Unaccustomed to such attention, my cheeks warmed. Short and curvy in what I saw to be all the wrong places, I wasn’t the kind of woman guys liked to look at.
“Are you…” I looked at the invoice. “Are you John Smith?” Registering the name for the first time, the corner of my mouth ticked up. If his name was John Smith, my name was Poca-fucking-hontas.
“No, I’m Bob Black. John’s my roommate.”
Bob Black? Who the hell were these guys, with names like those?
Fighting a full-on grin, I thrust the package at Bob’s fabulous, six-pack abs. “Well, I ended up with this, but I think it was supposed to be delivered here.”
He took the box in his giant, beautifully shaped hands. With all my attention focused on those hands, I didn’t take the usual care not to touch him.
Our fingers brushed and I cringed, waiting for the onslaught of images and emotions to tear through my mind.
Nothing.
Shock wended its way through me. There wasn’t even a flash of the irritation that played across his face. No sudden image of his lost dog, or his job at the local gym, where he’d surely fit right in with those muscles. There was no transfer of anything from his mind at all, just a blessed silent calm.
Well, no, that wasn’t true. An odd sensation raced through my fingers when they brushed his, but it was so faint I almost missed it, a warm electrical pulse that raced up my arm. But still, I couldn’t read his mind. At all.
I shook myself when I noticed him staring at me, dark brows furrowed in concern. My lips parted as I took in his stunning eyes. I’d never seen anything like them. They weren’t just grey, but silver, and pale, like shining steel.
Only after a full ten seconds did it hit me, I was staring, too. I must have looked like a total boob, gaping at him.
“Hey, John.” He turned his head, shouting into the room, over what sounded like a video game. “Are you expecting a delivery?”
For some reason, he sounded annoyed.
“Oh, is it here? It’s about time.” A second man, almost as large as Bob, but with thick copper curls, appeared beside him. He wore pants that hung low on his hips. The jeans might have looked delicious, except for the multitude of pale blues that swirled everywhere, ruining the effect.
Acid wash. What the hell?
A black tribal looking tattoo shone from most-definitely-not-John-Smith’s bicep, disappearing under his shirt sleeve. His shirt, which was branded with the Beastie Boys, of all things.
Where did he shop, 80’s ‘R US? I looked at his face, and my mouth almost dropped open. Just as hot as his roommate, but with sharper, Val Kilmer looks, he had the exact same eyes as Bob, a pale, silver. Looking between the men, I noticed something else. There was just the faintest hint of a glow in their eyes, like a cat’s.
“Man, you guys are slow to deliver on…out here,” Not John Smith said.
“What? Oh.” I nodded dumbly, only half-registering his words.
“Is that the pizza guy?” Another man, a blond, called from further into the room. I caught a glimpse of sun-streaked, windswept hair. “Tell him to make sure it’s got double anchovies and triple cheese.”
Bob Black rolled his eyes at him. “Thank you,” he told me. “Have a good day.”
The words seemed stiff, rehearsed, but I barely noticed. I was too busy staring at the blond one. At his eyes, which, sure enough, glowed the same pale silver as the other two.
Eerie.
Before any of them could notice my staring, I yanked my gaze down and mumbled a goodbye, then turned on my heel for my own place.
By the time I’d returned to my apartment and locked the door, my heart raced like a rabbit. I’d never been the most fit person in the world. A love of chocolate and too much time in front of my computer ensured I had a little more ass and hips than I liked, but my heart’s pattering had nothing to do with the shape I was in, and everything to do with what I saw in apartment 505.
Thoughts spinning, I leaned against my door. There were a lot of odd things about my neighbors, but one thing leaped out at me, impossible to ignore.
Far more than the way they dressed, the way they talked, their fake names, what they ate on their pizzas, or even their eyes, I’d never forget what happened when I’d touched Bob Perfect Abs Black.
That blissful, perfect nothingness.
