“Maybe that’s when I lost touch with reality,” I murmured aloud.
Catman gave me a sharp stare. “You believe you are not experiencing reality?”
I shrugged. “Seems possible. I mean, why should I be the first person on Earth to have extended contact with aliens?”
Catman snickered, and it sounded remarkably like the chuff he’d given outside when I pointed out how dangerous he was. “Who says you are the first?”
True. There were plenty of stories about alien abductions.
“Was Roswell real?” I asked, suddenly eager to know.
“What’s a Roswell?”
“Shit. Of course I get one without a high enough security clearance.”
“I’m not at all certain what you’re talking about. Perhaps the translation matrix hasn’t had time to fully integrate with your neural system.”
“Maybe not.” As I glanced over at him again, he stepped out from behind his end of the metal table, and my eyes instantly dropped to his midsection.
Holy cow. He was huge all over.
His face and hands were bare skin, much like mine except for the color—he was still a neon green. The rest of his body was covered in a fine layer of fur, a light covering somewhere between the kind of hair a male human might grow and the coat on… well, on a cat.
A blush crawled up my cheeks, and I glanced away quickly. “Could you maybe put on some clothes?”
Catman looked down at his body assessingly, and then cocked his head at me. “Am I inadequate to you in some way?”
I blushed harder. “It’s not that. It’s just—on Earth, we prefer to wear clothes with people we don’t know very well.”
Unless, of course, we just picked them up in a bar and are taking them home.
Which was how I had met William.
And look what that got me.
No, better for everyone if the giant gorgeous alien catman covered up.
He shrugged. “Very well. My people are less formal about clothing.”
“Apparently,” I muttered, unable to tear my eyes away as he turned around to pull some clothing items out of a nearby cabinet.
The green skin and black stripes were a little distracting, but even so, his ass was perfect.
In fact, as far as I could tell, all of him was. He was broad and muscular—and strong, I remembered from the way he had scooped me up and carried me inside.
And a cold-blooded killer, the voice in my head reminded me.
Shut up, I told it, or I’m going to lock you away in a cage or something.
Oddly enough, even the memory of the bloody pile of rags Catman had made of the mugger didn’t stop my fingertips from itching to reach out and touch him, to feel that skin under my hands.
Yeah. It was official.
I had totally lost my mind.
Chapter Six
Dax
I was beginning to worry there might be something mentally wrong with my new mate. She said the oddest things, most of which made no sense at all.
I suppose I could have chalked it up to the translation matrix, but every so often, something she said made technical sense—just not in the context of our conversation.
A thumping sound came from outside the ship.
“Oh, flark,” I cursed.
I’d been so fascinated by my mate that I had completely forgotten our current position—parked in the middle of a nature preserve presumably full of indigenous wildlife.
“Computer, external visual, please. One-way.”
A comscreen wall in the medbay shifted from its standard calming green to show an image of two Earth males outside the ship, one of them pounding against it with a confused frown. A third male lay stretched out on the ground next to them.
“Computer, outside audio.”
“There’s definitely something here,” the fist-pounding male said.
The other male crouched down next to the third. “Yeah, well, whatever it is, it gave Brandon a hell of a bump. Knocked him out cold.”
“Computer, query: can we lift off without damaging the males outside?”
Instantly, the ship responded. “Negative. Takeoff will result in severe burns and possible death.”
Well, we couldn’t do that. Unlike the male who had attacked my mate, these three had not done anything dangerous.
“You won’t hurt them, will you?” my mate asked. The scent of her anxiety floated off her, mixed with her own natural scent. Under any other circumstance, I might have found it charming.
Right now, though, I didn’t have time to be charmed. “No,” I replied. “But I will need them to leave.”
“You might be able to roar at them and scare them away,” my mate suggested. “Open the door and stick your head out and yell at them.”
Not a bad idea, but I could almost see her mind twirling as she plotted something.
“And what would you do?” I asked.
She stared at me for a long time, holding my gaze defiantly before finally dropping her eyes to stare at the deck. “Wait until you open the door and run away, probably,” she said sullenly.
“I thought as much.”
“You’re not going to let me do that, are you?”
My inner beast growled. Never.
“No,” I managed to say mildly, shoving the beast down for the moment. But her suggestion had given me an idea. “Computer, external projectors on.”
“Projectors activated.”
I closed my eyes and fell into a half-shift—maintaining my current form’s arms and legs, allowing my hands and head to change. Then I let out a giant roar.
I knew from experience that outside the ship, I would appear as a giant hologram, bigger even than my natural feline form, floating in the air above them.
The two conscious men screamed. The one who’d been knocking on the ship’s hull dashed away. The other grabbed his unconscious friend under the arms and began dragging him in the same direction as the one who’d run.
“Computer,” I said, my words blurry from the interference of my fangs, “as soon as they reach a minimum safe distance, please get us off this godforsaken rock.”
“Acknowledged.” The engines rumbled beneath us, and as soon as I felt the stabilizers kick in as we lifted off, I said, “External projectors off.”
Once the computer
