by Zoe Blake
"I did nothing ‘alien’ to you." He raked a hand through his hair. "If it helps, this is not typical behavior for me, either. The only time a Baylan becomes highly aroused like that is when––" He cut his words off with a wave of his hand. "I will try to not touch you again. It would be the wisest thing, considering the circumstances."
"Fine. Sure." Rachel pressed her fingers to her eyes. What circumstances? Her pulse was beginning to normalize. Maybe there was something wrong with her that she'd never been this turned on by a human man. It took some dude from another planet to get her juices going. "And quit with the 'Miss Harkett’ thing. We just made out. Call me Rachel."
He nodded stiffly. "I'll be leaving now. No one will know I was here."
"There's no way you're healed,” she said. "I'll take you..." Where? To her apartment? Yeah. That probably wasn't smart, unless she wanted to add the certainly of sex with an extraterrestrial to her personal resume.
"My body heals very quickly." He glanced at the wound on his abdomen. The bleeding had stopped. He pushed to his feet. "I must get back to my ship." He touched his fingertips to his forehead, then his chin and extended his palm toward her. "Thank you for helping me, Rachel. And for the kiss. I won't forget it. Or you."
His words made her belly clench. Crap, she liked him. A little. Enough to wish he could stay and hang out. He's an alien, Rachel. But he didn't look like one. He didn't feel like one. "I won't forget you, either. I enjoyed kissing you, too." She cleared her throat as heat crept up her neck. "Right. I'll dispose of the metal thing I took out of your belly. What was that, anyway?"
"Part of a helicopter, I think."
"Wow. I don't think I want to know how that got in you."
He smiled. "No, you don't."
"Well..." Why was she still standing here?
Drace moved past her toward the steps. She should go, too. When she came back tomorrow morning, she’d have extra work, he’d be gone, and this whole surreal night would be filed under Weirdest Memories Ever. And maybe one day she'd meet someone who got her as hot as Drace did.
"Okay. Good luck to you. If you––" Rachel was following behind Drace when he froze.
"We need to leave," he said.
“What?” Hello. He’d said “we.” “Why?"
“I can hear it. They’re coming back."
Rachel couldn't hear anything. "I seriously doubt––"
He turned to her and gripped both her hands. "I'm sorry, but we need to get out of this building now. My captors somehow found out that I was in here. They're returning to kill us."
CHAPTER FOUR
Ah, he'd almost missed it. The whip of blades, too quiet for human ears to detect. This was a stealth helicopter, or so Dept. 6 thought. Baylans could hear them, and he had heard these particular choppers come and go so often during his captivity, he could identify them from miles away. This one would arrive soon.
He'd have heard it sooner if he hadn't been so absorbed by Rachel. Now she was in danger because of him. There was no way he would allow her to be hurt. He’d had thoughts of returning. After getting his men back to their base ship, he’d fully intended to come back and claim his mate. Maybe do a little of that courtship humans seemed so bent on. Whatever it took to introduce her to the life she was destined to lead as his mate. As his peoples’ Yana-queen.
“Are you sure they’re coming here?" Rachel's voice rose to a squeak.
He strode up the stairs, ignoring the pain in his belly. He grabbed her hand. "I have exceptional hearing."
"Okay, but how do you know they want to kill us?"
"Because they're not coming in a car. It’s helicopters. They're going to destroy this building––us along with it."
She snatched up her purse and coat and, as they passed the lost-and-found bin, grabbed a man’s wool coat. She thrust it at him. "How did they know you were here? Or am I a worse liar than I thought?”
"Maybe they did a heat scan and saw two heat signatures. Mine would be slightly cooler than yours." He cursed again, in the Baylan language. "I'm sorry I've put you in danger."
If anything happened to her, there would be no forgiving himself. She was his mate, and although she was not the only woman in the galaxy who could have ignited his sexual soul markings, once a Baylan identified a mate, he or she was connected to them and desired no other. His body and mind would suffer doubly if she died because of his carelessness, and his people––the citizens of his ship who depended on him––could ill afford a mentally damaged leader. To keep her safe, he would have to stay with her longer than he should. Every moment he remained in her presence strengthened their bond. She would feel it, too. He didn’t want to imagine how she’d react when he told her the rest.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rachel could hear the helicopters now. The dull whomp-whomp of blades in the inky sky was the only indication of their presence. She and Drace burst outside into the crisp fall air. Rachel headed straight for her car, the lone vehicle in the parking lot, but he shook his head.
"They'll target your vehicle.” He shrugged into the coat she’d given him. "We have to stay still until just before they fire on us."
"This is insane!" She tried to wrench from his grasp, but he held tight.
He pulled her into his arms and pressed her between his chest and the wall. Awareness sliced through her, along with terror and a wild sense of denial. This can't be happening repeated in her head.
"They want us to panic," he growled in her ear. "Panicked people are easier to kill. They need to lock on the building first, and then we run. Their instruments won't be able to detect us for a short time."
