The Alien's Obsession (A SciFi Alien Warrior Romance) (Warriors of Luxiria Book 6)

by Zoey Draven

  Kirov’s face was unreadable when he climbed onto the hovercraft and Lainey looked past him, at the older male watching the both of them.

  “Is that your father?” she couldn’t help but ask, shifting her eyes to look up at her male.

  Kirov looked at her and said, “Nix.”

  Nothing more.

  Frustration, disappointment filled her…again.

  But before she could say anything, Kirov had her secured against his body and the hovercraft lifted from the terrace and hurtled towards the opposite hill of Troxva.

  In less than five minutes, Kirov was landing onto a very similar terrace, except there were no homes in sight. Only a long, single glass panel, imbedded into the side of the hill. And just like Kirov’s home, it was mirrored, so she couldn’t see past it.

  Kirov guided her down the hovercraft and she walked next to him as they approached the panel. He reached out, scanned his palm, and the door slid away, revealing a long, metal tunnel leading into the hillside.

  Much like the command center in the Golden City, she realized. They stepped inside and the air felt cooler, fresher within. The door slid shut behind them and Kirov murmured, “Come.”

  The hallway was brightly lit, but not in a clinical way. Kirov led her down and they passed mostly closed doors. But a few were open rooms that revealed walls of Com screens, similar to the ones at Kirov’s home, rooms Lainey shamelessly peeked inside.

  A pair of Luxirian males inclined their heads at Kirov, stopping in their paths, as they passed. Kirov murmured something in Luxirian but his grip tightened at her waist and Lainey was once again reminded of the night of the lunar celebration. How he’d told her his Instinct demanded he ‘mark her as his.’

  Suppressing a shiver at that erotic memory, Lainey nodded at the two males with a small smile when their eyes narrowed on her curiously. But Kirov kept moving, never stopping.

  Not until he reached a door at the end of the labyrinth of a hallway he’d just maneuvered her through. Without him beside her, she’d never be able to find a way out. There were no neon exit signs with arrows to point her back, not on Luxiria.

  That thought made her antsy, slightly trapped, and she picked at the skin around her fingernails, that old nervous, disgusting habit returning. She’d forgotten what it felt like, to be surrounded by walls.

  Then Kirov ushered her through the last door…and Lainey managed to forget about those fears. Because he’d taken her to a large room, a room so big that if she yelled, she would hear echoes. There were no windows, since they were deep inside the hill, but there were ten panels of screens that showed live feeds of Troxva, of the Golden City, of other places on Luxiria that she didn’t recognize, beautiful places she wanted to see one day. She even saw an ocean on one panel, with giant, cresting waves. In another, she saw a peaceful forest, with trees similar to the ones surrounding the lake, white and mossy, swaying with a small breeze.

  In the center of this giant room was a large, metal table, with various projects in various states of completion laid out, much like Kirov’s ‘office’ at home. Coms, with their bright, blinking screens, were positioned on the furthest wall. Some of Kirov’s projects were there, hovering in beams of blue light from the Coms. She wondered if those beams were the Luxirian version of a USB adaptor.

  “This is my personal lab,” he said from behind her.

  “It’s all yours?” she asked, awed.

  “Tev,” he murmured, coming close, leaning his forehead down into the back of her head, wrapping his arms around her waist.

  And just like that, Lainey forgot her frustration with him, for keeping her in the dark about his family. Perhaps ‘forgot’ wasn’t the right term, but she wouldn’t push him, not right then.

  “And you think I’ll be able to help you with something?” she questioned, eyeing the space with trepidation. “Because I have to confess…back on Earth, I still had an old flip phone and I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Windows computer and a Mac.”

  Lainey had only ever needed her sheet music and a piano. That was what she’d spent her time on. Nothing else.

  “I need you to identify something I found,” he said, dragging himself away from her. She followed him to the impressive set up of Coms and he pushed away a heap of metal from a nearby table, clearing a space for her to sit. He helped her up, the cool table chilling her ass and the backs of her thighs, before his long, graceful, masculine fingers flashed quickly across one of the screens.

  “Okay,” she said, slowly, still slightly confused.

  Then she froze.

  Because sounds were coming from the Coms. Sounds she’d never thought to hear again.

  “That’s…that’s…” she trailed off because she didn’t want to miss a moment.

  It was the song “Johnny B. Goode.” Performed by Chuck Berry.

  The famous opening guitar riff was playing through unseen speakers, the sound completely…human in such an alien place.

  It was jarring. It was surreal. It was familiar.

  Kirov was watching her reaction closely but he let her listen to the entirety of the song before he asked, “This is…music from your home planet?”

  “Yes, it’s rock and roll,” she whispered, her eyes wide because she huffed out a breath, a sudden grin appearing on her face. “Oh my God, Kirov, where did you find it? Do you have others?”

  He jerked his head in a nod and her breath hitched in excitement. “Tev. I found them in the Uranian Federation’s database. Apparently, an Earth probe was intercepted in the Fourth Quadrant, its contents uploaded, and then released.”

  A probe?

  Lainey’s brow furrowed, racking her brain.

  “There were other contents,” Kirov explained.

