ALIEN SHIFTER ROMANCE: Alien Tigers - The Complete Series (Alien Invasion Abduction Shapeshifter Romance) (Paranormal Science Fiction Fantasy Anthologies & Short reads)

by Tanya Jolie

  “Will that work for you, Miss Parker?” I nodded absently and looked up at Brian, who smiled down on me.

  “You can even bring Tweety.” I smiled as Brian pulled me closer to him. As the officers got into their cars and left, Brian and I made the trek across the yard to his place with Tweety. The house was very warm, very inviting. Adam had designed our house to look clean and modern – lots of white, lots of black, lots of grey. Brian’s house was a mishmash of his past. There were medals in shadowboxes hanging on his walls, mismatched furniture that all looked warm and comfortable. Instead of energy saving, bright white lightbulbs, he had those yellowish 60 watts in all of his lamps, casting a nice glow. I put Tweety down and she jumped right to his couch and fell asleep.

  “Well, I guess she approves.” I laughed.

  “That scores me points, right?” he laughed and showed me to the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “I’ll take a glass of water.” I nodded. I sat gingerly at the kitchen table, taking in that night’s events. He slid a mason jar of water towards me and I thanked him. “What a night.”

  “Oh, I can only imagine what you’re going through right now.” He tried to sound sympathetic though I knew he had been through so much worse in his own life. Something like this was nothing compared to trudging through mud up to your knees for days, dropping out of planes into oceans, or, heaven forbid, killing someone before they had the chance to kill you. It made me shudder thinking about it. “You look like you could use some sleep. With all of the bedrooms I have though, I only have one bed.”

  “Oh, the couch is fine.” I smiled, sipping on the water slowly.

  “Not what I meant. You can take my bed. I’ll take the couch. I’m actually getting the better end of the deal. This is the most comfortable couch ever. I mean, that’s why Tweety is already asleep.” I began to laugh as Brian smiled wide.

  “Well, far be it for me to rob you of your couch.”

  “I’ll show you to my room.” We walked up the stairs together, making small talk as if we were old friends. That was the best part about that night, feeling as if I had known Brian my entire life. I actually went back into my past and thought about any Brians I had ever met, just to be sure I, in fact, didn’t know him already. I didn’t.

  “Sleep well and if you need anything, I’ll be downstairs.” Brian smiled to me from the doorway. I sat down on the bed and smiled back at him.

  “Maybe you could just, I don’t know, stay.” I said, speaking my mind instead of thinking before I said anything.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, genuinely misunderstanding. I felt like a hooker. I felt like a desperate college freshmen trying to spend the night away from her snoring roommate.

  “I just meant that maybe you didn’t have to leave… right now.” Brian looked around the room cautiously. It was a now or never moment. “I just, God, I feel so stupid saying this, but I feel like I’ve known you my entire life. Well, maybe not my entire life, but a solid chunk of it. There’s something about you. I don’t know. Oh God, please don’t kick me out or think that I’m weird.”

  “I don’t think you’re weird.”

  “No, really, if you do, that’s fine, but well, please don’t. Or do, but don’t let me know that you think that.”

  “No, Nellie, really, this isn’t weird. I mean, maybe if I didn’t feel the same it would be weird, but I do. I feel the same way. It’s not that you remind me of anyone, either.” He absently walked into the room a little bit, closer to me. I wanted him to sit next to me. Adam was the furthest thing from my mind and it was all because of him. If I had been with Laura at that very moment, we’d be talking about Adam and how crazy he was.

  “I’m really glad to hear you say this because I thought for sure you’d think I wanted to make a suit out of your skin or something equally grotesque.” Brian laughed.

  “You’d never even get close. I would stop you long before you even touched me.” He was oddly serious.

  “I’m not totally sure if that makes me feel more or less comfortable.” I chuckled and he eased.

  “Are you still scared? You seem a little on edge.”

  “I wouldn’t say that I’m scared. I am a little anxious though, but not about Adam.” I stood up and walked towards Brian, my heart shaking my body from pounding too hard. Brian didn’t back away, but he didn’t reach out for me either. “You should know I don’t normally act like this.” I whispered as I got closer to him.

