by Fall, Carly
He walked up the sidewalk thinking about baby steps. Yeah, he didn’t have to jump her bones and totally lose his SR44 form. If she let him, he would go a little further each time and see how much his body could take.
He pushed the button and the door to the vestibule opened. Abby was there to greet him. Her hair was down around her shoulders, and she wore a long, flowing skirt with a silky blue tank top. She smiled at him tentatively.
“Come here, you,” he growled. He had her in his arms within seconds.
He felt her hesitancy, but then she snaked her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. He backed her up against the counter, then gently lifted her up so she was sitting on it. She spread her legs and wrapped them around his waist, and he ground his erection into her core. God, he loved how she felt, how she smelled, how she tasted.
He couldn’t believe how Abby cranked him up. There was nothing but fire, lust, and desire sweeping through his veins. All that mattered was getting as close to Abby as he possibly could.
He pulled out the silk shirt from her skirt and let his hands travel up her bare skin until he reached the softness of her bra. Gently, his thumb glided over her nipple, and he felt it peak and harden. He loved the little moan that came from her throat.
Her hands moved under his T-shirt, and goose bumps formed on his skin as she touched him. He wanted to be skin to skin with her, to feel her soft breasts against his hard chest.
He lifted the hem of her tank top and slid it over her head, finding the clasp to her bra and flicking it open with ease. He would have ripped the damn thing in half if the clasp had given him trouble. He then quickly took off his shirt, breaking the kiss for just a second while he slipped it over his head.
Better. So. Much. Better.
The urgency within him to have all of her almost overwhelmed him. He knew it was his SR44 tendencies coming out. Once a male of their race had the urge to mate, or join with another, it was difficult for them to stop. Thankfully, females were the same way.
He found the hem of her dress and let his hands slowly travel up her calf, over her knee, grazing over her thigh, to her hip. Jesus, her legs were a contradiction—long and strong, yet soft and feminine.
He wanted her naked.
Now.
He wanted to be inside of her.
Now.
So much for baby steps.
Abby was the one who pulled back, both of them breathing heavily. When she opened her eyes, he saw shock cross her face.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, backing away from him.
“What’s wrong? Did I do something?”
“Noah, you’re . . . you’re glowing!”
Chapter 28
At that point, Abby wasn’t sure who moved faster. Noah stepped away from her with a string of expletives, turning his back to her.
She held her shirt up to her bare chest and jumped off the counter, still staring at the subtle orange glow that radiated from his skin. She recalled the time all those weeks ago where she thought she had seen him glowing, but had chalked it up to the sun reflecting off her orange robe.
Wow.
When he had arrived, she had planned to confront him immediately with the photo from her mother’s murder file. But then he had practically tackled her, overwhelmed her, and well, she simply got caught up in the moment and became more concerned with getting as close to him as possible and letting the rest of the world fade away.
Now his skin was shimmering a light orange glow. As she stared at him, she felt stunned. Oddly enough, she wasn’t afraid of him, but supposed that would be a good reaction to have. No, instead she was insanely curious. The man before her not only shimmered a light orange, but he had been at her mother’s murder scene twenty years ago.
She had the feeling she was about to find out something terribly important. She felt like she was on the precipice of a rabbit hole, and when she jumped and found the end, which would be the answers she desperately needed to hear from Noah, her life would never be the same again.
She slid on her shirt while Noah kept his back to her and planted his hands on the kitchen table. She stayed silent as she watched the shimmer on his skin fade, then disappear.
“Noah?” she said quietly.
No answer.
“Noah, you have to talk to me.”
Still no answer.
She approached him slowly and laid her hand on his bicep. He looked at her hand, then into her eyes.
“Noah, it’s only fair that I know the truth.”
“You’re not afraid of me,” he said quietly.
She shook her head. No she wasn’t. Curious? Yes. Surprised? Yes. Afraid? No.
“No. I have a lot of questions, and not just about . . . the glow.”
“What else?”
Abby drew in a deep breath and opened the file on the small kitchen table in front of them. He pulled out a chair and sat down.
“What’s this?” he said, looking at the pictures.
“I was wondering if you knew anything about this case,” she said, watching him flip through the yellowing papers and pictures.
“Well, obviously a female, throat slashed,” he said noncommittally, his eyes meeting hers. “I don’t know any specifics about it though.”
“So you don’t know anything about this case?”
She felt him hesitate, and she couldn’t help but feel she was about to pull the guillotine on an unsuspecting rabbit. She was trapping him.
“No, Abby,” he said quietly, meeting her eyes.
She stared at him for a moment, then nodded. She didn’t know whether to be upset at his blatant lie or afraid of the truth.
“Abby, what’s going on?”
Abby calmly took the file and rifled through the papers. She threw a picture on the table in front of him. “Then why don’t you explain why you were at my mother’s crime scene?”
