Claimed by the Alien Warlord: A Science Fiction Alien Mail-Order Bride Romance (TerraMates Book 14)

by Lisa Lace

  Fury didn’t think much about Natasha’s lie or whether Nick bought it. He was more interested in the fact that the drunkard on the porch had just called her a bitch. He launched a fist forward, making Natasha’s husband fly backward into the grass, feet completely coming out from beneath him.

  “No!” Natasha exclaimed as the cyborg took a step out the door to finish the job. “Just leave him alone!” The bar owner was going to be nothing more than a smear on her lawn if she didn’t find a way to control Fury. She moved to follow him.

  Fury turned around to face her. He stepped back into the house and slammed the door. A framed picture of two boats sailing on a river fell and crashed to the floor. The cyborg’s face looked menacing as he loomed over her. “You shouldn’t talk to him anymore.”

  “He’s technically still my husband. I’m going to have to deal with him.”

  “No!” Fury exploded. “You don’t talk to him. I’ll talk to him. Only me.”

  At the moment, Fury looked terrifying. She could barely keep herself upright under the force of his argument. “But what if he comes back?”

  “That’s no excuse. He is no good for you, and I will keep him away.”

  The cyborg barely had himself under control. If this incident had happened right after the upgrade, there was no telling what the cyborg might have done. Natasha could tell he was on the verge of dropping his safety protocols.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered.

  “Don’t apologize if you haven’t done anything wrong.” Despite John’s advice, Natasha had given the cyborg a guest bedroom. He stomped down the hallway and slammed the door.

  Natasha fell to the floor, lost in a puddle of emotions. Tears stung the back of her eyes, and she let them flow freely. They flooded down her cheeks and silently dripped down her face.

  CHAPTER 20

  When Natasha finally dragged herself to bed, throat sore and eyes aching, she collapsed onto the mattress without even washing off her makeup. She didn’t have the strength to do anything more than put her head on the pillow and slide under the blanket.

  Her alarm went off like a blaring horn, startling her out from under the covers. She had forgotten that it was her day off. The commotion the night before had disrupted her schedule. The sun was beginning to peek through her curtains, casting a dim gray light into the room and reminding her that life went on. The frequent and unwelcome visits from Nick made her want to shove her head back under the pillow and forget about the world. Natasha’s concerns were compounded by the nebulous relationship with Fury.

  She didn’t regret her decision to get the update and focus on his rehabilitation, but she wished it hadn’t happened at such a vulnerable point in her life. Fury always seemed to be in control, and Natasha liked that. But when she felt herself wanting to surrender herself to him, it made her worry. She had let Nick have the upper hand in their marriage, and that had led to disaster. Would Fury, who was a human at his core, be any different than Nick? Wouldn’t he eventually turn into a bully too? Time was the only way to answer her questions. The redhead didn’t feel patient enough to wait.

  The scent of breakfast cooking wafted under the door, making her inhale deeply. Natasha recognized the seductive smell of coffee brewing, her favorite thing in the morning. There was also the alluring bouquet of melting butter, frying eggs, and melted cheese. Without bothering to get dressed, Natasha raced down the stairs in her pajamas.

  Fury stood in front of the stove with a pan on the burner in front of him. He was carefully folding an omelet into thirds, patting it down with the spatula to ensure that it stayed in place. Behind him, the coffee pot gurgled to itself. The cutting board showed signs of chopped onion and pepper.

  She stood in the doorway, flabbergasted. When it came to breakfast, Fury’s culinary skills so far had amounted to pouring a bowl of cereal or putting a couple of pastries in the toaster. What he had created in the kitchen was nothing short of a miracle. He had only had the software upgrade for two weeks.

  The cyborg looked up at her. “Sit down. Food will be ready soon.”

  With no choice but to comply, Natasha took a seat at the table. She hadn’t put on a bra yet, but maybe he wouldn’t notice. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “I did.” Fury scooped the egg concoction out of the pan and onto a plate, setting a toasted English muffin and a slice of avocado next to it. “You don’t want me to take care of you with fists or weapons. You can’t stop me from cooking for you.”

  “How do you know how to use the stove?” Natasha marveled. The meal in front of her was a thing of such beauty that she hardly wanted to sink her fork into it. Her mouth, however, had other plans. It began to water. “Were you a cook before the operation?”

  The cyborg shrugged. It was a gesture Natasha hadn’t seen before. It made his shoulders look too large for his body. “I don’t know. But there are other ways to learn than Cyborg Sector. There are videos and books.”

  “I see.” So that was what he had been doing while she was away at work. She knew about his workouts but didn’t know he had been studying. Natasha wanted to ask him what other things he had learned. She had a feeling he wouldn’t tell her. Apparently, the soldier liked surprises.

  Fury sat down on the other side of the table. As she looked up, she noticed a vase of freshly cut flowers. The big bunches of hydrangeas in variations of purple and blue filled the jar. Someone had cut each stem so its flowers didn’t interfere with the next one. Bits of greenery appeared among the flowers.

  “Where did these come from?” If Fury had learned how to call a florist, she thought she might fall right out of her chair.

