It wasn’t a glitch. This was a total and complete meltdown of anything civilized within him. Max’s gaze arrowed in on the woman wearing a thin robe, her hair hanging damp around her shoulders. She was tall and not human. Detyen, his processors helpfully supplied. In the dim light of the ship, her skin was the color of rubies, darkened along the edge of her neck by triangular and rectangular markings that he was sure climbed down her arms and chest.

He wanted to run his tongue over them, mark them with his teeth and then taste the swelling curves of her breasts and down further, over her hips, until he tasted her most private treasure. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, even if she was alien. Delicate hands with finely clipped nails hung down by her side, and her fingers twitched like she was reaching for a weapon. Max almost licked his lips. This woman was dangerous, exactly like he wanted. Her eyes matched her skin, and they glowed with an inner fire that lit his own desire from within and shot straight to his aching, hard cock.

He heard the captain say something, but his mind had lost all concept of speech. There was only him, only her, and the nuisance of a captain who wasn’t even dangerous to rise to the level of a threat. He’d seen the man in action and Max knew that he could beat him in any fight, even blindfolded with an arm strapped behind his back.

Protecting this woman, his woman, would not be an issue. Not from him.

Max stepped forward, his hand raising of its own volition. He needed to touch her more than he needed to draw his next breath. But he stopped with more than a meter between them, something holding him in place. It wasn’t anything physical. It was the look in this woman’s eyes.

They were stricken, exactly the look he’d expect to see from someone whose entire world had been stripped away until there was nothing left but ash.

Exactly like someone who barely dodged the first killing blow.

He rushed back into himself, that aching vulnerability in her eyes enough for him to leash the beast within and chain it down with discipline and code and everything that made him the inhuman creature he’d long ago embraced.

The captain looked at him, an eyebrow raised, but the entire almost-encounter had only lasted a few seconds. Max took a step back and sat on his cot, letting the Detyen woman enter.

For a moment, he thought that she’d run. She looked ready to find the nearest escape pod and take her chances with a flimsy life vessel and the cold vacuum of space. Max’s fists clenched as he imagined her forced to fend for herself, to fight for her life against the elements, and then once she survived—because nothing within him could cope with the other thought—she’d be left to the mercy of the merciless powers on Tarni.

“You’ve been getting acquainted with Kella, then?” Captain Morvellan asked the woman. He didn’t seem to register her distress. Max had noticed that about the captain from the first. The people around him weren’t too important. He didn’t care about his crew so long as they remained functional.

“I thought the ship was named Inkelladranion,” said the woman, her words toneless, but nonetheless pouring over Max like a fine wine.

Morvellan shrugged, “That’s a bit of a mouthful. Now we’ve had a bit of a change of plans.” He nodded to Max. “Mr. Staunton, Max, has agreed to come on a short-term contract as our robo. That means you’ll be sharing your quarters with the bot. Hope you don’t mind.” The casual way Morvellan used robo and bot made Max especially glad he’d only agreed to a term of three months. If he didn’t break down before then, he didn’t want to stay long among a crew with this captain’s opinions. “Max, this is Inrit. Our engineer.”

Inrit. Yes, that suited this woman with fire burning so hot inside of her that he could almost feel its flame.

Her eyes narrowed at Morvellan, and Max saw a flick in her hand like something strained beneath the skin. Detyens all had retractable claws, he remembered. So what had made her want to use them?

“I thought the appropriate term for Mr. Staunton was cyborg,” she said. She didn’t glance at Max, but with those few words, his heart started pounding hard and an emotion he didn’t recognize and couldn’t name welled at the back of his mind. “Perhaps I am not as fluent in IC as I thought,” she continued, voice made of steel. “Because I’m certain you didn’t just introduce this man to me with an insult.”

Max had to be careful now because he just might fall in love with her.

The captain’s head jerked back like he’d been slapped. “We speak casually here, don’t need to make an issue of it, I think.” He nodded back at Max as if he was ready for a fight. But when Max kept his mouth shut, the captain nodded one more time and walked out the door without bothering to say farewell.

And that left Max alone with Inrit the beautiful alien.

The captain closed the door behind him and it slammed shut, brushing lightly against her back. She took a step forward but practically clung to the wall as she sidled over to her bed. She turned her back on him and reached for her bag. If Max’s entire being hadn’t been focused on her, he wouldn’t have realized that her hands were shaking.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said. He knew he needed to say something, needed to fill the silence between them before it could ice over. Before she could ice over. This was a woman with walls built so high not even the most sophisticated machinery could scale them. The only way inside was to be invited.

And Max wanted that invitation.

Something about Detyens pestered the back of his mind, something that he should remember. Something that would tell him why she had this effect on him. But he shoved those thoughts away. He didn’t care about the why, he only cared about her.

Inrit finally shoved her quaking fingers in the bag, hiding them from view. She threw a glance over her shoulder, her hair flicking back with a snap. “I wasn’t startled,” she replied.

Getting into a debate about the exact nature of her emotions wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and he wasn’t fool enough to argue. Awareness of her pounded on the edge of his consciousness and even if he closed his eyes he knew he’d be able to pinpoint her exact location in their room.

