Awakened by the Giant Read online

  Well, at least he hadn’t called her a specimen again, Maddy thought dully. Not that it really mattered. She was still trying to wrap her head around the idea that everyone in the Kennedy was dead except for her and now she was stuck in a weird alien science station or research facility or whatever this place with its slime tanks and oversized furnishings and fire hose showers was.

  “I’m not that small,” she muttered rebelliously. “You’re just really big.”

  “The Jor’gen Kindred are thirty percent larger than most humanoid species,” he agreed, conversationally. “It is one reason we have difficulty finding females to mate with.”

  Sudden horror came over Maddy.

  “Is that why you saved me and put me in your slime tank to, uh, defrost?” she demanded. “To mate with me?”

  She was suddenly aware all over again of the fact that she was naked—naked and dripping wet and still mostly covered with slime which couldn’t be very attractive but then again, who knew what this huge gray giant with his glowing bronze eyes found attractive? She tried to cover herself with her mostly useless hands and started to back away from him.

  Calden seemed to understand her horror because his eyes widened.

  “No! No, of course not,” he exclaimed quickly. “I will never take a mate—it is forbidden here aboard the Mentat station. I wanted only to study you—and to see if you could give me information about the other specimens from your home world we found in the wreckage of your ship—some of which are already growing.”

  “Study me?” A new fear came into her mind. “Are you planning to cut me up? Dissect me like a frog in a biology lab?”

  Calden looked horrified.

  “I do not know what a frog is but I promise, I would never harm you, Madeline” He sighed. “Forgive me—I fear I am not doing an adequate job reassuring you. I’ve never had a specimen—er person—that I could talk to before.”

  “You might as well call me a specimen,” Maddy said dully. “For all I know, I’m the only human left alive anywhere. I guess that makes me something to study.”

  “Was your planet destroyed?” Calden asked gently. He began to run the stream of water over her again as he spoke and to Maddy’s relief, some of the slime started coming off. She tried to help the process along by rubbing herself but her hands still didn’t want to work right so she wasn’t very effective.

  “It was about to be,” she said, remembering the dark, awful days when the invaders came. “By a race that called themselves ‘The Scourge.’ Our government had been preparing an expedition to go out and seek new Earth-like planets for the human race to live on. They sped up the schedule and got us launched and away before the Scourge could stop us. We got away but then…then…” She frowned. “I can’t remember what happened—what’s wrong with my memories?”

  “They’ll come back to you in time,” Calden assured her.

  “Are you sure no one else made it?” Maddy asked, feeling the lump in her throat again. “No one else from my ship? Ana or Laurence or…or Pierce?”

  “Pierce was your mate?” Calden’s deep voice was neutral.

  “Yes.” Maddy nodded, her dripping hair flinging green slime with the action. Though the stuff he called “nutrient bath” seemed to be coming off her skin, it stuck to her hair stubbornly.

  “And I suppose you loved him very much. I am…sorry for your loss,” Calden murmured.

  “No,” Maddy said bluntly, too emotionally overwrought to keep her thoughts to herself. “No, I didn’t love him. But I was trying to love him. I’d like to think we were trying to love each other.”

  Calden frowned. “Forgive me but I don’t understand. I have never had a romantic relationship myself—is it necessary to try to love someone?”

  “Sometimes it is,” Maddy said and sighed. “We were in love when we first got married but then we just…grew apart. He was married to his work and then he decided he didn’t want kids. Of course, the expedition to another planet was supposed to change all that. They only allowed fertile couples to go. Once we got where we were going, we were supposed to start a family right away. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to go with him instead of just asking for a divorce.”

  “A divorce?” Calden frowned. “What is that?”

  “A…parting of ways. What people do when they outgrow each other.” She frowned, turning around in the spray of water so that more of the slime could be washed off her back and hopefully out of her hair. “Don’t your people have anything like that—a way for a man and woman to get away from each other if their marriage doesn’t work out?”

  “I am a Kindred, as I said before. We have no parting of ways between male and female because we mate for life,” he rumbled, running the jet of water over her back and behind. Maddy wanted to cover her bare ass but that would have meant taking her hands away from her breasts and sex—not that her hands were working properly because they still weren’t.

  “No divorce, huh?” She looked over her shoulder at him. “That must make for some pretty interesting shouting matches.”

  He frowned. “Why would you shout at the one you are bonded to? Most arguments stem from misunderstandings. A soul-bond, such as my people form with their females, eliminates such errors.”

  Maddy didn’t know what he was talking about—they seemed to have strayed into a wholly philosophical discussion on marriage somehow and all while he was hosing her off. Again, the situation felt surreal.

  But there was one aspect of her current predicament that felt entirely too real. The green slime had come off most of her body but her hair was still stiff with the stuff. And there was still some of it up inside her too. Ugh! She pressed her thighs together uneasily, wishing it would just slide out on its own but the slime seemed stuck up there. Well, she couldn’t do anything about it or her hair with her useless hands. Reluctantly, she realized she would have to ask for help.

  “Calden?” she said, turning to look at him again, while keeping herself covered as best she could. “Is there any way to get this stuff out of my hair? My, uh, hands don’t seem to want to work right which is kind of scary.”

  “Your hands aren’t working properly?” He frowned. “Let me see them.”

  “If I do that, you’ll see all the rest of me too,” she protested, taking a step back. “I mean, I know you already saw most of me but at least I was covered in green slime then—now that I’m all washed off except for my hair I’m just…” She shook her head. “I don’t like feeling so exposed, especially to a guy I just met.”

  Calden shook his head. “If you fear that I have some kind of sexual interest in you, Madeline, please put that thought far from your mind. As I said, mating with a female is expressly forbidden here aboard the Mentat station. And even if I wished to mate with you, I could not. You have only to look at our respective sizes to see that it would be quite impossible for me to fit my shaft inside you.”

  That made her cheeks feel hot for some reason but she lifted her chin and refused to show her embarrassment. Well, if she was no more than a scientific specimen to him, then it was probably okay to let him see her naked, even if it did make her feel really nervous. She was plus-sized and she’d never been very comfortable in the nude, even with Pierce. But Calden seemed to be only interested in her in a scientific capacity.

  “Okay,” she said at last, peeling one useless hand away from her breasts and holding it out to him. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Calden turned off the water for a moment and took her hand in his much larger ones. Again Maddy felt like a child confronted by an adult. His hands were massive compared to hers. But he was extremely gentle as he examined her, his long fingers delicately feeling her own, much smaller ones, as he frowned in concentration.

  “I believe your fine motor skills didn’t develop properly because you left the nutrient bath early,” he said at last. “The easiest way to remedy this would be to put you back into the bath and—”

  “No!” Maddy backed away from him, her