by Julia Sexton
He got up from the desk. Walked by Sandy and went down the hallway to the door. The door with the lock that clicked shut.
When Sandy sat down at the desk, his scent lingered on the chair.
Just yesterday Sandy had been putting together end-of-month reports for Harrington, Ltd. secure in her new job. She was working for the most eligible bachelor, possibly in the country, in a beautiful office by the ocean. In less than 24 hours, her world had turned upside down.
However lush her new housing was, it was still a prison. The door locked from the outside and there was no escape. The glass on the balconies was sturdy and high.
Sandy stood by the pool after an hour of swimming. She picked up her sandal and threw it at the glass. The little shoe bounced off the glass as if swept aside and inconsequential. It would take more than a shoe to break through.
Josh Harrington. When she thought about him, her blood boiled. She was sure this was the first time in her life she had truly felt rage. Every part of her wanted to destroy him. Josh, the billionaire. Josh, the alien prince. Josh, the know-it-all. And, most of all, Josh the jailer. That was the truth of it. He was her jailer. Like some long ago story of princes and princesses. And, she wasn’t even a princess, just an ordinary woman making her way through life.
In that talk of his of studying the brain to reduce suffering, he hadn’t mentioned one word about imprisonment and how it caused emotional suffering. She might as well be a guinea pig in a cage. He’d watch her suffer while he luxuriated in his grand mansion. Palm trees, ocean views, delicious food were not regular prison fare, but she was trapped. She wanted out. She didn’t know how to get out. And she wanted escape, to get away. Never see Josh Harrington again.
He might sway other women with his height and strength and good looks. His tousled red curls, his mighty shoulders, his more than handsome face, his lips…Why was she thinking about him like this? She didn’t give a flying fajita how he looked. All she knew, right now, was that he was her enemy. Her personal enemy.
Sandy picked up the tossed shoe and went inside. She took a quick shower, dressed, and felt hungry after her swim. From the kitchen, she grabbed a small salad and a sandwich Giulia had left earlier. She took them to the dining room. The big, dark Spanish style table sat 10. The mosaic of tiles on the floor complemented the stark table and chairs. She sat at one end staring out the window at the ocean. After all her anger, her mind felt blank. She had no answers. She didn’t even have a question. She took a bite of the sandwich as she looked at the tall palms swaying in the ocean breeze.
The lock on the door clicked. Sandy put down her sandwich. Now what?
“Sandy, Sandy,” Josh Harrington called. She heard hurried footsteps running down the hall. He appeared at the arched entrance to the dining room. “You’re here. Come with me.”
He grabbed her hand. His strength flowed up her arm as he literally pulled her from her seat and led her through the door. Through the door! She was out!
“What’s happening?” Sandy said breathlessly as she trotted beside him keeping up with his long, hurried strides.
“Just come,” he replied.
Once again, Josh Harrington took arrogant command without a thought of explanation or treating her as someone who deserved an explanation. With him, it was “Do it my way.” But Sandy could tell something important was happening. First, she was out of the prison! This could be the time she got free. Free of her prison. Free of Josh Harrington and his commanding ways.
Wordlessly, he led her down the same long hallway she’d been in the night before. The night before when she’d seen…those things, those creatures. They went to the doorway of the same room. Josh opened the door and pulled her in. They stood, still holding hands in front of the same table with the same beings. Well, she wasn’t sure they were the exact same ones. It had all been so vague and so fast.
Now that she had a better look and they weren’t disappearing, she counted seven of the creatures. The skin on their faces was slightly blue, the color of the veins under her own skin. What she remembered as hairless heads, were heads covered in thin, pliable helmets each one with a badge on the front. They wore sleek bodysuits covering them from head to foot. Only their hands were visible.
The table was in the shape of an ellipse, oblong and transparent. If this all weren’t so strange she would have thought it was translucent plastic. So were the chairs. The creatures looked (what was that sci-fi word?) humanoid. A head, a body, two arms, two legs. The one in the center with the red badge on his helmet started hissing and growling. He waved his arms at Josh. He issued a few more hisses and then waved his arms at Sandy. Her gripped tightened on Josh’s hand. She felt a gentle squeeze back.