“You don’t look like the kind of man that hires out with a crew like this,” she said. He watched as she pulled a change of clothes out of her bag and set it aside.

“I worked on the station for a while, but it was time for a change.” Only the captain and the Tronx knew that he’d been in charge of Nina Station, and Max had every intention of keeping it that way. In a position like that, a man made enemies. He didn’t need to be settling scores and petty grudges every night for the next few months. Once he was off this ship, his name would disappear and he’d find something else to go by. Space was too big to find one lonely cyborg.

“Morvellan seems alright,” she said. “I hope it works for you.”

Max didn’t know what to say to that, and what she did left him tied up in so many knots he didn’t know how to break free.

Inrit’s hand went to the belt cinching her robe together, and with a few flicks of her fingers, she let it drop, revealing her naked back. The only thing keeping her from complete nudity was a small, silky pair of panties that barely covered her ass.

Max sucked in a ragged breath.

She stiffened, and with quick flicks of her hands, had her clothes on before he could blink. Inrit whirled around on him, her hands automatically flying up to pull back her hair. She tugged a tie out from where she held it in her mouth and studied him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, lowering her arms back down to her sides. “I’ve been on a lot of ships, it makes a girl lose all her modesty.”

That fire was back, but he could see it dimming with every second. Max could make it easy on her, he knew. He could laugh this off, take a step back, and let the ice crush them both. Whatever that flare of recognition he’d felt—and he knew she’d been right there with him—could be denied. But only if they never fed it.

Denya.

The word whispered through him, tearing a hole at his center and pouring the meaning straight into the place a part of his heart used to be. That was the thing he’d been missing, the little piece of information that made every bit of this make sense.

But it couldn’t be. He’d seen a human/Detyen pairing when his friend Dorsey came back to Nina Station for the final time. Her mate, Tyral, was a good man, willing to sacrifice anything to keep her safe.

That couldn’t be what this was. It had to be some trick, some joke, or some cheap ploy to gain an ally in new and potentially hostile territory.

Max took a looming step forward until they almost touched. She had to tilt her head up to look him in the eyes, and now he saw something fierce in their depths, something hungry. “I’m not here to pretend,” he said, his whisper almost lost over the distant hum of the engine.

***

He was standing too close, and if he didn’t step back, Inrit was going to do something crazy. Like kiss him. The first wave of recognition had poured through her, crushing her with the force of a tsunami. In the maelstrom, she was remade into a being of pure need and she only needed one thing.

Him.

She dragged in a shallow breath through her mouth. If she breathed through her nose, she would catch his scent and it would be all over. She’d be wrapped around him, begging him to come in her, to seal the bond and take her, keep her, do anything so long as he did it with her.

“Pretend what?” she forced herself to ask with the same even tone she used when looking down the wrong end of a blaster.

They’d met less than five minutes before, but already she felt like she’d known him forever. The aching want within her wasn’t merely sexual. Her whole heart wanted to open and let him inside until she was completely intertwined with him, two beings with only one soul.

“Who are you?” he breathed, and she knew he wasn’t asking her name.

He wasn’t pretending. And he was hers, at least in this one instant of recognition. For one second she could give up the pretense, let herself be taken, and surrender to the safety that was at the other end of this thing blooming between them.

“Denya,” she mouthed, unable to let it form fully in the air. He was human, why should he know what it meant?

But in his silvery eyes, she saw knowledge. He knew. And he wasn’t running.

In the same second, they reached for each other, lips crashing together and arms flung wide. She pressed up against him, rubbing her warm skin against the hard planes of his chest. He may have been a cyborg, but everything she could feel felt like man.

His taste exploded in her mouth, his tongue a conquering force. There was no romance, no seduction, just lust.

Without meaning to, her hands found the buckle of his pants and undid them, fingers slipping inside and gliding over the soft fabric of his underwear. Max froze, and his fingers tightened on her arms. With a yank, he pulled himself away from her and flung his body back until he smashed himself against the wall.

Before Inrit could take a step, he held up a hand, his face a blanket of fear and longing.

She recognized it so well because she felt the same thing deep in her heart. She had to get this under control, if not for her own sanity, then for his. Max wasn’t Detyen. He obviously felt the same swell of attraction that she did, but his mind hadn’t been formed to accommodate it. He was tall, powerful, imposing.

What must it be like for someone like him to be powerless to the hand of fate?

Inrit took a big step back and her knees brushed against the edge of her cot. She plunked down, bouncing a little at the hard impact. It wasn’t graceful, but all her willpower was engaged in keeping her hands to herself. She didn’t have the strength to be graceful.

Max took a step towards her when she wobbled, but she shot one hand behind her to steady herself and another one in front to ward him off. “I think it’s best if we leave a bit of space,” she said. Her voice had an erotic, husky element to it that she would do well to mask. She didn’t normally sound like it and didn’t want to give anyone else any ideas.

Max swallowed and nodded. He slid down and sat on his own cot, slightly off center so she had to turn her head to look at him. That was good. She didn’t want him right in front of her when the hurricane was still blowing too hard inside. It would be too easy to launch herself at him, too easy to reach out.

