Ouroboros 2: Before Read Free Page A

straightened up, turned around, patted a hand down her tight green bodice, and sighed.
    Far from laughing at her, Carson simply stood there in the doorway, staring at her with an open mouth. ‘Nida . . . what are you wearing?’
    ‘ The traditional garb of a modern woman of this planet,’ she said with a curtsy. ‘I think. And the gloves,’ she brought them up, ‘are just there to stop people from noticing my glowing hand.’
    Carson didn’t appear to be capable of speaking; instead, he stared at her. Thoroughly. His eyes appeared to dart over every single centimeter of her, and before too long, she started to blush. She was thankful for her long veil, and suddenly tugged it down over her eyes.
    ‘ Where did you get those clothes?’ Carson finally stopped staring, and perhaps he realized just how intense he’d been, because he straightened up, coughed, and looked sheepish.
    ‘ Upstairs. I’ve found something for you too,’ she walked past him awkwardly, then practically ran into the hallway, the shoes she had selected clicking over the stone floor.
    She quickly found the pile of clothes she’d selected for him, picked them up, and handed them over.
    He took them off her, then considered them, concentrating on the worn leather vest especially. ‘Fashionable,’ he quipped in a long drone. Then he glanced at her again.
    It was a weird, awkward kind of look, and he immediately cleared his throat when she saw him watching her.
    She shuffled her feet a little. ‘Are you feeling better?’
    ‘ Fine,’ he said quickly. ‘But we have a lot to do. We have to figure out this alien race’s language. I have no idea what time we’ve gone back to, but I doubt that they’re using—’ he began.
    ‘ The Standard Galactic Dialect,’ she finished off his sentence. ‘They aren’t. And the scanner has just finished building a functional language model for them.’ She gestured to where she had set it down on a small side table several meters from Carson.
    He actually frowned at her. ‘Sorry?’
    ‘ Well, while you were asleep, I tried to remember some of my Academy lessons, and gathered together everything that looked like it had alien language on it, and fed it into the scanner. Then I told the scanner to monitor all airwaves for any kind of coherent data that looked like communication. Well, it found radio waves; I told it to assess those too. And now it has built a functional model.’ She felt a little bit like she was presenting a project in class.
    Carson’s lips were a little too far open. ‘You did that on your own?’
    She suddenly felt defensive. ‘Yes. I followed Academy regulations,’ she began.
    He put a hand up. ‘Never mind. I’m just . . . impressed,’ he winced as he said it, ‘sorry, that sounds bad. I mean . . . you did good.’ He winced again. ‘No, that sounds worse. Look, never mind.’
    Though she wanted to remain defensive, she couldn’t. He was terribly cute when he was being awkward. Which was incredible when you thought about who he was. That was Carson freaking Blake standing in front of her. He wasn’t meant to be cute. He was the leader of the Force; he was effective, efficient, trained, and sharp like the sword of justice.
    Yet now he looked like he wanted to crawl back to his little chair and fall asleep so he could snuffle the day away and forget his embarrassment.
    Thinking about that reminded her of just how damn sweet his snuffling was, and she brought a hand up and couldn’t help but giggle behind it.
    His eyebrows shot down over his eyes. ‘What?’
    ‘ Nothing,’ she said in a high-pitched voice.
    ‘ Yeah, right, now tell me,’ he grumbled.
    ‘ You snuffle while you sleep. Maybe it was just the effect of the device,’ she tried to reason quickly, surprised that she’d actually just shared that detail with Carson.
    He looked mortified. Then he straightened his back, lifted his chin, and gave her that same look he always did when he was trying to