“What’s good?”
“Everything,” the waitress said promptly. “Our special tonight is the roast beef dinner.”
“We’ll take that.”
The waitress glanced at Yar. He smiled at her and Adrianne thought for several moments the woman was going to drop her order pad. “Guess that’s two,” she managed to say, turning quickly to Darcy and lifting her brows.
“I’ll have the same.”
“I don’t suppose you could give us directions to get out to the site?”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” a young man seated just to Darcy’s right muttered.
“Excuse me,” the waitress muttered and took off.
Adrianne leaned forward, checking the guy out.
He looked to be in his early, or maybe mid-twenties. He was dressed more like a biker than a truck driver, his light brown hair straggling well past his shoulders.
Apparently feeling her gaze, he turned and looked first at Darcy for a long moment before his gaze skated past Darcy’s bright red face to Adrianne’s curious one. “Why wouldn’t it do any good?”
“FEDS crawling all over the place. They’ve got the whole site barricaded off.”
Excitement flooded through her. “Really? For a meteor?”
He made a derisive sound in his throat and returned his attention to the cup of coffee he held cradled in both hands. After a moment, Adrianne nudged Darcy and indicated with a jerk of her head that they should switch seats. Darcy looked happy to oblige and Adrianne wondered fleetingly if the young man had made her uneasy. She dismissed it, however, moving down to the bar stool Darcy had just vacated.
“I take it you’ve been out to the site?”
The young man glanced at her.
“My name’s Adrianne,” she said when he looked at her, then turned to introduce Yar and Darcy, discovering in the process that Yar had moved down a seat, as well, and that Darcy had been shuttled to the opposite end of the group. “This is … uh ….” She shrugged. A more commonplace name didn’t come immediately to mind. “Yar, and the lady at the end is my friend, Darcy.”
“Chance,” the young man said, leaning forward on his elbows until he could see Darcy, who barely glanced in his direction at the introduction. He grinned as her face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Darcy, huh?”
Adrianne hid a smile as she divided a glance between the two. After a few moments, Chance managed to pry his gaze from Darcy’s breasts and glanced at Yar. He did a double take, then his eyes narrowed as he examined Yar more carefully. Finally, he looked at Adrianne again.
“Any particular reason you’re looking for the … meteor?”
“Just curiosity,” Adrianne lied promptly.
He nodded. “There’s been a swarm of curious, but the Feds won’t let anybody within miles of it. The locals I’ve talked to that happened to get a glimpse of it said it was huge … and it didn’t look like any meteor.”
“Maybe we could talk better if we moved to a quiet table in the back?” Adrianne suggested.
Chance shrugged. “I can’t tell you much.”
“I’d still like to talk.”
He nodded and Adrianne summoned the waitress. “We’re going to move to that back table over there.”
The waitress didn’t look too pleased, but pleasing the waitress wasn’t high on Adrianne’s agenda. When they’d settled again, the waitress brought their plates. As soon as the woman left, Adrianne leaned forward and said in a low voice, “It wasn’t a meteor, was it?”
Chance shrugged, looked around, looked pointedly at Yar for several moments and finally said, “You tell me.”
Adrianne’s lips tightened in irritation. “We’re not FEDS, so let’s stop beating around the bush, shall we? It was a space ship that crashed, wasn’t it?”
Chance scrubbed his face with his hands and sat back in his chair. “I haven’t managed to get a look at it, but … yeah … I’m pretty sure it was a UFO. This place has been crawling with UFO enthusiasts. Most of them are camped out as close to the site as the FEDS will let them get, just a little north of here.”
Adrianne frowned. “I suppose it would be useless to ask if anyone had seen … a stranger around here, then?”
“You mean besides him?” Chance asked.
“We’re looking for a woman,” Adrianne said bluntly.
“Gotta description?”
Adrianne turned to Yar. “Tell him what Mis… Serena looks like.”
“She is beautiful,” Yar said promptly.
Irritation washed over Adrianne, but it wasn’t entirely because Yar’s description was so unhelpful. “How tall?”
Yar held his hand just above the top of his head. “To here.”
“That tall?”
Yar frowned, thinking it over, and nodded.
“Good God! Never mind. Her hair. What color is it?”
“I don’t really think we need that,” Darcy put it. “There can’t be too many women over six feet running around the place.”
Yar pointed to the table cloth.
“Red?”
“This color.”
“So … you’re looking for a red head somewhere in the neighborhood of six foot six? Did you file a missing persons?”
Adrianne gave Chance a look. “You know very well what I’m talking about.”
“We could ask around, but from what I heard that thing came down pretty hard … NOT like a falling meteor, mind you, but it was definitely a crash. If she survived, I doubt she would have been in any condition to outrun the FEDS. They were here within minutes of the crash, from what I heard, and had cordoned off the area. The tale they’re passing around is that it’s a potential bio-hazard. Most everybody around here thinks it’s a piece of space debris--satellite or something.”
