Healing Her Patient

“I know, I just…” She shook her head. “Are you sure there are no negative effects?”

“To folding space? Hell no—I’ve done it hundreds of times,” Brav assured her. “Well, except for pregnant women—folding space is bad for the fetus. But I’m sure you don’t have to worry about that.”

She stiffened and glared at him.

“And what is that supposed to mean? Are you presuming to know the state of my fertility just by looking at me?”

“The state of your fertility?” Brav threw her a confused look. “What in the Seven Hells are you talking about? I’m saying I can tell you’re not pregnant because of your smell.”

“So now you’re saying I smell? I honestly cannot believe this!” she exclaimed. “Talk about a hostile work environment!”

“No! Fuck…” Brav shook his head in frustration. “I’m not saying you stink or anything—you smell fucking amazing, little girl!”

“I what?” It was her turn to throw him a confused look.

Brav could have kicked himself—why had he said that?

“What I meant to say,” he bit out carefully, “Was that I can tell by your scent that you don’t have a mate and that you haven’t been with a male in the past several months at least. Therefore, you can’t be pregnant and it should be perfectly safe for you to go through the fold.”

She stared at him.

“You can tell all that by my smell? You can tell I haven’t had…had sex in a while?”

“Don’t feel bad, little girl—I haven’t either,” Brav growled.

Which was probably the problem. The minute they got back from this mission, he was going to go pay a visit to one of the pairing puppets that were kept in the Single Males area of the Mother Ship. The lifeless mechanical dolls were good for relieving a single male’s sexual tension without forming any attachments or forcing any messy failed bonding scenarios.

In the meantime, though, he would just have to deal with the situation at hand and try not to do something stupid.

You mean like telling her you haven’t had sex in a good long time? whispered a little voice in his head. Or letting her know how good you think she smells? Gods, what the fuck is WRONG with you?

Brav didn’t know. Clenching his jaw to keep himself from saying anything else, he steered the shuttle into the red gash in space, determined not to say or do anything else idiotic.

Six

What in the world is he talking about, saying my scent is “amazing” and that he can tell I haven’t been with a guy so I can’t be pregnant? Danni wondered as the shuttle entered the red gash Bravik had called “the fold.”

It was such a distracting question, she forgot to be frightened of the strange experience of traveling millions of light years in the blink of an eye. As Bravik had promised, it didn’t hurt, although her insides did feel a little strange when they flew out the other side.

Why would he talk about my smell? she wondered again. Liv had told her several times that Kindred had a much more acute sense of smell than humans did.

“Baird always tells me he could pick out my scent even if we were in a stadium and there were thousands of other people there,” she’d told Danni. “Kindred are attracted to a woman’s scent as much or more than they’re attracted to her appearance. It’s like a pheromone thing.”

So did that mean that Commander Bravik was in some way attracted to her?

Surely not, Danni thought. If he was, there’s no way he’d act like such an asshole!

But she still didn’t know what to make of his strange remarks. She was tempted to ask him, but that might be opening a whole new can of worms. Better to keep her questions to herself. She just hoped they didn’t have to spend hours flying through space in the tense silence that had fallen between them.

Luckily, at that moment, the round shape of a planet began to grow in the viewscreen. It didn’t look that different from Earth, Danni thought, other than the fact that there were intense pinpricks of pink light at intervals all over the planet’s surface.

I wonder if those are signs of industry—maybe power sources for their cities, Danni thought, frowning as they began to make their descent into the Soluu Four atmosphere.

She was still interested to learn how the natives—the H’rakens—lived. They were a space-faring race and had excellent long-range communications technology, but there were no satellites or space stations or any kind of spaceships orbiting around the planet that she could see. There was no layer of space junk either—which Earth had plenty of from earlier space launches gone wrong. The atmosphere was clear and clean with no signs of pollution as the long-range shuttle dipped down into it and quietly hummed its way to the ground.