by Zena Zion
The Alien’s Captive Bride
Alien Protectors Book 6
Zena Zion
Copyright 2016 by Zena Zion
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any way whatsoever, without written permission
from the author, except in case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews
and articles.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any
character, person, living or dead, events, place or
organizations is purely coincidental. The author does not
have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for third party websites or their content.
First edition, 2016
Description
Tough-as-nails Jasmine Lane has never needed anyone else. But an unexpected diagnosis of late stage cancer has left her feeling alone and desperate to feel alive.
Just as she's ready to throw her life away for a thrill, a creature from another world, the handsome and ferocious Prince Gwydion, steals her away back to his home planet, the frozen kingdom of Taliesin, where an ice age has reduced the once advanced species back to a feudal society living in the marble halls of their ancient cities, surrounded by technology they no longer understand.
To lead his people out of winter after the death of his father, Gwydion must ensure his claim on the throne over his uncle. But he has no chance at inheritance without the love of his soul mate, his Amorent, which prophecy has declared Jasmine to be.
But though Jasmine is all too happy to indulge with him physically, she refuses to bond with him, knowing she's soon to die and unwilling to take him down with her.
Can she resist the charms of the prince, especially as their relationship grows from lust towards love? Or will she risk it all to spend her last few days alive with him, as Amorentessa of the ice planet?
Chapter One
It was a cool, still night outside, cicadas screaming in the heady humid air of a Louisiana summer. Somewhere, the water splashed as something, probably a frog or a turtle, dropped into the midnight bayou. The rural sky above was clear as crystal, the stars sparkling like shattered glass, flickering as the quick, delicate silhouettes of bats darted past, pursuing the moths and other night insects that filled the air.
Occasionally, the larger silently gliding shape of an owl would cross the moon, casting shadows on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot below. The parking lot belonged to a collapsing shack of a cocktail lounge, a dive bar among dive bars which even the most hardened of drunks would have thought twice about entering.
The decrepit tan building looked like the plywood sheets over its windows were all that was holding it together. A flickering neon sign near the door declared it 'The Rabid Gator' and it had earned its name.
Inside, it was neither cool nor still. It was hot as Satan's sauna and packed with dedicated drunks, most of them steadfastly ignoring each other in favor of coddling their drinks and smokes, which had filled the roof of the bar down to about head level with a cloud of acrid tobacco smoke. It was not a place anyone with anywhere else to go would want to be. Which was exactly why Jasmine Lane was there.
A tall, dark eyed blonde, she didn't exactly fit in with the rest of the clientele, who were mostly Cajun hillbillies who made their living off the river, truckers passing through on their way to Baton Rouge, or bikers traveling the coast from Florida to Mexico for reasons not difficult to discern. Aside from a few of the biker's girls, Jasmine was the only woman in the bar, and that had so far earned her a lot of suspicious side eyes.
The 'resting bitch face' she'd adopted and the sleeveless top she was wearing to show off her muscular arms had kept most of the weaker willed drunks at bay. One of the bikers however was lurking close by and had been eyeing her since she came in.
Jasmine stared into her drink, turning the glass in her hand to roll the whiskey around the bottom, waiting for him to make his move. Eventually, as she'd known he would, he stood and ambled towards her.
She shifted, eyeing him dangerously through the curtain of her long, honey colored hair. He was a big one, at least 6'5", with a shaved head and dull, crowded tattoos crawling up his neck and across the rolls of the back of his skull. His nose was crooked, probably broken more than once. The displacement of air as he dropped his hand down onto the bar next to her stirred her hair. She refused to look up from her drink.
"What's a little thing like you doin' in a place like this?" he asked with his sleaziest grin and one of the worst cases of meth mouth Jaz had ever seen, "Pretty thing like you could end up in trouble, wandering around by herself."
"Not interested," Jaz replied bluntly, still not looking away from her scotch.
"Well you better get interested," the biker's voice was sinister, aggravated by her off hand dismissal of him, "Seems to me like you're lookin' for trouble. And you found it."
Jasmine rolled her eyes.
"Oh yeah, I'm totally looking for trouble by sitting here with my drink, bothering no one," she said sarcastically, "Iron clad case you've got there buddy.’She was asking for it' is a real classic."
