Page 5 of Tamed By Her Touch

Clair winked at him and set about making him a steaming cup. She added sugar and creamer and then crossed to his side of the lab to hold it right under his nose.

Kaelus inhaled deeply. For a moment, a look of interest crossed his face…then he frowned and shook his head.

“No, I do not want it.”

Clair lifted her eyebrows.

“So you’re not even going to try it? Are you naturally rude or do you really have to work at it?”

He frowned.

“I am not being ‘rude!’ Fine—I will taste it just this once.”

“Good.” Clair handed him the cup and he took a careful sip of the steaming liquid.

His eyebrows lifted in apparent surprise.

“Oh—it’s bitter and sweet at the same time!”

“Yup, that’s coffee for you.” Clair winked at him and crossed back to her own side of the lab. “You’re welcome, sugar,” she told him. “Now maybe we can get down to work.”

3

CLAIR

In the coming weeks and months, Clair was unfailingly polite, perky, and cheerful. It was like her mother had always said—“If you can’t win them over, kill them with kindness.” And that was what Clair intended to do.

She continued to spread her things all over the lab, regularly crossing to Kaelus’s side whenever she needed to use a piece of equipment or borrow something. If he complained, she gave him wide, innocent eyes and remarked on how it was much nicer to share and get along than to be stingy and fight all the time.

She made him a cup of coffee every morning too. And though the big Hybrid never asked for it, he always took it and drank the whole thing. In fact, it made a noticeable improvement in his mood, though he was still grumpy and distrustful of humans—herself included.

By being so relentlessly cheerful, Clair managed to stave off a fight for the whole first month…but that was when she made the mistake of using his Molecular Resonance Analyzer without permission.

The MRA, as she privately called it, was an amazing piece of Kindred technology and Clair had been dying to get her hands on it from the moment she first saw it.

It looked something like an extremely high-tech electron microscope, though instead of a single eyepiece it had a large, curved viewscreen that projected three-dimensional molecular models in glowing colors. According to Kaelus, it could analyze biological material down to the molecular level and determine not only which compounds were present but also how those compounds interacted with different kinds of living tissue.

Apparently it could even model how a substance might be metabolized by different alien species, which made it invaluable to a Xenopharmacologist who spent his life attempting to turn strange alien substances into useful medicines.

It was also, unfortunately, very useful to a Xenobotanist, which Clair had pointed out to him several times.

Kaelus had not been impressed.

“You have your own analysis equipment,” he had told her when she asked to use the MRA the first time.

“Yes, but mine isn't half as good as this thing,” Clair had protested. “You could probably tell what I ate for breakfast just by having me breathe on it.”

“I have no desire to know what you ate for breakfast.”

“Well, that's good because mostly I just have coffee.”

“I am aware,” he had growled, throwing a pointed look at the coffee machine she had installed beside the sink despite his objections. “The entire laboratory is aware.”

But he still hadn't let her use the MRA.

Which was extremely irritating because it sat approximately twelve feet away from her workstation, gleaming at her from the other side of the black line like some kind of forbidden scientific fruit.

Still, Clair had behaved herself…mostly.