“What is he saying?” Sandy whispered.
Josh didn’t answer, he squeezed her hand again as he hissed and growled back.
Everyone at the table started hissing vehemently. Obviously there was an argument. Sandy was bewildered. Josh growled in a commanding tone. The table fell silent. He hissed at them all and turned to Sandy. He took both her hands in his. She felt a wave of compassion come from him.
“This is an emergency meeting to decide what to do with you.”
“Why are you sounding so, so…protective?”
“They want to get rid of you.”
“Get rid of me? What do you mean get rid of me? Imprisonment isn’t enough?” Sandy suddenly felt weak. She held on to his hands as if to pull strength from him.
“You know, get rid. Make you disappear.” She could tell that the super intelligent Josh Harrington was struggling for words. He took a breath. “End your life.”
“What?” She felt weak and trembly. This couldn’t be happening. She had to wake up from this nightmare. “End my life.” She whispered and blinked. She could feel tears coming.
“Shh. Shh. I am in command, I have the final say. This is only their proposal. I won’t let it happen.” He looked into her tear brimmed eyes and gave her an encouraging smile. That smile. This wasn’t a fake beam smile, this was real. Did he care about her? “Don’t say anything. Just stand next to me and be brave.”
Sandy took a deep breath. Her knees trembled. She wanted to sit down. She took another breath. She looked into his smoke blue eyes. He gazed back and nodded.
“Shh,” he whispered gently. “Shh. You will be fine.” He raised his hand and stroked away the hair that had fallen over her cheek. Sandy felt a thrill surge through her body.
Josh turned back to face the table. Still holding her hand he hissed and growled at the aliens.
For what seemed an eternity, but was probably only five minutes, Josh and the aliens argued. All of a sudden, the creature in the center stood up.
“What’s going on?” Sandy said, seeing the menace in the alien’s face.
“That’s General Baliik. He’s the planetary general for all of Zinka. He says this mission is his personal command.”
“What does that mean?” Sandy wanted to understand what they were saying. She had no idea what they were proposing other than “get rid” of her. Josh was too busy with the general to answer.
Josh and the general hissed at each other. The general growled. Josh growled.
Josh squeezed her hand again then held it firmly. He lifted her hand in the air. He pointed at General Baliik, then pointed at Sandy. His growls were terrible to hear. Sandy’s heart raced. Her trembly knees were going to betray her. She wanted Josh to put his arms around her. Wanted him to hold her up and tell her everything was fine. Instead, she could feel his anger. His deep growl filled the room. Sandy started shaking.
“Josh, what is he saying?”
He didn’t answer. He gripped her hand and raised it up in the air again. He issued another thundering growl at the group.
General Baliik, stood silent. He sat down in resignation.
“Josh, please tell me what’s going on? I can’t stand much longer. My knees are going to give way.”
“Not right now,” he hissed betwee
n gritted teeth. He squeezed her hand. She felt his strength flow through he body. Her knees stopped shaking. She took in a long breath.
The aliens at the table started hissing amongst themselves. Twice they all turned to stare at Sandy. Josh kept his eyes focused on the general. The aliens hissed and growled at each other, always deferring to the general.
Sandy felt helpless. She couldn’t understand what they said. What would happen? Why was Josh so tense?
The aliens stopped “talking.” The general stood up. Then, as one, the other six stood up.
Josh almost crushed her hand.
“No!” Josh shouted.
“Josh, what is it?” Sandy began shaking again as the aliens moved slowly from behind the table and approached them.
Josh let go of her hand. He put his arms up in command. He growled commandingly at the group of aliens as they advanced.
“No!” Josh shouted again.
Were they going to take her? Was Josh going to stop them? Should she try to run? Sandy felt frozen to the spot.
