Page 40 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

Cordelia followed Rentir through the stark halls until they gave way to more of that opulent architecture that apparently only the auretians were worthy of enjoying. Rentir kept glancing over his shoulder at her, his expression torn.

He held open a door for her, and humid air thick with the sumptuous smell of fresh blossoms filled her senses. She grew heavy-lidded as they stepped into the big glass dome, filled so densely with plants and mist that she could only make out the shape of the building from the vaulted ceiling.

“What is this place?” she breathed, turning in a circle.

“This is the conservatory. All the plants are from Auretia.”

The foliage was silvery gray and palest white, and the blossoms were every shade of jewel tone.

Some flowers were as small as her pinky finger and numbered in the thousands, while others were bigger than her head and made their stalks droop under their weight.

The smell was overpowering, but not in the eye-watering way of a heavy perfume.

No, the scents of these blooms were sweet and musky and rich, layering over each other so that each breath allowed her to pick out some new smell she hadn’t noticed before. It was incredible.

“Not many of the others know this place.” His attention was pinned to her with no interest in any of the splendor around them. “The only reason I’m familiar with it is because…”

“Because?” She pressed, letting go of a burgundy blossom. It sprang from her fingertips and bounced wildly at the end of its stem.

“I served as security for the overseers,” he said, his tail twitching at the tip but otherwise unusually still. “They often took their meetings here. It reminded them of home.”

She wound down a path through the plants, exploring as Rentir trailed behind her. The sun was beginning to set on them, the room darkening bit by bit. She expected an explosion of color like what she’d experienced on Yulaira, but the only thing that glowed in the darkness was Rentir.

She hummed, studying the glowing spots over the bridge of his nose.

“What?” he asked in a small voice.

“It’s so dark. Everything in here—except for you.”

“Ah. I’m out of place.”

She shook her head slowly. “You’re better than this place.”

His face crumpled, and he looked down at his feet.

“What’s wrong?” She stepped closer.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but his voice was thick with emotion.

He flinched when her hand fell on his arm, yet when he looked up, his eyes were burning with lust. She swayed toward him, drawn like a moth to a flame by his intensity, but he took a step back and pivoted away from her. His glowing tail twitched with agitation behind him.

The rejection stung, but only for a moment. He was clearly grappling with something, and she had a feeling that it didn’t have anything to do with her. Or at least that she wasn’t at fault for it.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

“We are talking,” he replied, a nervous edge in his voice.

She huffed. “Yeah, I guess we are, but…”

Lights flickered on around them, illuminating the garden like a Christmas light show.

Floating lanterns drifted along the path above their heads as tiny flickering lights lit up the trunks and branches of trees.

The path itself glowed softly beneath their feet like UV-reactive paint under a black light.

She sat on a nearby bench carved from glowing white stone. A little brook ran past it, babbling over smooth, rounded rocks. She beckoned him to join her. After a moment’s hesitation, he did, sitting as far down on the opposite end as he could without falling over the edge.

“You’re acting weird, you know?” she said.

He cleared his throat but offered no defense.

“If it’s something I did…”

“It isn’t,” he said quickly. “I do not want you to think that. You are beyond reproach, Cordelia.”

She couldn’t help laughing at that, even if the reverence with which he said it made her feel breathless. “I can think of a fair number of people who would disagree with that assessment of me.”

“Then they are fools.”

She cast him a wry look. “How can you say things like that and treat me like I’m radioactive at the same time?”

His brows climbed, and he stammered. “I am not treating you like—I do not mean to—I only—” He buried his face in his hands, shoulders curling miserably. The green glow of his eyes spilled from between the seams of his fingers.

Something was holding him back. Shame, maybe?

Regret? God knew she understood the feeling.

After all, she’d been keeping her own skeletons deep in the back of her closet.

She’d rebuffed all his attempts to get closer to her, to understand how she thought, so it only made sense that he had his guard up, too.

She couldn’t help him if he wouldn’t tell her what was eating at him, and she didn’t have the right to demand he open up if she wasn’t willing to do the same.

