Heat

Tagen pulled his hand gently free of hers. “You ca

Tagen pushed his chair back from the table and got up. He could smell his sweat thick in the air. He could smell hers, dizzying with the female scent of her.

Only Heat.

He returned to his room and locked the door.

*

Deathwatch Northwest. Dedicated to accurately reporting the casualties of mankind on the Pacific Coastline and beyond. Hoping to go nationwide in five years. How admirable.

Every death, every single one, was listed, along with whatever details were available. Some entries had photos or even video accompaniments if they were newsworthy. Most were just one-liners with name, age, and place and cause of death listed. There was some confusion—deaths listed under the deceased’s place of birth instead of death, and once in a while, the same dead person was listed by more than one volunteer ‘reporter’—but all in all, it was a pretty solid site. Morbid as all hell, but solid.

Fortunately, it came with its own search engine. Unfortunately, ‘massive head trauma’ appeared to be the In thing for folks to die from these days, and it covered everything from car accidents to shootings. Daria sifted through dozens of homicides, suicides, accidents and even one genuine God-smite (Jerry E. Weems, age 54, dead in a corn field in Succotash, Oregon, with a meteorite the size of a golfball smack between his eyes), and finally gave up and printed everything off. She’d sort through it later, with Tagen’s help. If he was in the mood to help. He’d been in kind of a weird mood lately.

Daria found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged it down selfconsciously, not that it was riding high or even that Tagen was in the room at the moment. And not that he was always staring at her when he was in the room. And not (even she would admit this) that it was particularly unpleasant when he did stare at her. Startling, yes. U

She picked up her printed pages and headed out to find him, crossing her mental fingers that he would be moderately cheerful.

He wasn’t in the living room and the TV was off, but when she switched it on, Law & Order was playing, proving he’d been here last. Daria stood at the bottom of the stairs, tapping the rolled-up printouts into her palm. He’d taken to hiding out during what he called the ‘worst hours’, which were for him anytime between 10 and 4, and she was loathe to interrupt him. He didn’t look like he was sleeping well these days.

But finding the bad guy seemed more important than Tagen’s nap. Hesitantly, she moved upstairs and down the hall to hover outside Tagen’s door. She waited there for a stifling stretch of time, but even pressing her ear to the door betrayed no sounds of life on the other side. She didn’t want to just barge in on him, not when things were already so strained between them. On the other hand, she didn’t want to stand out here for the rest of the day, either. After a while, feeling faintly ridiculous, she knocked.

Behind her, the bathroom door opened and Tagen emerged, frowning his ‘Can I help you?’ frown. He wore exactly one towel and nothing else and he was beaded liberally with moisture. ‘Wore’ was perhaps a generous word. ‘Draped’ would be more accurate. He was holding it on with one hand, and it hung alarmingly low on his left hip.

Daria found a spot on the ceiling to stare at. “I brought you the first bunch of dead people,” she said loudly. “All head trauma cases, although it looks like lots of them actually have other injuries in addition to the head stuff. The search engine’s pretty good, but it doesn’t have a lot of advanced options.”

“What are you looking at?”

Daria risked a glance. He was searching the same spot on the ceiling she had been fixed on, and he couldn’t have looked more bewildered. Or wet.

“Nothing,” she said. “Look, I’ll come back when you have more clothes on.”

Tagen looked down at his towel and then glanced up through the black curtain of his hair. Something in his stoic expression—God knew what—made her blush.

“Here,” she said, thrusting her pages at him.

He didn’t take them. “I do not read N’Glish,” he said patiently. “If you will wait, I will dress and join you downstairs.”

“Okay.” She shuffled back a few steps to allow him to move past her and into his room. He brushed at the door as he went through, but it didn’t close. It struck the locking plate and then slowly and silently swung back open.

Daria backed up toward the stairs, biting at her lip. Then, hardly able to believe she was doing it, she crept forward and peeked into his room.

He hadn’t lost the towel yet. Not entirely, anyway. He was using it to briskly dry his hair and it completely covered his head and nothing else.

He was lean and he was muscular. He was fit in a way that never came from deliberate sculpting at a gym. He was a soldier, he’d seen combat, and the scars that proved it somehow enhanced his perfection instead of detracting from it. It solidified his reality, firmly removing him and his amazing body from movie-star fantasy and putting him back in her house. Back within reach.

