He was walking over to look more carefully at the images when Kaia’s bedroom door shut and she strode over to push on his chest until he sat down on the bed. “Let me see that cut.” First, however, she bustled into the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth and a small first-aid kit.

Bowen wasn’t used to being bossed around, but if it meant experiencing Kaia’s touch, he’d do exactly what she demanded. He winced when she gently dabbed the blood away from his cut. Frowning, she said, “How bad is it?”

“Fucker made me sacrifice my pie.” Bowen’s stomach rumbled on cue. “And I’d barely gotten started on my breakfast-as-lunch.”

Gripping his jaw, Kaia glared into his eyes. “Be serious.”

“I am.” He put his hand on the curve of her hip, wasn’t sure she felt it, she was so focused on his face. “Lip’s nothing. It’s only cut because he was wearing a big-ass ring. My head didn’t get rattled—I’m hungry and pissed, but the experiment’s fine.”

She ran her fingers through his hair. “We have to come up with an innocent explanation for the swelling and the cut.”

Thinking of her panic and that of the rawboned man with the work boot on Alden’s chest, Bowen put the pieces together. “Dr. Kahananui’s a doctor. She’ll know at a glance that this isn’t serious.” He’d come along with Kaia because, honestly, she’d had her hand linked to his and he’d have followed her anywhere, but he saw no reason for the extreme reaction.

Continuing to run her fingers through his hair, the rhythmic motion soothing on a bone-deep level, she said, “Did you ever wonder how my cousin got permission to bring a human test subject down into a secret research station in the first place? A subject who, if he woke up, would then know about this place?”

“I figured it was an act of good faith because of the growing relationship between BlackSea and the Alliance.” After all, it had been prior to Hugo’s allegations.

“That relationship is far too new.” Kaia finished dabbing away the blood around his lip and, opening the first-aid kit, put the washcloth on the back of the lid. She picked up a small tube of ointment from inside the kit before returning her attention to Bo. “And it’s not as if we were talking about bringing an ordinary human down here.”

No, they’d been discussing the human who posed the biggest security risk of them all. “So why am I here?” It had something to do with Dr. Kahananui and the dread on Kaia’s face when she’d realized her cousin was about to walk into carnage, that much was now clear.

“Attie grew up in a big family.” Kaia dabbed the ointment over his cut. “Five younger brothers and me.” She didn’t explain why she’d been raised with her cousins. “And Mal’s family was just down the way, so it was like having six brothers really.”

Bowen had the family connections straight in his head now. Eight cousins, six of them in one family, Malachai and Kaia from separate families. But it sounded as if they’d all grown up together. “Changelings generally have small families.” It wasn’t a secret that they had lower levels of fertility than humans or Psy.

“Auntie Natia and Uncle Eijirō are serious outliers.” Her finger gentle on his lip, Kaia continued to speak when he didn’t interrupt. “I know Attie comes across as scientific and pragmatic, but she’s the oldest of us all, and we grew up knowing that if we needed help with anything, Attie would step in without hesitation. She’s ferociously maternal.”

Bowen watched her put away the ointment.

Picking up the washcloth, she shut the lid on the first-aid kit, then walked silently into the bathroom. He heard water run in there, and when she came back out, it was with nothing in her hands but sadness in her eyes.

He rose, went to take her hand. It was cool from having just been washed. Tugging her over to the window that looked out into the black, he said, “Do you shut this when you sleep?”

A hard nod. “I love the deep, but half the time I think my clanmates treat those inside the habitats as their personal zoo exhibits.” Exhaling softly after that dry statement, she said, “Attie is gifted, one of our most brilliant scientists. That’s why it nearly broke her when she couldn’t ‘fix’ herself. She said that to me—Why can’t I fix myself, Kaia?”

Kaia swallowed hard. “It didn’t matter what the healers or we said to her, how Dex tried to make her see that she was beloved and wonderful and perfect. This is her fourth pregnancy. She miscarried the first three.”

“Ah, hell.” Weaving his fingers even tighter through hers, he said, “That’s why you’re so scared of giving her any reason to worry?”

“She was anxious beyond belief before we brought you down here. All her attention was on not miscarrying and it was causing so much stress on her system that the healer worried she’d give herself a heart attack.” Kaia looked up at him. “Atalina is so well loved that Miane authorized the experiment because it was the only thing that seemed to stop her from obsessing over the baby.”