  “Are you sure you want to then?” Our eyes were inches apart and unflinching. A part of me thought what I was doing was a crazy, knee-jerk reaction to my sudden break up with Adam, but a huge part of me was thinking that Brian was the one. The real one, this time. I didn’t have time to wonder if I was ovulating or not. That would have been an excellent explanation.

  “Absolutely.” I pulled his face towards mine and we kiss, passionately. His lips were soft and the perfect size for mine, which are fairly large and the one subject for most of my childhood torment. I left my hands fall to his shoulders as I felt his hand wrap around my waist. I wondered for a moment how long it may have been since Brian had kissed a woman. He was so good at it.

  I was in love with his hands. They were large and played my hips like bongo drums. It was always the first thing I looked at on a man – his hands. If they weren’t twice the size of mine or covered in callouses and scars, I knew he’d be wrong for me. Come to think of it, Adam’s hands were always perfectly manicured. I led us towards the bed. I was never one for foreplay. He began pulling at the lower hem of my t-shirt, but hesitantly. “It’s okay,” I whispered to him as he tried to fight his urge. I eagerly grabbed his shirt and pulled it off over his head. I gasped.

  His chest was covered in scars of all different shapes and sizes. Some long slash marks, others seemingly like pock marks. There was one, however, that would have been impossible to miss. A quarter sized crater a few centimeters away from his heart. Without thinking, I reached my hand up and touched it. I watched his eyes wince.

  “I don’t like to show that one on the first date.”

  “I don’t need to know.” I pushed my lips back onto his as he laid me down on my back. The bed was actually quite comfortable and I remember thinking that I would be able to sleep in it just fine for as many nights as I’d get the chance to. His weight felt nice on my chest, very comforting. His hands danced on my skin and I pulled on my jeans to loosen them off of my hips and down my legs. I could feel him growing through his pants and I wanted so bad to feel him inside of me.

  I reached my hands under his belt, loosening the leather strap and unbuttoning the ever tightening waist line. I slowly unzipped his jeans, laced my fingers behind his boxers, and felt him for the first time. He let out a soft, deep moan and bit my bottom lip hard, though it didn’t even hurt. His fingers scrambled to my panties and tugged them down off of my hips. My heart fluttered as I felt his fingertips nearing closer and closer to the void I was so desperate for him to fill. When he touched me, I felt myself inviting him inside, hungry for a man that made me feel so safe and secure.

  “Are you sure?” he asked me again, breathlessly. I kissed him hard and pulled bare hips towards mine. When he entered me, it was as if I was having sex for the very first time. I could feel every inch of him and my adrenaline was soaring through my veins. I saw colors and felt heat radiating outward from my stomach. I thought for sure he could feel it too and worried if maybe something was wrong with me. He thrusted in and out, each time pushing himself further and deeper into me. He moved slowly, the way they do in the movies when Phil Collins is playing in the background and the moonlight pouring through the window makes everything look a little hazy.

  Our breathing, hard, was in a syncopated rhythm. I had never felt so close to anyone in my life. If this was what sex was supposed to be like, I don’t know what I had been having up to that point. We worked so well together. I knew he was there for me and I trusted him completely. He kissed me with every
thrust, our lips magnetized. My fingers rushed over his chest, memorizing every scar, reading it like braille. I let myself moan and be as loud as he warranted. It was exhilarating.

  I felt I was at the cusp of climaxing. All of my muscles contracted, keeping him inside of me. My thighs shook violently, as if they were being jolted with electricity. My back arched, bringing us even closer together. It took only a moment longer for him to join me in absolute ecstasy, our bodies writhing in pleasure. I don’t believe there had ever been a more beautiful moment in my life. Laying side by side, breathless and beaded with sweat, he held my hand in his and kissed my forehead. My mind was so clear. I felt weightless.

  “That was amazing,” he broke the silence as he fingered my knuckles that I had been cracking since I was thirteen.