I didn’t know if Raul was right and they were meth dealers, but one thing was for sure. The men living in apartment 505 were strange indeed, and somehow, I’d find out why.
Desperate Measures
After my strange encounter with the men in 505, it took most of the day for my mind to settle enough to focus on work.
Once I’d finished another two chapters of my book, I turned in. Just after midnight, I lay awake, my head filled with thoughts of my three hot, but very odd neighbors at the end of the hall.
The peaceful silence I’d encountered upon touching Bob teased my memory. In the twelve years since my condition manifested, that had never happened.
Well, it did happen once. Ten years ago my aunt passed away while I visited her in the hospital. I’d been holding her hand as she passed, and felt her life-force leave, and then…silence.
I made a face at the ceiling, shuddering at the memory. Well, my neighbors weren’t the undead. Bob’s hand had been warm. Alive. Yet the memory of my aunt’s death, the nothingness I’d felt from her mind after, underscored one fact; there was something abnormal about those men.
Something that I was sure explained their eyes.
As a woman who’d grown up accustomed to keeping secrets and covering for my own oddities—flinching when touched, isolating myself, not responding when spoken to—I detested busybodies, but I had to know about those guys.
For God’s sake, all three of them had the exact same silver eyes. And what about the complaints Raul had mentioned, about a weird smell coming from their apartment?
At some point, my brain shut off enough to allow sleep to find me. And then the dream came. Only it wasn’t the normal one I was used to, about the exploding spaceship.
How it happened, I didn’t remember. It was like the dream started in the middle. I was in my claustrophobically tiny apartment, and all three men from 505 were there.
In my bed.
Fucking me.
If I’d thought the image of my gorgeous neighbors in one bed together was hot, this one, with me in the middle of them, was much better. Never mind that it made zero sense, and the idea of being with more than one man in real life was just wrong. This was a dream, so I got a pass.
Mouths and hands seemed to be everywhere at once. Someone was tweaking my nipples until they were so hard they almost hurt. There was a tongue lapping at my core until I rocked into the mouth that pleasured me. I thought someone, John, perhaps, held my hands down in a grip that screamed control, and a voice—Bob’s?—whispered in my ear. I didn’t recall what he said, but his voice melted my insides.
Everything was so vivid. I remembered how calloused Bob’s hands were, like he worked hard with them. I looked down and saw a shock of sun-streaked blond hair between my thighs. John’s mouth covered mine.
Best of all, despite all the skin-on-skin contact, there wasn’t a single flash of emotions or memories that weren’t my own. I floated in the bliss of lovemaking, my mind surrounded by that peaceful quiet. Feeling only pleasure.
Thing was, I’d never had sex, so I had no idea what to expect. Was this crazy whirlwind of pleasure and heat normal? It threatened to consume us all. I nearly came, crying out.
My scream carried, turning into a high keening sound that pierced at my ears. An instant before I would have come, I jerked, opening my eyes. The keening sound was still there, and it wasn’t from me.
What the hell? I sat up in bed slowly, rubbing my eyes. Moonlight still streamed through my window. According to my clock, it was nearly three AM. The alarm, still going off, sounded distant.
A smoke detector, from one of the other apartments. I
jumped up and went for my door, ignoring that I was only dressed in a long T-shirt that covered my undies and reached to my knees.
Once I had the door open, the alarm blared louder. It drifted from down the hall. From 505.
“Really? Damn it.” I threw on robe and hurried down the hall.
“Shut that damn thing off!” One of the other tenants stuck his head out and shouted. He vanished again when he saw me headed for 505. I banged on the door.
“Guys! Your alarm!”
Shouts drifted from inside, but the alarm was too loud to hear what they said. I knocked again.
“Hey, Bob! You in there?”
More talking, but closer to the door, and then it opened. Bob once more took up the doorway, looking tired and worn. I covered my ears to block out the high-pitched beeping and pointed in the general direction of the ceiling.
“You guys want to get kicked out? Shut that off.”
Bob shook his head, raising his voice to be heard. “We’re trying. How does it shut off?”