She’d never seen a body like that in real life. She didn’t think people had bodies like that in real life, not without heavy chemical interference. Broad chest, ripped abs, bulging biceps, powerful thighs, athletic and rippling muscles, and a butt you could bounce a quarter off of. She could see the shadowy indication of his essential maleness. If he turned just a little, she would be able to see it all.

Daria ducked back into the hall, one hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her breathing, dead-certain that he could hear it. Hell, he could probably hear her heart pounding.

‘Remember,’ she thought faintly, ‘It’s perfectly natural to check out an alien’s ass. You said so yourself. It doesn’t make you in the least bit weird.’

She leaned over and looked again.

He draped the towel over the back of a chair and crossed down the side of the bed to the boxes where his clothes were kept. He reached and then he paused, and Daria yanked herself back into the hall, her pulse now roaring in her ears, convinced he had seen her in the reflection of the window. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t come and close the door or call her a pervert, or anything.

‘Close enough!’ she told herself shrilly. ‘Just get out of here before he does catch you!’

Good idea. Daria eased forward and peeked.

He was stepping into his uniform pants, completely oblivious to her. They fastened down the side with about a billion catches invisible to Daria’s eye. As he aligned them, she found herself staring at his broad shoulders, at his arms bunching while he tugged and tightened, at his hair falling long over his face.

This was the man who had been checking her out every day for a week.

No, strike that. This was the alien who had been studying her for a week. There was a difference.

Tagen picked up his shirt, a kind of tank-top-ish thing in brilliant white, and snapped it out. His entire torso kind of rolled as he pulled it on. It was like watching the tide come in. His body, starkly defined beneath that concealing fabric, instantly became even sexier.

Hang on, since when was the alien invader keeping her prisoner in her own home ever sexy?

She was blushing even before her mind had finished asking its indignant question. Since about the second day, and she damn well knew it.

Tagen shrugged into his uniform jacket, again with that unconscious strength and grace that took the bones right out of her. It, too, had about a billion fastens, but here Daria’s common sense finally got the better of her. There was nothing else for him to wear. He was going to turn around and find her unless she bailed.

Daria backed up and headed for the stairs on tiptoes, moving with such painstaking silence that she knew she must look like a Scooby-Doo villain. Once she was on the stairs, she scampered down at speed and then raced through the hall to the kitchen. She didn’t stop ru

‘I’m a peeper!’ she thought dazedly. ‘God, I’m a total pervert!’

She couldn’t believe how turned on she was. She knew she should be ashamed. She knew she’d be mortified if she’d been on the receiving end of an alien peep-job after a shower. Mortified, hell. She’d be hysterical. Probably throw herself out the nearest window, and never mind whether the peeping alien in question had a sexy ass or not.

What would Tagen have done if he’d seen her? Probably cover up and tell her to leave in that extremely calm and dignified voice he used when he was two hairs shy of royally pissed-off. At the very least, he’d close the door. But just for a moment, Daria imagined something very different. Just for a moment, she saw him turn, see her, pause to let their eyes really meet (his smoldering with that eerie golden fire), and then he came towards her, all right. He even closed the door, but first he pulled her inside.

No words. She wasn’t very good at this fantasy thing and never had been. She couldn’t begin to imagine what Tagen would actually say in such a situation and anyway, he was pretty close-mouthed at the best of times. He would not speak, he’d just pull her against him and let her undress the body she’d just watched him clothe.

Oh Jesus, this was the most ridiculous—

Tagen’s talons came clicking down the hall. Daria quickly fumbled down a tumbler and tried to pretend she’d been thoroughly engrossed in pouring a glass of water for the last six minutes. He crossed without speaking to the table and sat.

“Can I get you anything?” she offered brightly. Way too brightly.

“Please.”

She put a little ice in the water and brought it to him. He smiled when he took it. He didn’t look like a man who knew he’d been peeped at. Or if he did, he didn’t look like he minded.

“You have been a considerate host,” he said. “Far beyond my expectations.”

As compliments went, it was never going to replace ‘You smell purdy’, but it still made her blush. Well, it was that or the memory of him naked.

“You have information for me?”

The question served to center her back in the here and now. She looked around for her printouts and fetched them from the counter where she’d discarded them in the throes of Fantasyland. “Maybe.” She came to the table and sat beside him, not close enough to touch, but certainly close enough to think about touching.

“These are all the massive head trauma deaths for the Pacific coast for the last week,” she said, fa

“Week?”

“Seven days.”

“Ah.” He flipped through the papers. “So many.”

“I know. They’re not all murders,” she added defensively. “I was just getting screen-blind.”