by Lily Graison
She forgot he didn’t understand what she said and let him tell her what happened, the blank memories filling in as he did. He made no mention of the dragon, said he’d killed the monster himself, so she must have dreamed that part. She reached out and touched his hand. “I know I’ve been a bit standoffish when all you’ve wanted to do is get a little friendly. This is all just a bit on the weird side for me. I’m not used to relying on people and I’ve never been in a life or death situation before.” She paused, brushing her thumb across the back of his hand. “I guess I just want to say, thank you. I know you have no clue what I’m saying, but you look at me like you understand—“
He smiled down at her and took her hand, kissing her knuckles and let her go on talking. She told him what her hang up was in regards to letting him be her alien boyfriend, about needing to find Marcy and even scared-beyond-belief, doom and gloom girl, Emma, and what it would mean if she stayed with him. He didn’t say anything when she finally fell silent, just laid something over her backside from neck to foot. The material was a bit scratchy and she realized in the next moment that she was naked. Completely, naked. It had escaped her notice before now. Not even when he’d touched her butt had the fact clicked into place. She opened her mouth to ask why but didn’t bother. He wouldn’t know what she was asking and as thin as that pitiful dress the Big Head’s had given her was, losing it was no great hardship. She was practically naked with the thing on anyway and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t caught him staring at her enough to know he’d seen everything there was to see—or had his hands on.
“Are you hungry?” He turned toward the wall by her head and leaned over. She noticed he was wearing pants and wondered where he’d found them. He sat a bundle of something near her shoulder and said, “It’s just dried meats. It’s not much but it will fill your stomach until I can find something fresh for you.”
He pulled the wrapping away and lifted a piece of what looked like long strips of flat beef jerky up, then handed it to her. She sat up far enough to brace herself on her bent elbows and gave it a sniff. It had a slight—woodsy—scent to it and she wondered what it had been. She’d not seen any animals other than the beast the dragon had dropped by the river’s edge and that little blue critter Marcy had wanted for a pet so, which one of those was this made from?
She took a small bite, pulling a hunk off and started chewing. It was dry and didn’t have much of a taste but it would fill her belly.
Toren slid the pouch of meat closer and stood. “Eat your fill. I need to find more firewood.”
She watched him leave and chewed on the dried meat as she looked around the cave. It wasn’t huge but it was bigger than her dorm room had been.
The fire put off enough light to see the entire cave. She lay on a thick pallet of something and near her head was a pile of things. There were bowls, fat pouches that looked like the old water skins her daddy used to carry when they were camping, and a mound of cloth she assumed was clothing. Was all this stuff already here or had Toren found it somewhere?
She finished the dried meat and sat up, wincing as all her weight shifted to her bottom. She ran a hand over her backside and winced as she touched the scratches and tugged the blanket away to try and see. The shadows were too heavy to make out much but her entire ass and most of her legs had been scraped raw. That burning sensation she’d felt when the tree monster dragged her down the rocky bank had burned for a reason. It had damn near torn the hide right off of her.
She shifted and wrapped the blanket around herself, tucking in the corner underneath her arm. She was halfway through her second piece of jerky when Toren came back. His arms were full of broken pieces of dry tree limbs. He dropped them in a pile and looked over at her.
“You should be laying down.”
She shrugged her shoulders and tore off another hunk of the dried meat.
He sighed. “The nosha will do you little good if you rub it off.”
“No-sha?”
He nodded and showed her a pile of small brown leaves. “Nosha leaves. They form a thick paste when prepared. That’s what I covered your wounds with.”
She looked down at her legs. She could see the back of them without moving more than her head. They were covered in a layer of what looked like clumpy mud, not leaves. “Is this what felt so cool when you touched me? It was this stuff?” She scooped up a bit of it with one finger and brought it to her nose and flinched. It smelled strongly of moldy earth and burned her sinuses. She wiped her finger on her leg and in the next instant, could breathe as if she’d sucked on ten peppermints at once or rubbed vapor rub under her nose.
“It will help heal you. By tomorrow those cuts will be closed and only red welts should remain.”
A super-healing mud bath that also cleared your sinuses. She’d have to remember what those leaves looked like. “You’ll have to show me where to find it and how to prepare them.” He didn’t reply, of course, so she returned to her bland meal, motioning to the pile of things along the wall and raised an eyebrow at him in question.
He must have gotten her meaning. “A camp not far from here.”
“They let you have all this stuff?”
He didn’t answer and neither said anything for a long time after that. The light spilling into the cave grew dim and Toren added another piece of wood to the fire. She finished the chewy dried meat and laid back down, watching the fire burn, the last several days playing back through her mind. Her life felt a bit like a dream, but it only took her a few minutes to realize it wasn’t. She was still on an alien planet. Still dependent on a guy she couldn’t even talk to. And had almost been eaten not once, but twice. Hopefully the rest of her life—however long that might be—didn’t keep playing out the way it had been. Of course, she didn’t think it would improve much either. She didn’t foresee any cute houses with white picket fences in nice little cul-de-sacs in her future. Everything looked pretty primitive here, so those camping trips her daddy used to drag her on at least gave her a small advantage. She knew how to survive in the wilds. Well, normally she did. The wilds here were a lot different from the state park but she had Toren to help with the hard stuff.
