by Bertina Mars
Complete Christmas Alien Romance Boxed Set
Heavenly Claimed Complete Series
Bertina Mars
The Alien’s Captured Mate
Heavenly Claimed Book 1
Bertina Mars
Copyright 2016 by Bertina Mars
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any way whatsoever, without written permission
from the author, except in case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews
and articles.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any
character, person, living or dead, events, place or
organizations is purely coincidental. The author does not
have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for third party websites or their content.
First edition, 2016
Chapter One
Mira Hawthorne used to love the stars. She remembered when she was 7 years old, laying out on the grass in her backyard, staring at the night skies. Pointing at a random glittering orb, she would ask her parents to tell her another story about the adventure they had on this one or that.
Twenty years later, this was the kind of thing that Mira tried not to think about. Now, she focused on the memories, thinking it better than what she was actually doing, looking out the window of the shuttle. The transportation ship started to shake and rumble, causing Mira to jump. Embarrassed, she looked around her quickly to see if anyone had caught her being afraid at them probably breaking the atmosphere of the destination planet. Then she remembered she was one of the only passengers.
I shouldn’t even be here, she thought to herself with a sigh, I should be in the lab. It was Mira’s favorite place to be. And Zethrad? It was a planet that nearly no one visited, and the only people who ever did were war buffs.
The Zethradans had a reputation as a military planet, and a military planet only. From what Mira had researched before her trip, and what she had heard from others, the people there were barbaric and primitive. As it was, they had something that her research team needed, though, and it was Mira’s job to get it.
Jak Newson’s voice still stuck with her. “It’s an in-and-out job, Hawthorne,” he had told her, “Not like you’ll get much of a chance, but be careful not to fuck up even in the slightest. Relations with Zethrad are tense enough, as is. We don’t need the meat heads in military going and cutting our funding, got it?”
In and out, she reminded herself, trying to make it more easy. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, but nothing was easing the nausea or making her palms less sweaty as they broke through the atmosphere and neared their destination, Q’talik, the capital city of Zethrad. She wondered how loosely they were using the word “city.” Just in and-
“Everybody out!” the pilot yelled as he went through the aisles, grabbing and handing over peoples’ carry-ons to speed up the process of getting the few passengers off his shuttle. He said it in four different languages, starting with English, moving onto Spanish, and then finally in Zethradan.
She started to grab her things, heading for the exit with the pilot hot at her heels. Her nerves reaching a new height, Mira stopped right at the doorway of the shuttle, staring wide-eyed at the new planet.
She didn’t even see another Earthling, all appearing to be natives. She didn’t get much of a chance to look from afar before the pilot sighed and pushed on her shoulders to continue guiding her outside. “C’mon, out,” he told her as he ushered her out.
Zethrad was a planet with many biological similarities to Earth, Mira knew from her studies of the planet, which was really just a beginner course on their language, some independent internet research that she had done for the past couple nights before, and small folder saved on her digital watch that the secretary, Niki, had put together.
All of it was fun facts, nothing actually useful as far as Mira had seen so far. But what she was seeing was something vastly different, something she had never expected. It was beautiful.
Glass towers spiraled up towards aquamarine skies, twisted with delicate pieces of metal to hold it all in place, yet somehow adding to the beauty of the skyscrapers as well.
It contrasted starkly with the star shuttle port. It was made of glass like the rest of the buildings in the city, which really did earn the name “city,” much to her surprise, but it wasn’t ornate like the others. It was a simple block, and much smaller than any other shuttle port that she had been to.
Ping. Mira looked down at her watch. It was 2097’s latest and greatest piece of technology, a telecommunication device that you could use intergalactically, work around the wrist. There was almost nothing it couldn’t do. Right then, the ping meant that it was doing its most basic function: picking up a call.
Jak’s face appeared as a three-dimensional hologram displayed just an inch from her watch. Mira used to joke with him that she felt at risk from getting stabbed by his holographic, messy hair. Since she’d known him, it was always a mess, sticking up in the most random places. He spruced it up for fundraisers and board meetings with the stockholders, but that was about it. Mira refrained from making the joke now as his face appeared.
Jak wasn’t in the joking mood as much as he used to be. It was a pity, one of her favorite things about him. “Mira, hey,” he said, just as Mira slipped ear piece on to take him off of speaker, “You should be in Zethrad already. You are, right?”
“Just got here, boss,” Mira replied, then cocked an eyebrow, “Almost eerie timing… Do you have all your lab technicians tapped with location devices?”
“Yes, I can hardly afford to pay for my 5-year project to find the Fountain of Youth, but dammit, I found enough money in the budget to make sure I could find you monkeys at whatever bar holes you sink down into when you’re off the clock,” Jak retorted dryly, “Or maybe I checked the times.”
Mira wasn’t surprised. He had been obsessing about this trip for the past few months, since he had first asked her if she could go with him. She had been slightly disappointed that he hadn’t been on the star shuttle with her. “Obviously not, because I don’t see you here.”