Adrianne threw a glance at Yar, wondering what he thought of the conversation. His expression told her he had followed the discussion well enough to realize that his mistress might be dead. She couldn’t tell how he felt about it, but he had said she was kind to him and he’d been anxious enough about her to come looking for her. He must be feeling a good deal of distress over the possibility. She gave his hand a comforting squeeze.
“Could you give us directions to the site?”
Chance smiled faintly. “I can do better than that. I can show you a back way in.”
* * * *
They’d been following Chance for over an hour before they reached a place where he signaled for them to pull over and stop. Chance, riding a motorcycle, led the way down a series of narrow dirt roads and finally along an overgrown track that didn’t look as if it had been used in fifty years. They stopped beside a run down, abandoned shack.
Adrianne got out of the car and looked around. “I don’t see anything,” she muttered, wondering if she should have trusted the guy after all. It wasn’t incomprehensible that he’d led them out in the boonies to rob them.
“I told you, the FEDS are crawling all over the place. We can’t get within a mile of the site in broad daylight. We’ll have to wait here for dark,” Chance said as he parked his cycle and pulled his helmet off.
Darcy, who’d been driving and had come to join them, sent Adrianne a frightened look. “We’re going on foot … in the dark? What if … what if we’re spotted?”
“We’ll have to run for it,” Chance said cheerfully, moving to the rickety porch of the cabin and taking a seat. “But we’ll have a better chance of not being spotted if we wait till dark.”
Darcy glanced from Chance to Adrianne. “I think I’ll stay with the van … if it’s all the same to you. Someone ought to stay and make sure nobody messes with the van. And, if they do chase you, I could start it up and be ready to make a quick getaway.”
“Good thinking, Darcy!” Adrianne said, beaming at her.
“What about the little fellow?” Chance asked, pointing at Yar, who’d climbed out of the van and was looking around curiously.
Adrianne turned to look at Yar, frowning. “He should prob
ably stay with Darcy. He’s … uh … not used to this sort of thing.”
“And you are?”
Adrianne glared at him. “Let’s just say I’m better at thinking on my feet.”
Chance hooked a jaw in Yar’s direction. “What about it? You going to let her tell you what to do?”
Yar looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, then looked at Adrianne. “I do not think I understand the slave’s question.”
“Slave!” Chance snapped, jumping to his feet. “Did he call me a slave?”
Adrianne put her hand out. “There’s no sense in getting all pissed off at him. He doesn’t understand.”
“Well, maybe I’ll explain it to him,” Chance said belligerently, stomping over to Yar and giving him a shove … at least, Adrianne assumed that was what he’d intended to do. Yar didn’t so much as budge.
He sent her a helpless look. Adrianne set her jaw, stalked over to the two of them and wedged herself between them, giving Chance a push. “Leave him alone, Chance. I told you, he doesn’t understand. On his world, men are bred to be slaves. He assumed you were. He just doesn’t understand our customs.”
Chance took a step back. “He’s an alien?”
“I thought you’d figured that out by now. He described the other alien, remember?”
“Yeah, but I thought … well, he doesn’t look like an Alien.”
“We’re trying to help him find his mistress so he can go home.”
Chance looked excited, but then something apparently occurred to him because he frowned, and looked Yar over again carefully. “You want to go back to being a slave? Why don’t you just stay here and be a free man?”
Adrianne glanced up at Yar. She’d been too wrapped up in trying to fulfill her part of the bargain to give much thought to Yar’s situation. He’d said he wanted to find Serena so he could go home and it hadn’t occurred to her to question whether that was what he really wanted or not … or if that was what was best for him.
“Is that what you want, Yar?”
Yar looked both scared and confused. “I could … decide?”
“I suppose you could. You said it was forbidden to come to Earth. If they won’t come here, then you wouldn’t have to worry about being captured, would you? What do they do with runaway slaves, anyway?”
Unconsciously, Yar put his hand protectively over his groin.
Chance paled. “Aw man! No wonder you didn’t think about it.”
Adrianne studied Yar a long moment and finally took his hand and led him over to the rickety porch and told him to sit down. “If you think there’s any chance you could get in trouble, don’t think about it, OK?”
“But … I could decide?”
Adrianne sat down beside him. “It’s against the law to have slaves here. If you decided you wanted to stay, you would be free. If we can’t find Serena, or we do and we don’t manage to release her, you would be a free man.”
Yar frowned. “But … you said ….”
Adrianne felt a blush rise to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean it. I was just … I could see you expected to be ordered to do things and it was easier than trying to explain that you didn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to do.” She thought it over. “Well, actually, everybody has to do things they don’t really want to do. Even when they’re free. But you have a choice. You can do it, or you can face the consequences.
“Like what my boss did to me. I could’ve done it and kept my job. But I decided I didn’t want to do it, so now I have to look for another job. See what I mean?”
“What did your boss tell you to do?” Yar asked curiously.
“He wanted me to please a client … sexually. It totally pissed me off when I realized that was what I’d been sent to do, so I left. Not that I’m worried about it, mind you. I wouldn’t work for that bastard again if he gave me the raise I thought I was going to get!”
