Page 10 of The Alien Warlord's Fated Mate

His green-irised gaze shifted to the wall behind her, and he visibly stifled a sigh. “Very well. Come. You have more to learn.”

He flicked the sheet off and stood, giving her an eye-level view of his amazingly sculpted, nude backside. She goggled at the miles and miles of flexing muscle as he walked toward the bathroom. Honestly, was the man made of nothing but muscle?

Then her memory caught up to her and she remembered the flash of a very hard organ jutting from between his thighs as he rolled off the bed, a very hard, verylargeorgan that promised all sorts of naughty pleasures. An unfamiliar heat settled between her own thighs, warming her to the point of squirming. She hadn’t had a good romp in the sheets, as Leona put it, for at least a year, maybe two, not since that rat bastard Timothy Riley had broken her heart, ending a whirlwind fling that had lasted a scant two months.

Which is what she got for dating a co-worker, albeit one working in an unrelated department.

Zoran stepped into the bathroom, and Mia caught another glimpse of his very un-Timothy like erection.

God. Here she was, acting like a nympho at the first sign of temptation. The barbarian really had corrupted her.

Her bladder awakened, reminding her that she hadn’t tinkled in hours. She slid off the bed and was about to bang on the bathroom door when Zoran reentered the bedroom, still as gloriously nude as when he’d left it.

Mia crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “I need a shower and a toilet and fresh clothes.”

He raked his gaze down her body, and though his face remained as hard as a certain other part of his body, she got a sense that he was displeased. Abruptly, he stalked to the foot of the bed, opened the trunk, and rummaged around in it. Curious, Mia sidled over and peeked over the lid as he pushed aside neatly folded fabric and pulled out a thin, shimmery robe similar in cut and color to the one his mother wore in the screensaver image.

He stood and handed her the robe. “I did not bring appropriate undergarments.”

“I can wash mine,” she replied gruffly, then temptation got the better of her and she held the robe to her chest, measuring the deep red color against her skin, the length against her height. It was too long and probably too loose, but it was so beautiful, his gesture so generous, she didn’t have the heart to complain. “Thank you. I’ll make do.”

He nodded solemnly, somehow regal despite his nudity. “Allow me to demonstrate the toilet functions.”

Her cheeks flared hot again, and she cursed both her fair skin and her modesty. He must think her a prude by now. Which is what she wanted, she assured herself hastily. If he thought she was a prude, maybe he’d prolong this rutting thing as long as possible. She wasn’t so sex starved that she’d fall into bed with just any old stranger, even one with hard slabs of muscle, an intense gaze, and a very promising, er,organ.

Zoran guided her into the bathroom and squeezed into the tiny space behind her, said organ prodding irreverently against her spine. Quietly, he demonstrated how to turn on the faucet and adjust the water’s temperature, how to use the miniscule toilet, and how to extract what he called “bathing scrubs” from the shower stall.

By then, she was nearly dancing from the need to tinkle. “Ok, got it,” she said and all but shoved him out, ignoring the humor softening the hard planes of his face. A few minutes later, her most pressing need taken care of, she stepped under the shower’s weak, tepid spray.

Mindful of his warning about the limited water supply, she squirted a tablespoon of bathing scrubs onto her palm. She’d expected something like liquid soap. Instead, the mixture resembled dark brown mud dotted with charcoal black specks. Cautiously, she lifted the mixture to her nose and sniffed, got a whiff of ocean and sand, and drew back. Not soap, she guessed. Definitely something to query the database about.

Quickly, she scrubbed herself clean and dried off with a thin towel stashed in a cage above the toilet. As she’d suspected, the robe he’d given her fell to the floor when she pulled it on, draping in a pool around her bare feet. She shrugged. Well, he was a lot taller than her. It stood to reason that Xeruvian women would be tall, too.

Carefully, she gathered her soiled clothes into a bundle and stepped out of the bathroom, her finger-combed hair falling in damp rings to her shoulders. The bedroom was empty, but the screen-table was down and food had been left on it. Her muscles relaxed, and she sighed happily. Alone with an alien database. Every research scientist’s dream.

She dropped her dirty clothes on the trunk, then hunkered down in front of the screen, absent-mindedly gnawing on an apple while she dove into an entry on Zephyria’s climate.

Mia wasn’t sure how long she sat at the fold-down console, scrolling through the ship’s database, absorbing every facet of Zoran’s culture and home world that she could fit into her brain. After floundering through the incredibly non-intuitive—to a human, she amended silently—search, she’d chanced upon the Xeruvian equivalent of JSTOR, without the password protection or the sociopolitical bias.

Or, at least, if there was sociopolitical bias, her knowledge of Xeruvian culture was too limited to detect it.

Once there, she managed to find research papers related to her own discipline and was absorbed in a study covering the intersection of biodiversity and crop rotation when Zoran’s hard warmth surrounded her.

She sucked in a gasp and stiffened in his grasp. “Don’t startle me like that!”

“How can you miss the hatch opening?” he chided in that ever-patient tone of his. “You did not finish your food.”

She glanced guiltily at the half-eaten apple she’d shoved to one corner of the console, along with an unopened cereal bar. “I guess I just got carried away. Your scientists have made some fascinating discoveries—”

His tongue raked along the column of her neck, and she squawked and slapped at the arm he’d wrapped around her, pinning her against his hard chest.

“We are not rutting!” she snapped.

“This is not rutting,” he replied. “It is licking. I enjoy tasting you.”

Every cell in her body lit up like a cheap neon sign. “You really need to learn to ask before you touch me like that.”

“If I ask, you will say no.”

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