Blinking, Ashley stared at the big alien. It was hard to think with him so close, and her fingers still tingled from the touch of his skin. Smoother, softer than she'd expected, and hot like a stone left by the fire.

Hot in every sense, she thought, blushing as she lowered her hand. Putting up a barrier between them hadn't been easy, and she almost regretted doing it. Maybe I should have let him grab me and seen where that went?

Even thinking that made her melt and squirm with desire. It would be so easy to give in to those feelings, but she couldn't. Wouldn't.

"What do you mean, mate?" Ashley knew what the word meant on Mars, of course. Everyone talked about how the aliens could find their soulmates, the perfect women for them. That was why Mars had a human Empress, after all. But the idea that one of them would pick her, that was something she'd never considered.

It couldn't be right. She wouldn't let it be.

Kosar was talking, and she tried to pay attention. It wasn't easy to listen to the words rather than the deep sexy rumble of his voice which vibrated through her.

"— brought together by fate," he said. "We belong together, and nothing will keep us apart."

Ashley shivered at his words. She couldn't deny that they sounded right, that she wanted to believe him. But it was impossible. She was here to do a job, and she wasn't going to pair up with the chief of security at the place she was robbing. It would be an awful thing to do to him, aside from anything else, and she didn't want to be that kind of person.

Soon I'll be safe back on Earth, she told herself, trying to ignore the pang of pain that thought sent through her. I'll leave all this behind and be safe. Get enough money to retire to the Protected Zones and bring my brother with me.

That had been the dream for so long that Ashley could almost taste success. They could finally, finally, be safe, and all it would take was this one job.

All it would take was stealing from Kosar. Damn it.

"I don't believe in your superstition," she said, as coldly as she could manage. "There's no such thing as mates, not the way you mean it."

"It isn't superstition," Kosar replied fiercely, taking a half step forward only to catch himself before he reached out for her. Ashley fought the urge to go to him, to touch him, as he continued. "Our implants know when we are with our mates, they're designed to detect them. And you can feel it too. I know you can."

"I can't feel anything," Ashley lied. She tried to keep her tone cold and hard. "Look, I'm here to work and I don't mix work and pleasure, okay? Maybe after I'm done, if you still think that you want me."

Half of that had the virtue of being true. After one disastrous attempt at dating another scavenger, she wasn't keen to make that mistake again. And once she was done here, Ashley was pretty sure that Kosar wouldn't be interested in her anymore. At least not to date.

He might be looking for her to capture or kill once she'd stolen the secret of the stardrive. That wasn't something that she looked forward to, but it wasn't something she could avoid either. One problem at a time.

Kosar snarled something in his own language and shook his head. Ashley held her ground, glaring at him as coldly as she could manage. After a moment he threw up his hands, his wings spreading behind him.

"You humans can be ridiculous," he said. "But I will still want you, Ashley. Nothing about my feelings towards you will change between now and my dying day. If you insist on waiting, then I can wait a little while."

Ashley relaxed, just slightly. It didn't fix anything, at best it put the problem off. At worst, well, now the head of security would be paying attention to her, making everything that much harder. But at least she had a chance to get her work done.

All she'd have to do was keep her hands off Kosar until she left. That couldn't be too hard... could it?

Working on the stardrive engine was like nothing that Ashley had ever done before. In many ways it was easier than the work she was used to on Earth: back there she'd often been stuck in a half-collapsed building trying to get a broken, flooded machine to function.

Instead, she was in a clean and well-supplied chamber, with all the resources she could ask for. But the machine she was working on... it wasn't just damaged, she didn't know what the various parts of it even did.

For the first week she barely touched the engine itself. There was too much to read up on — reports from Dr. Cooper's own investigation, to start with. Then she moved on to the descriptions of the engine as written by those dragons who'd seen one in action. It gave her a headache. The alien computers could translate their language into English almost flawlessly, but the alien viewpoints could still be hard to grasp.

Fortunately, whenever she had a question she only had to ask Kosar. Unfortunately, that was easy because he was always there. A ready distraction from her work, and an eye looking over her shoulder. Ashley found it intensely frustrating. How am I going to get this data out of here without him seeing me copy it? And how am I meant to concentrate with him in the room?

