Page 23 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

To her credit, Cordelia made it a few minutes before Rentir was forced to pick her up again. Her body was shutting down on her. She wasn’t dying—not yet—but she was weak, pitifully weak.

She thought the stab wound might be giving way to infection, hot and relentlessly throbbing as it was.

Her brush with drowning hadn’t helped the situation.

On top of that, the breeze that had been refreshing before her surprise dip in the river was now keeping her body from regaining the warmth she’d lost in the frigid water.

She couldn’t stop shivering, and she knew it was scaring Rentir.

He’d given up his jacket already, but the wet fabric wasn’t doing much to help.

As much as she resented her reliance on him, she was grateful he was so willing to bear her weight.

It wasn’t in her nature to rely on others.

Her mother had trained that out of her young, having learned the hard way what could happen when you allowed yourself to depend too heavily on a man.

The intention behind the lesson had been to ensure her survival in a world that wasn’t made for her, but in the end…

Cordelia couldn’t deny that it had made her paranoid and closed off.

That had kept her alive, but at times it felt like a half-life.

She’d never been able to open up enough to enjoy connecting with another person, even other women.

She looked up at Rentir’s strange face. His big, green eyes were so expressive. Right now, they were flinty and focused, scanning restlessly over the forest as he carried her.

“That was quick thinking back there,” she remarked, unable to stomach the silence.

He glanced askance at her.

“Jumping into the river. It was using infrared technology, wasn’t it?”

“Infrared?” he echoed, frowning.

“Uh, measuring heat as a source of vision?”

Understanding lit in his eyes. “Ah. Yes, that is how it operates. It cannot see well through the water.”

“It was a drone, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. They don’t usually deploy them to the surface like that. It’s… a strangely desperate act. They’re meant to monitor the airspace around the Gidalan—clear debris and deter pirates, that sort of thing.”

“Pirates?”

He shrugged. “I have never seen any, but I suppose they must exist.”

“Space pirates. Shit. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get picked up.”

He seemed to bristle at the thought. “Yes. I suppose you’re right.”

Another awkward silence. Damn it.

“I’m sorry for being a burden,” she blurted.

He cast her a look of astonishment. “A burden? Why would you say that?”

“You are quite literally carrying me around. I think that’s the textbook definition, actually.”

He snorted, shaking his head. She ducked her head as they slid beneath the towering frond of a green fern.

“If you believe that holding you like this burdens me, then human women are less perceptive than you led me to believe.”

Her cheeks flushed despite her poker face. “If you’re talking about the fact that you’re, ah, standing at attention… I was honestly starting to believe you’re just built that way.”

“Standing at…” Now he was blushing. He cleared his throat, avoiding her gaze under the pretense of scrutinizing the path ahead. “No, that… that is not how I am built.”

“Just happy to see me then,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She patted his shoulder.

“How did you become the Commander of your ship?” he asked, changing the subject.

That was a softball, and she intended to take it.

“Well, I did ROTC in high school—that’s a kind of program that prepares you for the military.

My mom could never have afforded college, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in the same trailer park I grew up in.

It’s probably ungrateful of me to say so, but I didn’t want to struggle the rest of my life the way she had.

Military offered a stipend for school, so I enlisted. ”

He nodded, though she could tell he hadn’t quite caught everything she said.

“I did eight years, got my master’s degree during that time.

When I got out, I was eligible to join a special program that the government had set up to meet the demand for off-world colonists.

By that point, greed had basically chewed our planet up and spit it back out.

Even the most generous estimations held that it would take three generations to reverse the damage, and that was assuming we stopped polluting the Earth the next day.

” She gave him a droll look. “That was not going to happen, so everyone who could afford it was bailing out.

“They needed pilots, and I was one, with leadership experience to boot. When it came time to pull names for the next mission, mine came up.” Regret gripped her throat, and she found she couldn’t finish that particular tale.

“Anyway, it didn’t work out. A few years later, I got called on again for this mission, and…” She laughed bitterly. “Well, I guess it didn’t work out, either.”

Cursed. She swallowed the thought like poison.

“Perhaps it will yet,” Rentir said.

She looked up at him in surprise.

“Your story isn’t over yet.”

That coaxed a genuine smile from her. “Are you an optimist, Rentir?”

His leonine nose scrunched up at that. “Not often.”

Her smile grew. “Just for me, huh?”

That pinkish undertone in his cheeks deepened.

“Yes,” he said, casting her a look so tender it made her stomach do something funny.

“Just for you.” He looked away, clearing his throat.

“You make me want to believe it can be better. When you speak of your homeworld… it makes me realize what a gift we have here. I want to share it with you. This world, unpolluted by greed or misogyny, without the Aurillon in orbit above us waiting to taint it all. I want to believe I can give it to you.”

Her heart fluttered in a girlish way that only one other man had ever been able to call forth. She smothered the feeling.

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re kind of intense?”

“Yes,” he said seriously.

She grinned, shaking her head.

Rentir’s foot slid over a moss-coated rock, jostling her in his arms, and she couldn’t help the small sound of pain that escaped her as her vision flashed white.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Are you alright?”

“I’m good.” She was lying through her teeth.

He gave her a look. “You do that too readily.”

“Do what?” She dabbed at the sweat beading on her upper lip. Her skin was growing feverish enough that the chill of her damp clothes was a welcome relief.

“Lie.”

She looked up at him in surprise. At times, he seemed so na?ve and guileless that she forgot that it wasn’t quite reality. She’d watched him kill a man with grim efficiency.

“What was your job?” she asked. “Before the rebellion, I mean.”

He glanced away. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “Security.”

“So that guy today… he wasn’t the first person you’ve…?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Killed? No.”

The tone in his voice was enough to make her drop the topic. His ears were pinned flat against his head.

So, not innocent—but not happy about it, either. Fair enough. She’d known plenty of soldiers with regrets. She had a few of her own, though none of them involved killing. She was grateful to have avoided that over her brief career.

If she could go back in time, she wasn’t sure she would have joined the military, though she was grateful for all she’d learned during her tenure.

The politics were too muddy for her to be confident that everything she’d done had been morally justifiable, despite how they’d tried to impress upon her that it was.

Rentir… he’d never had a choice. God only knew what he’d been asked to do, and his handlers didn’t seem like the type to try and polish it up with a sheen of justification.

Content to drop it, she let her cheek press against his shoulder, and he rewarded her with a deep purr.