  “Yes, it most certainly was,” I laughed out in the awkward cloud that hung around the room. I placed my other hand on his chest, tracing his scars with my finger idly.

  “That one was from a knife fight outside of a camp in Baghdad.” He began pointing out all of his scars and telling me the stories. Some were silly, some warranted larger scars than what he had, but none of them were quite as shocking at the crater near his heart. “This one,” he pointed to the crater, “was my kill shot.”

  “You’re what?”

  “It’s the injury that got me taken off the SEALs. I’ll let you guess what it’s from.”

  “It’s clearly from a bullet.”

  “Actually, it’s not.” He smiled. “There’s a matching scar on my back. I took a spear through the chest while approaching an undisclosed location from sea.”

  “Seriously?” I asked propping myself up on my elbow to stare at him. “That is so badass!”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “It wasn’t that badass when I was losing three pints of blood on the beach. If it had been a centimeter closer, I’d have died. If it had been a centimeter further, I would probably still be in the SEALs.”

  “But you’re alive now. And that’s pretty important, too. At least to me.” We smiled at each other and leaned in for a kiss when a crashing sound echoed throughout the house. It sounded like glass splayed across the hardwood floor in his living room. Tweety began to howl as Brian shot up out of bed. I watched him run naked towards the door, pausing to assess the action downstairs. He looked like a Greek god, shadows hitting him in all the right places. He came back towards the bed and put his jeans on.

  “Stay here. Be quiet. Lock the door behind me.” I nodded and watched him leave. I rushed into my clothes and locked the door behind him. I couldn’t hear much of what was happening, but there was definitely a scuffle beneath me. I could hear yelling, but no words were coming through clearly. I began to panic. Even though Brian’s room was the largest in the house, I couldn’t stand still knowing that I had locked myself inside.

  I ran to the window and opened it, allowing the cold wind to come in and wash over me. I took several deep breaths before realizing that it had fallen quiet beneath me. I could hear Brian coming up the stairs and I walked towards the door to unlock it and let him in.

  That’s when everything went black.

  Chapter 3: That ended in a trunk

  When I opened my eyes, everything was still black. I was on my back, my hair pinned underneath me. Groggily, I exhaled and listened to the sound echo. I felt my breath hit me in the face. That’s when the panic set in. My heart instantly started pumping blood, throbbing hard enough to shake my ribs. My hands swung out in front of me, but I couldn’t stretch my arms out straight.

  “Help me!” I screamed as loud as I could. My voice reverberated in my ears. My chest heaved as my breathing got more and more shallow. I began clawing at the lid of whatever box I was in. Every part of my body was shaking, whether it was from fear or from how cold I was I couldn’t be sure. That’s when it occurred to me where I was.

  I was in the trunk of a car. I felt around the ground beneath me for anything. My fingers searched frantically. The air tasted sour and like it was filled with dust; it actually felt like a solid mass forcing itself into my body. It was like being in that bathroom all over, except I was in a closet in a bathroom. I felt so far away from the world, even though the only thing separating me from it was a thin piece of plastic. Or metal. Who knows what cars are actually made out of these days.

  My sobbing, which started without my even realizing it, was making it even more difficult to breathe. My nose had started beginning to clog and the tears were stinging my eyes, causing them to water even more, depositing all of the tears into my ear canal. I never cried laying down because it reminded me of wet willies, yet there I was drowning in my tears, quite literally. I could hear muffled voices.

  “Brian!” I screamed, though it was a pathetic and hardly loud enough for me to hear. That’s when the tremors set in. Uncontrollable shaking took over me, exaggerated kicking and arching. I could never tell you really what it looked like, but I always imagined it resembled something like a demon possession minus the speaking in tongues and Hollywood magic. My mouth felt dry, my tongue weighed ten pounds and was covered in glue, and my entire body was flashing hot and cold. I did what I could to overcome my body’s natural response to the trunk to bang wildly on the hatch. I attempted to scream Brian’s name once more, but absolutely no sound came out.

