Page 30 of Tempting Her Grumpy Protector
She was so distracted by her thoughts that she barely noticed the rustling sound—a little like dry leaves—coming from the floor.
Carefully, she slid down the side of the mattress until her toes touched the little carved steps—the “bed steps” as their Thropp’ian guide had called them.
The rustling grew louder.
Sunny was too preoccupied to pay it much attention—just one more step and she could hobble off to the fresher and pretend last night hadn’t happened. Well, at least until Greer woke up, that was.
She stepped down.
Crunch.
Sunny froze.
“What the hell?—?”
It felt… squishy. Like she’d stepped on an egg. But what would an egg be doing on the?—
She squinted into the shadows, and her blood turned to ice.
The floor was moving.
No. Not moving. Crawling.
A wave of chitinous bodies shifted and clicked over each other, their long antennae twitching as they crawled across the hut’s floor.
Sunny’s whole body seemed to turn to ice.
“Oh… oh, no…” she whispered.
The guide’s cheerful warning from the day before flashed through her mind. The skuttlers. Thropp’ian pests. Nighttime intruders. Giant, roach-like scavengers that came into every hut every single night, no matter what the residents did to try and keep them out.
They were like the Palmetto bugs back home in Florida only much, much bigger.
Her stomach dropped.
What if they can fly? Palmetto bugs can!
Pure instinct took over and her frozen body seemed to thaw all at once. She screamed—a high-pitched, full-volume, horror-movie shriek—and scrambled backward, nearly toppling the bed stairs in her rush to get off the floor.
Up on the bed, Greer’s big form sprang upright—he was instantly awake, moving with the lethal alertness of a trained warrior.
“Sunny—what is it?!” he demanded.
“Roaches!” she wailed. “The giant, disgusting, probably flying kind!”
“Hang on—I’ve got you.” He vaulted off the bed and landed a few feet from her.
He was reaching for her when one of the skuttlers skittered over her foot and Sunny panicked, knocking the steps over completely in her scramble to get away. With no way back up to the bed, she made the only logical choice—she launched herself straight at Greer.
He caught her mid-air with a grunt, her legs wrapping around his waist, and her arms around his neck.
“By the Goddess!” he growled, but his hands instinctively gripped her bare thighs, holding her up as she clung to him like he was the last tree in a flood and she was clinging for dear life.
Sunny buried her face against his neck, shuddering. “Kill them! Kill them all. I hate roaches!”
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