“So you know about the bond?” she asked, a bit redundantly. “Everything about it?”

Max’s eyes collided with her and it was like being struck again. Something in her psyche had braced for it, and it wasn’t as much of a sensual onslaught as the initial recognition. Still, Inrit’s fingers dug into the soft mattress of the cot and clung tight. She licked her lips and saw his eyes flick down, drawn by the quick dart of her tongue.

“How old are you?” he asked in response, confirming that he knew enough.

“I’m twenty-seven, what about you?” His shoulders relaxed a centimeter when she told him she wasn’t on the verge of dying. He couldn’t be much older than her, but with cyborgs it was hard to tell. The machinery in them could do strange things to the human aging process.

“Thirty-three.” He studied her, eyes narrowed, and she got the strangest impression of him. He was like one of the mountain cats that stalked the highlands of Thanatos. They were beautiful and deadly hunters who had been hunted and experimented on until they were nearly extinct. Until they learned from the humans who’d hurt them and made the researchers pay for their crimes.

It had happened hundreds of years ago, but the story remained a popular lesson in the dangers of underestimating alien species.

The cat spoke. “My friend Dorsey took a Detyen mate about six months ago. It is my understanding that human matings are a recent phenomenon.” There was that name again. Dorsey, Reina’s friend. “I didn’t think it was possible…”

“Because you’re a man?”

His eyes locked on hers and the animal was back. “Because I’m not.”

Her eyes flicked down and quickly back up to his face. “You’re not?” The evidence she’d briefly touched said otherwise.

He closed his eyes, and when they opened back up, the pupil and iris had disappeared and the silver that normally was little more than a sheen over his normal human eyes had coalesced into pools of molten metal. Max flicked the collar of his top open and pulled the stretchy material until the upper plane of his chest was revealed.

A jagged scar cut across the right side of his chest, beginning with his breastbone and disappearing down in a line under his shirt. If he took his top completely off, she imagined that it would taper off under his armpit. A thin, surgically precise line, almost invisible in their poor room light, cut from the top of his chest on down.

With practiced dispassion, he tugged on the top of the scar until his skin gave way, revealing the silver metal plate that covered many of the important pieces of his cybernetics. Though it sat right over his heart, this was truly the brain of the machine that lived within him.

“Is this human?” he asked. There was a catch in his voice, like the question wasn’t rhetorical. His eyes remained that eerie silver, but the small crinkles at the corners deepened in strain.

Inrit’s heart clenched, and in that one moment, she knew this man entirely. After all, he was showing her his heart. “When did you become a cyborg?” she asked. She studied the panel and noted a flickering light almost completely covered by his skin. She wanted to get close and study his wiring almost as much was she wanted to explore the rest of him. Cyborgs could do amazing things, and she wanted to see him pushed to his limits.

“I began the transition thirteen years ago,” he answered dispassionately. Clearly disturbed by her lack of discomfort, he covered up his control panel and rearranged his shirt back into place. “My final modification was made the day before my twenty-fifth birthday.”

The most extreme modifications were done to the youngest cyborg recruits. Inrit knew of a number of procedures that could not be performed after the age of twenty-five, and it only deepened her interest in him.

“As to your question, of course you’re human. Why would you think otherwise?” What did a few modifications change about a person’s fundamental self? Even on short acquaintance, Inrit was almost ready to declare Max one of the best humans she’d ever met. But she’d been wrong about such things before, and the influence of the denya bond was clouding her own thoughts.

No, she needed to be cautious here, needed to wait.

Max’s mouth dropped open by the slightest fraction and his eyes widened, the silver fading back to the normal, darker color. He stared at her and somehow managed to look less human than he had with his metal exposed and eyes gone to silver. His eyes flickered from brown to silver and back again and his neck twitched. At first she thought he was scanning information or applying it to his secondary memory banks, but when two seconds passed and he remained frozen, she knew something else was wrong.

“Max?” she asked tentatively, leaning forward.

He didn’t react at all. Cyborgs undergoing maintenance or surgery could put themselves into stasis, and what he was doing almost looked like that. But it wasn’t. A cyborg would never leave himself vulnerable without someone he trusted to guard him. And he wasn’t in an operating room or on a maintenance table.

She reached out slowly, giving him time to see her coming, to snap out of his trance. But as she closed the centimeters between them, he remained deathly still. No, she didn’t like this at all.

Her hand made it all the way to where she could feel the heat pouring off of his chest; if she strained her fingers forward they’d brush against him. But with speed so quick she couldn’t see it, a vise clamped around her wrist, hard enough to bruise, almost hard enough to break.

Max wasn’t in his eyes. There was nothing there at all. And then he blinked and furrowed his brow, looking down at where her wrist was clamped in his hand. His grip loosened, but he didn’t let her go. One tug and she’d spill forward onto his bed; her stance was too much of a lean.

“How did you cross the room so quickly?” he asked, confused.

And it was then that Inrit saw that she wasn’t the only person in the room living on borrowed time.