Won by an Alien (Stolen by an Alien Book 3)

by Amanda Milo

  The woman in front of me faces me again. “Now. You okay?”

  I feel like a bobble head doll when I nod. The woman looks gratefully relieved and I feel a little more mollified about the whole shooting incident. They were worried about Tac’s reaction. Tac’s got some power. But right now, he’s looking down at me, face drawn. He’s worried about what’s been upsetting me and now I can finally tell him! I catch the tail end of something the woman is saying to me. "—and tell your man what’s freaking you out.”

  A baby’s wail rings out. A baby. And my heart feels like someone is ripping it right out of my chest and squeezing it in front of me as someone passes this woman her infant.

  ‘Tell your man what’s freaking you out.’

  I grab at Tac’s arm, and gasp “I have to get home—my babies need me!”

  The crowd goes silent.

  And I burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 61

  TAC’MOT

  This went to hells fast.

  I bound across the distance as rapidly as I can, Tara held tight to me as we flee the melee. I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why, and I care not: I simply need to see Tara safely out of it.

  Her babies?

  Tara has babies?

  I’m struggling to process an overload of information.

  We’d been in the middle of discussing rescue plans with some hobs and other assorted peoples, when a massive ship landed. Not friendly arrivals. They even harshly retaliated on a pair of Rakhii that were simply trying to protect their humans. Humans. Not Gryfala, but their human mates.

  I chatter loudly, thinking of Brax in the same situation.

  When we hear a shout to ‘Stop and release the Gryfala’—I do not stop. My thighs burn as I extend my stride and kick it to get to our ship. The main cargo bay is shut. “Lem, Lem, Lem,” I pant to the universe. “You better not have locked that teveking stock door!”

  It’s so new an ability, that I forget that Tara can understand me now. And now she moves from merely scared out of her wits to utterly horrified and scared of her wits. “We can’t get in?”

  “Vssshp,” I try to reassure her as I hop around the side, our pursuers rounding the ship with me and gaining fast as they take to the air in flight formation. “Remember that first day, when you got me shot?”

  Tara’s hands tighten. “Sorry about that—”

  I exhale hard. “Forgiven. Just…We need that door open now, and then we need it to close after us—fast.”

  “Great! Hey, maybe we can throw that thing on them! The one that attacked my face.”

  I spare her a shocked look. “Only if we have to, though Culcs are used for home defense,” I muse on a half-wheeze.

  We do throw that Culc at them. It blocks the laser blast intended for me—I have never been shot at so many times in my life as I have since I met this female—and the hob falls back with a guttural yell as the injured Culc adheres itself to his face. The Culc’s buyer is going to be furious! My toxin is rolling down my skin like sweat, but I can’t risk getting near the door to knock them back for fear of taking a laser blast.

  Finally, the door clangs shut before the next closest hob can squeeze through. The Culc however, manages it, and I exhale a sigh of relief.

  Watching it scamper off seems to unsettle her deeply.

  “It’s getting away,” she says in a horrified voice.

  “We’ll catch it again,” I tell her. “Just…don’t go anywhere alone until we do.”

  She looks at me sharply, as if assessing if I’m jesting. Suddenly, the floor below us seems to tilt and rock. “It’s alright,” I assure Tara. “This is Lem breaking through what is no doubt a sanctioned ship lockdown.” These hobs do not want anyone to get away with the… humans.

  Tara is not a Gryfala at all.

  An overload of information.

  “They looked like Grake,” Tara says weakly.

  “They are hobs. As is Grake,” I confirm. I turn to look at her, absurdly giddy, perhaps because we can converse. It’s a gift I’ll never take for granted again.

  “Tac!” Grake’s voice echoes in the cavern that is the cargo bay. “You two alright?”

  “Are you unhurt?” I ask her, and she throws her arms around me and starts to cry. But I do catch an “I’m fine!” in amongst the sobs and a spate of words I don’t understand, not because of a fault on the translator’s part, but because her words are simply tumbling together so fast. “I think we’re fine, Grake,” I reassure him.