  Her companion did not look up from his meal. “Outside the house. It was dark.”

  Natasha’s stomach trembled, and it wasn’t from hunger. “Someone might have seen you.”

  The cyborg shook his head. “I know how to stay hidden.”

  “I think we need to talk about what happened last night,” she began. The nurse lifted a forkful of egg and avocado to her mouth. The smooth, nutty flavor went perfectly with the omelet, and it was almost enough to distract Natasha from what she was about to say. “Nick is a dangerous person for you to be around. I don’t trust him, and I think you should stay out of the way if he returns.” She knew it was more a matter of when Nick returned. He was not the type to give up easily. He was more like a dog with a bone, gnawing until there was nothing left and then prepared to steal from someone else.

  “We don’t have anything to discuss,” Fury replied. He was calm but pensive, and Natasha knew the cyborg wouldn’t accept her reasoning. “I will deal with him. He’s not good for you.”

  Natasha would have been grateful if she hadn’t been worried about someone discovering Fury’s existence. Nick was not the smartest man on the planet, but it would be just her luck for him to unravel the cyborg’s story. “He is bad,” she agreed readily, “but he might start wondering who you are. Nick thinks he should be able to control me, and he might try to do it through you.”

  A rumbling noise shook the dining table, and Natasha realized it was coming from the cyborg. Fury growled as he scarfed down his meal. He didn’t look at Natasha or his plate but stared off into space somewhere into a corner of the room. “You do not belong to him,” Fury said slowly. “He can’t control what is mine.”

  Natasha felt a clenching between her legs when she heard the cyborg be possessive. The notion didn’t match with her feminist values, but she couldn’t deny that it was sexy. Deep down, she wanted to belong to Fury. Natasha wanted to do as he asked and use his desires as a convenient excuse.

  She could easily imagine the reactions of her friends and coworkers. The girls at the office, Brittney included, would have no problem saying that she shouldn’t do anything a man says, let alone a cyborg. Modern thought dictated that women weren’t property, and men did not have to be dominant in the relationship. There was a secret part inside Natasha that felt like a man could be in charge of her as long as
he was the right man. She had never verbalized her thoughts out loud.

  “He can control me, in a sense. He hasn’t signed our divorce papers yet.” Natasha decided to take a different approach and hope she could convince the cyborg. “I know Nick. He’ll do whatever it takes to make me suffer as much as possible until he’s tired of playing around.” She had seen Nick do it to his friends, family, and employees. It was no surprise that he was trying to manipulate her now.

  “No!” Fury’s fist slammed down on the table, making the dishes jump. “If he doesn’t leave you alone, he can deal with me.”

  Natasha slid her chair back in surprise, wondering if one of the table legs had cracked. Fury was not in the mood to argue with anyone. “I think I’m done eating for now,” Natasha mumbled as she stood and headed for the sink.

  Fury caught her elbow as she walked past. She flinched automatically even though his grip was gentle. He pulled her down into his lap and looked her in the eyes. Some anger was still visible on his face, but a different emotion was becoming dominant. Concern. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. But you belong to me, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you.”

  The redhead’s eyes teared up immediately. Fury’s words had moved her and made her feel...something, but she hesitated to name it. Natasha knew she needed to talk to the cyborg about his memories and analyze his progress from a clinical perspective. The problem was that he was no longer just a cyborg or a patient to her. He was something else.

  “Thank you.” Natasha knew he wanted to say more, but she wasn’t ready to hear it. Even though Fury’s lap was warm and inviting, she pushed herself up and started rinsing off the dishes. Nick had only been out of her life for a short time. She’d thought about leaving her husband before and had always pictured herself as staying single for a while before looking for a new partner. Maybe she wanted different things in life now and needed to plan how to get them.

  Natasha had never imagined she would meet the right person too soon or that the right person might be a cyborg. She contemplated a potential future with Fury. Cyborgs could live relatively healthy lives. Many had jobs, and some were in relationships. If it was okay for other women to fuck cyborgs, why couldn’t she?

  As she climbed the stairs to her room, intending to get dressed, Natasha realized that she knew exactly why. Fury was not an anonymous man she had met on the street, in a bar, or through an online dating site. He was not a man who would eventually tell her some secrets after they had been on a few dates. Instead, she knew the intimate details of his rehabilitation process. He was unstable and prone to violent outbursts. Even more importantly, Fury was just as likely to be terminated as live a successful life.

  She couldn’t put her heart through that torture.

  CHAPTER 21

  The house was deathly quiet. Fury had been used to silence while secluded in his holding cell, but the feeling was different from being alone in a house. The hush invited memories, which he could still barely understand.

  Or rather, he was finally beginning to comprehend the difference between a memory and the information that came to him from his computer system. The two systems — his brain and the operating system on his chip — worked similarly on the most basic level. They stored information for later recall and use. But the computer was reliable and organized. Fury could count on it to pull up exactly what he needed when he needed it.

  His brain didn’t work the same way at all. He was at its mercy as it felt things and played memories whenever it wanted. They always came at inconvenient times, such as yesterday evening.