  “Like what?”

  “Images. Languages. Sounds. Audio sounds, not music,” Kirov said, turning his attention back to the Coms before he played the unmistakable sound of chirping crickets.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  He played another sound, this one was the sound of cars, of buses driving. Another sound was rain, of the ocean, of waves crashing.

  “And the images?” she asked, excited.

  Kirov swiped on his Coms and dragged a photograph onto the screen.

  Lainey stood from the table on shaking legs, approaching. It was an image of numbers, of mathematics. Kirov swiped again and another image showed, a picture of a mother breastfeeding her baby. The next was the UN building, the next one after that showed cars in traffic, and then an old photograph of Earth appeared.

  “This is your planet?”

  “Y-yes,” Lainey whispered, overwhelmed, happy, homesick.

  Kirov flipped through other images: a book, an airplane taking off, a woman with a microscope. He stopped on a black and white diagram of a pregnant woman and a man, staring at it intently.

  He paused only for a moment before the next photograph was…sheet music and a violin.

  “Stop,” she whispered, getting closer to the screen. Notes. Actual notes. She could read them better than she could read words.

  “Is this your instrument?” he asked, peering at the violin.

  “No,” she said. “But it’s a beautiful instrument nonetheless, one I’ve played before.”

  “There are other images, other sounds,” Kirov explained, turning his attention back to her. “Many of them that were uploaded and then forgotten.”

  “Kirov,” she said, her suspicions confirmed, “I think you found the Golden Record.”

  “The Golden Record?” he asked, frowning.

  She’d read about it once. She’d been interested in the music NASA had put into space.

  “It was launched in a probe called Voyager. It was a collection of sounds and images and greetings in different languages spoken on Earth. They put it all on there, hoping to find an audience,” she explained, looking up at him. “It was supposed to take over 30 or 40,000 years before it got close to another system. But someone found it long be
fore that.”

  He absorbed that information like a sponge and inclined his head. “Tev. There are many advanced species with access to that technology.”

  “There was more music on Voyager,” she said, hope rising in her chest. “They put on Beethoven and Mozart and Bach. I know they did.”

  “It is why I brought you here,” he said. “I wanted to see if your piano sounds were among them, so I can begin creating your instrument.”

  Lainey inhaled a sharp breath, deep affection warming her chest.

  “My instrument,” she repeated softly.

  “Tev,” he murmured, pulling her closer. “I promised you, did I not? That night at the base of the facev.”

  The night he’d taken her to their little meadow, with the pink fireflies and the stream that shimmered with moonstones and the blue moss that felt like velvet against her bare skin. The night they’d been intimate for the first time, when she’d first kissed him.

  Lainey shivered with that memory. That night had frightened her because she’d realized just how deeply she could fall for Kirov.

  That night he’d stolen a piece of her heart and he’d been taking little pieces ever since.

  When had she started falling in love with him? She didn’t know. Not truly. It might’ve been that night, or it may have been when she first saw him, bathed and magnificent in moonlight, a fantasy made flesh.

  Or it may have been all the other moments after that.

  “Yes,” she whispered, looking up at him. It hadn’t been so long ago, but somehow she felt like it’d been ages. She felt like she’d known Kirov for a lot longer than she truly had, as if time moved differently on Luxiria, as if time moved differently between them. “I remember.”

  Kirov’s eyes warmed, softened in a way that she knew was only meant for her.

  When Lainey looked back to the screen, she looked at the sheet music for a long time, hearing the notes in her head as though she was reading words from a book.

  “Can I hear more music?” she asked.

  “Tev,” he said immediately, swiping over the Com. “Of course.”

  And he played the songs for her, going through the Golden Record.

  There were chants, there were songs with bagpipes and windpipes and drums, there was opera by Mozart, the Queen of the Night aria. Kirov’s favorite—thus far—was by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, a wonderful jazz piece that made her close her eyes and feel.

  Who knew aliens loved jazz?

  But then she heard it.

  Bach.

  The Well-Tempered Clavier. Book Two. Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1.

  Pure piano, the beautiful sounds drifting over her ears like a caress.

  Tears sprung in her eyes, her hands shaking with the notes, as Kirov watched her reaction.

  Lainey listened to it in its entirety, with bated breath, hardly daring to move. And when it was over, she asked to listen to it again. And again.

  “This,” she finally whispered to Kirov, pointing to the Com. “This is my piano.”

  Kirov inclined his head.

  “What…” Lainey trailed off, her head still muddled from the music, but feeling determined, wanting to create that music again. “What do we do now?”

  Kirov guided her to the table and pulled out a tablet for her, not unlike the one he’d given to Crystal.

  “I need a design for your instrument.”

  “I’m terrible at drawing,” she warned.

  “Try,” he urged. “It does not need to be perfect. I will need the approximate size as well.”

  That would be easy, considering she knew a piano like the back of her hand. Lainey quickly drew a rough sketch of a standard 88-key grand piano and a sketch of a keyboard, up close. She’d once played on a piano with 97 keys—with 9 extra bass notes—but thought better of including those.

  When Kirov looked over her designs, he asked, “How do you produce sound?”