“I know, I know. I missed the shuttle. Got caught up with a last-minute thing at the lab,” he sighed, sounding tired. Jak was always tired these days, but Mira expected nothing less.
At 41 years old, Jak Newson was the only one to come even close to curing old age. He was the new face of biology and life sciences. Mira was just his favorite lab technician, mostly because she had the most drive and ambition, plus he was a fan of her parents.
He was assistant to head of the department of sciences when she had first started as an intern. His passion for the subject and easy smile back in those days had made her fall head-over-heels in love with him, though Mira never admitted it to him.
“I already talked to that Zethradan biologist guy, Tyroc. He’s a hotter mess than I am, I can tell you that. He completely forgot about our meeting, so it’s going to be about an hour late.”
Mira looked around herself and then back at Jak. “And I just sit around here and wait for you?” she asked sarcastically. They both knew she didn’t want to be there in the first place, and now she was here on her own.
She watched the hologram of his face let out a slow sigh, looking down at something that she couldn’t see. “About that…”
It was obvious. Mira frowned deeply. She knew Jak too well to know where was going with this. “You’re not coming, are you?”
His eyes looked back up into hers, and she hated the fact that those were the same eyes that could make her heart skip a beat. “You’re my number one lab technician,” Jak sa
id, “We can’t have you and me leaving at once. These idiots wouldn’t know what to do without us… I’m sorry; it was poor planning on my part. When I came back her to check up, they’d already broken two nanoscopes.”
The lab technician couldn’t help but be irritated. She was 27 years old, and yet she had still acted like a young girl, dreaming of this as more of a romantic getaway with her boss that had never once actually admitted his feelings for her besides when he was drunk and said she had the best breasts in the lab, even better than the skinny secretary that all the guys flirted with.
The compliment of being his “number one” fell to the wayside. “Great, so I’m stuck on a foreign planet all by myself, surrounded by strangers. Funny how this didn’t make it into your initial pitch, Jak.”
He scoffed. “You know how many people would kill to be in your position, traveling to a new planet and negotiating peace and all that shit?”
“I’m not negotiating peace. We were supposed to negotiate letting us harvest some of their wildlife.”
“You’ll do fine, Hawthorne.” He was getting impatient with her, Mira could hear it in his voice and at the fact that he used her last name. Jak didn’t like to argue, hated it in fact. He was much better at staying completely detached, working behind the scenes and then having someone else deal with whatever mess was caused by it. This time, it was going to be Mira.
“You’ll be getting a ride to your hotel any minute now, so wait outside. If you need anything, contact the office line. I’m turning mine off until I fix the havoc going on around here.” And that was it, him avoiding her being angry with him.
She had her mouth open with her retort, but Jak hadn’t given her the time to reply back, hanging up his call as soon as he’d asked his final question. The woman sighed, giving one last look around her surroundings before she decided to fix herself up before the meeting.
Mira weaved in and out of the people in the shuttle port with ease, what with there being so little people there. The only hard part was when she got to the restrooms themselves.
The symbols weren’t the restroom symbols she was used to, one being a red circle with a white outer ring, the other a single slash of red. Mira paused, then tried to look through her folder, but there was nothing in Niki’s ridiculous files that helped her with deciphering them. Luckily, a couple of male Zethradan came out of the one with the slash mark, making the process of elimination pretty easy.
With Zethradans, they were mostly humanoid, so it wasn’t hard to tell which gender was which. The only real cosmetic differences were with the faces. Zethradans had sharper cheekbones that jutted out, which always made them seem so regal, intimidating, to other races.
And while human hair color could range from black to brown to blonde to red to white, naturally, the only natural colors for Zethradans were white and black, and then every shade between the two, no correlation with age.
And that was one thing that had interested Jak, as well as Mira and the rest of their group. The Zethradans matured until they looked about 30 years old, though they would be about 70 years old at that point. Once reaching full maturity, they just stopped aging, kept living until something else killed them.
Mira made a beeline for the mirror, but unlike the bathrooms in the overcrowded Earth, she found this one to be completely empty. She let out a sigh of relief, finally feeling comfortable now that there were no eyes on her. Mira’s brown eyes found themselves in the mirror of the dim bathroom.
While she had been walking through the shuttle port, she couldn’t help but feel like there were eyes on her, having noticed the blatant stares she had gotten from the two Zethradans leaving the bathroom.
She frowned, looking at her blonde hair, which she had pulled back into a neat ponytail to seem more professional. It didn’t match the black-to-white shade wheel, making her stick out like a sore thumb. The biologist also began to question her outfit, which she had selected to seem more uniform and simple, like she expected a military civilization to use. They were pants and a simple, loose shirt, both black.
Over it, she wore a brown, leather jacket that matched her boots. Mira had always been on the curvy side, and now she was afraid that the pants were a little too form-fitting. They made her ass look bigger, she thought, which probably was the reason for some stares too.