  “Creator. It feels odd that I can understand you,” Grake tells her, trying to talk her out of the state she’s working herself up to.

  For an extra fee, the Na’riths promised to remote-force upgrades on all our tech, but they magnanimously cut us a deal on Grake and Brax’s, considering theirs would have been done at no cost once Homeland pushed through automatic language upgrades to all its citizens’ translators.

  Tara gives him a wobbly smile. “It does feel odd! But it’s amazing. And I need help—”

  He stalls her gently. “First, you need to see to Brax before he gets sicker.”

  Tara drops off of me. “Oh no! Brax is sick?”

  CHAPTER 62

  BRAX

  I’d lain on the floor, keeping myself as close to all of her things as I could; her markers, her spoons, her broken shoe and her favorite cup spread out between my arms where I could scent them. I traced over her artwork thoughtfully until my shaking became too extreme for my claw to follow her lines.

  That’s how she’d found me. Pitiful, ill, and desperate for the touch of her skin. Desperate to assure myself of her safety. And the moment she arrived, and her scent reached me, I became desperate to rid her of the stench of other males.

  Tac left us.

  Now she lays on the bed with me, and she is letting me veritably smother her.

  “There’s no reversing it?” Tara asks sadly.

  I shake my head, my cheek’s scales brushing the sensitive skin of her neck. She shoves at me, so I move my attention to marking inside of her elbow.

  “Brax?”

  I pause and pull back enough to look at her as I answer. “I wouldn’t even if I could.” I exhale an incredulous sigh. “And you’re not Gryfala.”

  Her mouth tightens in concern. “Is that a problem?”

  I hug her tighter. “It’s a relief.”

  She looks confused. “Why?”

  “It’s forbidden for a Rakhii to bond to a Gryfala.” My tail is snapping. “It’s the reason my brother was executed.”

  TARA

  I stare at the ceiling, my thoughts swirling. “So, you were taught with hard knocks,” I tell him finally. “You had to learn everything the hard way,” I think to clarify.

  Brax laughs in his nose, a sort of thrum, and it’s strange but I can tell the difference now, I can hear this is an unhappy vibration. “‘Hard knocks’? Sounds about so. After Gelert’s Princess—”

  Llywelyn. I mentally provide the name that he’s only been able to say out loud once, and it kills me to see his jaw tighten now over even this reference to her. So much tragedy. His bitterness and resentment are understandable.

  “—provided the opportunity and the means, I bought the biggest teveking cargo ship I could.”

  And he’d just taken on two slaves. Lem had submitted himself into the auction willingly, but poor Tac…

  Tac. Tac who had, until very recently, been a slave. At first, an extremely unwilling one.

  “I didn’t know a rutting thing about mechanics, about bartering—about anything. None of us did.”

  Because you were just kids!

  “We got fleeced on deals until we figured it out.”

  My heart is aching for him. For the younger him, orphaned when his dam died of a heart(s)attack when her eldest son was beheaded in front of her.

  His father had ‘faded after her’.

  I shudder.

  Brax’s hand strokes my back. “We’ve done a fair job of keeping th
is ship going, though we’ve run through mechanics due to the engine problem.”

  I knew it! I knew what I saw wasn’t good, how could it be? I find my voice. It’s higher than normal but I find it. “Engine problem?”

  He snorts smoke and tugs the ends of my hair. “They all should be replaced. As each one fails more and more frequently, the workload… it’s a lot to expect one person to keep on top of.”

  “Grake is a slave now?”

  Brax shakes his head. “No. No, that’s where he got the credits to put up for your translator today. From me.”

  “Grake paid to have me shot?” I say slowly, maybe indignantly.

  Brax busts out laughing.

  I give him a look that says, ‘I’m glad one of us thinks this is funny’. I’m going to have to have words with Grake. Words with which I will profusely thank him. Mostly.

  His tail curls over my arm and slides back and forth slowly. Soothingly. I sniff.