"Now listen here you little bitch-" the man's hand closed around Jaz's shoulder, and that was all the invitation she needed. With one hand, she grabbed her whiskey, throwing the last of it back in a smoky, burning gulp. With the other, she grabbed the front of the biker's shirt and slammed his head into the bar with all the strength she had.
When she released him, he reeled back with a pained shout, clutching his bleeding forehead, and she slid off her barstool, heels of her boots clicking on the grimy floor. When he took his hands away from his face she was there to grab his upper arms and pull him forward into a knee to the groin which she put all her body weight behind. He hit the floor wailing and she planted a heel in his chest.
"Anybody else?" she called, a ferocious sneer curling her dark red lips.
The rest of the bikers, five total, stood up and Jaz felt her heart racing. She might have bitten off more than she could chew here. But that was exactly what she was here for.
Jasmine Lane had always taken very good care of herself, physically. Healthy diet, lots of exercise. She'd been on the track for major league women's baseball once upon a time. When that hadn't panned out (problems with the scholarship and her recurring and often violent behavioral issues) she'd set her sights on MMA. She might not be the next Ronda Rousey, but she was doing pretty damn decently in her bantamweight division. Or at least she had been.
That was before the fainting spells had started. She had tried to ignore it at first, said she was just training too hard. But when stepping back the intensity of her training didn't help, her manager sent her to the doctor, who sent her to a specialist, and so on and so forth, until eventually someone figured it was about time to tell her she had late stage terminal brain cancer. She was dying.
Her manager, with little apology and less ceremony, dropped her. At first she'd been outraged, trying to figure out how she was going to live on the pitiful amount of money she had in her savings. And then she remembered- she wasn't. She wasn't going to live on it. At least not for long.
Which brought her here, shoving her elbow into the solar plexus of a three hundred pound biker while his friends lay on the ground at various levels of grievous injury. She hadn't come here to die, not really. But neither had she come here just to drink.
There was something so humiliatingly helpless about having cancer. She was used to physical enemies she could grab by the balls and br
eak over a table, like she was currently doing to this biker. This intangible, inescapable enemy inside her was unbearable. But she could pretend these bikers were cancer cells if she needed to. She could beat the tumors into a pulp with her own fists. It was better than therapy.
The smarter patrons of the Rabid Gator started vacating the premises as soon as fists started flying. The bar tender knew better than to try calling the police out here. He just grabbed the cash box and bolted. All the better in Jaz's opinion. She didn't want any interruptions.
She had thought the gang was a little small, and she was proven correct a moment later when the rest of their group arrived. She dropped the thoroughly beaten man she'd been wailing on and turned to face them, the first seeds of worry beginning to grow within her.
Jaz had already been outnumbered, but that hadn't been a problem until it suddenly became a case of ten on one. As two of the men caught her by the arms and a third hit her hard enough for her teeth to cut open the inside of her mouth, Jasmine realized she wasn't quite ready to die yet.
She put a dent in a few them in the process of breaking loose and bolting for the door, and she figured that was something to be proud of. Yeah, she'd really look back fondly on breaking that guy's nose ten minutes from now when they were scattering her brains all over the pavement with a shotgun. She wondered if the tumors would be big enough to see in the brain matter, or if the shot would disintegrate the masses that were killing her the way radiation could never hope to.
She'd walked to the bar. No one with any sense would park their car in front of a place like that unless they were actively looking to have it stolen. And Jaz knew she wouldn't make it if she tried to run down the barely lit country road back to the gas station where she'd parked her vehicle.
Her best bet, in her admittedly somewhat impaired judgement, was to head into the bayou and hope they didn't bother to follow. Ignoring the feeling that she was making a mistake, Jasmine bolted into the swamp.
Thunder rumbled distantly and the muddy road squelched under her boots as she ran into the dark. The mosquitos buzzed thickly, a further warning that rain was coming. Jaz wouldn't want to be out here when the rain started.
She could hear the shouts of the bikers behind her, but she was still hoping they'd give up when they saw she'd run off into the bayou. They wouldn't want to bring their bikes onto this road, that she knew for sure. But, judging by the sound of shouts getting closer, they didn't mind risking their boots. Jasmine ran faster.
