Khol (Rescued by the Alien)

13. Nancy

Chapter 13

Nancy

K hol cut the tree and hefted it, slinging it over his shoulder.

It looked nothing like evergreens on Earth, but it was pretty in its own unique, alien way. Purple, but so was all the vegetation on this planet. I was rapidly getting used to the color.

And to the warm feelings Khol kept generating inside me, feelings I wasn’t sure I dared trust. It was hard to put yourself out there to someone, to pretty much hand them your heart. Richard hurt me.

But Khol wasn’t Richard.

No, he was a nice guy who was still mourning his lost love.

As we walked back to his house with him carrying both Flora and the tree and me hefting the saw, I watched the way he teased my daughter and how happily she responded to him. He really was an amazing person, and he’d make someone the perfect mate.

Me?

I could’ve wound up in a worse place than a tropical island with a blue-skinned alien who seemed determined to give my daughter and me joy.

Yet he was going to take us to another clan and leave us.

A silly voice inside me suggested he wouldn’t want to leave us if I started showing him he mattered, that he was worthy of love.

We were two lost hearts. Could we nudge our hurt aside to find something new together?

It was too soon to decide. I had days. Weeks. Years if I wanted. Just because he was going to take us somewhere and leave us, that didn’t mean I had to accept that plan. I could tell him Flora and I wanted to join his clan, that I wanted to see what might come of this spirit-induced mating.

My heart skipped at the thought of doing something like that. It was a big risk for someone who’d told herself she would never try again. But life was too short to waste it by letting one bad experience cloud the rest of my future.

Something wonderful could be waiting for me; I just had to let it into my heart.

We arrived at his house and, after tilting the tree against the front wall beside the door, he carefully placed Flora on the ground. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes shone with excitement. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this happy just running around in the woods and doing something as simple as cutting a tree .

“We need ta get it inside,” Flora exclaimed, bustling over to the door and pushing it open.

“Do you have a bucket or something to put the trunk in?” I asked.

He thought about it for a moment before his face cleared. “I know exactly what we need.” Hefting the tree, he strode inside the house. He placed the tree on the floor in front of the sofa and returned to the front door. “I’ll be right back.”

As he left, I turned to Flora. “We need to start making ornaments.”

“Yay,” she said, hopping over to stand in front of me. “Can we paint and use dough?”

Dough would work if I could find the right ingredients. I’d made a dough with salt, flour, and water in the past.

Water spirit . . .

“Let’s go see if the local alien can give us what we need,” I said, taking Flora’s hand and striding over to stand in front of the counter.

I’d never spoken to a water spirit before, but I’d chatted quite a bit with the resident alien, Khol. No harm in trying, right?

I laid my hand on the counter and lifted my voice. “Um, water . . . err, Taikeen Clan spirit? Flora and I want to make ornaments, but we need specific ingredients. Water—”

An empty bowl oozed up from the counter along with a cup of water. Maybe this would work.

After sending Flora a smile, which she returned, hopping in place, I turned back to the counter. “I also need salt. The ocean’s salty, but I need only the salt, not salty water. ”

A bowl of white crystals appeared. I hesitated a second before licking my finger and dipping it into the crystals, tentatively tasting it. Yup, it tasted just like the stuff back on Earth.

“Yummy, Mommy?” Flora asked, tilting her head to watch me.

“Nope. Thank you, Taikeen . . . err, spirit.”

The counter glowed, and I sucked in a breath, taking a step backward. Khol had said his house spirit enjoyed praise. Was that all it took to get what I needed?

“And flour. I’d love a five-pound bag of that if you can . . . create it for me.”

Nothing new appeared on the counter. What would make a good substitution for flour? We weren’t baking with it, though I’d wondered if I could make cookies over the next few days.

“Where da fwower?” Flora asked. “We need fwower.”

“Flour.” I drew out the word, waiting while she repeated it for me.

When she’d gotten it right, I ruffled her hair.

“Spirit of the Taikeen Clan?” I asked. “Flour is made from ground grains and it’s white and powdery. Look in your computer, if you have anything like that, and you’ll find a description. We’d love some food-grade flour, because we’re going to make cookies soon too.”

“Yes, cookies,” Flora squealed. “Lots and lots of cookies.”

We waited while the world ticked by, and just when I was beginning to give up hope, a larger bowl with what looked like flour appeared on the counter .

“Yay,” Flora cried out. “We got it.”

“We sure did, sweetie.” Maybe. I tasted it, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever eaten plain flour before, and it seemed like what I was used to back on Earth.

Khol returned with a small pail full of water. While Flora and I mixed our dough, he placed the tree trunk in the pail and secured the top to the wall with a few pieces of vine, keeping it standing upright. After, he stood back to admire it. “It’s . . . nice.”

“It’s going to be gorgeous,” I said. “Come help us make some ornaments. I don’t suppose you have an oven, do you?”

“I do.”

“Really? What do you bake?”

“So far, only meatloaf.”

A married meal from Earth? That’s what I once heard someone call it, like it was a dish every bride made not long after the honeymoon was over. Like it was a staple in everyone’s marriage. Or, on Zuldrux, a bachelor’s meal, I supposed. “Where did you hear about meatloaf?” Actually, there was no reason aliens wouldn’t have discovered how to make it themselves. He said he ate meat.

“Vanessa taught me.”

My breath caught. “One of the other women cooks?”

“Yes.” He flashed me a smile that made my heart flip over. “She loves to bake, and her mate, Aizor, built her an oven.” I loved seeing the excitement in his eyes as he described how he’d collected the right stones here on the island and mixed mortar to hold them together. How he’d measured his oven to make sure it was big enough to hold the very flat rocks he used for cookie sheets, and how he selected exactly the right wood to bake with, wood that didn’t generate lots of smoke unless he wanted to give his meat that yummy flavor. How he used ground meat from creatures he trapped on the island.

“When I visited the Indigan Clan after the gathering,” he said, “Vanessa showed her oven to me, and I studied how Aizor made it. It wasn’t hard to recreate it here. As I said, my clan spirit doesn’t provide meat. I enjoy the fish I catch and the meat from small creatures I trap in the jungle, but in the past, I’d fry or cook the meat over a fire on a stick. Being able to cook something slower and with steady heat is a joy. I also cook roasts, and I bake my fish with seasonings I collect near the stream.”

“This sounds amazing.” I peered around. “Where’s your oven?”

“Since I fuel it with wood, I built it behind my house.”

“Could you fire it up?”

His gaze fell on the dough we’d just finished kneading. “When would you like to have the oven ready?”

“In a few hours. We still have to finish rolling and cutting our ornaments, but they should be ready for baking by then.”

Ornaments were on the agenda for today.

Tomorrow, I was going to bake some cookies.