Page 13 of Deserted

He stood, his massive frame unfolding with that fluid grace that never failed to mesmerize me. “Stay out of the systems next time.”

“Aw, he cares.” I placed a hand over my heart in mock surprise.

His look was flat. “I care about not dying of dehydration.”

I rolled my eyes but smiled anyway. This whole thing was weird. Alien tech. Alien desert. Alien man. And now, alien flirtation, apparently. Because no matter how grumpy he tried to act, I wasn’t imagining the way his eyes dropped to my mouth. Or the way his tail twitched every time I touched my hair.

I made a strategic retreat to the other side of the small common area, busying myself with reorganizing my meager possessions while my face burned. Smooth, Jas. Real smooth.Accidentally propositioning the alien warrior who’s keeping you alive. A+ survival strategy.

But when I dared to glance up again, I caught him watching me, something almost like amusement softening his stern features. His tail swayed gently behind him, a rhythmic movement that seemed unconscious. It was... strangely captivating.

“Four hours,” he said suddenly.

I blinked. “What?”

“Until the storm clears. Four hours.”

Four more hours trapped in this shelter with him. Four more hours of this strange, electric tension. Four more hours of pretending I wasn’t increasingly drawn to someone who wasn’t even human.

“Great,” I said, aiming for nonchalance and landing somewhere near desperate. “Can’t wait.”

His tail twitched again, and I wondered if it gave away his thoughts the way a human’s face might. If so, I desperately needed a translation guide. Because something told me surviving the next four hours would be a hell of a lot harder than surviving the alien desert.

The temperature dropped first,which made no sense on a planet hot enough to fry an egg on my forehead. Then, with a sound like a dying whale, the environmental controls went haywire. Red warning lights flashed across the console as the shelter’s system fought a losing battle against whatever was happening outside.

“What the hell?” I pressed my palm against the wall, feeling it vibrate beneath my touch. “Is this normal?”

Rhaekar stalked to the control panel, his movements tense and controlled. “Radiation surge from the storm. Overwhelming the cooling systems.”

As if to punctuate his explanation, the lights flickered once, twice, then dimmed to an eerie emergency glow. And with that dimming came the heat—not gradually, but all at once, like someone had opened the door to a blast furnace. Within seconds, sweat beaded along my hairline and trickled down my spine.

“Fuck,” I gasped, already feeling my clothes sticking to my skin. “What happened to ‘advanced alien technology’?”

His golden eyes gleamed in the low light as his fingers flew over the controls. “Legion tech. Not designed for anomalies of this magnitude.”

“Great. So we’re going to bake alive in here?”

He didn’t answer immediately, focused on whatever emergency protocols he was engaging. The shelter’s systems responded with a series of angry beeps that didn’t sound promising.

I peeled my shirt away from my skin, already soaked through. “Jesus, it’s like a sauna in here.”

“Remove excess clothing,” he ordered without looking at me, still working frantically at the console. “Conserve your body’s cooling mechanisms.”

“Excuse me?”

“Human physiology is inefficient at temperature regulation. You will overheat faster than I will.”

Well. Hard to argue with that kind of cold biological assessment. I stripped down to my tank top and shorts, fanning myself like some sort of stranded pin-up girl. The relative lack of clothing helped, but not much. The heat was relentless, pressing against my skin like a physical force.

Rhaekar finally abandoned the console with a growl of frustration. “System is locked. Self-protection protocol.” He turned to a storage compartment and yanked out what looked like a thin silver mat. “Emergency thermal regulation.”

“A space blanket?” I asked incredulously. “It’s already hot enough to cook meat in here!”

“Heat shield. Reflects ambient temperature.” He unfurled the mat on the floor, the material gleaming strangely in the emergency lighting. “It will protect from radiation and extreme heat.”

And then came the kicker: only one heat-shielded mat. Just one.

I looked at the mat, then at him, then back at the mat. It was barely big enough for one of us, let alone both—especially considering his massive frame took up about twice the space of an average human.

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