Chapter 29
Noah looked at the photo in front of him. So, so, very, very busted. There wasn’t any denying the man in the photograph was him, even with the horrible mullet haircut. He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Short of killing her, which he wasn’t about to do, he didn’t see a way out of this. His mind swarmed, trying to come up with a lie that was plausible. All he could think of was how quickly the day had spiraled down the pisser.
Mother. Fucker.
“That’s my mother,” Abby said quietly. “I need to know what’s going on. Why were you there? Why haven’t you aged a day?”
Her mother.
Well, well. He never saw this one coming. Kind of like being blindsided by a Chevy. Or maybe a tank. Here he was standing in front of the ten-year-old girl he had felt so bad for all those years ago. How was that for a good smack of fate?
He remembered the case. Distinctly. The woman had left behind a ten-year-old girl. He knew the murderer had been one of his kind, a Colonist, and now that he was looking at it, the throat slash actually matched the women in Carson City and Lovelock. He made a mental note of the year of this case so that he could cross-reference it to the others. It looked like Colonist number seven had been a very busy boy for quite a long time.
He remembered seeing the traces of ash that didn’t appear in the photograph in front of him, but had been at the murder scene. He had been in the Sacramento area when the murder occurred, and he raced over when the detective in charge called him.
He stood up and began pacing the small kitchen. “Do you really want to know the truth, Abby?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment of silence. He could tell she was having her own internal war of whether she really did want to know, or if things were best left unsaid.
He stopped in front of her, nodded, and met her eyes. “What I’m going to tell you will sound crazy. When I’m finished, you can kick me out and we can never see each other again, but you can’t ever say a word to anyone. Do you understand?”
She looked up at him, and he could see her trying to make a decision on whether sh
e could keep that promise.
“Abby,” he said, grabbing her hands, “please. It’s so much bigger than me. I need your word. It’s crucial that you never breathe even a hint of it to anyone. It could mean your life.”
He had visions of her talking about the whole situation to the wrong person and her ending up in the funny farm, or worse, in the hands of some government that would not relent until they squeezed every last drop of blood, or information, out of her. Whichever came first.
She nodded. “I promise,” she murmured. “Please tell me what’s happening. Please help me understand.”
Noah sighed and turned to grab his shirt off the kitchen counter. He couldn’t believe he was going to tell her what he was, but he didn’t see a way around it. He did, however, make a mental note to beat the ever-loving shit out of Hudson and Cohen when he got home. He distinctly remembered both of them saying humans couldn’t see the glow. Lying motherfu—
He had to tell her the truth, because nothing else could explain his sparkly ass, or the picture, and frankly, he was at a loss of words to make up a lie.
He turned to Abby and leaned against the sink. He crossed his arms over his chest and met her eyes.
And then he started talking.
Chapter 30
Twenty minutes later, Abby found herself plopped down on a chair at the kitchen table, the truth more wild than she could have imagined. She found herself slightly afraid, excited, unsure.
She looked at Noah, who was still leaning against the sink, her eyes traveling from the waves of his brown hair, down to his wide chest, his narrow waist, down his long legs to the tips of his leather boots. So this was what an alien looked like.
Huh.
So much for the whole E.T. image of Hollywood.
He met her gaze. She knew from the hard lines and stress on his face that he was telling the truth. There wasn’t any reason for him to lie to her. There was also pain on his face, as if he were hoping she would accept him the way he was, but expecting that she wouldn’t.
She looked around the kitchen, wondering if she could get up. Would her knees work? She gave it a shot, almost surprised that her legs functioned well enough to carry her to the cupboard to get some red wine. For some reason, she was certain this occasion called for red. Noah reached up to the cupboard beside him and pulled a glass down. She took both the bottle and the glass to the table and sat back down. She poured and stared at the blood-red liquid before she took a long drink.
The fact of the matter was that there was a little voice in her head telling her she should probably be more frightened, but she wasn’t. Instead, she was completely and totally overwhelmed. In twenty minutes, her life had been tossed upside down, and she needed time to absorb what he had told her. She felt like she was in a snow globe and someone had just shaken it. Hard. She needed time to see where everything would land.
She had questions, but her mind was swimming and she couldn’t put the words together. She needed to be alone. She needed him gone so she could sort through all of it and try to bring it into her own reality.
“Noah, I think you need to leave,” she said quietly. “My brain feels like it’s going to explode.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him physically flinch as though she had just whipped him.
She stared at the linoleum as he made a call on his cell phone.
“Hey, Hudson. Ready.” He didn’t wait for a reply, just ended the call. “I’ll wait outside,” he said quietly.
She nodded and felt the tears roll down her cheeks as she heard her door click shut.
She sat at the kitchen table, reflecting on everything that had happened.
One thing that had driven her toward journalism was an unrelenting need for the truth. She had always compared her mother’s murder to other unsolved cases, and she was always surprised at the lack of evidence in her mother’s case. Something hadn’t seemed right. There simply wasn’t a clue or lead to be found anywhere. With the other unsolved cases she had looked into, there had been something—a hair, some fiber, a print, a footprint. With her mother, it was as if a ghost had made its way into the house and killed her.