Whenever she looked up, he was watching her. His powerful violet gaze seemed to pierce into her soul and Ashley's breath caught at the feel of his gaze on her. She couldn't afford to let him get to her, though. She needed a clear head. It just wasn't easy to keep one when she was alone in a room with Kosar, feeling the strange pull of his presence. Her body responded to him in a way that she'd never felt with any human man.

"For God's sake, Ashley, get a grip," she told herself under her breath. But apparently dragon shifters had excellent hearing, because on the far side of the room Kosar straightened up.

"What was that?" he asked, and Ashley felt her cheeks heat. Now he's caught me talking to myself. That's just great. Way to look crazy.

Pushing her hair back from her face she looked up at him, trying to ignore his distractingly attractive physique. It wasn't easy, not when he had muscles like that and chose not to cover them.

"I was just, um, trying to understand these notes," she said, trying to cover her slip-up. It was true, at least. She had plenty of questions. Picking one at random, she continued. "What the hell is a 'hirvu'? Apparently, a stardrive should sound like one when it's warming up."

Kosar frowned, then laughed. "It's a kind of bird, I think. A flying predator big enough to challenge a dragon anyway. I've never been on the same planet as one, though, and I've no idea what it sounds like. Is that important?"

"Probably not," Ashley admitted. "But the notes are full of things like that, and I've got no idea what half of it means. It might be the key, somehow, and at least it would be handy to know if that's like a high-pitched shriek or a growl or what."

Kosar stood from his desk and made his way across to hers, and every step closer made Ashley's heart race faster. The mix of fear and desire his presence brought with him was exhilarating, intoxicating, and the problem she was trying to investigate was driven from her mind. It almost seemed like she could feel his touch, and she imagined him sweeping her off her feet into his strong arms and carrying her off.

Swallowing, she pulled herself out of that fantasy and tried to focus on the reality. It wasn't easy to ignore his presence, and she thought that she could feel the heat radiating from his body as he leaned past her to look at the screen.

It would be so easy to touch him. But she couldn't give in to the urge, because she knew where that would lead. She needed a clear head.

"Vordak wrote this," Kosar said, shaking his head. He was trying to hide his feelings, too, but Ashley could hear the strain he was under this close to her. It would be so easy for him to snap, to reach out for her and... No! Stop thinking about that!

He stood abruptly and stepped back, almost as though he'd heard her thought. Or maybe thought the same thing himself. His wings flicked out wide, showing an emotion through body language she couldn't read, and he turned away from her.

Biting her lip, Ashley looked back at the screen. She could still feel his presence, his warmth, but it was easier to ignore him if she wasn't looking at him

"Vordak... he means well, but I think he wrote down everything he could possibly think of," Kosar said. "He's more of a poet than an engineer, and I wouldn't look to his notes for detail."

"Then why are his notes here?" Ashley asked, exasperated.

"Because he spent a lot of time in the engine room of our transport ship," Kosar explained. "He saw a lot of details the rest of us didn't. If only he was better at describing what he saw, it would be a real help. Alas, he was more interested in the cute engineer he was visiting than the engine that she was working on."

Ashley groaned. That explained it, but it didn't help. There wasn't much information here, even if she could figure out a way to get it off site and to her employer. Would they even believe that this was all the dragons knew? It certainly wasn't enough to build a stardrive from.

Dr. Cooper's methodical exploration of the engine's inputs and outputs provided a starting point, but that was all it was. And no one human knew how to grow the crystal structure — at least, not as far as she knew. Ashley reminded herself that people had been smuggling the dragons' crystal technology off Mars for years now. All the big Earth corporations would be studying it, and maybe someone had secretly figured out how to make their own.

"How am I meant to figure anything out from this?" she asked, throwing her hands in the air and addressing her question to the ceiling. "Poetry and a broken engine and the guesswork of a dozen soldiers pretending to be scientists!"

Kosar laughed, a rough and powerful sound that sent a shiver through Ashley. Turning to glare at him, she saw at once that he wasn't laughing at her but at the situation. "This is exactly why we brought you in. None of us can do anything with this, so we hoped that someone with your skills might be able to work from what we've put together. Your file says you're good at using incomplete documentation, right?"

Ashley narrowed her eyes, but he had a point. She'd done a lot of work with less information than this, just not under anywhere near the same pressure. When she dug something out of a ruin, it either worked or it didn't, and if it didn't she could just move on to the next task. Here there was only one thing to repair, and if she couldn't manage that, then it would be a disaster. Not just for her, either.