One alien took Sandy’s arm. His touch was like ice.
The general pointed a small red pen at Josh. For an instant, Josh turned his face toward Sandy, a look of helplessness in his eyes. Then he fell to the floor.
Sandy watched him fall to the ground.
The alien next to her pointed a red pen at her and everything went black.
Chapter 5: Tables Turn
Sandy’s eyes blinked open. Her dark eyelashes brushed against the fabric of the sofa in the great room of her…prison. She was back in jail. What had happened? Why had Josh looked so forlorn? She sat up. Yes, the swimming pool outside, the porticoes, the deceiving glass walls. All there. She was back.
Her mind flooded with questions. What had happened? Why had the aliens kept her and not “got rid” of her? What had Josh said? Why did the aliens stun their Prince? What had happened to Josh? Was he still alive? What was going to happen to her? Was she still locked in?
Was she still locked in? She leapt from the sofa and ran to the door. She pulled on the handle. Nothing. Damn, Josh Harrington, Harrington Ltd., Zinka. Damn her taking this job. She’d had two other offers. Sandy kicked the door. Then kicked it again, harder.
She heard a sound down the hall. The other bedroom. She ran down the hall. Just as she got to the door of the bedroom it opened. Josh Harrington stood in front of her, all 6’4” of him. Her body did that thing but she was so angry she ignored her body. She stood speechless. Then she looked at his face.
Gone was his commanding, arrogant demeanor. His grey-blue eyes looked at her softly. His mouth had lost that commanding determined lips. He looked sheepish.
“I had to think of something…fast. It was all I could think of.”
“What was all you could think of?”
“Let’s go sit out on the terrace. I need to think this through.”
“Think what through?”
“The terrace.” He strode off down the hall but not toward the terrace, toward the kitchen. The man was a puzzle. “I’ll get some wine.”
He brought a bottle of deep, red wine and two big round wine glasses. They sat on the garden settee outside. He opened the bottle silently. “We’ll let it breathe.”
He looked out through the glass wall at the stars over the ocean. Lights sparkled from the town of La Jolla below. A sailboat turned on its navigational lights, they twinkled red and green and white. The ocean swells twinkled back. It looked so idyllic. Just like the mansion had seemed idyllic.
“Zinka’s out there,” Josh said pointing at the sky. “I can never go back. I didn’t realize until tonight what that really meant. I was so involved. Involved in the business and all its ramifications. Involved in the mission.”
“Josh, I’m sorry you can’t go back. But, really, I don’t care about you. I don’t care about whether you can go back to your lost star…planet. I want you to tell me I’m free. Tell me I can walk out of here. We’ll pretend we never met, that none of this happened. You’ll go on being the great Josh Harrington and I’ll be Sandy Wilson, unemployed. I’ve been there before.”
Josh sat silently staring at the sky.
“Sandy, I have a long story to tell you. Will you listen? Then we’ll decide. Both of us will decide what to do next.” He reached for the open wine bottle, filled the glasses, and handed one to Sandy. No toast.
Sitting next to him she felt the warmth of his body. Her body responded. She was glad she had that bra on. No nipple betrayals. Well, she had something to say, too.
“Josh, I’ll listen. But in the short time I’ve known you, three weeks, you are the one that gives orders. I’m the one that carries them out. And in the last 24 hours so many things have happened. I want you to tell me a long story. But, and this is important. Look at me.”
He turned his head from the sky and looked into her eyes. His grey-blue eyes shone in the soft light of the terrace. “I’m listening.”
“After you tell me your story, and I don’t care what it is, that master-servant relationship is over. We’re done.”
He said nothing, just kept looking into her eyes. “I’ll tell you the story. Your bra is not working, by the way.” He smiled, and the skin around his eyes crinkled.
The man was exasperating. In spite of herself, Sandy blushed. She was very glad it was twilight and he couldn’t see. She knew her face was red. The rest of her felt hot. Below she was wet. This was not what she wanted to happen.
“Just tell the story.”
