Chosen by the Alien Above Part 3: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial

by Nora Lane

  I changed my mind.

  I wanted the boots.

  And I wanted the suit.

  Noah sucked in a breath. His eyes burned for me.

  "I misspoke. The color does have an effect."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I had only one question in my mind now.

  Did the boots do the same thing?

  "Cosmo, can you make my boots the same color?"

  "Yes."

  My boots remained black.

  Why were they still black?

  "Cosmo, I thought you said you could make them periwinkle?"

  "I can."

  I wanted to smack something. He could do it. But I didn't tell his literal, annoying self to do so. I wanted to smack him. But I wasn’t sure where to start. A wall. The table. Would anywhere do?

  "Please change them to the same color."

  An instant later I was enveloped in the most beautiful purple imaginable. I studied it for moment.

  "Cosmo, make it a touch lighter."

  “A touch? The colloquial use of the word implies—“

  “Make it a tiny bit lighter.”

  "Yes, Ms. Gabarro."

  The purple of my suit and boots drifted up a touch. The perfect touch. The periwinkle of purple's dreams. I wanted to jump up and dance around the room like a princess. Like this was my coronation ball. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance the boots would help my normally clumsy moves more graceful. My balance seemed better walking in them.

  Noah grinned and clapped. "That's one of my better creations. Getting the nano carbon fibers aligned and bending in perfect synchronicity was a terrible chore."

  "I love it!"

  I sounded like such a girl. I couldn't help it. I did love it. I was a girl.

  "Would you mind showing it off to me?" He made a little twirl with his finger.

  "You're pushing the bounds of propriety again, Mr. Sinclair."

  "What? I simply want to admire my creation. It has nothing to do with you."

  I almost clawed his face off. I didn't know what was worse. His asking to take a good look at my ass or then telling me he had no interest in doing so.

  I was not going to give him the pleasure of seeing my discomfort. I stood up, stepped away from the table and then started a slow twirl. I made sure to give him an eyeful of my backside. We'd see who could make the other more uncomfortable.

  "How do you feel about your creation, Mr. Sinclair?" The tone of my voice made it clear the suit was not the true topic.

  A soft growl escaped his throat. He coughed and I heard the squish as he swallowed.

  "Most pleasing. I had no idea it could be worn so well. It's a pity I'd like to tear it to shreds."

  My glutes clenched at the implied force. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw his eyes smoldering like the sun. I had no doubt the seven-foot-tall man muffin could get me out of this suit in a hurry. I wanted to see if we could set a world record. Or a space record if Guinness was particular about locations.

  As long as he was tearing my clothes off.

  I finished the slow spin and sat back down. I'd never felt sexier in my entire life. I felt so alive. It hit me all of a sudden.

  The injustice of it all.

  Why now? Why did love dance at my door now? And never before?

  There were two major obstacles to any imagined love I might harbor.

  One, I was here to interview him, as a professional. I wasn't here to sign up to be his personal concubine.

  I could almost see the uncapped pen in my hand, shaking to scrawl my signature.

  And two, even if that obstacle could somehow be overcome, even if that stormy sea could somehow be safely navigated, it didn't matter.

  I had less than thirty days to live. That was the concrete consensus of my team of doctors back home. Despite their hopeful babbling.

  The lightness in my being that buoyed me up on the wings of a bubble burst in mid air. The tension on the surface tore apart.

  I crumpled in my chair, despite its best efforts at perfecting my posture. This pushy gel stuff was getting irritating.

  Tears burst from the limitless reservoir behind my damned eyes. I wished I could see another truth, another way. Another future. The most dangerous time to embrace hope was when everything inside you knew it was pointless.

  Small streams guttered down my cheeks. I snorted as an especially wrenching bubble burst in my throat.

  Noah was at my side in an instant. He knelt on the floor, his head not much lower than mine. He was crazy big.

  "What hurts you, Cora?"

  Every fiber in my being wanted to spill the beans. Wanted to pour my tragedy into his large hands. I didn't harbor any false hopes that he could change it. But getting it out would've been something. Just sharing it would've been a comfort.

  The words choked in my throat. This wasn't why I was here. I wasn't three hundred miles above the surface to dump my troubles on the richest, sexiest recluse to ever float above the face of the earth. And I didn't want to give him leverage. Something he might find useful in manipulating his questioning.

  "It's nothing," I said.

  He took my trembling hands in his rock-steady ones. His skin was soft despite the obvious strength lurking underneath. He looked up into my eyes. The room faded around us.

  "That's not true, Cora. I know it's not because I've been in your shoes. I know what it means to carry the burden of a death sentence."

  He placed both my hands in one of his and cupped my cheek. I'd never been treated so tenderly. Certainly not by the doctors when I got the news.

  "You're destined to die, Cora. Not in some far off, ambiguous way. Death stalks near and your body grows weary of the chase."

  He wiped a tear from my cheek.

  "You're going to die soon and not a single soul on earth can do anything about it."

  I was truly a mess now. Rivers of tears and snot drew deltas on my chin and flooded the plains of my chest. Wet drops tinted the suit a slightly darker purple. My breath came in painful, racking sobs.

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  He lifted my chin and touched my lips.

  "I'm telling you because I think I can save you."

  CHAPTER NINE

  I slapped his face. Hard. Not as hard as I wanted to though. On any normal face, it would’ve left a red print that perfectly fit my hand like the slipper to Cinderella.

  Astro growled and flashed a red eye at me. Her mangled mouth of parts gnashed the air. She started toward me.