“I’m a distraction.” Bowen nodded. “I’m fine with that—it doesn’t make the work she’s doing any less important to my people.”

Kaia’s expression softened. “She’s been herself—cool, calm, centered, and practical—since the instant the experiment began.”

Shifting position, Bowen raised his free hand to cradle her face and jaw. “You love fiercely, Kaia Luna.”

Shadows streaked across her face, but she didn’t break contact. And Bo could no more stop his head from dipping toward her own than he could stop the sun from rising or the moon from shining.

Chapter 25

I had a bad dream that I woke up and you were all gone and I was alone.

—Kaia Luna (10) to Natia Kahananui

“OUCH.”

Kaia’s eyes widened, her fingers rising to his mouth but not touching his lip as he broke the kiss before it had truly begun. He half expected her to laugh at the foolishness of the moment, of the security chief being brought down low by a stupid cut lip. But she didn’t laugh.

“Bend down.” Her voice husky, her fingers releasing his own to curve around the side of his neck.

Surrendering to her siren call with his heart a drumbeat and his own hand moving to the flare of her hip, Bo held his breath. It punched out of him a second later as she placed a soft, wet kiss against the side of his throat. His body grew hard, his muscles rigid, and the air in his lungs, it came in shallow bursts.

Another kiss, as deliberate and as sensual. Her fingers petted his nape as she kissed him, and her breasts, they pushed lush and tempting against his chest. Flexing his hand on her hip, he moved his other hand to under her hair . . . and found himself with his palm on warm, bare skin.

Her dress had no back.

“Kaia.” Groaning, he nuzzled her throat, drinking in the scent that haunted him. He picked up another opulent thread now that he was so close to the source: coconut infused the tropical flowers, or perhaps it was the other way around. He didn’t care; he just knew he could breathe it in for eternity.

She shivered, didn’t push him away when he slid one hand up her rib cage to gently cup the erotic weight of her breast. He could feel the lines of a built-in bra, but her nipple was taut through it, and when he ran his thumb over the pebbled nub, she rose on tiptoe and let out a sound that was pure, pleasured female.

Skin hot, Bo went to caress her again when something vibrated against his thigh.

Releasing him with a jerk, Kaia scrambled at the side of her dress to pull out a phone from a pocket hidden among the folds. “It’s Tansy,” she said, her lips plump and slightly parted—as if he’d kissed the life out of her when she was the one who’d brought him to his knees with her kisses. “I’m supposed to be having lunch with her and another friend.”

She coughed, cleared her voice, then answered the call. After telling Tansy she’d been delayed but would be there soon, she hung up and looked at him. “I shouldn’t be kissing you.”

He could almost see the battle within her. As he’d said, Kaia loved fiercely. Nothing in her behavior said she loved Hugo the way a woman loved a man, but that she loved the vanished male as a friend wasn’t in question. Now, her loyalty to Hugo was in a hard collision with the potent beauty of what burned between her and Bowen.

“This isn’t lust,” he said softly, and it was an admission to himself as well as a statement to her. “It goes too deep.” He thumped the flat of his fisted hand over the mechanical beat of his heart. “I feel it here when you touch me, when you smile at me. I listen for your voice and I’ve memorized your scent.” That it had happened at brutal speed changed nothing. Some things just were.

And this broken, fleeting fragment of time, it was theirs.

Kaia took a step back, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she’d raised a shield he could almost see, her gaze impossible to read. “Will you tell Attie you stumbled into a doorway? Say you tripped on your duffel after you left it in the wrong place.”

“Won’t a clanmate tell her the truth?”

Kaia shook her head. “We all love her too much.” Turning on her heel, she flowed to the door. “You need to go finish eating and I have friends waiting on me.”

* * *

• • •

BOWEN got the explanation to Dr. Kahananui over with first, finding her at a table in the atrium with the man who’d ripped Alden a new one. “My own fault,” he said with a scowl after explaining the lip. “My mother was always telling me to clean up the mess in my room.”

“You’re certain you didn’t hit your head?” the doctor asked with a frown.

“Yes. I’d tell you if I did.” He didn’t have to add the rest—that he knew exactly what was on the line and would do nothing to sabotage it.

Muscles relaxing, she nodded at the man across from her. “Have you met my mate, Dex? He’s the station commander.” Pride glowed in every word.