Page 37 of Alien Mine

Or as Fate had said,Go in guns a-blazing and beat some ever lovin’ sense into that goll darned drug dealin’, woman stealin’, heavy fisted son of a biscuit eater.

The time had come for action. At the very next opportunity, Dyuvad would talk with Fate, and together, they would track Ramirez down and do what had to be done. And if that didn’t work, there was always Plan B: Steal Rachel and the girls away likethe Pruxnæ Dyuvad was.

It had always worked for the men of his people, and Dyuvad saw no reason why it wouldn’t work now, save for Rachel’s objections. Then again, it was hard to object to being stolen away when you were tied to a bed on a spaceship light years away from your home planet.

The rightness of it settled the uncertainty, squashing it into a tiny, forgettable lump. The Net ‘path had sent Dyuvad here to protect Tiny. What better way to do it than on Abyw, far away from the men intent on harming her mother?

Rachel sniffed a final time and pulled away, eyes lowered. “Sorry about the blubbering.”

Dyuvad waited for the appropriate definition to pop into his head, and grunted when nothing came to mind. Kraden autolearner. Where was it when he needed it? “Blubbering?”

“You know. Crying and carrying on like a banshee on a two day bender.” She blotted her eyes with the back of one hand, smearing black makeup along her skin, and frowned into his chest. “Are you ever going to wear a shirt again?”

“Only if you ask me to.”

She huffed out a laugh, part exasperation, part humor, and swept her palm over his bare shoulder, drying it. “A woman would have to be a pure plum fool to ask a man to cover up when he looks like you.”

He grinned, oddly pleased by the compliment. “You’re no fool.”

“No, I am not,” she said tartly, and immediately softened. “Thank you.”

He crooked a finger under her chin and lifted her face to his. “You are welcome.”

A sigh shuddered out of her, warming his skin. “Lunch?”

“I have to check on Kelly, but after, I’ll make you a sandwich and sit with you while you eat and tell me of your journeys into town.”

“Dyuvad—”

He shushed her the best way he knew how, with a gentle kisspressed against her lovely mouth, and he kept on kissing her until she relaxed against him and he was certain she’d forgotten all the reasons why she shouldn’t do exactly as he wished.

The rest of the day passed in a fog. Rachel checked on the girls right alongside Dyuvad, found them safe and sound in Kelly’s bed exactly where he’d told Kelly to go when he’d done whatever it was he’d done to get Rachel out of a bad situation.

She’d fibbed there. Oh, not at the time, certainly. She hadn’t needed to know how he’d gotten her out of that van right then, but after she’d made sure the girls were ok and had a quick lunch, after the rain finally petered out for good and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, after Fate came jogging over, all worried frowns and rumpled hair, after all of that, Rachel’s mind began turning over the impossibility of it all and raised a few inconvenient questions.

Like how exactly Dyuvad had gotten inside a locked van that had managed to keep out a handful of hooligans.

Like how exactly he’d gotten her home without her remembering it.

Like why exactly he kept telling her he was there to keep her and the girls safe, as if he’d somehow known trouble was heading their way before it even arrived.

But try as they might, those questions didn’t do more than buzz around inside her head. Rachel was too numb to voice a single question, too shaky to do more than pass the time between being saved and bedtime with family and chores, and a single thought underlying it all. Being held so close in Dyuvad’s embrace had felt right as rain and somehow like it was the safest place on Earth.

And wasn’t that a thought to give a body pause.

She called a tow truck and let Fate drive her out to meet it. Her van was dinged up good. Those rascals had managed to bend the goat up, break the windshield, and puncture a couple of tires. Rachel didn’t want to know what else they’d done that couldn’t beseen. When the mechanic called with an estimate for repairs was soon enough to learn all that. She retrieved her cellphone from the floor and left the tow truck driver to his job.

Bedtime did roll around, right on schedule, and with it the kind of dread Rachel hadn’t felt in a good, long while. The mere thought of facing an empty bed with Miguel Ramirez’ goons on the loose raised a sick knot in her gut. Dyuvad was right there through a narrow passage in her closet, just like he’d been right there all day long, never letting her or the girls out of his sight for longer than a cat’s breath.

Did he really have to be so far away during the night?

She gnawed on it while brushing her teeth. Her skin was still pasty pale underneath her tan, like the fear running thick in her blood. A God fearing woman would rest her worries on the Good Lord and trust in Him.

But maybe trusting in Him meant trusting in the man who seemed to think he’d been sent to Warwoman to protect a woman and her young’uns. Maybe it meant putting her faith in a man who, for the short time he’d been in Rachel’s life, should’ve been a stranger, but wasn’t. Maybe it meant leaning on somebody when she hadn’t had a body to lean on in years, save her own.

Rachel spat into the sink, rinsed out her toothbrush and mouth, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, the too pale skin and the wide green eyes and the tense set of her lips. She didn’t have to believe Dyuvad had been sent by God to know she could trust him. That, she already did. Otherwise, how could she possibly feel safe around him? How could she possibly have allowed him to watch over her girls in her absence if she didn’t trust him?

How could she want him the way she was beginning to, so much that just the thought of inviting him into her bed for a purely innocent reason fired her blood and weakened her limbs?

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