She glanced over at him. He was across the fire from her, staring down at the flames. It was the first time since he tackled her to the ground and pulled her into the underbrush, so the others wouldn’t see her that he wasn’t paying any attention to her. Since that first moment she met him, he seemed very focused on her. Seeing to her every need long before she even knew what it was she needed and now, he seemed a million miles away. Small lines bracketed his eyes, a small indent on his forehead made him appear to be thinking hard about something and she wanted to ask what but knew it was pointless.
The light outside the cave grew black before she saw him move. He stood and went to the cave entrance and sat down, leaning back against the rock wall, then looked toward the sky. Those loud shrieks and screams that filled the air every night were louder here for some reason. Sara watched Toren for a long while and realized, even here, hidden as they were in the cave, he was still protecting her. Watching over her as she slept for no reason she could discern other than he saw her as his.
The thought whispered through her head. What would it mean to be his? She knew what it meant by human standards but he wasn’t human. She wasn’t sure what he was but that sometimes-blue skin told her he was—other. He was different and had different beliefs and was as trapped here as she was.
She studied his profile, wondering why he was here. He didn’t seem dangerous. Completely the opposite, actually. He’d done nothing but try to provide for her—to save her from any and all harm since the moment she’d met him. He looked her way and something in his eyes spoke of a longing she’d not seen before now. How long had he been here? How long had any of the aliens she’d seen been here?
She knew they wanted women for sex but surely that wasn’t all it was. The way Toren was looking at her, she knew it wasn’t for him. He wanted more otherwise, he
wouldn’t have bothered finding her somewhere safe to stay or tended her wounds. He’d have had her flat on her back and her knees spread wide regardless of how hurt she was. Toren wanted more than sex and that look in his eyes made her wonder if his need for more came from simple loneliness. It was a sobering thought. She knew all about loneliness. With both of her parents gone and no siblings, she’d spent the better part of her teen years feeling isolated. Her aunt had treated her like a daughter but her cousins had been aunt Susan’s main focus. She was just another mouth to feed until she left for college and surrounded by classmates didn’t help any either, nor getting beamed aboard a spaceship bound for this miserable place. She had no idea how long she’d been on the alien ship but it had felt like a small eternity. Surrounded by other people most of her life, she’d still felt alone. Isolated. Lonely.
Toren was too and if she had to be here on this foreign planet, then she’d do it with someone who might eventually ease all that loneliness and maybe return the favor in the process. Starting tomorrow, she’d let him know he was hers as well.
Chapter Ten
The scent of roasting meat drew Sara from sleep. She lifted her head and peered out through her tangled hair to see something hanging over the fire. It was smaller than a rabbit and not nearly as fat. The juices dripping into the fire and sizzling on the hot coals, along with the scent of it, caused her stomach to growl.
Sara pushed her hair out of her face and sat up, noticing a few moments later her backside no longer hurt. She looked at her leg, the muddy leaf-paste from the night before was dry and flaking off. Brushing some of it away, her eyes widened. The scrapes and cuts were barely noticeable. Red lines ran down the length of her leg but nothing more. “What the hell is this stuff?” She brushed the rest of the dried paste away, then realized she was getting it all over her makeshift bed.
Toren wasn’t inside the cave. Sara stood, wrapping the length of cloth that had been draped over her around her body and tucked the loose end down under her arm and took a step. The flimsy sandals the Big Heads had given them weren’t on her feet and she didn’t see them after a quick glance around.
The floor of the cave was a mix of hard, solid rock and packed dirt. She crossed to the entrance and looked out. Toren was a few feet away, wrapping a bit of cloth around a triangle-shaped frame of sticks. The fabric was loose in the middle, almost sack-like. She was about to ask what he was making it for when he turned his head to look at her.
“How do you feel?” He laid whatever it was he was making on the ground and crossed to where she stood and placed a soft kiss to her forehead. Those thoughts she’d had the night before about him being as lonely as she was came back in an instant and before she had time to be embarrassed wondering what he’d think, she took a step closer to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He stiffened, from shock, she imagined, then relaxed, his arms closing around her to pull her tight against him. He kissed the top of her head and whispered, my Sarra, against her hair and for the first time in ages, she didn’t feel quite so alone.
This close to him the scent that lingered on his skin was overwhelming. It also made her skin tingle in ways that made no sense. She felt flushed and the longer she stood there inhaling the spicy sweet scent, the more aroused she felt. Heat pooled in her core and a throbbing pulse beat between her legs. What the hell was causing it? She’d seen plenty of hot guys in her life and none of them affected her like he did. She met his gaze, wanting to ask him about it but knew it was pointless.
The sun peeked out from behind a cloud, the bright rays shining down once again made the skin on his shoulders look blue. She ran her fingers over his flesh and lifted up on her toes to get a better look. This close up, she could see his skin was not like her own. What looked like barely visible scale-like plates covered his body. It was smooth to the touch and as she moved her head to one side, the color shifted to every shade of the rainbow, the tiny color change going from muted shades to shiny iridescent before her eyes. “Huh. All I’ve ever seen when looking at you was someone who looked very human even though I knew you couldn’t be but this—“ She ran her fingers over the scales again. “—this proves you’re not.” Aside from the color, his skin reminded her of snake skin or a lizard.
