“No,” said the man in front of her, lifting his head.
Face-to-face, she could see he didn’t have tentacles or laser beams for eyes. If anything, he had an ordinary face, the kind designed to never get a second glance. In shadows it was hard to make out his features, but Lilly got a hint of dark brows, dark eyes, a curving mouth.
She was soaked and shuddering from cold, despite the freakish heat of the ground under her now muddy hands. All of this was too surreal, yet she heard herself say, “No what?”
“No, not transported,” the man said. He stood, tall, the sleet and snow parting around him, not even touching him. “Fallen.”
“So you…fell.” Lilly turned from the microwave with a mug of hot cocoa in her hand and set it on the table in front of him.
The man, still naked beneath the afghan Grandma Lillian had knitted, looked curiously at the mug, then her. “Yes.”
“From…a…plane?”
“No.”
“From something else?”
He smiled, slow. It was like watching chocolate melt. That sweet, that rich. That good. “You could say that.”
Lilly leaned against the counter, her arms crossed, and eyed him. “Unless it’s super cold where you come from, you’d better drink that cocoa so you don’t get pneumonia. Shit.” She had a very bad, very sudden thought. “Are you going to go all War of the Worlds on me?”
“Hmm? What does that mean?” The man shifted, the afghan slipping on his broad, naked shoulders.
“You’re not going to get sick and die on me if I sneeze, are you?”
“I don’t think so.” He gave her another of those smiles. He lifted the mug to his mouth and sipped, then let out a completely decadent, sensual sigh. “Ah, I had no idea. They told me this would be good, but…”
“They, who?”
“The others who came before me.”
Lilly let out a small, shivery gasp. “Others who came before you? Like, oh, shit…at Roswell?”
He gave her another curious glance. “You are very trusting.”
“Because I let you in, instead of calling the police?” She laughed. “Trusting, or stupid. But my grandma always told me it was important to be kind to strangers, since you never knew who you might be entertaining without knowing it.”
“Your grandmother was a wise woman, and you are not stupid, Lilly Gold.”
“You know my name!” She scooted along the counter a few steps away from him.
“Would you imagine otherwise, that I should land in your backyard without knowing who you were?”
“Oh.” She watched him finish the cocoa. He made another of those moaning sounds and licked his lips, and she watched his tongue. “What’s your name?”
“You could not pronounce my name.”
Lilly laughed, loud enough to offend him if he was the sort to take offense. He didn’t appear to be. He smiled at her while she guffawed.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
He shook his head. The afghan slipped further down, baring his chest. She couldn’t see the rest of him hidden by the table, but she had no trouble remembering what he looked like. Underneath he might be tentacles and scales, but on the surface he was all very, very hot dude.
“I am not kidding. I have answered to many names. You couldn’t pronounce the one I use most often.”
All this was too surreal, even with Lilly’s admittedly very broad worldview. “So what should I call you, if I can’t pronounce your name?”
“You could call me Zachariah.”
“Is that your name?”
“I told you—”
“Right, right,” she said, waving a hand. “Okay, Zach. You show up naked in my backyard in the middle of a blizzard. Tell me, please, what I’m supposed to do with you?”
That smile again. Slow and creamy and rich and delicious. Lilly forgot, for a moment, to breathe.
“Anything you want.”
All this should’ve been too much. Too strange, too crazy-out-there, too…something. But all Lilly could do was watch, fascinated, as Zachariah’s tongue slipped over his lower lip. His eyes gleamed. He had lovely dark eyes.
“Anything?” she asked, her voice hoarse and not sounding like her own.
He nodded, just once, then tilted his head to stare at her with heavy-lidded eyes and that damned smile. “Anything.”
“What if I asked you to leave? Right now?” She pointed with a barely shaking finger at the sliding glass doors. Snow had melted in front of it, from her feet, not his. He’d tracked nothing inside with his bare feet.
“Do you want me to leave?”
He stood, the blanket falling off his shoulders. He might’ve come from some mother ship or some strange planet where they didn’t speak a language she could pronounce, but he looked every inch a human male. Broad shoulders and chest tapering to a lean waist. Strong thighs. Nicely muscled and curving ass she could see as he stepped out from behind the table. Lilly had never been a fan of full-frontal nudity on dudes—too often she felt like giggling at the sight of shrimplike dicks curled tight in shrinkage, or even aroused cocks, bobbing as their owners walked.
But this guy…this Zach, this stranger…
“Wow,” she said, throat dry. “Um…”
He held out his hands and fixed her with a stare she felt unable to look away from. “If you tell me so, I’ll have to go.”
“Is that, like, a rule or something?”
“Something like that.”
Lilly swallowed again. “Why are you here?”
“I told you. To do anything you want. Be anything you want. What you need.”
“Why me?”
At this, he tilted his head again. She thought there might be a flicker of something in those dark eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. “I wasn’t told the reasons.”
She shook her head at this. “What happens if I tell you to leave?”
“I will fail in my task.”
Damn, his voice was as soft and low and deep and rich and butter-creamy as his smile. As his eyes. This wasn’t a battle Lilly could readily win; she knew this about herself, at least, and didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
“And if you fail?”
A definite flash that time. “I don’t intend to fail.”
“You drop out of the sky, naked, and come into my house telling me you’re here to be anything I want, what I need, for crying out loud, and I’m supposed to just accept this? How do I know you’re not just some random crazy stalker freak with a degree in theatrical special effects?”
“You can’t know,” Zach said, “but you should have faith.”
She scoffed at that. In the window, her candles had burned out at last. The wind whipped snow against the glass. There’d be no work tomorrow. The governor had already called a state of emergency, and not even Lilly’s boss would expect her to come out in this.
“I should