  “No Astro!” Noah yelled.

  The she-monster went back to her place by the door. A low growl echoed in her metal throat.

  Still no red print emerged. Noah’s wasn’t a normal face. Mainly because it spewed lies offering hope where none existed. Where it was better off not to go looking.

  False hope was a soul splinter I didn’t have the strength to endure.

  I raised my hand to slap him again. Rage vibrated my arm in the air. He didn’t move an inch.

  He offered himself to me. A lamb for the sacrifice. More like a bull.

  His calm acceptance stayed my hand.

  “How dare you!” I shrieked. “You have no idea what I go through just pushing forward. How impossible it is to simply live. My life is a black sky and still I struggle for breath.”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  “Shut up! You don’t know shit!”

  “Meristatic Cranial Cystosis,” he said.

  The floor dropped out from under me. My stomach fell three hundred miles down to the surface. How did he know?

  “Right, you hacked my medical records. Asshole.”

  “I apologize for peeking into your personal data, but my intrusion may save your life.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  It was like he enjoyed stabbing a blunt club through my heart.

  “I know how you feel,” he said.

  My fingernails seriously wanted to drag furrows through his cheeks.

 
“I had the same condition,” he said. “I, like you, was given a short window for life.”

  My stomach felt like it dropped through the surface and further still to the core of the rocky ball below.

  “What are you saying?”

  My brain wasn’t working right. His words couldn’t mean what they said.

  “I was in the same exact situation you are in now,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  “Why aren’t you dead then?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.

  “If you go cryptic on me now, I swear I’ll claw your eyes out.”

  “I prefer my eyes where they are,” he said as his glance dropped to my chest.

  How could he be thinking like that right now? Ten years alone in space indeed! My eyes narrowed and claws raised.

  “I was diagnosed. Told I had less than a few months before the rapidly growing cyst in my brain would either choke off all other functions or explode. Neither outcome offered a chance at life.”

  I’d heard all the same information. Great. I was no closer to living and I got to parade my doom before the world.

  I snarled and flexed my claws. The cat scratch fury was about to be unleashed.

  He sped up his delivery. “I faced exactly what you face. No known cure. No hope but the doctors simultaneously saying I was doomed while also saying we were going to beat it. To give it our all. Easy for them to say when their asses weren’t on the line.”

  I knew exactly how that felt. It was my daily reality of the last several weeks.

  “Despite all my billions, despite almost limitless resources, I found no answer. All of my effort couldn’t cure the richest eighteen-year-old in the world. I didn’t find a cure, but I did find a possibility.”

  A possibility? What possibility? Why was he still alive, looking distractingly gorgeous?

  My claws wavered.

  "I built this space station, or its progenitor, and moved here. I moved heaven to escape earth and the death it promised."

  "Why? Why did that help?"

  He sounded like he was selling space snake oil.

  "Microgravity allows for a slowing of the system. The pull of gravity and all the accompanying stressors are diminished. Combine that with an oxygen-deprived environment and you have the perfect conditions for a kind of suspended animation."

  "You froze your head and woke up cured years later? You expect me to believe that?"

  "No, not exactly. That's cryogenics, and it's yet to be proven useful in extending life. What it's great at is creating human popsicles. No, I merely slowed down. Really slow. I floated in microgravity in a darkened, stimulus-free environment, with extremely low levels of oxygen. The end result was much like time slowing down for my body. For me, a month was a day."

  "Are you fucking with me?"

  "No. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't all champagne and bubbles. I had limited cognitive capacity. It was a coma. Artificially induced to prolong my life."

  "Prolonging a fatal disease doesn't cure it."

  If he was wasting my time, I'd kill him before I died.

  "Right you are. That's when my story took an unexpected turn. As you have already observed, the coma was no real solution. It was simply my best to avoid the inevitable. Years passed in that miserable state. It was torture. A dream limbo where my mind continued but my life didn't."

  "That's your fucking cure? You want to torture me until I die?"

  "No, I want to save you. Let me finish please."

  "Yes, do. So I can stop wasting my precious few hours remaining on this!" My spit freckled his face.

  The low rumble continued from Astro's malformed direction.

  "Then something happened. The cure. It changed me. It transformed me." He traced the line of his bulging bicep.

  "You weren't seven feet tall back on Earth, were you?"

  "Six-two."

  "I knew it."

  "I was moderately lanky as well."

  "So how did you turn into He-Man? You befriend a master of the universe?"

  I laughed at the ridiculous reference to a campy kid's cartoon from decades ago.

  "Something like that."

  "Stop wasting my time," I shouted. "What is the cure? Why haven't you given it to me already?"

  I didn't believe in any cure. I just wanted the conversation to be over so I could crawl into my, his, restoration pod and float away on warm waves of forgetful bliss.

  "This is going to sound crazy," he said.

  "Then stop hemming and hawing and round out my existing view of you."

  He paused and looked away. He returned his gaze and gingerly took my claws in his paws. His strength soothed me. Spoke to me in a language you didn't learn at school.

  "I need you to mate with me."

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  About the Author

  Nora Lane dreams of exploring beyond the wonderful home we call Earth. For now she lives on our planet, and shares a home with her wonderful husband, children, and two dogs that act more like alien overlords than obedient mutts.

  She writes science fiction romance about what could, and likely will, happen as humanity continues to push beyond the confines of our ancestral home. If she's not writing, she can usually be found reading or dreaming of other worlds, usually ones with hot alien races that love human women!

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