Page 16 of A Mate for Vasek (Tallean Mercenaries #11)

Dawn

Dawn blinked, but nothing except the darkness inside the transport greeted her. She reached for the seat’s harness and realized she wasn’t upright anymore. She braced her feet so she wouldn’t slide over to one side. So that was why everything felt wrong.

What had happened? The last thing she remembered was holding on and wondering if they were going to make it as the shuttle veered from side to side. Then nothing.

Had the pirates hit something? Were they even now floating in outer space, completely powerless and slowly leaking oxygen, sitting ducks for the pirates?

She imagined a crew much like the one that had joined Kotch’s company marching in, weapons drawn, then reminded herself that Kotch had gotten lucky.

The ones who’d taken the job had been bad as pirates.

The ones who were good at the job were probably much worse.

What if they were the mutated ones she’d heard of?

There was a scratching noise outside the transport door, and she froze. It was pitch black, and she couldn’t see a thing. The door opened.

“Dawn?”

Dawn huffed out a breath of relief at Vasek’s voice. “I’m here.” She reached toward the sound of his voice, and he met her, pulling her into his arms. God, did it feel good to know she wasn’t alone! She clung to his strong shoulders, burying her face into his chest.

“Are you hurt?”

She tried to assess her body. She was so pumped full of adrenaline that she probably wouldn’t even know if she were hurt. “I… I don’t think so.”

“Good. We have to get moving.”

Moving? Where would they go? Did the shuttle have a secret escape pod she didn’t know about?

He moved, releasing her. She immediately felt totally alone.

“Come on. We need to go on foot.”

On foot? Did that mean we were not in space anymore?

She didn’t remember landing. She didn’t remember much of anything other than being tossed around like chicken in a shake and bake.

She’d gone full-on ragdoll mode since she’d read somewhere that it would increase her odds of survival.

Wherever she’d read that, it must have been correct because she was still alive, and she didn’t have a concussion that she knew of.

She also managed not to puke, which was a miracle.

“Hurry. We need to grab supplies and go. It’s almost dawn.” It took her a moment to realize what he meant. Why was morning bad? Wasn’t the nighttime worse?

“I can’t see in the dark,” she said, reaching her hand out toward where his voice had last come from.

“Fuck. Stay here.”

She did. It wasn’t like she could do anything else.

There was a sound of things being moved around like he was searching for something before a warm glow filled the shuttle outside.

Dawn was carefully getting herself out of the transport as he approached with a lantern.

It wasn’t just the transport that had tilted, but the entire shuttle.

Sudden vertigo had her fighting the bile rising in her throat, and she had to close her eyes.

Collecting all their supplies while tilted like a pinball machine proved to be a challenge, but soon Vasek managed to get a preloaded bag out from the back of the transport and stuff it with extra packs of water and food for her.

How convenient that he already had a bug-out bag ready.

It made Dawn wonder how often he got into pickles like this.

For extra protection, he’d insisted she tie a pair of his shorts onto her hips.

There was no way they would stay up on their own, and on her, they might as well be capris.

He also dug out some self-adhesive bandages and had her wrap the exposed part of her calves with them.

These would’ve come in handy back on New Rhea, but it wasn’t like she could’ve said, “Hey Vasek, can I wear a pair of your shorts and borrow some bandages so I can escape while your back is turned?”

But the most surprising of all was the sheer number of weapons the medic strapped to his body. There was his blaster in a holster attached to his belt, a knife tucked into his boot, another knife on his belt, and a scythe-like thing across his back.

He strapped the lantern onto her body since she was the one who needed it to see, then opened the shuttle’s door.

They were perched precariously in the branches of a tree, or perhaps trees, high off the ground.

Dawn stared out into the jungle canopy in dismay.

They were so high off the ground that she couldn’t see the forest floor because the ambient glow of her lantern couldn’t even reach it.

If she looked too closely, she got queasy again.

“This is good.” Vasek sounded genuinely pleased.

Was this guy serious?

“How is this good? We’ll never make it to the ground.”

“The most deadly predators in these jungles hunt on the forest floor, and they hunt mainly during dawn and dusk. We are safe up here,” he explained as he helped her out onto a solid branch that was nearly as wide as a sidewalk.

Huh, if all the branches were like this, it wouldn’t be too bad.

The first thing Dawn noticed was just how humid it was.

The air felt moist against her skin. The second was the smell of soil and decay.

The first she could do without, but she kind of enjoyed the second.

It had a quality that reminded her of Earth in a way that the forests of New Rhea hadn’t.

The trees were all giant. Absolute units.

Each branch was as big as a trunk back in the forest they’d left just recently.

Everything was green. Even the bark under her feet was covered with a layer of mossy carpeting, and a fern-like plant growing from the crook of the nearest tree branch was almost as tall as her. This was a primordial jungle in every sense of the word.

Had Earth looked like this once?

Vasek squinted at the ship. “Yes. This is ideal. It will be very difficult for the pirates to magnetize to this shuttle in this position. Even cutting into it would be difficult if they wanted to salvage what is inside. And by then, help would be here.”

She perked up at the mention of help. She doubted there was anything nearby, so at least the goal wasn’t to walk to their destination, because she doubted she’d survive that even with capable Vasek protecting her.

And now that she thought about it, she’d heard horrible things about the Vosthean jungles.

There were large predators that roamed the forest floors? If the scary predators were down below, then she was staying up here.

“There is nowhere to land safely nearby, so they’d have to be desperate to be sending anyone down, but we should still put a little distance between us and the ship.”

Vasek led the way through the highway of branches, and she followed behind, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling. The forest slowly started to lighten, and the red glow of dawn peeked through the foliage.