  “He wasn’t up for auction. Without being able to contract him off—”

  Which would have meant not having to pay him ‘severance credits’ until his seven-solar term was up. This sounds like a lengthy span of time to me, but then again, just how it relates to my unit of ‘years’, I don’t know.

  “I had to pay him a solar’s salary in advance to get him to take the job. It was everything I had; I can’t even afford to hire Lem and Tac on as employees yet.”

  “When can you?” I ask, worried for them, for him.

  He sighs, relieved. “Soon.”

  I blurt it out. “When can I get them?”

  I don’t address the issue of what will happen, what I’ll do once I have my babies. I know now that if I separate from Brax, he’ll die.

  He’s aware of this, I’m aware of this, we’ve got no easy answers but the important part is having Megan and Simone in my arms again.

  He kisses the tip of my nose. “Soon, veetling.”

  “The same ‘soon’ as you paying Tac and Lem?”

  The scales around his eyes show me he wants to smile. “Just as soon as we deliver the baby Culc.”

  I choke.

  He pinches the bridge of his snout. “His buyer Comms us at all spans of the rotation for updates and new vids—he’s demanding, but the sale is exciting. Culcs are rare and this one is of incredible quality. He’ll settle the other half upon delivery, and then we’ll be able to afford fuel cells and the supplies we’ll need in order to get our younglings back.”

  Our younglings?

  “Um, is this the octopus thing—” and seeing that he doesn’t know what my word for octopus means, I try, “—the thing with all the tentacle arms and biting suckers?”

  He nods.

  Oh shit.

  “Brax. We have a problem.”

  CHAPTER 63

  TARA

  It is stalking me.

  Brax couldn’t join in this expedition, not even cuffed to me because if he feels he has to defend me, this mission will become moot. Brax didn’t exactly agree to this plan, but on some level, he knows the Culc has to be recaptured.

  And guess who is the best bait around?

  That’s right. Lucky, lucky me. “It likes the way you taste,” Tac had told me. It grew double its size since it fed off of my face the day I got here.

  Bully for the Culc.

  At least its owner can be excited about that.

  He will not be excited to know that his exotic ‘little’ pet is injured. Tac says he found some blood, but after the initial trail, it seems it’s been cleaning up its own tracks.

  I am super creeped out at how intelligent this thing sounds.

  Especially when I’m the one it will come out for. Because it’s hunting me.

  “It can’t kill you,” Tac tries to reassure me.

  FAIL.

  “And I’ll be with you, so it won’t get the chance,” he finishes quickly when he sees that, surprisingly, his words do not have the effect he was aiming for.

  We’re alone together, back in the giant wide open area that Tac calls the main cargo bay, which is where the livestock chute actually feeds into. And in here, it may be kept neat and tidy, but there are many odd places for a flexible, deviously intelligent creature to hide. Too many.

  So we’re waiting.

  And we’re… baiting.

  This consists of me trying to look tasty. Not hard; we can hear it scuff along the floor occasionally, and one time, when Tac took off to follow the sound of what turned out to be a pebble clattering to the floor. Tac’s answer to this: “It must have thrown it to distract and misdirect me.”

  But before he’d returned, I’d heard a soft squish, squish, squish.

  Cue mental screaming.

  I’d whirled around, and yes, there it was.

  I’d screamed. Out loud. And in my head too, but out loud, like I wasn’t supposed to.

  From waaay on the other side of the ship, Brax had roared, and the Culc, an arm poised above my head, had scrambled off.

  “Tevek!” Tac curses when it stays hidden. “Tara…” He sighs. “You can’t scream. Brax is going to warn it off every time. He can’t help it.”

  I gape at him. “I can’t help from screaming!”

  Tac does the thing that hot guys do on Earth, where his bottom teeth catch his top lip as he considers something with a sexy face.

  Unfortunately, the thing he’s considering is gagging me.

  “No!” I argue. “No way! You cannot gag me!”

  Tac’s eyes are playful as he brings his hand over my mouth. “Is this an order or simply an incorrect statement?”

  My muffled growl makes green spots break out across his skin.