And he told her. A human growing up in a life-support bubble on Zinka. Trained in the ways of earth. Drilled in mathematics, physics, chemistry, statistics, the sciences. He had a natural aptitude and his scholars pushed him to his limits. But he had no childhood. Not the way people here on Earth did, hanging out with other children, playing foolish daredevil games. He was the Prince and he was created and reared for one task only: to come to earth as an explorer.
He came to earth when he was 17 as a student at MIT. He got his first patent when he was 19. That was the beginning of Harrington, Ltd. By 21 he was a millionaire and now, at 29, there was so much money it meant nothing. His patents earned him money, his corporations earned him money, Harrington consulted with governments. He was comfortable. All the while, he gathered information on brain function and human behavior and sent the information back to Zinka.
He could never go “home” because as a mutant human, he could not survive the atmosphere on Zinka. The Zinkan representatives that came once a month could only stay on Earth for about two days.
But once a month they came to talk about the information he sent and give direction on which areas to probe more deeply. Or, in turn, he told them he was pursuing a new path because he had made a discovery about neurophysics.
“What you walked in on Friday night was one of those briefings. No one has ever interrupted our sessions before. I was stunned. They were so startled they disappeared. Keeping you here was my solution to not letting the word get out in the world. I told you it was the worst mistake of your life. But, my response was the worst mistake of my life.”
Josh stopped. He looked out at the stars. The sailboat was beating up the coast almost out of sight. Sandy took in a deep breath and sipped her wine. It was deep and hearty. She was relaxing. Her anger had diminished from a blazing flame to a burning coal.
“But they came back today. I never made it to Denver,” Josh continued. “This time they felt the entire mission was jeopardized. You were the first human to witness their presence here on Earth. It would be simple to just make you disappear. We could continue the mission without disturbance. Obviously, I couldn’t keep you here a prisoner forever. It was impractical. You were impractical.”
Sandy interrupted. “But we’re both here now. I’m not gone and you are here in my “prison.” This is not making any sense.”
“That’s just it, Sandy. I am a prisoner, a prisoner here with you. They threatened to take you to Zinka for study. For 24 hours, they
would have you as a live specimen before you collapsed from the atmosphere. I told them that as their leader, I forbade them to take you. Then all hell broke loose. You saw General Baliik, the one with the red badge. He is second in command, after me. What you just witnessed was what you call a palace coup. I’m under house arrest. The general is in my quarters. The rest went back to Zinka to report.”
“House arrest? You mean you are locked in here with me? We are both prisoners?”
“That’s the story so far.”
Sandy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In one way, this was all so preposterous nobody would believe her even if she did escape. On the other hand, she was a prisoner and had no control. She had no control over Josh. And he seemed to have lost control of his…his…people, underlings. She didn’t know what to call them. Her body started shaking. Tears welled up. This was just impossible.
Josh leaned over, put his arms around her, and tilted her chin. He looked into her big eyes framed with lush black lashes. He saw the tears. Sandy’s full lips trembled. He leaned down and planted his lips on hers.
The fear melted at the touch of his lips. They pressed against hers. The trembling stopped. Her nipples responded before her lips did. Her eyes closed as her entire world centered on his lips. They were firm and then very, very soft. Gentle.
She felt the tip of his tongue part her lips. Now that he was close, very close, his scent like pine trees by the ocean, made her feel dizzy. She heard the ocean whispering beyond the glass walls. She opened her lips wider. His tongue explored her mouth, slid along the side of her tongue. She moaned and responded with her tongue. Her body was on fire. She was pulsing all over. The musty taste of wine on his tongue made her want to drink him, drink all of him.
Josh moaned and pressed his fingers against her breast. She shivered and pushed her tongue into his mouth.
The lock on the door clicked. General Ballik came down the hall.
“You were trained to resist these human temptations. I can see that we made the right decision. If only the people of Zinka could see how low you’ve sunk. How you’ve betrayed our mission. Our mission of years. For this inconsequential human.”
