As soon as he walked into his garage and smelled the familiar scents of metal and computer wiring, his muscles unknotted and he relaxed. The minutes flew by as he got his systems booted up and running. Around midnight, his radar pinged again. He plotted out the location, and according to the navigational coordinates, there was an unidentified spacecraft that had landed in the Arctic Circle.
He checked again, and sure enough, the results were the same. His machine was picking up data that showed that an unidentified flying object had entered the atmosphere and traveled at a high velocity toward Earth, with its trajectory headed straight toward the Arctic Circle.
“That can’t be right…” he muttered. “Surely someone’s military would have intervened…”
He picked up the phone. Not many of their clan left the area. And if they did leave, they didn’t stay gone for very long. Except for Garrett, the rock star, and Eli’s cousin, who worked for NASA. He’d always wanted to be an astronaut, and you couldn’t do that in Oregon. So, he’d lived at the International Space Station in Alabama for a while, and now he was stationed in Houston.
“Hello,” his cousin said. “Eli? What’s wrong?”
Of course, his cousin thought there was a problem. Eli never contacted him. They spoke twice a year when his cousin came home for a visit. Maybe Eli needed to do a better job with that relationship. “Nothing’s wrong. I have a question.”
“Okay,” his cousin said. He sounded like he’d been in a deep sleep.
“Have you gotten any reports of a satellite moving out of orbit? Or a rogue asteroid landing?”
“No, why? What’s happened?” His cousin was aware of Eli’s hobbies.
So, Eli told him all about the radar and the readouts.
There were a few shuffling sounds and then his cousin was back. “No, I don’t have anything. No messages, no alerts. I couldn’t tell you if I did if it was classified, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
Eli wasn’t worried precisely. He was curious. Fascinated. He couldn’t believe no one else in his family was intrigued by the idea of aliens. At least his cousin was one of the more tolerant members of his family.
Eli’s friends didn’t care either. As supportive as his best friend Jackson was about most things, he didn’t understand Eli’s long-standing obsession with finding life on another planet.
“This earth’s good enough for me,” Jackson had said. “I don’t need more.”
“That’s not the point,” Eli had said. “The point is to learn about the rest of the universe and about the things we don’t understand.”
Jackson had tossed a ball at his head then, and Eli had dodged it. He might be nerdy, but he was still a dragon shifter.
His cousin moved on from the topic, asking about the clan. Eli rubbed his forehead. Not even a NASA astronaut wanted to talk about his experiments. Maybe it was time for him to go out to the ocean.
He left his equipment running and ran out toward the cliffs. Once he was there, he leaned his head back, letting the misty drizzle pepper his face. He shed his clothes and let his instincts take over, transforming into his dragon form. He jumped from the edge of the cliff, soaring out over the rocky beach.
In the distance, he saw a humpback whale as it flipped its tail through a wave. Eli spread his wings and soared, trying to clear his mind of the beautiful human assistant who dominated his thoughts. She wasn’t his, and she never would be, and he was going to have to face that. But for now, just being home would have to be enough for him.
6
Ava
The day after Eli drove her home, he started acting oddly. She noticed it right away that morning. Instead of holding the door open for her as she walked in, he was already in his office. And then when she took a coffee break, he declined to join her. And finally, when the whole office went out to lunch, he said no.
He wasn’t in a bad mood, and he didn’t seem to have anything going on that was out of the ordinary or anything that was overly stressful. Sometimes he did have special requests from state officials or politicians, or he’d have a journalist call who wanted to do a televised interview. But that day had seemed fairly routine, yet Eli remained aloof.
For a split second, she thought about asking him if anything was wrong.
He’s not your friend. He’s your boss.
She couldn’t blur the lines. Despite Ashley’s warning and the warnings of the rest of the staff about how prickly Eli could be, he was easy to work with. She suspected that was because they were so much alike. They both approached the work with a dogged determination, and neither of them liked being interrupted while they were deep in thought.
He was still polite, and he was still a perfectionist about his work, so they continued to get along. They just got along while working, and there was no small talk or extra chatter.
She missed it. She missed him.
But it was still a fabulous job, and she wasn’t going to complain.
Two weeks after he had pulled away from her, he handed her a cream-colored piece of cardstock. “Here,” he said, handing it to her with no explanation. “This is for you.”
“What is it?” she asked, even as she began to read the details.
“It’s a charity gala. It’s a fundraiser for the hospital, and the CEO invites us every year.”
“Oh, that sounds nice.” She looked up at Eli’s face. He didn’t look like he thought it was very nice. She’d attended plenty of galas while she was growing up. She’d learned to eat a