“Seriously?”
He shrugged, shook his head.
“Can I come in?”
“I can’t allow that—.”
“Hey, asswipe, shut that stupid thing off before I pop you one.” The same guy from earlier had come out into the hall.
I thought I saw a peculiar look cross Bob’s face before he begrudgingly moved aside to let me in. I crossed the apartment, passing by the blond I’d seen earlier, who was coming out of the bedroom rubbing his silver eyes. In the tiny kitchenette, I looked up at the blaring smoke detector.
When I didn’t find a chair to stand on, not that there was room for one, I turned to Bob. Beside him, Not John Smith watched from the kitchenette doorway.
“Do you have a broom?”
“What?” Bob put his hand to his ear.
I made a sweeping motion with my hands. He nodded, disappeared, and came back a moment later, handing me a broom. I stood on my toes, using all of my five feet and two inches to reach the button on the alarm, hitting it with the end of the broom handle until the beeping stopped.
“Thank you.” Bob scrubbed his palm down his face.
John Smith wiggled a finger in his ear, pain flitting across his face as if the high-pitched sound had hurt him. For some reason, both men looked unsettled. Because I was there, or because of something else?
“Sure.” I handed the broom back to Bob.
Again, nothing from Bob’s mind inundated mine, not even the vague inkling of emotions and images that came when I touched something at the same time as someone else. However, an unexpected emotion did jolt through me. I should have wanted to return to the isolation of my apartment, but the thought of leaving seemed wrong somehow. I was supposed to be here.
What the fuck? I shook myself.
Then my gaze snagged on the single kitchen sink.
A large rock about the size of my dad’s ten-pin bowling ball sat at the bottom of the sink. It looked like some kind of crystal, but it was burned black, like a meteorite. A pungent, acrid smell wafted off of it. Some of the stainless steel in the sink had burn marks on it.
“What the…” I moved toward the strange object.
Blondie swore and hurried in, putting himself between me and the sink, his bulky frame forcing me back. “Hi there.” He flashed a big smile, a dimple gracing one cheek. Those luminescent, silver eyes pulled my gaze up and held it.
As Bob’s gaze had done before, Blondie’s eyes lingered, taking in my curves, and then my mass of curls, and his smile widened. “Nice. Very. Nice.”
He liked me in a robe with my hair a mess and wearing a faded old tee? Did these men not get out much? I thought I heard Bob make a rumbling noise in his throat. Annoyance, or something else?
“What is that?” I gestured to the sink.
“What is what?” Blondie gave me an innocent look.
“Really?” Obviously, he didn’t have a ready explanation. The mischief in his eyes told me he knew playing innocent wouldn’t work.
“Fuck,” John muttered from the door. What had I stumbled onto here?
“You need to go.” Bob took my arm, his face suddenly like stone. Wow, his grip was forceful.
“Hey.” I struggled, startled at being manhandled, instinctively panicked at the physical contact, but he just hurried me to the door.
Again, nothing bombarded my mind from him. Nothing, but that same desire to remain with him. With them. So weird.
At the door to the apartment, when Bob let me go, I turned to him and his two roommates. “You guys better watch yourselves, okay? Raul already thinks you’re cooking drugs in here, and I think you woke up half the building with that alarm going off.”
“He thinks we’re making drugs?” The blond punched John in the arm. “See? Told you not to try your stupid experiments in here again.”
“We will take your warning under advisement,” Bob said, opening the door.
“You’ll take it under advisement?” Again, with that odd way he talked.
I was about to leave when something else caught my attention. A huge black duffel bag sat in a corner, zipper open. Almost spilling out of the top, I could just make out wads of bills. I froze. There must have been thousands in there. Millions, maybe.
Standing there immobilized, the first inkling of fear nibbled at my insides. What the hell was going on here? Were they bank robbers?
Bob followed my gaze to the duffel. “Damn.” He put his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Without another word, I turned to run.
“Fantastic.” Blondie, from behind me.