"But the clinic––"
"Better the clinic than you." He set her away from him and held her gaze. "They're almost here. When I say run, we run through those trees to the building next door. What goes on there?"
"Next door?" She shivered. "A veterinarian."
"Do they have one of those large metal containers for garbage?"
"You mean a dumpster? Yes. Same service we use here."
"Good. Go straight for that." His body tensed against her. The helicopter sounded like it was directly above them. "Are you ready?"
She nodded, but her heart was racing. Nothing about her was ready. She wasn't even sure what she was getting ready for.
Drace gave her a light shove. “Run."
Rachel broke into a full sprint toward the thick treed lot separating the clinic from the Linville Animal Hospital. She heard his even footfalls on the parking lot pavement.
But nothing was happening. She slowed down. Maybe he was mistaken and the office was not going to be blown to smithereens. She was about to glance back when an explosion rocked the earth. She flew forward, propelled by the force of the blast. Heat seared her back. The trees before her reflected the gold and orange of a massive fireball.
A cacophony roared in her ears––howling fire, helicopter blades, and a high-pitched whine. She trembled on hands and knees, struggling to draw a breath, but her lungs weren't working. Her vision went gray and splotchy at the edges.
Powerful arms scooped her up and cradled her against a wide chest. "I have you," Drace murmured and plunged into the woods. Rachel locked her arms around his neck and held on. He stopped next to the vet's dumpster and angled them so the metal box was between the helicopter and them. "It's okay," he said. “With everything burning, the heat should confuse their instruments from picking up our signatures. And they can't stay here. Local authorities will be arriving soon."
Rachel struggled for breath as the stench of smoke filled the air. She could see the flame-engulfed remains of the office through the trees, but shook herself mentally. This couldn't be real. She’d wandered onto the set of an action movie. She was stuck in the worst nightmare of her life.
"Are you hurt?" Drace asked.
"I-I... No."
"Can you walk?"
"Yes."
He set her down but remained slightly hunched. He was paler. Pain etched his
features. Sirens wailed in the distance. “The fire department. We can tell them––"
"We can't tell them anything," he rasped. "I'm sorry, but you can't talk to them––or anyone. Dept. 6 knows who you are. They have to believe we were killed in that explosion."
A red haze slipped over her vision. She pulled away from him. "But..."
"Rachel, I've experienced their brutality, and now your life is in danger because you helped me." He grabbed her by the upper arms and pressed her back against the dumpster. His face pulled tight in tense lines. Liquid silver eyes glowed in the darkness. He leaned forward and touched his forehead to hers. "I vow to find a way to fix this for you. Until you send me away, I will be by your side. I will do everything in my power to see that no harm comes to you. I swear this on my life.”
She couldn't move. Something about the way he spoke the words, their formality, their sober conviction, made her think this vow was more than it seemed. She believed him.
He drew back and their eyes locked. He wrapped his arms around her, pressed her fully against him. She couldn't breathe. His mouth slanted over hers, hard and possessive. Her body tightened with an urgent, almost painful desire. She curled her fists into the front of his coat. She met his kiss with ferocity. This was no gentle exploration, but a primal, desperate need to escape the carnage around her, if only for a moment. She hooked a leg around his and jerked his hips tight against her. He moaned into her mouth and pressed his hips between her thighs. She couldn’t tell if he was hard through all the coats and clothing, but sensation rocketed through her nerve endings like an electrical current. The fire and the cold and the sirens snapped off. There was only blood pounding in her ears and this strange, powerful attraction igniting the points where bodies touched. Where mouths devoured. Where hip ground against hip.
Something was happening she didn't understand. It couldn’t be normal. It couldn’t be right, but she knew on a base level that it was important. She was drawn to him, as though invisible threads were weaving between them. Threads that would be difficult to cut, and that sent a trill of panic down her spine. Rachel was not some swoony teenager. She'd been through a lot––losing her parents, enduring a few horrible boyfriends––in her twenty-four years, yet here she was sighing in a man's arms. Except Drace was no ordinary man––not really a man at all. She knew next to nothing about him.
On a shaky breath, she pulled her mouth from his. His breathing came ragged and deep. His eyes blazed with intensity that made her knees weak. This was a powerful man––one who could take her against this very dumpster with or without her permission. But he made no move toward her. His hands stilled. He eased back from her.
“Rachel.” He said her name like a prayer. Or a curse.
Reality crept back in. So did the fear and the cold and the absolute dread that the life she’d begun to build for herself had just exploded, along with the urgent-care center.
"How long do I have to pretend to be dead?" She failed to keep the tremor from her voice. Watching the clinic burn knotted her stomach. All she’d ever wanted was stability. She’d just found her path toward home and a profession. A purpose, to be honest. The clinic helped the community, and now, because she gave refuge to an injured man––or what she’d thought was a man––it was destroyed. They had insurance. The Linville RediCare Clinic would rebuild, but she couldn’t go back now, not with some psycho secret group monitoring her. Once again, her future was a complete unknown.
“I don’t know.” He traced his thumb down her cheek. "I'm sorry, Rachel."
