“We all belong to the storm.”If I didn’t know better, I’d swear his features softened.“The storm chose you.Pulled you from the sky.”
“Lightning hit our ship.”
“Exactly.That was no accident.Soltharra has spoken.We are Stormbound.We will complete the Skybond and honor the storm’s gift.”
What the fuck was this guy talking about?Stormbound?The planetchoosingto hit our ship with lightning and make us crash?As if the planet had any say in where a random electrical charge would be released in its atmosphere.And to do it for me?So that this alien and I would meet?The very idea was laughable.Completely absurd.
Unfortunately, the alien male in question looked at me like he believed every word he said.He wasn’t laughing.
"Being hit by lightning was a gift?From your planet?”
“Yes.”
“You call your planet Soltharra?”
“Yes.That is Her name.”
“Lightning does not choose where to strike," I said.“That makes no sense.”
"You do not need to understand for my words to be true."His eyes didn't move from mine.The ghost of something passed through them — warmth, patience, the tenderness of someone who already knows the ending of a conversation and is waiting for you to catch up."The storm is the spirit of Soltharra.The storm chooses the path.We walk the path."
“You already said that.”The jungle breathed around us.Above the cliffs, lightning split the sky — a flash of pure white that illuminated the obsidian rock faces and the full sprawling pattern of his storm nodes all at once.Silver-bright and fractal, energy branched from his spine across his shoulders like the light tried to burn itself into the rest of his body but found the surface had already been claimed.His chest lit up, tendrils of power writhing and twisting through his muscles.
I stared.My heart pounded in my chest.My skin tingled as if inviting that energy to jump the gap and invade me instead.The way he watched me made my core pulse, empty and needy.My skin was too sensitive.I needed him to touch me.To share that light.The craving was instinctive.All consuming.An instant obsession.
I looked away first.
"I need to fix my ship and find my crew," I said.“After that, we have to go back to Earth.”
"Perhaps."
Perhaps?Perhaps?“You going to take me prisoner?Keep me here against my will?”
“That will not be necessary.The storm will speak to you.”
Talking about the weather like it was a living thing again.Make that the spirit of the planet.Great.I didn’t have time to argue with an alien right now.I had shit to do.
“We need to get moving.”I turned around and headed back inside my ship.I needed supplies.A containment field for the crystal I needed to collect.Tools.Maybe a hammer and chisel?Mr.Gorgeous didn’t appear to have any tools with him.If he did, I had no idea where he was hiding them.He was practically—gloriously—naked.Wore nothing but a bit of cloth covering the manly parts of him I really, really wanted to see.
“It is not safe to be out at night.Dangerous predators roam the darkness.We will climb the mountain at dawn.”He issued his decree and fell into step beside me.Close.Not invading — he kept a deliberate distance — butclose, close enough that his warmth displaced the cooler jungle air against my left side, close enough that when my shoulder drifted an inch toward his arm the static charge between us snapped with a tiny, involuntary arc that shot directly from the point of near-contact all the way up to my jaw.It was as if my suit wasn’t even there.Like I was as naked as he was.The suit provided zero protection from him.His heat.His energy.
“Fine.First light.”How could I argue?I didn’t know this planet, or its creatures.My pulse was doing things I would have found clinically terrifying under any other circumstances.My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest.Every cell in my body felt like it’d been dipped in an ice bath.Fiercely, painfullyawake.Shocked out of slumber.Alive.I could barely think, let alone come up with a plan or argue with an alien about his own planet.
Bioelectric response, I told myself again, firmly, precisely, like a diagnosis that would stick if I repeated it enough times.I was in shock.Being on the surface of Soltharra was like walking around inside a living electrical circuit, the planet’s motherboard.A generator.If I didn’t have my hair pulled back, it would probably be floating a foot above my head with static electricity.I’d look like a troll doll who’d never used a hairbrush.
The electric hum of the planet rose around us as we walked, deep and alive and resonant, and it sounded — disturbingly, undeniably — like it wassaying something.
Everything happening to me had to be a side effect of the crash.Adrenaline.Shock.Worry for my crew.The awareness pulsing through me was not the planet, the atmosphere or some consciousness that lived inside the storm.
This alien obviously worshiped the storm like it was a god.More like ancient Earth pantheons than a modern, scientific understanding of reality or physics.
My physical reaction had nothing to do with the godlike alien male walking next to me.Nothing.Everything I was feeling, every bit of desire, of longing, of awareness for the male next to me could be explained.Sorik’sstormhadnotdeliberately chosen me, thenchosento hit my ship with a lightning strike, then steered the ship to crash inthisvalley, close enough thathewould be the one to find me.
That was nonsense.Complete and utter fairytale bullshit.
The planet wasnotalive.The storm wasnotsentient.This alien didnottruly believe I belonged to him now.He was full of shit and old-fashioned, superstitious, primitive nonsense.
I almost believed it.