“Sorry about this.” Bob spoke, and I heard footsteps across the carpet. I spun around to see him stalking toward me, his face hard.
“What are you—?”
I didn’t get to finish. Bob’s hand gripped a spot between my neck and shoulder, a single hard squeeze.
Pain shot through my muscles. Blackness enveloped me.
Conundrum
“You idiot. What were you thinking?”
“Calm down, Kai. I did what was necessary in order to protect us.”
“By knocking her out?”
“What if she tells someone?” A deeper voice I hadn’t heard before spoke up.
“Well, we need to do something. She’ll wake up soon, and she will have questions.” Another voice, rife with accusation, for the person he was talking to, I thought.
Through the darkness that surrounded me, I heard at least four male voices, one of them Bob’s. The one who called him an idiot sounded like the blond one.
There were four of them now?
The memory of what I saw—the weird burned rock in their sink and the duffel stuffed with cash—cut across my thoughts. Coupled with their strange eyes and the other oddities about these men, I didn’t know what it all added up to, but it couldn’t be good.
Details about my surroundings seeped in. A faint smell of leather tickled my nose. I lay on my back, across a semi-hard surface, a soft pillow under my head. Smooth material—the leather I smelled?—cooled my fingertips. A couch? Was I still in 505?
The impulse to leap up and run for the door struck me, but I knew better than to do that without knowing as much about my situation as possible first. Instead, I lay still, listening, taking in all I could. While fear flickered across my thoughts, once again something pulled at me to remain there, a tantalizing sense of security and safety.
Safety, with men who had a bag full of cash no one would have in any legal way?
“I saw no other options.” Though annoyed, the calm command in Bob’s voice smacked of leadership.
“Captain, we could have come up with an explanation.”
Captain?
“Yes, because people have bags full of bills lying around in their apartments all the time.”
“I’m going out for a while,” the same accusing voice said. Footsteps sounded, and then a door opened, then closed.
“Bain Gorkan, please go change.” Bob
, and again, I noticed the command there. “We’re trying to blend in.”
My brows mentally scrunched. Bain Gorkan? Had he been playing too many video games? His name sounded like something out of an RPG.
“She already knows we’re not like her.” His deep voice sounded like huge stones moving.
“Maybe not.”
“She does, Cap,” the blond one muttered. “I told you after we saw her yesterday, she picked up on something. I thought she looked at us strangely. From the shocked expression on her face before you knocked her out, I’m sure she knows.”
“What could she possibly have seen? Our tech is always on, so she can’t see what we really look like.”
Now my brows mentally climbed with every word.
“We have to do something. She might expose us.” The threat in Bain Gorkan’s tone made my muscles tense, dispelling some of that odd sensation that compelled me to stay where I was.
“What do you suggest I do? Lock her up? Kill her?” Bob said.
“If need be, yes. If you won’t, I will.”
That got me moving. I snapped my eyes open and jumped up off the couch, racing for the door.
“Not so fast.” Bain Gorkan suddenly appeared in front of the door, a blur of movement.
Wow. He was dressed strangely, in what looked like some kind of warrior’s garbs, all an unusual looking leather and metal, with a set of blades in a sash across his chest. The leather lovingly clung to his giant legs, while a jacket with wide sleeves and an opening that dropped low on his broad chest only drew attention to his masculinity.
“Jesus.” All three of the men I’d seen were big, but this one stood a good half a head taller than the others, dwarfing me.
It dawned on me that I should have been freaking out, but somehow the understanding of what I was seeing hit with a strange sense of normalcy. I turned to the one who called himself Bob and cocked my head.
“So, you’re aliens, right?”
Bob blew out a breath and sat on the armrest of the sofa. In the tiny room, a couch, a Lazy Boy, and a coffee table vied for space. A large wall-mounted TV hung across from the coach.
Drawn to Her Warriors: (Her Warriors Book 1) (Reverse Harem Sci Fi Romance Serial) Page 3
