Page 126 of Riv's Sanctuary

“I do not think you’re property.”

A small chuckle left her lips. “You think I’m a nuisance, though.”

“You talk to the animals. You sing to them. When you’re gone they will want me to do the same.”

Right. The smile dried on her lips.

This wasn’t permanent. He was still intent on getting rid of her.

“Right.” She’d forgotten she wasn’t welcome at the Sanctuary. She looked back at him. “Thank you. Are you finished?”

He froze, opening his mouth to say something before it slammed shut again.

With a nod, Riv stood and walked toward the door, opening it and sliding out silently.

When a part of her protested at him leaving, she took it by the neck and stomped on it.

She didn't need to be nurturing feelings for Riv.

He was the sort of guy you crushed on in high school but who would look right through you.

A girl didn't find herself in another galaxy, so far from home, to be having juvenile feelings for an alien who didn’t want her.

She didn’t survive this long to die from heartbreak on another planet.

She’d rather die alone.

27

That night she couldn't sleep.

Combined with tossing around in bed, she just couldn't get her mind off him.

He’d left some long thin strips of moist material on the bed in her room. The strips smelled medicinal and she’d assumed they were to bandage her hands, so that’s exactly what she’d used them to do. She’d bandaged her palms and left her fingers free.

She guessed he’d had enough of her for one day because after the bath, he’d disappeared.

But it was amazing what a good warm bath could do—or maybe it was those healing salts.

Her muscles didn’t ache so badly anymore and with the bandages over her hands, she couldn’t feel the pulsing of the blisters.

Sighing, Lauren tossed this way and that.

Why was it so hard to sleep?

No matter how she told herself it was bad, really bad for her to think about him in any other way except the fact he was a bit of a dick, her mind—no, her vagina, wasn't listening.

Maybe she had daddy issues.

Her father had left when she was young.

Maybe this was her way of acting out, albeit that it was happening a decade too late and on the wrong frickin’ planet.

She was attracted to the hot guy who was bad for her psyche even though her mother had warned her about such men.

She should know better.

When she did manage to get some sleep, images of Riv came to her in her dreams.