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“You needn’t fret,” she sighs, and really, I’d swear I canhearher rolling her eyes this time. “We have a whole colony of human women, and soon we’ll have more. Your females adore the males of my planet. It’s unlikely they would take a female against her will.”
I thud back to my ass on my chair. “‘Unlikely?’ Really? And so that makes it okay?”
“Truly. And yes. Trust me.”
I drag a hand through my hair. “Shit, woman.” When I glance up, it’s to watch her nose scrunch in reaction to the first word, which is unbelievably cute on such an alien face. “What’s your plan here?” I ask.
She eyes me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you said you snuck here, and your family is uber protective, yet you’ve flown the coop and traveled across the galaxy.”
“More than one,” she corrects, smirking. “By far.”
I wave that away. “Loads of universes between us and them, got it. But seriously, your family—they’ve got to be looking for you, right?”
Inara purses her lips, and her tail starts to twitch like an irritated feline’s. “I left them a note. I told them not to search for me.”
My eyebrows climb right to my hairline. “They’re going to follow that order? Really?”
Her grimace makes me think yeah, no.
“So we can expect your relatives to swarm us at any moment?”
She shoots me an alarmed look. “No, it will take some time.” Her widened eyes relax as she shakes her ears out. “Perhaps a significant amount of time. A number of ships are already here. It won’t be terribly easy for my siblings to find passage to this planet at a moment’s notice.”
“Can they track the ship you hocked? Here, for example, we’ve got technology that…”
She’s giving me an indulgent smile. “We’re at least that advanced.”
The way she says it so kindly tells me what she really means is her people have spanked the pants off of ours in the LoJacking department. “I disabled the trackers,” she explains.
If one of my sisters or nieces ever took the Boss, drove it far, far away, and turned off ways to verify her location and safety...
I drop my face into my hands. “All right. I can’t hear any more of this.” I scrub at my eyes with the heels of my hands, inhaling like I’m trying to suck French fries up my nose as I meet her eyes again. “Okay. You. Hop up. You’re the guest, so you get guest accommodations. Take my bed.”
Smiling, she gets to her feet and struts to my room, hips provocatively swaying. I’m beginning to think that’s just how she walks. Some sort of natural come-hither, and it works across species, apparently, because…
I want to follow.
With painful intensity, I’m aware that she doesn’t close the bedroom door.
But I’m good. I behave. I busy myself making up the couch with a sheet and knocking off the spare pillows.
“Matt?” Inara asks.
I turn, and then I want to blind myself with a hot poker.
My shirt that I gave her earlier? She’s in it. And although Inara’s long flexible spines stick up enough so that she looks sort of like a one-strip alien porcupine trapped in a shirt, she’s onepretty—
YEAH, SHUT UP, I’M USING THAT WORD TO DESCRIBE HER FROM NOW ON, AND I’M NOT GOING TO FEEL ANY SHAME ABOUT IT ANYMORE, OKAY?
—alien as she stands in front of me in what looks like nothingbutmy shirt.
I try not to let that sink in.Nothing. But. My. Shirt.
It doesn’t matter that she’s an alien; she’s gorgeous, and she’s wearing my clothes and nothing but my clothes.
When she asked me earlier if there was significance to a man giving a woman his shirt, I guess there’s more to it than I thought. There’s something strange and deep and instinctively possessive, having a woman wear your things.