  A loaded question. Lainey took in a deep breath and said, “Well, to put it as simply as possible, when you press a key,” she tapped Middle C on her keyboard design, “a hammer strikes a string inside and produces a specific note. But on Earth, there are keyboards where the sound is programmed in and reproduced without strings.”

  Kirov nodded, cocking his head at the design. He was getting a look in his eye, a look she was slowly beginning to recognize. His intense look when she knew his beautiful mind was working like crazy.

  “We will begin with this keyboard, tev?” he finally said. “You can isolate specific notes from the music you heard and I can program them. Any notes you still need, we can synthesize if you can identify the correct pitch.”

  Lainey’s lips parted, her belly warming unexpectedly with arousal. Kirov’s brows ticked up when he scented her and a growl rose from his throat.

  “Baby,” she breathed, reaching up to lock her hands around the back of his neck. “It really turns me on when you talk about pitch and piano notes like that.”

  Kirov chortled and rasped, “Noted, female.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For the next five days and nights, they worked together whenever they could in Kirov’s labs. Of course, her male had other duties to attend, but he still made their project a priority, something she couldn’t tell him just how much she appreciated.

  And life was good. She would wake next to Kirov in the mornings, feel his heat and scent wrapped around her in their furs. On the rare occasion she woke before him, she would kiss him awake and then they would spend a leisurely and pleasurable morning in bed. Once they got up, Kirov would work on the kitchen extension he’d already started adding. Sometimes Luxirian males would show up with materials or help her male with installation and while it would still be another week until it was finished, Lainey could already see that it would be beautiful, the kitchen of her dreams.

  Afterwards, Kirov would need to attend to his duties as Ambassador and Lainey would usually call up Crystal and Erin or Kate. She’d learned that Erin had finally convinced Bianca to move into the house on the terrace and while Bianca still refused to speak with Lainey, it relieved her that they were out of that windowless room. And with still no news of the stolen Luxirian crystal, it was the best decision for their sanity and mental health.

  Lainey had also connected with Cecelia and Taylor, who were enjoying mated life with their Luxirian males. It made Lainey happy, knowing that her friends weren’t that far away, that she could talk with and see them every day.

  Kirov returned home shortly after. He would still go over to his father’s house, would still come back distant and frustrated, which took him a while to shake. He still never told her or offered up any information, despite her trying to ask questions.

  Then he would take her to the lake after dinner and they would walk the shores for a bit before going to the labs, to resume working on her piano.

  Their project steadily came to life. They worked together on the design of the keyboard, debating over different materials and structure. When Lainey had identified all the notes and chords she could by ear from the collection of songs from the Golden Record, they filled in the gaps with synthesized notes. Lainey assigned them their place on her instrument and Kirov logged the information into his Coms.

  Then they’d tweaked. With all the notes inside the Coms, Kirov recreated Bach and it sounded perfect. For the other songs, Lainey heard when a synthesized note was slightly off key and Kirov changed it until she was satisfied.

  “You remember all this from memory?” he asked her, late on their fifth night, while they were still in the labs.

  He wore that same expression she’d often looked at him with. Awe. It pleased her, considering he’d been a little quiet that day, a little distant.

  Lainey flushed and told him, “I’ve been playing the piano since I was four. I was classically trained. I played piano more than I did anything else, even sleep. These notes, this music…they are a part of me. So yes, I remember them.”

  Lainey was s
itting, perched on the table, next to Kirov, who was tinkering with the kind of metal he would create the keys from, weighing them, testing them.

  Kirov hesitated but then said softly, “When you saw your Golden Record…you were happy.”

  “Music makes me happy,” she said simply in reply.

  He went quiet. He’d been doing that throughout the day, even throughout the week, going quiet. Sometimes, she’d catch him just…thinking, the wheels turning in his mind so hard. It was difficult to get his attention when he was like that, but Lainey was patient.

  But lately, that silence had started to feel different. It felt…loaded.

  “Do I?” Kirov asked suddenly, cocking his head to the side, his fingers stilling over the metal in his hands. “Do I make you happy?”

  Lainey froze, blinking, the question catching her off guard. She should be used to it by now. Kirov was always direct. And with the exception of the situation with his father, he was always honest with her…which was perhaps why that situation hurt her as much as it did.

  She must’ve hesitated too long because Kirov’s eyes slid away, his shoulders stiffening. The metal key in his hand dropped to the table with a loud clang and he blew out a sharp, frustrated breath.

  “Where is this coming from?” she asked softly.

  “The selfish part of me,” Kirov started, looking back at her, “worried that if I showed you the Golden Record, you would pull away from me.”

  Lainey’s lips parted, her brow furrowing, blinking. “You were thinking of not showing it to me?” she asked slowly.

  “I do not know. I do not think I could do that to you,” he confessed. “It was a piece of your home planet. It contained music, something I knew you loved above all else. It had images of your home, of your people, of your world. I worried it would strengthen your resolve to leave Luxiria…to leave me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she asked, not sure how to feel about his confession, wondering if this was what he’d been thinking about this past week.

  “Because I wonder if it matters at all,” he said, frustration seeping into his tone.

  “Kirov—”