The sheets smelled like Trudy, like making love... and like the stranger who had fallen into their lives.
He didn’t even need the dragon’s alien touch to cause this hard-on; it was so heady a mix that he felt like a randy youth, and a younger version of himself would have spent this solo time in an empty bedroom jerking a quick one off.
He knew, however, that he would not have been thinking of his wife, and the guilt of that realization drove him out of bed and into clothing. It wasn’t that he hadn’t fantasized before, but they had always been pleasantly impossible fantasies. Nothing so close, or so gorgeously shirtless, before.
The object of this desire, still without cover on his upper half, was sitting alone at the kitchen table when Rikard had gotten dressed and emerged from the bedroom.
“Where’s Trudy?” he growled, reminding himself that it wasn’t the dragon’s fault that he was built like a god and could make an erection with one careless caress.
Or even just one half-lidded, innocently smoldering look, apparently.
“She took the truck to the garden outlet,” Danyen told him serenely. “I expressed my desire to repair her garden and she thought I perhaps should not attend her in purchasing the necessary supplies without being more, ah, appropriately attired.”
Rikard had to laugh at that. “She’s got a point,” he conceded. “We have pretty gossipy neighbors. Even clothed, I bet you set off a chain of speculation in town the likes of which we’d never live down.”
“I would not wish to damage your social reputation,” Danyen said, his perfect brow furrowing.
Ridiculously, Rikard wanted to comfort him. “You don’t need to worry about that,” he assured the dragon. “We’re too old and stubborn to care what people think of us.”
Danyen tipped his head graciously. “In our culture, tenacity is an admired trait, and age is a sign of vitality.”
“How old are you exactly?” Rikard had to ask.
“I am about two hundred of your earth years,” Danyen said casually. “I have been on earth approximately ten of those.”
Rikard wasn’t sure what to think of that. “Have you had breakfast?”
“Trudy gave me a bowl of cereal when she ate.”
“Trudy and I don’t always agree on the definition of breakfast,” Rikard scoffed. “I’ll whip something up.”
It was pouring rain when Trudy returned from her shopping with a truck bed of replacement plants and parts for the raised bed and greenhouse repairs, as well as a selection of clothing to fit over Danyen’s broad shoulders from the second hand store.
She pulled the truck into the garage and scurried to the house.
Danyen was clearly willing to go out and labor in the rain, but Trudy and Rikard both insisted that this was a poor idea.
“It can wait,” Trudy reassured him. “We’re on retirement time.”
Thwarted in that, he wandered around the house trying to assist them. Rikard spent some time discussing the anatomy of the perfect sandwich over lunch, and Trudy, bemused, showed him how to knit at his request.
“We’re retired,” she told him, rather flustered by his desire to be involved with their every task. “I’m afraid we just aren’t that exciting.”
He looked at her solemnly, with his jewel-like green eyes. “I find you fascinating,” he said sincerely.
His joy when he completed a row of knitting was compellingly adorable.
“I have never created something before,” he confessed. “Our species aspirations tend to… grander things. Games of power, competitions on an empire scale.”
“Oh, don’t think that we can’t be competitive,” Trudy teased him. “You should see Rikard play Monopoly.”
“I look forward to it,” Danyen said formally. “Now, may I knit a sweater as you are?”
“Let’s start with a hat,” Trudy suggested quickly. “I have just the pattern for you.”
Though he should have been hurrying to find suitable human anchors, Danyen could not find it in him to regret the rain that kept him from the repair of the garden.
He finished the hat that Trudy had set him on, disproportionately proud of the finished product to its level of polish. He started in on a second hat intended for Rikard, enjoying the quiet periods of conversation that this afforded him with Trudy.