  I learned that night that even in the dark, you can see spots. My lips and fingers starting tingling as the blood drained from them. It felt as if I was turning into stone; I had stared into Medusa’s ugly eyes and she was forcing her spell over me. My feet began to go numb, even though I could feel that my shoes were soaked with sweat. This was the worst attack I’d ever suffered through. My eyes started to dry out because I wasn’t even able to blink.

  “Nellie!” Brian’s voice boomed from outside as he reached the car, jolting it with his weight and me along with it. I felt no rush of relief. “Nellie, are you in there?” I squeaked in an attempt to respond, but absolutely nothing came. I summoned the strength of a Greek god and still it was of no help. I could have very well been bound and gagged with the amount of help I was doing for myself.

  Adam knew. He knew that he could do something like this and he knew I’d be defenseless. I feel it deep within my soul even today that he had been planning to do this for quite some time. Maybe not consciously, but in a way that anyone thinks of what they would do to someone else to hurt them. Everyone has a kryptonite, some more obvious than others, and it doesn’t take someone with the blackest of hearts to stow that information away for a rainy day. Or a day when your fiancé leaves you because you are a worthless pig.

  “Okay, Nellie, are you by the door? Are you near the edge or are you closer to the seat?” Silence. “Okay, get closer to the seat. Get as close to the seat as you can. I’m going to open the trunk.” I couldn’t move. Not for my life, not an inch, not at all. There was no air left in the trunk and I began to suffocate on my own phlegm and tears. My body wasn’t even coughing it up. I was rendered completely and utterly helpless.

  There was a loud bang and the car shook. Another bang. A third bang and I could hear Brian grunting as he lifted the now dented trunk hatch open. The air hit me like shattered glass, piercing my skin and leaving my lungs shredded. I gasped and it hurt, like eating a feast after fasting for a week. My entire body ached as Brian lunged into the trunk and pulled me out. I felt like a ragdoll, my limbs weakly dropping with gravity. He laid me down in the snow and hovered over me on his knees. I just stared aimlessly into the dark black sky above us.

  “Is he gone?” I asked, once my tongue began to move at my will.

  “Yes, he’s gone. He’s never coming back.” I stared into Brian’s face, which was beaten and sore. His lip was bleeding, but it was as if he didn’t even feel it. I could only imagine what Adam looked like. Police lights shined themselves into our eyes as two squad cars pulled up. Officers rushed out and cornered Brian, who put his hands up and calmly explained what had happened.

  Another office ran over to m
e with a blanket, picking me up out of the snow and sitting me down on the front steps of Brian’s house. He was talking to me, asking me questions, but I wasn’t listening. I strained my ears to hear what Brian’s statement was, but all I could see was him pointing down the street and saying something about a broken arm. He turned and looked to me, smiling softly.

  “Nellie? Oh my God, what the hell is happening?” Laura’s shrill voice carried all the way from the street. I looked towards her voice and watched as she came through the crowd of officers, shooing the one next to me away. “Excuse me, this is my best friend. My name is Laura Wallace and I am Nellie’s best friend. Just what the hell is going on here? What happened?”

  “It’s a really long story, Laura. It involves Adam, a dead cat, me being locked in the trunk of my broken car, and sex with Brian.” her face looked stunned, though it eased with understanding. She wrapped her arm around me and rubbed my shoulders hard in an attempt to keep my warm.

  “Oh my God, you slept with Brian?” she pointed to him as he smiled back.

  “Yes, yes I did. Out of all of that information, that’s the part that you picked up on?” I smiled at her.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, yes I’m worried that you were locked in your trunk, but you’re not anymore, so tell me about sex with Brian!”

  “Laura, lower your voice, God.” I looked up at Brian as he began walking over.

  “So, someone actually already reported Adam’s car on Route 80 heading towards the city. They’ve got someone on the road and closing in. So, everything is going to be okay.” He nodded and patted me on the shoulder.

  “That’s it?” Laura said. “A pat on the shoulder? Didn’t you just save her life?”

  “Laura,” I started.

  “Everyone knows that the guy who saves the girl kisses her at the end of it. I’m Laura, by the way.”