I can just change before the meeting, once I get to where I’m staying tonight, she thought to herself. Suddenly, Mira’s eyes widened. Shit. I need to go claim my other bags and find my ride!
Luckily, as she had read, the transportation system wasn’t like her home planet, where punctuality was all that important. They had a dedicated carriage system, which closely resembled those of the 1700s on Earth. Except Zethrad had their own species of horses, the Ghiholo. They more closely resembled wolves, though there was no fur, just a blue-ish color to their flesh and mouths with snarling teeth that dripped thick saliva.
It didn’t sound as pretty as the car that she had back home, but it was the only thing she had to get her to her hotel. Mira raced out of the bathroom, grabbing her one small bag that had been her carry-on. Mira opened the door, but then something she would never forget seeing happened, forcing her back.
As if in slow motion, the shuttle that she had just been on, the one that was just 200 feet from her, burst into flames in one giant explosion. The waves of it, pushed the stray strands of her hair back, the heat on her face causing her to wince.
There was a ringing in her ears, and under that, muffled screaming from the people around her that were now running in the opposite direction, away from the flames. The first explosion caused the two next to it to explode, and then the next two and the two after that, an intense example of the domino effect.
Mira took a step forward unthinkingly. Her mind was having a hard time playing catch-up, her body moving of its own accord without her brain there to tell it what not to do. Until she felt a strong arm wrap around her waist and the ground disappear from beneath her feet as she was hefted over someone’s broad shoulders. Mira didn’t react, her eyes stuck on the flames as hot metal and glass shot out. It reminded her of her parents.
She was broken from her reverie when she was abruptly dropped to the ground across the road from the burning shuttle port and heard the purring of a weapon aimed directly at her head. Mira sucked in a breath as she came face to face with a gun unlike any she’d ever seen.
Humans had always thought they were so clever and smart with their warfare, but when their world was expanded upon and the Space Age began, they quickly realized that they were severely under-performing in that category, and Mira could see why now.
It looked a bit like a regular gun, but it was made of several different pale metals, and she could see that in the barrel, it was glowing purple and blue. She didn’t want to know what kind of ammo was in that thing.
“Stand up,” a stern voice commanded, and as much as Mira wanted to see who was doing this to her, her fear of the gun kept her eyes on that colorful barrel, “Slowly. Do it now with arms stretched out, Earth Girl.”
Whoever he was, he had decent English, though there was a clear Zethradan accent, and a deep baritone voice that would be more comforting if he didn’t have a gun aimed at her. “Turn around and face the building.”
Mira listened, rising slowly and turning around, her arms stretched out on either side of her. In the glass, she saw a Zethradan man standing behind her, his weapon raised at her with one muscular arm.
He didn’t waiver, didn’t shake, and there was a firm expression on his face. He would shoot her if she weren’t careful. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mira told him, watching as the Zethradan stepped forward. The basic Zethradan that she knew was now flying directly out of her head.
The closer he got, the more detailed the reflection in the glass building became. The Zethradan seemed to be about her age, though that didn’t mean much with his race. He had that same telltale sign with the sharp cheekbones and his jet-black hair had waves th
at fell just an inch or two above his shoulders.
The man stepped so close to her that she could feel his body heat, could smell him, some sort of cologne, but there was an evident, strong note of sweat.
It smelled good somehow, and Mira just breathed slowly to try to keep herself calm, that smell filling her nostrils. Without warning, he placed his hands on her hips, gripping her hard. “Hey!” she protested, trying to jerk out of his grasp.
He brought her closer, pulling possessively. “Stop talking. Now,” the Zethradan hissed in her ear, causing Mira to shiver.
“But-”
His fingers dug in deeper. “Stop. Talking. And don’t make me repeat myself. Understand, Earth Girl?” No one had called her a girl in probably ten years, before she was 18.
“I am Ve Dominok, and you will do exactly as I say.” He paused, waiting for a reply. Mira would normally have one, and now that he didn’t have his gun on her, instead just his hands, she felt a little safer about her life. But she kept quiet, Jak’s words running through her head.
Mira didn’t need to end up in some sort of prison for this, especially not when she was here for a job. Not to mention, there was one thing coming back to her about the language, and that was that Ve Dominok was both a job title and a military ranking.
This was the Lord Commander of Zethrad, their leader. Her lips pressed together, filling with quiet rage as he dared to meet her eyes in the reflection of the glass and smirk cockily at her.
The Lord Commander’s hands started to move now, going down her sides and brushing briefly over her ass, then down, pressing and squeezing along the outside of her thighs and calves.
Mira kept watching, her cheeks burning in embarrassment at how public this was, especially when he started to move back up, fingers now almost massaging the inside of her calves.
She squirmed slightly when he kneaded into the inside of her thighs, backing up, though his head and chest were right behind her, holding Mira in place.
