Page 24 of Alien Jeopardy
I lick my lips, then glance back up at the darkening sky.
Feverish. That’s how I feel. Light-headed, bizarre, out-of-sorts. Hot, then cold, goosebumps chasing sweat, my feet painful.
My teeth grind together, and I purse my lips into a thin line.
I refuse to complain.
I am not a whiner. I always get annoyed when a contestant on one of the shows I watch won’t shut up about how bad they have it, as if they didn’t sign up to be there. As if they didn’t know what they were in for when they signed up to be stranded on the side of a volcano.
I’ll be damned if I get labeled the whiner on this season, even though I did not know what I was getting myself into.
Just one more minute, I tell my aching feet.
I have no idea if it’s a minute or not, but everything seems more bearable in terms of taking it one minute at a time.
I tilt my head, cracking my neck. Eyes closed, I inhale deeply, regretting all those mornings I lay in bed snoozing the alarm on my phone instead of hitting the gym.
Although no amount of working out normally could have prepared me for shoeless adventures in heat on an alien planet.
I swallow a sigh, trudging onward. One more minute. I can do one more minute.
And then one more minute.
And then?—
Cold droplets splatter on my cheeks, and my foot stops mid-stride as I crane my neck, looking up. Grey clouds push out the blue sky, still deepening as the day wears into night.
More rain falls, and I shiver as it splatters across my skin.
“If it stays sprinkling like this, it won’t be so bad,” I tell myself over the lump in my throat.
Ka-Rexsh turns around, taking in my upturned face with a curious expression. Or, at least, what I interpret as curious. Who the hell knows what that expression means on an alien?
Not me, that’s for damn sure.
He utters something in his language, and I cock my head, like that will suddenly make the words make sense. Newsflash: it does not.
“We should hurry,” I tell him. What felt good at first, the icy rain slowly spattering across my skin, has quickly turned extremely uncomfortable.
My teeth begin to chatter.
He takes a few steps toward me, and I clamp my mouth shut—which just causes the rest of my body to pick up the shaking.
“Drezzex shen K’lata zet?” he says, the little bit of his brow that can furrow doing so as he stares at me. His strange gold-orange eyes seem to swirl the longer I stare into them. So pretty.
The palm of my hand heats, and I blink as I realize I’ve reached up to touch his face.
“Shagrette leszzmeist,” he says on a growl, biting off the words.
Words that make absolutely no sense whatsoever to me.
Huge hands bracket my waist, and then he’s lifting my shivering body, holding me close.
The sky goes completely dark—at least, that’s what I think in a moment of sheer panic—but it’s his wings. He’s holding them over me like a heated umbrella, and as the rain begins to fall in earnest, heavier and heavier, I decide that being curled up in the alien’s warm and dry arms is much preferable to having to haul ass on my bare feet to the first challenge.
I sigh, pressing my cheek against his deliciously hot skin, the chattering of my teeth coming and going randomly as he lopes along, much faster now that I’m not trailing behind him at a snail’s pace.
Part of me feels slightly guilty about him carrying me, but the longer he’s at it, the clearer it becomes that I was slowing him down to an ungodly pace. His breathing is even and easy, and he vaults through the rocky forest terrain with so much ease that watching him is… delightful.