  Seeing them, knowing what they mean… I feel a pleasurable heat starting low in my belly.

  And Tac can smell it.

  “Tara?” he inquires softly.

  My voice comes out stupidly breathy on account of being muffled by his hand. “Yeah?”

  “Would it offend you if I suggested an alternative, radical method of gagging you? Radical, but just as effective.” He’s studying me intently. As if he’s being serious and is waiting on a serious answer.

  My jaw only closes so that I can use the bottom half to form words. “So this is like, ‘for science’, is that what you’re trying to sell me? Won't it be kind of hard for you to catch a killer Culc if you’re in the middle of having sex?!”

  “‘Kind of hard’ is not a problem at this moment.”

  “Tac!”

  Tac’s not even blinking he’s staring at me so intensely. “I’ll keep him off of you until we finish.”

  “JUST UNTIL?”

  He darts his head down, and his lips are on mine, and I’d have been flattered he is so hot for me—if I wasn’t in danger of a multi-armed, sucker-biting space octopus.

  When Tac’s hands glide around my hips, he encounters my stuffed skirt pocket. He pulls back, and peers down at what he’s tugged out.

  He looks back up at me in complete shock.

  Clearly he’s ready, eager, and was thinking we’d have a repeat of earlier, when I’d interrupted him while he was in the room with all the gauges and dials and lines and important looking things.

  “Are you busy?”

  He’d smiled at me so sweet. “Not too busy for you.”

  Good answer. “Did I hear right? Is this called the Service Room?” I’d dropped to my knees in front of him. “What kind of service?”

  I’d given him a handie. And because I couldn’t track down Lem and his bath time spray goodness, I had to have my bathtime via sink in the bathroom Tac and I used to share, before I made my way back to Brax.

  Unfortunately, his nose is CRAZY scary good, and not only did he know, but he found a spot on my shirt where Tac had splooged me. I was in the middle of kicking myself for missing that one when Brax had—snarling all the while—bent over me and licked it off.

  I’d just lain there, my eyes caught on his, thinking Whaaaaat just happened?

  I wa
s ready for sex with Brax that time. He’s intense, but he’s careful. And… having him clean another male off of me had been…

  I blow out a breath at the memory and refocus on the present. With Tac. With Tac, the other alienman in my life.

  I’ve actually been keeping these in my pocket in case the opportunity arose for Tac and I to have some lengthy alone time. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I was envisioning the bed. Not that I need a bed just… nowhere in my lurid fantasies were we out in the open in huge as crap room with a carnivorous monster hankering for another taste of my flesh.

  “Believe it or not,” I say against his mouth before I return his kiss, “this scenario isn’t how I imagined this happening.”

  “I’m sorry that your imagination is limited.” He draws the tip of his nose up the side of my face. “What say you we expand the scope of your fantasies?”

  I nip his lip and Tac gives a high tree-frog croak. It sounds happy. And weird too, but by now, my brain has wired itself to find it totally cute. “I’m not an exhibitionist,” I warn him.

  “Grake’s busy in the engine room. I’d hear his steps long before he reached us even if he were headed in our direction.”

  “I’m not a thrill seeker.”

  “You are free to return to your ascetic ways right afterward.”

  I laugh. “You’re crazy!”

  More like horny. And since I hadn’t enjoyed any since before I gave birth to a set of twin social-life-abolishers, I can sympathize. And his grin, which I feel against my neck, does things to me. This uncharacteristic cajoling, his playful teasing, his stroking hands; it all has me softening. In all the right places.

  “Okay, one death defying quickie, why not?”

  “Yay,” Tac says—and I hear me. He just mimicked my mini ‘Yay!’ cheer. In my voice.

  I laugh harder.

  Returning to a serious tone, his voice takes on a flavor of sheepishness when he admits, “I’ve never done this before.”

  I don’t let my eyes widen at his admission. I wondered, but I didn’t know. And really… I don’t mind this at all. Realizing this, I’m able to give him a genuinely relaxed shrug. “Then watch and learn, boy.”