Page 32 of Tamed By the Alien Warlord
Then she sighs, melts into me, and we both drift in silence for a moment.
After a beat, she mumbles, “You know, when Jasmine and I were kids, we used to play this game. Dreaming up the kind of guy we’d marry one day.”
I smile against her temple. “Let me guess. Strong. Brave. Handsome?”
“Well, yeah. And tall. Very tall. But I don’t think ‘seven-foot alien bondage daddy with a spaceship and a taste for leashes’ was ever on the bingo card.”
I chuckle, the sound low and painful in my throat, but real. “Bondage daddy?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know what you are,” she murmurs, poking my side gently. “You collared me, dragged me across the galaxy, and now you’ve got me snuggling up to you in a medical bed like a lovesick idiot.”
I press a kiss to the top of her head, her wild hair tickling my lips. “And you’re still here.”
“Yeah. I’m still here.” Her voice is soft. “Because you didn’t give up. Because you saved me. Saved Jasmine. Because somehow, against all odds, this insane, blood-soaked mess led me to you.”
I don’t speak. I just hold her tighter.
She nestles in closer, voice fading to a whisper. “Don’t scare me like that again.”
“I’ll try not to blow myself up more than once a week,” I say.
She chuckles, but the sound is wet with tears.
We lie like that for a while. Her breathing evens out. Mine matches hers.
And for the first time in my life, I don’t dream of blood or vengeance.
I dream of her.
CHAPTER 14
GEORGIA
The thing about victory is that it doesn’t always feel like one.
Jasmine’s safe—curled up in a nest of blankets in the Reaper medbay, her hair braided with rough care by a seven-foot alien who used to sharpen knives with his teeth. Lanz’s crew treats her like some war-touched relic. Sacred, untouchable. They nod when they pass, never speak.
And yet...
She won’t meet my eyes. Not for long.
She flinches when anyone laughs too loudly. Her voice, once so quick with jokes and razor sarcasm, now whispers like wind through cracked glass.
I did everything to save her. Tore myself inside out, offered myself to an alien warlord, walked into a lion’s den.
And still, part of me wants to scream becauseit wasn’t enough.
Lanz notices.
Of course he does.
He watches from his medbed throne, one arm gone, torso wrapped like a mummy, eyes dark and distant. It’s like the moment we kissed, the heat between us, that soft quietvulnerability—it all got buried under plasma burns and war wounds.
So I do what any sane, emotionally stable woman would do.
I mess with him.
“You know,” I announce loudly, dropping into the chair beside his bed, “this medbay is tragically lacking a sex hammock.”