  He and Natasha had been in the living room. They had spent the day cooking, cleaning, and looking things up on the Internet. Natasha was perfectly happy to spend her entire day working in the house, but Fury was restless by the time they had finished dinner. He was beginning to wonder how the humans managed to rattle about in the same buildings every day of their lives. The cyborg was ready to get outside and go other places, perhaps even meet new people. The last part, in particular, would have worried Natasha, so he avoided telling her about his desires.

  A commercial came on for something called car insurance. The term seemed familiar, but he didn’t understand it. Still, he watched the ad with interest, eager to learn from it.

  There were two people in a car, one of them driving and talking happily to the other. The scene went black. The sounds changed to crashing and screaming. When the picture returned, the television showed a destroyed car and an ambulance driving away without its sirens blaring.

  The image shifted again to a man in front of a white background talking about safe driving, but Fury wasn’t paying attention anymore. Instead, the memories were playing in his head again. Fury had been driving a car, just like the person on television. Something had happened, and he lost control of the vehicle. Unlike the commercial, he could see everything that happened during the crash. There was no fade to black. The view through the windshield alternated between the sky and pavement, mixing as the car flipped through the air. Every item in the car floated in midair, giving the scene an anti-gravity sensation.

  There was a woman next to him who had been yelling at him up until the crash. Fury struggled to hear her words and understand why she had been upset. Fury no longer knew who she was, but he had cared for her. In his mind’s eye, he studied her cheekbones, dark eyes that tipped up at the outside corners, and ebony hair that shone brilliantly in the sunlight.

  The memory spun back in time.

  “I’m not going to a stupid counseling session with you,” the woman said. She had folded her arms across her chest, and she sulked in the car seat. “You and the therapist are going to gang up on me.”

  “It’s not going to be like that.” He carefully laid a hand on her leg. “I just want to give us a chance at making things work.”

  “Whatever you do, it isn’t going to help. Why don’t you be a man and let everything go? You want to sit around and talk about our feelings. There’s nothing to discuss. I slept with him, I apologized. It’s time to move on.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Fury could feel his lips moving in real life as he replayed the scene in his head. His memory was suddenly at his disposal, having been jogged significantly by the commercial. “We need to figure out why you cheated on me. There’s something bigger going on here.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Fury turned to look at his wife. He knew that was who she was. She’d never spoken to him like that before, and he hadn’t expected her to. The shock had pulled his eyes off the road for an instant. But that split-second made all the difference in his life. He went off the road, overcompensated to get back in his lane, and that was when the world began to spin around him.

  “Fury? Can you hear me?” Natasha’s voice sounded like an echo that played loudly in the background of his memories. It slowly brought him back to reality. He found himself still staring at the television. The insurance ad was long gone.

  “Yes. I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he didn’t want to say anything. She would worry and ask questions. Fury wasn’t ready for answers yet. He still had questions of his own.

  The nurse stared at him skeptically for a moment before returning to her book.

  It was those types of memories that kept him from being happy in the house. He was going to get out of there, no matter what Natasha told him. Fury knew he would come back. Natasha belonged to him, after all.

  He’d made his feelings apparent on their first night together. He knew Natasha was going to need further convincing. There was more to her underneath the surface. He could see it in her eyes and feel it in her touch. The woman avoided touching him most of the time, but he knew she wanted to. Fury saw her resist temptation by reaching her hand out, then yanking it back. Her eyes had hunger in them. He was going to make her understand what she wanted and give it to her.

  But Fury also had needs of his own, like getting out of the house. Slipping out the back door in the wee hours of the morning
to cut flowers for the table wasn’t enough to stop him from feeling trapped. Natasha would be angry at him for leaving, but she would be far angrier if he could no longer control himself. He was thinking about ways to excuse himself when a knock came at the door.

  The nurse had explained that she was expecting a delivery from UPS, which would leave a box at the door. Natasha had thought Fury needed to learn how to interact with other people eventually, and accepting a package was the most innocent thing she could imagine. The driver usually knocked but raced back to his truck before she had a chance to open the door. Like most of the things he was learning, it seemed familiar once someone described it to him. It felt like he was looking at everything from a great distance.

  Fury headed for the front door, checking through a crack in the curtains to make sure the large brown truck had backed out of the driveway before grabbing the package. It felt cowardly to conceal himself. He had nothing to hide from anyone, no matter what Natasha said.

  To his surprise, the vehicle in the driveway was not a delivery truck. It was a long car, lowered close to the ground and covered in images of flames. The knock came on the door again, and Fury narrowed his eyes. His visual interface automatically activated, trying to help him prepare for the situation, but it didn’t have the right information to process this scenario.

  After another impatient knock, Fury flung open the door and blocked the entrance with his body. The skinny punk Natasha referred to as her husband stood on the stoop. Nick had someone with him this time. The other man looked cleaner and did not have the visible tattoos Nick proudly displayed. He had a scrutinizing gaze and clear, bright eyes. The new man seemed nervous. A bead of sweat rested on his upper lip, and there were stains under his armpits.

  “What do you want?” Fury demanded. Any visit from Nick was guaranteed to be an unpleasant experience.