Page 8 of Alien Mine

“I’m just trying to figure out where you’re from. You look like a Pacific Islander, truth be told. Well, your skin does, anyway.” She sighed and jiggled her knee back and forth in an unsteady rhythm. “I’d give about anything to have skin that tanned like yours without wrinkling me into a little old lady.”

“You are far from being old enough to wrinkle.”

“Fat lot you know,” she muttered. “You always drop your drawers around strange women?”

“Does my nudity bother you?”

She choked on a breath and her shoulders hunched around her ears. “God’s truth, if I’d known you were naked back there, I would’ve left already.”

“You may look, if you wish.”

She slapped her hands over her face, and though he couldn’t see them, he was sure her cheeks had flamed red. “You’re the devil, ain’t you?”

He grinned and stuffed his legs into the stiff fabric of his jeans. That was one concept he understood readily enough, without the autolearner’s implanted programming prodding his memory. “I could tempt you to sin, if it pleases you.”

“One of us is going to hell, sure as Sunday, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be me.”

He laughed as he shrugged on a fresh t-shirt. “I am fully dressed now, Lady Rachel.”

“I wish you’d call me Rachel, especially if you’re gonna wander around naked in my presence.”

Raw humor threaded through her voice, unwittingly encouraging Dyuvad to prod her into another reaction. “I sleep in the nude, if you—”

She whirled around, cutting off his teasing. “If you’re gonna suggest I come witness it, forget it. I ain’t even tempted.”

Yes, she was. It was there in the way her eyes lingered on him, in the flush still blooming in her cheeks, and in the faint smile curving her full mouth. He had a sudden urge to prod her into a full-blown smile, to hear her laughter ring out again, and immediately shoved it down. Teasing Rachel was one thing. A light flirt hurt no one, and it would be nice if they could find their way to friendship during his stay on her planet. Anything more would be foolhardy until he unraveled Tiny’s predicament.

After that, though, he was free to do as he pleased. Tempting Rachel into sin held a surprising appeal, one he wouldn’t mind exploring before he returned home.

Rachel plopped down on the bench of a rickety, wooden picnic table. She’d managed to snag the last one shaded by the towering trees growing along Lake Burton’s shores, and thank goodness for it. It was ninety if it was a degree, and lordy, was it humid. The air had to be thick enough to cut with a dull butter knife.

She swiped the back of her hand across her sweat-dotted forehead. As soon as Fate’s truck had rolled to a stop, Kelly had helped Tiny out of her car seat and made a beeline for the shallows. Fate had ambled along after them in his decade-old swimming trunks and a t-shirt while Dyuvad had helped Rachel carry towels and snacks to the picnic area.

She’d shooed him off right after. The man was too good looking for her peace of mind, he was. She’d about had a heart attack when he’d stripped down at the house, then again when he was trying on bathing suits at Wal-Mart. He’d opened the dressing room door holding the swimsuit she’d picked out for him instead of wearing it. She’d gotten an eyeful of him in all his glory and blushed to high heavens, and he’d just stood there grinning like a buffoon until she’d slammed the door shut on his nudity.

If the man had a shy bone in his body, it was well hidden.

He didn’t have a spare ounce of fat on him either, far as she could tell, and it didn’t go unnoticed. As soon as he stepped foot on the beach, the eyes of every woman over the age of fourteen had snapped to him and stayed there the whole time he helped Rachel set out their things, and while he stripped off his shirt and toed off his shoes,andwhen he jogged across the beach and waded into the deep side of the roped off swimming spot.

She clucked her tongue. Half the women there were married with children and the other half probably had intendeds. She wasn’t one to judge, though. Why, it’d be fairly hypocritical of her to, given the way her nerves jangled every time Dyuvad was within spitting distance. Besides, he had a nice body. Wasn’t a thing wrong with admitting the truth, was there?

A breathless Yasmin dropped onto the picnic table’s other bench seat. Rachel’s sister-in-law was tall and willowy, and pretty as a button in a white, sleeveless sundress that contrasted nicely with her native tan. They’d been friends since the first day of Kindergarten, two stranger-shy girls thrown together by fate, if Rachel told the story, or by the bus driver’s assigned seating arrangements, according to Yasmin. Either way, they’d bonded over a whole lot of mutual that day, their fear of what school held for them, their love of the written word, and irritation at their brothers, Yasmin’s older, Rachel’s younger.

Not a lot had changed in the past twenty-odd years, except for their dreams.

Yasmin dug a cold canned soda out of the cooler and popped the top. “Sorry I’m late. We had an off schedule flowerdelivery come in on top of a last minute wedding.”

Rachel checked on Fate and the girls. They were right where they were supposed to be, digging up sand at the edge of the lake. Dyuvad had swum out to the floating dock outside the safety ropes. Him, she wasn’t worried about a bit.

“Anybody I know?” she asked.

“Tourists eloping from the ‘burbs. She’s in that way.” Yasmin waggled her perfectly arched, black eyebrows and grinned. “They were happy enough, though why they decided to hotfoot it all the way from Lawrenceville to Clayton to get hitched is beyond me.”

“A wedding in the mountains is romantic.”

“It’s a waste of money they’ll need for that baby,” Yasmin said tartly. “But good money for me, so I can’t complain. And seeing as how they have one on the way, I made the bride a diaper bouquet.”

Rachel hid a startled laugh behind her own coke. “You did not.”

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