The swift breeze blew against the mountain and that delicious scent on his skin filled her head again. The moment it did, she remembered something from one of her biology classes—some animals produced pheromones to attract a mate. Sara looked at his skin again. He didn’t look like a lizard man or a snake, but she couldn’t deny the scale-like appearance to his flesh. He was an alien after all. She had no clue what he was capable of and what he wasn’t. If the scent of his skin was a pheromone, then it would explain her near-instant lust to him. Not that he wasn’t lust worthy without the scent lingering on his skin. The man was hot. There was no denying it.
Toren ran his finger down her cheek. “What are you thinking so hard about?”
She looked at the top of his shoulder again, then ran her hand over it, dragging it over her own. “What are you?” He didn’t seem to understand so she did it again, pointing to her skin, then his.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Sara sighed. Of course, he didn’t. This language barrier was beginning to be a real pain in the ass. His massive tattoo caught her attention. It ran the length of his left arm and shoulder and traveled up the side of his neck before dipping down his side all the way to his hip. She ran a finger over the design, tracing the pattern. She noted again how certain parts of it reminded her of flames. The black swirls were inked into his flesh and she could only imagine how long it had taken to etch them in or how they’d done it. Things looked primitive here, so she didn’t think there was a tattoo parlor around the next mountain.
“They signify my rank amongst the other warriors,” he said, guessing what she’d been wondering. “The first flame is inked over the heart when we make it through the first level of the Cha’tra Trials. It took many years to acquire these.”
Sara ran her palm over his chest, stopping to place her finger over a large swirl where his heart would be. Nearly one whole side of his body was covered and if these signified rank like he’d said, he must have been more than a grunt still in basic training.
Toren touched the center of the circle with his finger and traced the pattern to his shoulder. “There are seven trials we must endure to be amongst the warrior class. The higher our rank, the more valuable we were to our people. It didn’t do us much good in the end, though. My brother Tharius was one of the highest-ranking warriors, a general in command of hundreds and I don’t think he survived. I’ve not seen him since the war.”
For the first time since she’d met him, there was tremendous pain shining in those violet eyes. She had so many questions to ask him and not being able to talk to him was frustrating. Sara leaned up on her toes and brushed her mouth against his lips to try and erase the gloomy look on his face
Toren smiled at her but it never reached his eyes. “The hoppler should be cooked through if you’re hungry.” His eyes flicked down her body all the way to her feet before coming back up. “There are garments inside to cover you more completely than that wrap you have on. There’s water as well. I found a stream nearby so don’t worry about drinking it all. I can get more if we need it.”
She nodded and turned back to the cave. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the dim interior. When she could see well enough to move around, she found the bundle of clothes he’d mentioned and rifled through them. Every piece she picked up stank to high heaven and the thought of putting any of them on made her skin crawl a bit but she couldn’t walk around with what amounted to an oversized towel for the rest of her life.
She settled on a pair of pants that looked as if they were going to fall right off of her and a sleeveless shirt that would probably swallow her whole.
Several of those large skins of liquid sat in a darkened corner and giving one a sniff, she took a sip, the
n guzzled more. The water was cool and had a slight after-taste but she was so dehydrated she didn’t care. When she’d had her fill, she found a small bit of cloth, let her blanket fall to the ground and started washing the dried gunk Toren had spread over her cuts off, then poured the rest of the water over her head. It was while she was bent over that he touched her. Sara jumped, startled to feel warm hands slide over her backside.
Her skin was smooth and slick from the water and Toren ached to be inside her. Walking into the cave to see her bent over, the firelight making the water on her skin glisten, caused his desire for her to burn through his body, that internal flame growing hotter as he crossed to where she stood.
Sarra straightened, water from her wet hair dripping into her face as she looked over her shoulder at him. She wiped the moisture away, her eyes a bit wide as she regarded him. He’d startled her, it seemed.
He smiled and took the cloth she’d been using to bathe her skin and rewet it then washed the part of her back she hadn’t been able to reach. When every inch of her was clean, he tossed the cloth away and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her flush against him. Her breath hitched, her wet flesh against his bare chest doing little to cool the flames racing through his veins.
He cupped her breasts, his thumbs grazing her nipples and her body shuddered, the small tremble enough to make his cock ache. The scent of that sweet musk between her legs filled the air and he groaned and lowered a hand, sliding his fingers through her folds as he kissed the side of her neck. “You are everything I’ve ever wanted, my Sarra.” He tasted her skin, nibbling her flesh as he worked his fingers through her wet flesh, her hips bucking back to press against his cock. He wanted inside her, wanted to taste her on his tongue and possess her in every way possible and if the small noises escaping her throat were any indication, she wanted the same. “I’d given up hopes for a mate.” She moaned, her head falling back to rest against his shoulder. “But then I caught your scent on the breeze, heard the sound of your voice echoing off the walls of the temple lair and once I saw you—“