Page 16 of Alien Mine

“Just so,” he said. “But you would never have rented the room to someone untrustworthy regardless of your need, would you?”

Well, didn’t that just put a wrench in her questions? “No.”

“You’re a good judge of another’s character.”

She always had been, right up until Juan had fallen into trouble. It was the one, glaring flaw in her otherwise spotless record of sorting the good apples from the bad. “I was.”

“You are,” he insisted. “Yesterday, I watched the way you reacted to the people around you. A few you trust completely. Some you trust, but only so far, and others you trust not at all, though you don’t know them. What does your instinct say about me?”

She swallowed hard and touched her heart, the very heart that had been telling her what kind of man Dyuvad was from the get-go. “I can trust you.”

He nodded once and slumped into the chair again. “As I trust you.”

“But you don’t know me!”

“I know enough.” His watch buzzed once and blinked. He tapped its surface and stood, rising to his full height in a slow, muscle-flexing stretch. “Fate will be here soon. He and I are going into town today to gather supplies to paint your house.”

“When did you talk to…” She shook the question away. The ways of men were beyond her, always had been, and every little thing Dyuvad did wasn’t her business anyway unless it affected the girls. Besides, if he could motivate Fate to paint the house, who was she to argue? “Let me get money for the paint and all.”

He ran a fingertip down her nose, then slid it across her lower lip. “Consider this partial payment for room and board.”

He was gone before she could say a word to the contrary, and like a lump, she sat right where she was, holding one hand over her tingling mouth as the screen door slapped shut behind him. Lordy, that man could fire a light bulb from sixty feet away, couldn’t he, and all that with a single touch and a smoldering look.

And her still in the dark as to why he was there and what he was up to. She shook her head and got up to finish cleaning the kitchen. He was right about one thing, though. She did trust him, had since the minute she’d laid eyes on him, and wasn’t that odd?

Tiny did, too, and that little imp didn’t trust nobody outside of family, never had. And Kelly, sitting there calm as a laying hen, instructing Dyuvad on the finer points of mountain slang. Shy as a bug in a rug Kelly, who never opened her mouth to strangers, let alone looked them in the eye, had taken right to Dyuvad.

Rachel tucked the loaf bread into the bread box. Maybe it didn’t matter why he was there, though she’d be a cornmeal fried catfish if she’d let it go. No, the girls liked him, and since they did, knowing the whys right this minute wasn’t all that important. She’d wiggle it out of him sooner or later. In the meantime, she had a list of errands a mile long for him and Fate to run while they were in town picking up house painting supplies.

She grinned and hopped to making a list. Poor Dyuvad hadn’t known what trouble he’d landed in when he’d come here, but he was about to find out.

Chapter Five

Dyuvad twisted the knob on the portable radio he’d purchased during his and Fate’s supply run into the nearest town the previous day. Static hissed, then resolved into a heavy beat. Metal, Fate had called it, though Dyuvad was more inclined to think of it as a gift from the gods. Whatever its name, it was a welcome accompaniment to his day’s labor. He turned it to a low murmur, loud enough to enjoy, soft enough for conversation, and studied the tools he’d chosen for the day’s work.

Rachel rounded the side of the house carrying a bottle of goat’s milk. She wrinkled her nose as she drifted to a halt next to him. “Do you really have to listen to that caterwauling?”

He chose a scraper and set its edge against the porch railing. “I like it.”

“Really?”

“On my…home, our music is traditional. Stories, mostly. Old legends accompanied by simple instruments, sometimes myths of the old gods.”

“Folk songs.”

“Something like that.”

“I like folk songs.”

“I do, too. This metal makes a nice change.”

“Yeah, I guess it would, if traditional stuff is all you’d ever heard. We’ve got a lot of local bands that play bluegrass and country. Other stuff, too, but…” She shrugged and glanced at the milk in her hands. “I better get this in the fridge. Hot as it is outside, it’s liable to spoil.”

She bounced up the steps and into the kitchen. The door had no sooner closed on her than it reopened and Kelly bounced out.

Three days, he’d been on Earth, and most of the females he’d met bounced wherever they went.

Kelly sat down on the top step of the porch stairs and propped bony elbows on knobby knees. “Morning, Mr. Dyuvad.”

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