Me, I can’t just leave well enough alone. Like our dear Miss Frye, I just had ta tinker with it some, make it run smoother.

A LASTING IMPRESSION

Part One – Masculine Wiles

They didn’t meet straight off.

Kaylee’d stepped down into the cargo bay, just in time to see his back end goin’ out t’wards the kitchen. All she could tell from the glimpse she got was that he weren’t average-sized none.

“Man’s hungry,” the Captain commented, nodding at the doorway. “Ain’t been eaten fit servin’s for a month or more.” There was a pause before he added dryly, “Don’t seem none the worse for it though. Still the biggest, meanest gorram tracker I ever saw.”

Kaylee didn’t much like the sound of that. Big an’ mean weren’t her cup of oolong. She knew there had to be a grain o’ truth to what he said on account that Mal didn’t hardly lie to her, and that he’d specifically been on the lookout for some extra muscle since he got shot up on Whitefall a while back, but she weren’t one to make assumptions ‘bout how someone ought to be took on first appearance.

She reckoned to follow said tracker to see for herself.

He whipped ‘round from starin’ all lost-like at the table when she come in behind, and she gasped like she’d had her breath knocked clean out, her eyes eating him up like she was the one starvin’.

Sweet Buddha, but he was swai. Taller’n her pa and built real solid, the sort her dear ol’ grandmammy would’ve called ‘a strapping lad’. Not that he was laddish in any way. No, this specimen was every inch a man.

Thick muscles rippled and rolled along his tanned arms, stretched out the chest and shoulders of his tight blue T-shirt like they had a life of their own. Her gaze shifted from the breadth of that undulatin’ landscape down a trim middle and long, powerful legs, takin’ in with awe how the gunstrap ‘round his thigh was stretched taut with the strain of holdin’ on. Though, why that spectacle brought to mind memories of Uncle Deak’s prize bull was a mite inexplicable...

He cleared his throat and h