energy, and I have yet to fully recover from my captivity.” He paused to swallow and run his tongue over his teeth. “Also, this is good.”
“They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but the way to a girl’s is to compliment her cooking.”
“This is very good,” he said with a grin.
Zoey laughed. “Wait till I make you an omelet in the morning. For now—” she drained her fourth glass of wine and returned to the island counter to collect the nearly empty bottle, bracing herself with one hand on the granite “—I’m going to go explore upstairs. You look around down here.”
He covered her free hand with one of his own, stopping her before she walked away. “Are you sure we should separate?”
Zoey threw her arm wide, swaying against his anchoring hold. Why did the bottle feel heavier even though the wine was mostly gone? It didn’t matter; she felt great. “We have this whole place to ourselves. Lock the doors, and we’ll be fine. Besides, upstairs isn’t that far away.”
He looked her over, his expression oddly drawn with apprehension even though there was the hint of a wicked gleam in his eyes. “But you seem a bit…off balance. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay near?”
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