Her brother was relying on her to get this done. Failure was not an option. Damn it.

Carefully hiding that thought, she shoved aside the documents and looked at the engine again. The pulsing light inside seemed to be taunting her, a secret just out of her reach.

"Okay, let's try this again," she said. "If I can get at the diagnostic displays, you'll be able to read them, won't you?"

Kosar rose and came closer, and Ashley could almost feel the concern radiating from him. "Be careful. The drive is dangerous."

"You keep saying that," she said, rolling her eyes. "But if we don't do something I'll go mad staring at the work you've already done. Let me work."

The rumbling growl that Kosar let loose wasn't a happy sound, but he didn't tell her no. He couldn't, really — Ashley knew that he needed results as much as she did. Stepping up to the drive she glanced at her notes and found her way to the inspection panel.

It was broken, of course. If it had been easy to open, Cooper would have already looked inside it. But the scientist had been terrified of damaging his precious Baby. Ashley, on the other hand, was a scavenger. She was used to dealing with technology that was reluctant to cooperate. The gap around the edge of the panel was almost too thin to see, but with a little effort and care Ashley managed to get a pry bar into it and put her weight against it.

Nothing. The panel was jammed shut.

"Oh, for God's sake," she complained to no one in particular, throwing herself against the bar again. There was a tiny movement, just enough to make her certain that it was jammed rather than locked. That it could open, but wouldn't.

Before she could do any more than swear at the problem, powerful arms reached around her. Kosar was there, his body pressed against hers, and the musky scent of him filled her senses as he added his strength to hers. Even through her clothes she felt the burning heat of the dragon, his strong body moving with deceptive grace as he pushed down.

For a moment, Ashley forgot about work and pressed back against him instead, enjoying the touch of his skin, the feel of his body. His hands were beside hers on the pry bar, and she found herself biting her lip as their fingers brushed. Heart pounding, mouth dry, she lost herself in the moment.

Then the panel snapped open, Kosar's strength more than enough to break the jam. Ashley staggered back into him and he folded his arms around her, holding her tight against his body. There was nothing else in her world, nothing but his touch and warmth.

I can't. It's not fair on either of us. God. Damn. It.

Pulling away from the dragon's grip was harder than heaving open the inspection panel had been, and she knew that if he'd held tight there was no way that she'd be able to escape. Half hoping that he wouldn't let her go, she stepped away, her heart falling when he let her. It was ridiculous, she knew. What would she have done if he'd kept hold of her?

The thoughts that flashed through her mind at that flustered her and left her cheeks red. How easy it would be to just relax into those strong arms and forget about what had brought her here. What she needed to do. Forcing those thoughts down she drew a shuddering breath and took another step away.

"Don't fight your feelings," Kosar said, but he kept his distance. Didn't pressure her, beyond the oh-so-tempting presence of his wonderful body and his evident desire for her. It would have been easier to cope with if he'd been overbearing, Ashley was used to men like that. Used to pushing them away when they wanted more from her than she did from them. Like Cooper did, for example.

The dragon shifter was different, though. Kosar made no secret of the fact that he wanted her, but he never made her feel unsafe or like he wouldn't respect her choice. Perhaps it was because of his unshakable insistence that they belonged together, Ashley thought. From any human that would have come across as arrogance, but from this man it seemed like a simple statement of fact.

Turning away from her confusion and desire, she tried to focus on the work again. On the open panel, and the displays behind it. They were broken like the rest of the engine, static washing over the images projected into thin air, making it impossible to read the details. But there was something there, and it was progress. New information, something that she could build on. And the engine hadn't exploded or broken down or anything.

Ashley let herself smile, enjoying the moment. She'd taken a risk, yes, but it had paid off. It was a start.

"Cooper never dared to force anything," Kosar said behind her. "He was too afraid of damaging the engine to risk it. So was everyone else, me included."

The note of admiration in his voice made Ashley's cheeks heat and she shook her head. "If you don't take a few risks you'll never work anything out."

"True," Kosar said, "but this stardrive is unique. If you break it—"

"—there aren't any more to play with," Ashley finished for him. "I know. Believe me, I know that as well as anyone. Do you think that I wasn't worried about that? I just won't let that fear stop me doing what I have to."

Picking up her camera she started to document what they'd found. Suddenly there was a lot more work to do.