Secret Santa Surprise: Book 29 in the Kindred Tales Series - Evangeline Anderson Page 0,8
reading too much into things? Maybe Melanie genuinely did just want to learn to use her wave and she had no interest in Clear other than that. What if she was only being nice to him?
What if she didn’t find him attractive in the least?
“No,” Clear said aloud, pushing the doubts out of his mind. “No, I won’t lose hope! Not yet. There’s at least a chance that a mature and beautiful Elite might fall for Strong and me, if I put myself forward. But there’s no chance at all if I don’t try.”
Taking his brother’s coffee mug to the sink, he ran some water in it and glanced at his own chronometer. Damn! If he didn’t hurry he was going to be late!
Leaving the coffee mug in the sink, he rushed out the door.
3
“Okay, I think this should work all right.”
Melanie frowned at the frozen pizza she’d chosen for tonight’s cooking lesson. She had a few other things in the fridge too, but Sonja swore that frozen pizza tasted amazing when it was cooked by the wave.
“Seriously, it’s a game-changer,” she’d gushed to Melanie. “The wave makes the crust crispy and the cheese all ooey-and gooey and melty…it tastes just like homemade!”
Melanie didn’t know about that—she only knew that everything she’d tried to cook in the Kindred version of an oven had been burned to a crisp in a matter of seconds.
The wave appliance was a little taller than waist high—having been made for the much taller Kindred—and it consisted of a flat metal base about the surface area of a regular stove, and a thin sheet of highly tempered metal alloy which pulled out of the wall above it. The thin sheet aligned exactly with the base, matching it perfectly.
Melanie reached for the handle now and pulled the wave top—no thicker than a sheet of paper—out of the wall so that it was directly above the base. It was supposed to shoot thousands of pinkish-red microfine heat rays out when you told it to cook and get everything done in an instant. This sounded great in theory, but Melanie thought that maybe something was wrong with her model.
Every time she had asked it to cook anything, the tiny thin rays seemed to clump up and join together, so that instead of thousands of teeny rays, no bigger than a hair, she wound up with thicker rays—some as big as a good-sized piece of rope.
The thicker rays didn’t just burn the food—they blasted a hole right through it. It was scary to watch and even scarier considering that her hand had almost gotten in the way the last time she’d tried it. Melanie was certain the wave’s thicker rays would be entirely capable of burning one of her fingers to ashes—a phenomenon she was not at all eager to experience.
She left the wave all ready to go and went to check her appearance in the 3-D viewer one more time. A woman with long, wavy, chocolate brown hair and clear amber eyes looked back at her.
She was wearing a nice pair of dark jeans that minimized her hips and thighs and a red top with a v-neck which showed just the tiniest hint of cleavage. Her makeup was perfect—she’d just touched it up—and she’d put just a tiny bit of scent behind each ear. She’d been careful not to use too much because Sonja had told her that the Kindred had an incredibly strong sense of smell and they didn’t like overpowering perfumes.
Now, Melanie wondered anxiously if the scent she’d used was too much. She couldn’t smell it herself, of course, but what if it put Clear off entirely? What if he—?
Don’t be stupid, whispered a voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like her ex-husband. Why are you even worrying about what you look like or what kind of perfume you’re wearing? He’s way too young for you and you’re way too old for him. Face it, Melanie—you’re over the hill. Your best years are behind you and the most you can hope for now is to find some old codger who doesn’t mind those wrinkles around your eyes and the fact that your tits aren’t as firm as they were, to live out the rest of your life with. Hell, you might not even find that. You’ll probably end up like your Aunt Marge in a big old house full of cats with nobody to love you until you die. You—