"It's not your fault." She looked away, more confused than she’d ever been in her life. She couldn’t reconcile this bizarre powerful attraction with the feelings of grief, uncertainty, fear. It was only too easy to slip into the depths of his sparkling blue eyes and let everything else fade out. If she kept staring at him, she'd do something stupid, like kiss him again. "What do we do now?"
He stepped farther away, and the cold rushed in. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it. "We find a vehicle."
She looked through the trees to her car, burning in the parking lot. Her throat knotted. “They got my car, too.” Another thing gone. It wasn't a good car, but it had taken her a year to save for it. And if she was going to be declared dead for a while, insurance wouldn’t replace it.
"There must be a broken-down wreck around here somewhere."
Pain bloomed in her temples. She rubbed them. “We don’t have time to repair a car.”
"I have a way of...rejuvenating mechanical things."
“How?” she asked, voice sharper than she’d intended. “Alien magic?"
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His gaze was grim. ”Something like that."
"There's a closed-up car repair shop down the road," she said, abandoning all notion of what was known to be rational and possible and normal. "I think they left a few vehicles on the property."
"Lead the way."
CHAPTER SIX
Drace walked closely beside Rachel. Danger could come from anywhere. They kept off the street to avoid the emergency vehicles speeding toward the burning clinic, instead passing behind the business parking lots and small strip malls. Their footfalls crunched loudly on the cold gravel, but the stores were mostly closed up. He could no longer hear the helicopters, but that didn’t mean Dept. 6 would so easily assume their alien specimen had perished. They could return and when they did, they’d be looking for Rachel, too.
Rachel. Sweet stars, she was his mate. That was becoming more apparent with each passing moment. Each glance he stole her way. He could not have imagined a more magnificent woman by his side. And yet, she didn’t seem to be aware of her beauty. Perhaps it was her height, which was perfect for him, or her strong bone structure, which was also preferable, which caused her to not see herself as he did. Her form was firm muscle and soft curves. Drace’s hands itched to explore every inch of her lustrous skin. Humans seemed to prefer frailty and delicacy in their women, which puzzled him. Whatever it was that caused her to hunch her shoulders and flush like she did sometimes, he would put an end to it when she became is Yana-queen. She would know how beautiful she was. He had the rest of their lives to show her how beautiful, intelligent, and powerful she was.
Already, his wayward imagination was envisioning her on his ship, the Raplan-B, in her rightful place by his side. His people would accept her without question, as soul markings didn't lie. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Where had she come from? What kind of life did she want? Ordinarily, he was not the sort of man to ask these things. He gave orders, made decisions. If he wanted a woman, he had only to choose among the willing females on his ship. He'd never had to worry about seduction. As the Raplan-B's Saar-king, he had many unattached women vying for his attention, which was hard to catch and impossible to hold.
Now, his head spun with the dilemma of how to convince this human woman to forsake her home planet and live with him on his base ship. But first, he had to get them away from here. He had to take her to his ship where they would be safe.
Rachel pointed to a darkened, squat building up ahead with a for sale sign in the window. It looked to be quietly deteriorating. The words Bob's Auto Repair had all but faded from the sign. A few abandoned cars sat in tall weeds next to the building.
Rachel's face was smudged with dirt. She shivered and tucked her coat tighter around her. Although his body adapted to changes in temperature, she was not dressed warmly enough for the night's cold. He shrugged off the coat she had given him and draped it over her shoulders.
"No," she protested. "You have like no clothes on."
"I don't need it," he said, narrowing his eyes on her chattering teeth. "You clearly do."
"Alien bodies don't feel the cold?"
"Not like you, no." He bristled at the word alien. He didn't want her to see him as something so different from herself.
“Well, put that back on,” she told him. “You’ll attract attention without a shirt on.”
; He complied. The truth was, they were different. For now. If she accepted him as her mate, however, some of those differences would lessen. Sex with him would cause her body to undergo slow changes, making her capable of bearing Baylan offspring.
Drace turned his attention to the quiet mounds of metal rusting away in this abandoned car lot. He was weak. His body was still healing itself, but he had to summon the energy to reanimate one of these cars. His and Rachel's lives depended on it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sign still read Bob's Auto Repair, but from what Rachel had heard, Bob had retired two years ago and left for Florida, walking away from his garage and leaving a handful of vehicles lingering among the weeds. All were in various stages of decomposition. Rachel didn't know what kinds of cars they were, just that they were junk. All the good ones had surely been removed quite some time ago.
She watched Drace survey the offerings, poking around each of the remaining cars. It was so dark, she couldn't understand how he saw anything. She stood next to the empty garage and stared at the sky, where the smoke from the burning clinic blotted out the moon and stars.
"Good tires on this one." He patted the hood of a low, brown metal heap so lost in weeds, only the roof peeked above the dry grass. "We'll take it."
She dragged her gaze from the smoke-stained sky. "How will we do that, exactly?"
He beckoned her with a crooked finger. "Come here. You'll find this interesting."
