Page 37 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

The man stared at him, everything still the way a Chelion could be, except the tail that twitched and betrayed him. He turned without a word and opened the door to the cell, locking it behind him before he strode off down the hall.

His guards returned a few minutes later and Cooper made a show of stretching and getting comfortable.

"Asshole didn't even introduce himself," he complained to the silent guards. "On my planet, it's considered good form to tell the person you're threatening who you are. Let's them know who they should be afraid of."

He watched the guards exchange glances then go back to staring at the wall.

"Of course, he might have wanted me to be afraid of every nervous, twitchy person in a cloak. I can't say it's terribly intimidating but for all I know, he's still a child who hasn't finished his adolescent molt. I'm not likely to be scared of a teenager who still has his nymph spots."

His guards shifted uncomfortably and Cooper grinned. He might have been captured by a bunch of amateurs but they didn't know they were amateurs and he was insulting one of their leaders. The next few hours were going to be fun.

As he made his way through some of his favorite insults, Cooper watched his guards and got to know every tick, twitch and shift that they made. They had obviously been given directions to not talk to the prisoner but they gave him more information than they'd ever dreamed possible.

Every few minutes, he felt for Marissa in the back of his mind, reassured when she acknowledged his touch. He sent warmth and comfort back when he realized she was doing the same thing without any training in how to do so.

When they'd gotten out of this mess and had some down time, he was going to have to teach her how to use their bond. Ofcourse, that meant he was going to have to relearn things he'd half-ignored as theory that was never going to apply to him.

Maybe they'd learn together. And explore the limits of what was possible.

Cooper had just started into another round of insulting suppositions and annoying assumptions about his interrogator, the guards, and their families when he heard someone approaching from down the corridor.

He hadn't heard another door open and close. Were the cells just off the main hall with no other security? If he hadn't been so distracted by what was happening to Marissa when they brought him in, he might have noticed.

This time, it was a female Chelion hybrid flanked by two more cloaked figures who had decided to visit him.

"I'm starting to feel awfully popular," Cooper said, his lips pulled back into his best unfriendly smile.

"Let her go," the female demanded.

"No," Cooper replied.

"Your hold on her is killing her."

"You attempting to remove my hold is killing her," Cooper retorted. "Because she doesn't want to let it go. Are you aware of the concept of consent?"

The female sputtered at him and Cooper took the opportunity to reach out to Marissa, who did her best to reassure him that nothing had changed in the last five minutes.

"We will destroy you to save her if we have to," the female said.

It was bluster and Cooper knew it. If they were going to kill him, they would have done it already. He had things they wanted and they both knew it. Still, they were awfully determined to sever his bond with Marissa.

"At this point, killing me will kill her, too," he said. "And you're the ones who made that possible. We hadn't bonded that closelybefore they started torturing her. So, why don't you stop making idle threats and tell me what you really want."

Chapter 17

Marissa had been moved to a dark room with a soft bed to recover. They'd offered to take her boots off and she refused. Everything in her body hurt and she couldn't imagine how much worse it could be if Cooper hadn't intervened. At least half of the muscle aches were from her body curling up to try and protect itself from a pain that didn't have an origin.

Ae-cha had reached inside her mind and tried to pull out…something.

Whatever it was, Marissa was sure she wasn't actually trying for information. The attack had been too blunt for that. Or Ae-cha didn't know how to be anything but blunt. If that method had worked on other women in the past, they had to have come out more damaged than they started. Or they hadn't been trying to hang on to whatever Ae-cha was trying to remove.

Because one of the few things Marissa had done instinctively was hold on to whatever she was pulling on as tightly as she could. It had felt like she'd gripped a piece of her soul and yanked. And if Marissa had let go, she would have been letting go of her will to live.

It should have frightened her to realize that it was part of her bond with Cooper but it didn't. She felt safe knowing it was there, that he was on the other side of it, and she could reach out for him whenever she wanted.

He seemed to need reassurance that she was still there as often as she did because she felt him in the back of her mind every few minutes. Forming words took too much energy but she could acknowledge he was there and how she felt with half a thought and he sent back his own warm and fuzzy feelings.

There were few things about this place that would qualify for the description of warm or fuzzy. Her recovery room was cold and looked like it had been carved into the wall of a cave. Which, to be fair, is probably what had happened. It wasn't sound proof and, as she relaxed and let her mind float, she could hear the movements in the corridor beyond the door.

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