Page 5 of Resisting the Alien Rider

Garrek gaped at me like he was very concerned I’d lost my human marbles and that he’d have to start digging around in the dirt to find them for me. His reply was a dry, disbelieving bark. “What?”

“Never mind,” I said hurriedly. “Don’t try to answer that. I don’t even know why I said it.”

I let out a short breath and rubbed at my eyes. All at once, exhaustion from the day’s travels fell down on the top of my head like a weight. A weight that Garrek’s gaze was only adding to.

“Are your eyes bothering you?”

For someone who’d barely seemed to care if I broke my back falling off his shuldu, the question held a surprising note of gruff concern. I lowered my hands and blinked up at him.

“My eyes are alright. Though it definitely gets dry and dusty around here.”

More than once during the journey today I’d found my eyes watering in response to the elements, but other than some minor irritation and dryness, they were fine.

Where most people probably would have said something like, “That’s good,” Garrek merely gave a grunt. Then, stiffly, as if talking about anything besides shuldu or weather or making good time on the road was completely foreign to him, he said, “I imaginethose curly little hairs all around your eyes help. Keep the debris out.”

My breath escaped me in a surprised little chuckle.

“You noticed my eyelashes?”

“Of course I did,” he answered, again as if I’d asked him something stupid. “When the sun hits them, they cast shadows all the way down to your cheeks.”

My pulse quickened, though I couldn’t say why. It wasn’t embarrassment now. It was…

I wasn’t sure. Not exactly vulnerability. But a sort of naked shyness. To think that this hulking alien rider, who frankly didn’t seem to like me all that much, had made note of something as unimportant and fleeting as the shadows cast by my eyelashes.

Well. I guessed I could add being observant to the list of his ever-so-charming qualities. So far, the list went a little something like:

Good at cowboy things

Bad at small talk

Impatient

Doesn’t think I can pee on my own

Observant

Nice hands

I shook myself, wondering when the hell “nice hands” had snuck in there.

“Should we go check on Killian?” I asked, already moving away from him.

Garrek and his big, calloused, strong-fingered hands followed me.

“Yes,” he said in agreement. And then, grimly, “Make sure he hasn’t set anything on fire.”

I paused to peer back at him then, but his eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat as he looked down at his boots to manoeuvre over a particularly gnarly tree root. The warden told me that Garrek was travelling with his herd instead of staying in home pastures because a fire had destroyed the grass. It had happened the night of a recent bad storm. The rain had put out the flames, but not before the damage was already done.

Warden Tenn said it had been caused by lightning.

Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

And just as suddenly, my throat tightened against cutting shards of sympathy. For Killian.

And for Garrek.

Both of them had gone through trauma I could barely begin to imagine, living young lives that had led them to killing another person before puberty and then being ripped away from their world. I tried to picture what might have led Killian, that big-eyed, sweet-but-gaunt-faced child, here. Killian, whom I’d already observed being silently, endlessly considerate to both the shuldu and the bracku.

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