Now she understood why.
It hadn’t been a ghost, but another species all together. An evil that Noah said was here to hunt and kill.
As crazy as it sounded, it made sense.
The other thing that brought her relief was knowing that the people who inhabited Earth were not alone in this great space of the universe. She had never believed that they were, and she did believe in all of the sightings that were documented and recorded. Now she had proof, and he just walked out her front door.
She trusted Noah explicitly. If he had wanted to hurt her, he already had ample opportunity. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she also wondered where that left her.
She had allowed herself the little fantasy of the happily ever after with that man.
Alien.
Whatever.
And it didn’t seem that far-fetched, but now, from what he had told her, it seemed close to impossible. He would never truly be hers. He could never love her. He had told her that, not in so many words, but he had made it clear that his mind needed to stay focused on his work.
If things were to go any further with them, it would not be a relationship, but sex.
Period.
She thought about what they had done sexually. There had been the kisses, the caresses, the mind-blowing orgasms he had given her weeks ago on her couch. An alien, a being from another planet, had given her those time-bending orgasms that no human man had ever been able to achieve with her.
Score one for the aliens.
However, he couldn’t give any part of himself to her. But she knew she needed more than that. As ridiculous as it sounded, she had fallen in love with Noah in the short time they had been together. She wanted all of him, not just great sex every now and then. She couldn’t go on with the relationship knowing that she was the only one who had any emotional involvement in it, and that his end was simply physical.
Take away a point on the alien, and she was left again with a big fat zero.
She took another slug of wine, recalling the conversation.
“So you glow when you kiss me because it gives you pleasure. That glow is your . . . your SR44 form radiating out of your body, and if you experience too much pleasure, it will leave you and you will be fully human and begin aging. But you don’t want to do that because then you will have failed your mission here on Earth of eradicating the criminals from your planet.”
He had nodded. “Yes. They’re called the Colonists. I can’t allow it to happen, Abby. I was sent here for a purpose along with the others, and I can’t let them down.”
“Others?” she asked incredulously. “Others? How many others?”
He sighed, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if he were upset with himself for telling her too much. When he’d finally met her eyes again, he said, “There are six of us. We were sent to eradicate the Colonists. We didn’t know they would take on human forms, and we didn’t know they would begin mating with humans. We need to finish killing the original twelve, then check on their offspring. If their offspring are also criminals, we need to get rid of them too. We have six more Colonists to go before we start on their offspring.”
Wow.
If what he said was true, and why wouldn’t it be, there were aliens walking around the Earth in human form, killing people?
Abby went to the couch and turned on the TV. She flipped through the channels until she found a Rocky movie. Which one, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t even know how many had been made. She did know that they were good for shutting down, tuning out, and forgetting about life for a while. Neptune jumped on the couch and curled up on her lap.
Through the filmy curtains of the big window, she saw a car pull up in front of her apartment, then drive away quickly.
She felt a tear roll down her cheek because she had a feeling she had sa
id good-bye to Noah forever.
Chapter 31
Noah had Hudson drive home. Hudson had arrived a few minutes after Noah called, and Noah made it very clear that he wasn’t up for any type of conversation. He didn’t care about any topics, whether it be the weather, the latest celebrity gossip, or a new discovery at the bottom of the ocean. He didn’t want to hear a word. Especially from Hudson, the lying son of a . . .
He was really trying to avoid another fight with Hudson out in the desert.
He thought about his conversation with Abby.
Yeah, that had hurt. He didn’t blame her though. He had looked into her large brown eyes and a feeling crept through him that he would never see her again. He felt a fissure in his soul. He had been alone for so long, and he finally met someone who he wanted to be with, but they couldn’t be together.
There wasn’t a question; it was just a fact.
There were too many outside factors. First, they were from different planets. Screw all that men are from Mars, women are from Venus crap.
This was literal.
Second, he could never care for her the way he wanted to. His job, the eradication of the mistakes of his people, was too important. He needed to be around for a long time to erase the Colonists. He could never give himself over to what he felt for her now, let alone what he could feel for her in the future with more time.
He remembered the pain in her eyes, and he wondered if his were mirroring what he felt. He closed his eyes, memorizing every freckle, every curve of her face, every wave of her hair.
As they sped down the highway, Noah made plans for when he got home that involved a bottle of Lagavulin he had been saving for six years. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to be alone. He was afraid he would kill someone. Literally.
As they pulled into the parking area of the silo, Noah bolted from the car before it came to a halt. He punched the code to get in, then pounded down the stairs. He heard Hudson behind him. The male had been smart and kept his trap shut, as well as physical distance between them. Noah had so much pain ripping through his body he felt like fighting. He wanted to kill something. He hoped none of the other males in the house would get in his way. He knew if he killed one of them, he would be physically hurt, probably mortally, and then he would feel bad about killing one of his fellow Warriors. That was a whole lot of no winning on everyone’s side.