Close Encounters by Katherine Allred Read Free Book Online

enough that I could pick up the scent of his warm, clean, very male body. I had a clear view of him from this angle.
    I’m well above average height for a human female, skimming six feet tall. But he was the largest male of any species I’d ever met. He stood motionless as I stared up at him, and I tightened the belt on my robe nervously.
    Which was ridiculous. I never got nervous.
    In the distance, the roar of a rock cat after prey split the night, but neither of us so much as twitched. If the emotion I’d picked up earlier had come from him, there was no sign of it now. My shields were completely down and I wasn’t getting a thing.
    “Shall I record?” Max asked in my ear.
    I hesitated. Technically, every meeting with a new race should be recorded, because you never know what you’ll miss during a contact that you might pick up on later.
    “No,” I answered. “Not this time.”
    As usual, I had subvocalized when talking to Max, but the big guy tilted his head and his gaze became more intense. Slowly, he lifted one hand and touched me just over the chip implanted behind my ear. Immediately I felt a sense of puzzlement coming from him, and I sucked in a deep breath of night air.
    No one had ever been aware of my conversations with Max before. Absolutely no one. Either his hearing was better than mine, which was impossible, or he had, at the very least, a rudimentary telepathic talent.
    While I was thinking, his interest shifted from my conversation to my hair. I’d left it loose when I prepared for bed, and he spread his fingers to sift through the heavy mass, draping thick locks over my shoulder and wrapping them around his fist.
    For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do next. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for this.
    He continued stroking my hair, then his gaze shifted and our eyes met. And as we stared at each other, a buzzing filled my head, a small, pleasant sensation that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling and made me smile.
    Suddenly I was picking up more emotion from him than I wanted to, in the form of complete and utter shock. He dropped my hair as though it had burned him and took a step back. A low rumble erupted from deep in his chest as his gaze swept down to take in my bare legs and silk-clad body.
    With another growl, he turned and faded into the surrounding darkness, leaving me alone to wonder what in the thirteen hells had just happened.
    Had I dreamed the entire encounter?
    No, it was no dream. I was on the porch wearing nothing but my robe, and Ghost was still snoring from his spot against the wall. And I’d just had a deeply physical reaction to a male from an alien species.
    Oh, no. There was no way I’d allow this to continue. I was finished with men, regardless of what species they belonged to. Damn Gertz. When he was busy taking liberties with my genetic makeup, why hadn’t he excised this deep-seated need for love and acceptance I’d been cursed with? It would have made my life so much simpler.
    With a sigh, I padded back to bed, my mind still on the big guy. But sleep was a long time coming. I really needed to come up with a name for him, like I had for the others. Blackie was out. He just didn’t seem the type for a cutesy nickname.
    After an unusual amount of dithering, I settled on Thor. Yeah, that had some dignity to it, and I could picture him as the god of thunder. All he needed was a hammer.
    With that decision out of the way, I finally drifted off to sleep, only to have the dragon birds wake me two hours later at the crack of dawn. Apparently they’d decided the huts were a new toy. They covered the roof, their tiny feet sounding like a pouring rain, chattering and inspecting, even swooping down to peer in the Plexiglas windows.
    Mumbling under my breath, I dragged myself to the shower, and then forced my eyes open so I could find my clothes and dress. It took two cups of scalding cafftea before I felt semi-normal again. When I was sure my brain was