Then she felt it. She glanced around her nervously. She didn’t see anything, but she could swear they were being followed. Instinctively, she reached for Vasek, seeking… comfort? Protection? Validation that she wasn’t imagining things? She wasn’t sure.

“It feels like we’re being followed,” she said, her voice sounding too loud despite all the sounds of the waking jungle.

“We are. There is a stalker on us. Look below.”

Dawn glanced down into the darkened underbrush. At first, she saw nothing. But then there was a movement in the shadows. She adjusted the lantern and stifled a scream. Right under her, pacing back and forth as if waiting for her to fall, was the granddaddy of all monsters.

It moved like a big cat, stealthily, and had a similar shape too. But it also looked like a lizard, especially the head and jaws. It had mottled brown fur, and the parts that weren’t furry looked scaled, though she couldn’t really tell for sure from her angle and the light.

As if realizing that its prey had finally noticed it, the creature froze mid-prowl, staying statue-still.

Then came clicking sounds: they were loud, and everything else in the jungle seemed to quiet in response.

Goosebumps prickled the back of her arms, and a sense of impending danger had her ready to bolt.

Then the creature leaped straight up at her.

She shrieked and nearly tripped over herself to get to Vasek. The big Tallean male wrapped her up in the protective cocoon of his arms.

“It can’t reach you up here. But it can try to scare you so you fall. Ignore it.”

Now he tells her! The thing almost had her too. She wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to stay on the branch if Vasek hadn’t been there.

Vasek pointed to a higher branch overhead. “Let’s set up the tent on that branch. It should be far enough from the crash site. We’ll wait for help there.”

Dawn wasn’t sure how he planned on setting up a tent on a branch, but didn’t question it. She did, however, question how she was going to get up there. She’d need to scale the trunk straight up, and she knew she couldn’t do that. “I can’t get up there.”

“I’ll carry you up. Stay here. I will go up and set up the tent first.”

Dawn released her hold on him reluctantly and grabbed hold of the rough bark.

She watched as he put on a pair of gloves with sharp, pointed fingertips.

Then he leaped, jumping higher than she could possibly hope to jump, grabbed hold of the nearest branch, and was climbing his way up to his destination.

There was enough light to see what he was doing up there, but the crunching of half-dry leaves made it pretty clear to Dawn that the stalker was still below them. Now that she knew it was there, the creature was foregoing stealth altogether. It tried to climb up the nearest trunk to reach her.

When it managed to haul itself a good body’s length, she started to panic.

How was Vasek so sure that it couldn’t reach her up here? She was just about to call out when the creature slid down the wide trunk. Its body just wasn’t made for climbing despite its almost feline shape. Weren’t there big cats on Earth that couldn’t climb because they were too heavy?

Dawn could hear David Attenborough’s memorable voice and cadence explaining it all to her now in her head.

But knowing that it couldn’t climb didn’t make her feel any more relaxed. She kept an eye on it as the sky lightened and the tent started to take shape in the branch above.

Of course! She should’ve known it would be a hanging tent. She’d seen them back on Earth, but those spanned across two or three trees, not just one. But she guessed that with branches the size of trunks, there was no need to worry about whether it could hold their combined weight.

And Tallean males weighed a lot. Vasek was leaner than some, but still very cut and muscular. Whatever material his pants were made of, they molded to his ass and thighs perfectly and she got a generous eyeful from her vantage point.

Over the course of the trip to Vosthea, she’d started seeing him more as a companion and less as the reluctant alien owner who couldn’t wait to offload her at Kean’s compound.

She’d also come to the conclusion that her initial judgment of him had been correct after all.

The next time he went into bloodlust, she’d try her best to stay calm and remember that it was still him.

The alien medic was easy on the eyes too, and as the morning sun came up over the trees and illuminated his damned-near-perfect physique, she let herself enjoy the show.

Too bad nothing more happened between them.

Now that she’d decided she liked him, she wouldn’t mind getting to know him a little better physically.

She bit her bottom lip as she watched him make his way back down to her branch.

Up here the trunk was a little slimmer, and with the gloves he’d put on and the claws on his feet, he was able to move between the branches and the trunk quite well, though it did take a lot of strength.

Currently, she could see those yummy glutes flexing under the fabric of his pants.

Vasek was soon standing with his back to her, this time without the giant pack of their supplies.

“Hold onto me,” he ordered, lowering himself so she could wrap around him.

“I’m not sure I can hold onto you all the way up. And you can’t hold onto me. You need your hands. There has to be another way.”

“There’s no other way.”

He turned to face her. One second her feet were firmly planted on the branch, and the next, she was plastered against his chest, and they were already climbing. She threw her arms and legs around him with a squeal.

Vasek’s response was a throaty chuckle. The nerve!

“See, you can hang on.”

She was too terrified to make a retort lest she disturb him, and they missed their next branch. So she focused on hanging onto him instead. It was easier for her since she was in front of his body, but she worried that their position would hinder his mobility.

She was particularly nervous when they got to the part where they had to shimmy up the trunk.

Luckily for them his arms were long, and the gloves made his hold strong and secure.

They were halfway up when Dawn realized just how dangerously intimate their position was.

Every movement had them rubbing up together, and by the time Vasek was nearing the final branch, something rock-hard pressed deliciously against her.

Primed by the fantastic show she’d gotten earlier, her body reacted, exploding in sudden desire.

There was no way he did not detect her scent.

It was so strong it felt like she was wearing a giant blinking light-up sign with the words Come Fuck Me Now in big bold letters.

And for once in a very long time, she didn’t mind.