Page 6 of Alien Jeopardy (Mated & Afraid #1)

Breathe, breathe, don’t scream.

It’s not a great mantra, but it’s better than giving in to the fire in my blood that seems to demand I jump this strange alien’s bones.

Exhibitionism, thou art my nemesis.

If I make it through this, I’m going to cross stich that and hang it on my wall.

The alien’s stopped advancing, and he scratches the base of one horn, a confused look on his face.

Something drips from the talons on the tips of his wings, steadily hitting the ground under him.

Guilt swims through me, and I scrub a hand down my own face.

He can’t help that I don’t speak his language, and he certainly isn’t to blame for my body’s reaction to him?—

Wait.

Wait .

My eyes narrow on the liquid dripping from his wings. Slowly, my desire-addled brain attempts to put two and two together.

I palm the back of my thighs, which I distinctly remember hurting as we fell from the ship. They don’t hurt anymore, but my fingertips are definitely reporting some sort of scratch back there.

“Did you fucking poison me?” I whisper, furious and yet still too damned horny to do more than glare at him.

He takes another step forward, and I karate chop the air between us, baring my teeth. Compared to his, they’re really not very intimidating at all, but he should know I mean business. “I invoke the wrath of Clippy,” I tell him.

The alien backs up, murmuring things in a calm voice like I’m some kind of rabid animal.

Hell, maybe I am. Who knows what kind of venom this species has? Could be I have alien rabies!

“Clippy?” he repeats, sounding for all the world like he’s chewing the name. He points at me. “Clippy?” he repeats, a small, guileless smile replacing his frown.

I blow out a breath, annoyed, because he is cute cute, and whether that’s the maybe-rabies venom straight-up frying my braincells or a real observation, I don’t know.

“No.” I shake my head. “No.”

“No,” he agrees, nodding. He points at me, tilting his head the other way. “No?” he asks, pointing at me again.

I grumble in annoyance. We are so not doing the name game right now.

His grin deepens, though, and I squeeze my thighs together, like that’s going to solve my problems. News flash: it does not solve anything.

He taps his chest again. “Ka-Rexsh.”

Shit. I guess we are doing the name game. I close my eyes, doing my best to repeat my new mantra and get oxygen to my also new wanna-bang-an-alien brain.

“Kaw-wrekch,” I try, pointing at him.

He repeats his name, and I do my best to mimic him. Rinse and repeat.

“Kah-rexsh?” I attempt for the tenth time, exasperated.

Finally, he lets out a little laugh, shaking his own head and then nodding and pointing at me. Okay, close enough, then.

“Ellison.”

He frowns. “Elleyyzzon.”

“My friends call me Ell,” I tell him, then scrunch my nose because while we might be paired up, we aren’t friends. I might have gotten off against his washboard alien abs, but that doesn’t mean we’re friends.

Confusion twists his mouth. Not his brow, though, because that forehead is all horn and it ain’t moving.

“Ell,” I repeat, trying not to get any more frustrated than I already am.

I just have to get through this, and then I’ll have scratched off my bucket list item of being on a reality TV show. I need to take it one minute at a time. I blow out a long breath.

“Ell,” he repeats. His face lights up as I give him a tentative nod, and I find myself grinning back before I can think better of it.

I wipe the expression off my face as fast as I can, though, because the big green dude takes another step towards me. I do not need to encourage him to get closer, so I do another karate chop, causing him to stop in his tracks.

I want to ask him about the scratches on my legs, about the stuff that’s dripping from the tips of his wings, but I rationally can admit that sort of communication is going to be impossible at this point.

My chest heaves as I sigh.

Alright. Now that we’ve established what we’re going to call each other during this cursed season of Intergalactic Least Amazing Race , I take a look around, absorbing our surroundings.

There’s a chill in the air, a sort of outdoor icy crisp to it that reminds me of the end of fall.

Pine trees stretch as far as I can see, the weak light from whatever sun is in this solar system filtering through various shades of green.

A shiver goes through me, and I fervently wish I’d worn something warmer to sleep in.

I’m no Girl Scout, seeing as how things like that pretty much dried up after the Roth invasion, but I know one thing for certain in my bones.

It’s going to be frigid once the sun goes down tonight.

And all I have on are these thin Hawaiian floral print pajamas to keep warm.

That, and the near-blinding heat scorching me from the inside out, turning my lady parts achy all over again the minute I think about it.

Holding my hands up, in an attempt to keep him from touching me, I take a few steps towards him, and then reach up on my tip toes to point at the tip of the webbed wing closest to me.

His eyes narrow as he tracks my movement.

I jab my finger at the talon again, then swivel so he can see the backs of my legs and point at the scratches there.

He scratches at the base of his horn again.

I repeat the motion, pointing at the tip of his dripping talon, and then to my scratches, waiting for him to tell me something I know I won’t be able to understand anyway.

This is getting old really fast.

I start to do it again, pointing to his talons and to my legs—mind getting duller by the moment, heat getting, well, hotter, by the moment, too—when his arms scoop me up, and those dripping talons scrape down my back.

My eyes roll back in my head at the pure fucking pleasure of it, another orgasm building from the pressure of his talons on my skin alone.

Heat builds, his mere touch fanning the flames I’d done a pretty okay job of keeping at bay, when it clicks.

If there was any doubt that whatever is dripping from his wings was making me horny, it’s gone now. I’m about five seconds away from sticking my hands down my shorts and finishing myself off.

My breathing’s rapid, and his golden eyes devour me as I stare up at him, open-mouthed, needing him frantically, knowing in my head that it’s not real, that it’s some biological response to what he’s done, when a strange beeping song fills the air around us.

A drone plunges into the clearing, and Ka-Rexsh growls, pulling me into his side and wrapping a wing around me protectively.

My heart skips a beat because I might not ever admit it again, but being treated like a fragile little princess might just do it for me. It’s either that or the maybe-rabies venom melting my neural pathways.

Who’s to say?

I am a connoisseur of all things alien fanfic, and though this would tick a few of my favorite tag boxes in a story, living it is an entirely different kettle of fish.

I peek out from around his wing, trying my very best not to hump his tree-trunk thigh and mostly succeeding, and catch sight of a thick chunk of writing.

In bold letters, a logo screams across the drone’s shell in English, and then again in the same font in a language I can’t make heads or tails of.

I force my hips still mid-hump, my jaw going slack, the headache redoubling behind my eyes.

Mated and Afraid .

“Oh, shit .”

It dawns on me at the same time the alien nuzzles the top of my head with his nose, murmuring alien nonsense at my obvious distress.

“Fuck me sideways and call me Clippy.”

We’re not just partners. We’re not mates in the way Australians mean it, either.

Nope.

We’re mated -mated, in the way a lot of the alien species mean it.

I’ve done minimal actual research on the few alien species we know about on Earth, thanks to the Federation declassifying some of their documents a couple years ago.

Binging fanfic about aliens only gets you so far in the old knowledge bin, but thanks to that, mated is absolutely a term I’m familiar with.

It's the most common alien fanfic trope, after all.

Mated means forever to most of them.

Which means that it isn’t maybe-rabies venom.

I swallow hard, staring at the metal box emblazoned with that colorful logo.

It was mating venom, and if my alien fanfic habit has taught me anything all, it’s that the venom’s started something pretty damned serious.

I’m in deep shit, and—I’m in heat.