Yar thought that over. “You get to decide if you want sex?”
Adrianne nodded. “The men too. Thing is, you have to ask and if they don’t want to then you don’t get to even if you want to. That’s how choice works. Everybody decides whether they want to or not and sometimes you choose them, but they don’t choose you.”
He frowned. “You do not want me?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Adrianne lied. “You said you wanted to find Serena and go home.”
He lowered his voice, as if he was afraid someone would over hear, although Chance and Darcy were too far away to hear even a normal tone and, from what Adrianne could see, too caught up in flirting to notice anything less subtle than a freight train. Chance was, at any rate. Darcy was wearing her scared rabbit look, as if she’d just discovered herself in the clutches of Jack the Ripper. “If I stayed?”
Adrianne studied him. She’d been too focused on getting her hands on the Orgasmizer9000 to think about anything else, at least consciously. On a sexual level, she found Yar a definite 10 and a half. She couldn’t help but wonder if that was something that had been bred into him--a severely potent masculine appeal--but, in the end, did it really matter? Natural or not, it was definitely there.
Strangely enough, he also brought out almost a … motherly instinct in her to want to take care of him. She supposed, in a way, most women wanted to feel needed, but she had avoided men that were too needy. She enjoyed being completely independent. She didn’t want the responsibility of having anyone dependent on her … or she never had before.
She wasn’t so certain she felt that way when it came to Yar.
Not that that mattered. The chances were strong, in her opinion, that once Yar got his ‘land legs’ so to speak, he wouldn’t be needing her, or anyone, to take care of him. It might take him a while to get used to the way things were on Earth, but he’d already taken the first step toward independence by deciding to come after his mistress in what he perceived as a hostile environment. He was smart enough to have learned English, just from observations, as Serena had, she supposed. He was intelligent enough to have figured out how to get the pod down to the planet just from watching Serena program it. He didn’t say much, but there was every indication that that was from caution, and probably training, than because he was slow.
She patted his knee. “We’ll see when … and if … the time comes, OK?”
Yar frowned. Briefly he looked distressed, but in a moment he had his ‘impassive mask’ firmly in place, the expression he wore when he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. “This means no?”
“It does not mean no. It means … when you’ve had time to figure out what you really want, then we’ll talk about it. I’m not going to take unfair advantage of your innocence.”
Chapter Five
Yar exerted his newfound independence by refusing to stay with Darcy at the van while Adrianne and Chance went to check out the site. His stated reason was that she was his mistress and he should stay with her, but she couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he was so anxious to be reunited with Serena.
She didn’t like leaving Darcy alone. Chance showed every indication that he would’ve been happy to stay and protect her, but they couldn’t very well leave him when he was the only one that knew the way.
And this was her show. She wasn’t about to be left behind.
“Keep the keys in the ignition and if we’re running when we head back this way,” she told Darcy as they left, “make sure the van’s ready to roll the minute we get in.”
Chance had told her they were about a mile from the site. It seemed like further. The terrain was rough and although the sky was clear enough to shed plenty of light so that they could see each other, it was still too dark to keep them from stumbling over rocks and scrubby bushes.
When Adrianne finally reached the point where she thought she was going to have to beg for a breather, Yar simply scooped her into his arms and kept going, as if she was light as a feather--which she knew she wasn’t. Her ass alone … but she didn’t want to think about that. She
was trying hard not to think about how heavy she must feel to Yar.
After her first yelp of surprise when he picked her up, and a half hearted demand to be put down, she subsided when he insisted that she was tired and needed to be carried, looped her arms around his neck and enjoyed herself. By the time she decided she was rested enough to walk again, Chance had halted them with a sharp whisper and flattened himself on the ground. Adrianne did likewise when Yar set her on her feet. They’d been peering down at the activity for several moments before it occurred to her that Yar was standing as she’d left him. She turned to look up at him in surprise and irritation.
“Get down!”
He knelt beside her. “I will soil my clothing,” he objected reasonably.
“It’ll wash … if we get the chance. If they see you, we might not!”
Reluctantly, he lay down beside her.
The whole area below them was bathed in light from the floodlight towers that had been set up around the crash site. There must have been a dozen men and women wearing civilian clothing milling around--probably scientists. There were at least three times that many soldiers. The center of attention was the wreckage that was being carefully secured with heavy cables. Nearby stood an empty flatbed truck. Three men stood on the empty bed, busily assembling a huge wooden crate.
Adrianne frowned. “Looks like they’re about to move the ship. I don’t understand why they’d assemble the crate first, though.”
“Because it isn’t going into the crate.” Chance pointed to a huge helicopter off to one side that Adrianne had assumed had been used to bring in the scientists. “They’re going to air lift it out of here across the desert. The flatbed and the crate are just a diversion. They know the UFO people are camped out all around here and there’s no way they’ll get it out on any of the roads without being spotted.”
“Figures. I don’t see any sign of a tent where they might be keeping Serena.”
“Alive or dead, they probably took her out long since.”
Yar and the Orgasmizer 9000 Page 4