“The last guy I had feelings for died because of me,” she blurted.

His hands dropped, and he looked at her incredulously.

Her leg bobbed as she took a deep breath and prepared to gut herself for his benefit, hoping that some sense of quid pro quo might get him to open up.

God, what was she doing? She hadn’t talked to anyone but her therapist about this, and then she’d only done it in desperation to get her damn job back.

That had gone over like a car on fire; after she’d told the story and how she felt about it, that therapist had marked her down as too unstable.

A liability. Was that what Rentir was going to walk away with, too?

The words stuck in her throat, and she swallowed thickly to clear it.

“I was the commander on a ship called the Leto,” she began to say, twisting her fingers in the extra fabric of her shirt.

“I had worked my whole life for that command. I was almost thirty years old, fresh off my military service. God, I felt so wise and experienced. I had no idea.” She laughed bitterly, shoving an errant strand of hair from her face.

“I had dreamed of seeing space all my life, and when I landed command on the Leto, it was right there. So close I could reach out and touch it.” Even now, even tainted by the bitterness of what followed, she counted that year of training for the mission among the best of her life.

“It was a small crew, and we were like family, you know? You stay in close quarters with people like that, people who really understand the heart of you, it’s impossible not to get attached. And Felix… Felix was the best of us.”

Rentir straightened, turning toward her with a singular focus. “Felix was the male you had feelings for?”

She nodded, and Rentir seemed whipped by the mere thought of her with someone else. His head sagged, but his gaze remained on her.

“He was my copilot,” she said, trying to still her jiggling leg.

“He was a caricature of a good guy, honestly. People just aren’t like that in real life.

He would have given anyone the shirt off his back.

He got it into his head that he liked me as more than a friend, and then…

all that kindness was focused on me. It was like being blinded by a Care Bear stare. ”

“What is this… kairberr stare?” His gaze turned thorny. “Did it cause you harm?”

She laughed again, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Sorry, no. It’s nothing.

I just mean he was relentless. He wormed his way into my life bit by bit, and then one day I woke up and he had become this pillar of my happiness, something I couldn’t imagine living without. And I was scared shitless by that.”

“I think I understand.”

She studied the glowing planes of his face. His expression was somber.

“His loss had the power to hurt you,” Rentir mused. “I have suffered a similar fear with Haerune. We took great care never to let the overseers know how close we truly were. Wherever they found affection, they sought to break it.”

“That’s awful,” she whispered.

He shrugged, his eyes skating away from her, suddenly unable to meet her gaze. “Please, continue.” His tail slid along the bench, the tip flicking only a few inches from her thigh, painting her with purple light.

She cleared her throat before obliging. “There was a lot to lose on Earth. If I’d been caught sleeping with him, it would have impacted my reputation.

Could have cost me my position. I’d worked too fucking hard to lose it over something like that.

” She sighed, rubbing her sweaty palms against the rough fabric of her pants.

“I was so hung up on that bullshit I didn’t see what was happening right in front of me.

“There was a constant battle for resources at that point. Every ideology had made the push to extremism as a matter of necessity. There was no more room to agree to disagree, not with everyone believing their side had the answer to the threat of annihilation looming over humanity.”

She stood up and began to pace. Sweat dampened her neck as she approached the worst of her memories, her stomach clenching with anger and regret.

“Laura Price, our CSO, she’d made some weird comments over the year we trained together.

I should have fucking listened, but I…” She kicked a hefty rock into the bushes, satisfied by the answering throb of pain in her toes.

“I agreed with some of it. She thought it was a betrayal of humanity to focus efforts on getting offworld. We were pulling so much more funding for colony missions than the Restoration Coalition was getting for ecological clean-up attempts. And it wasn’t a lottery; only the rich were getting their golden tickets to the promised land.

I still believed that colonies offworld were the future of humanity, but I didn’t think it should come at the expense of damning everyone who couldn’t afford the flight. ”

She sat down heavily on the bench, bracing her arms against her thighs and peeking at Rentir through the curtain of her hair.