She'd already been fighting for a while, and it wasn't long before she began to wear out. Meanwhile, the men behind her were still fresh and eager to avenge the damage she'd done to them and their friends. While part of her was most certainly cursing her stupidity for doing this, the rest of her was undeniably exhilarated.
She had blood on her knuckles and running down her face. Her lungs were burning and she felt more alive than she had since her diagnosis. It felt like doing something. Like if she ran far or fast enough, fought hard enough, she could somehow conquer the disease infesting her. She wanted it to be true. She wanted beating cancer to be as simple as an act of will. But in her heart she knew the war was already lost.
She had been running blind, no lights on these country dirt roads, until the flare of a flashlight splashed over her back.
"When we get done with you, you're gonna wish we killed you!" someone howled behind her. Fear blossomed in Jaz's heart. Was death by biker gang in a Louisiana swamp better or worse than a slow, agonizing death by cancer? Neither sounded very attractive right now.
How do I get out of this? She thought as her chest tightened with anxiety. I'm not ready yet! I don't want to die!
Light exploded in front Jasmine like a solar flare. At first she thought it was headlights, a car coming down the road towards her. But it was too steady, sinking down from the treetops in front of her, not moving forward. Before Jasmine could decide what it was, she stumbled, her breath catching.
The light dimmed. No, not the light, she realized. It was her eyesight. She was fainting. She hit the ground hard, catching herself on her hands and knees. Her vision was swimming sickeningly. Distantly, she realized she was looking at someone's feet.
Someone was standing on the road, looming above her. Strangest of all, they appeared to be hovering, perfectly still, a good four inches above the mud.
She heard shouts of surprise and struggled to turn and look back at her pursuers, though she could feel her world increasingly shifting out of focus. The bikers were only a few yards away, the anger in their expressions evaporating into confusion as they stared at the person above her.
The stranger spoke three words in a language Jasmine had never heard. Deep, rolling consonants that vibrated in her very bones and made the stars tremble. It sounded like the voice of a god.
The bikers were screaming, falling to their knees in the mud. Blood was pouring from their eyes and ears and Jasmine, horrified, felt her consciousness slipping rapidly from her grasp. The dark took her at last and she slumped, helpless, onto the feet of the stranger, her last thoughts only praying that she wouldn't end up like the bikers. She wanted to live.
Chapter Two
She woke, which surprised her, and immediately realized she was not in a hospital, which surprised her more. Nothing smelled like antiseptic and there were silk sheets beneath her cheek.
Or something very like silk anyway. Something about it felt slightly off, too cool and slightly furry like velvet. She also noticed that nothing hurt. She'd had the shit kicked out of her back there. But she felt none of it. She felt fine. Better than she had in months actually. She opened her eyes.
She was lying in a bed, or something like it. It was a sunken round nest, filled with pillows and blankets in shades of rich burgundy, dark blue and gold. The exterior was circled with a white frame, like an elaborate headboard, which resembled intertwining antlers. It was open at the foot of the bed, and then rose steadily to a grand peak behind her.
She couldn't figure out what it was made of. She initially guessed plastic or resin, but looking closer it was too sturdy and slightly translucent, like something in-between ivory and milky glass.
There was no IV in her arm like she had thought there might be. And when she raised her hand to check she realized there were no cuts on her knuckles from the fight. She knew she had busted them open. How long had she been out for them to have healed already?
As she pushed the blankets off of her, she realized additionally that she was no longer wearing the clothes she'd worn to the bar. She wasn't wearing anything. She pulled the sheets back up to cover herself abruptly, confused and embarrassed. Where was she? What was going on?
"Good, you're awake."
Jaz shifted backwards warily as a man approached the bed. He was as naked as she was, but that was not the first thing she noticed about him. Because the man, to her baffled disbelief, was not human.
He was human shaped. Even the important bits currently so openly on display. In the dark, it would have taken her a while to realize he wasn't a human man, and an attractive one at that, with broad, powerful shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.
But no human man had ever had horns like that, or a long, sweeping tail, which flicked behind the man impatiently. His skin was a dark, caramel tan, nearly russet, in most places. But in certain areas, the color faded into a dark red brown.
His hands were nearly black at the claw like fingertips, the color fading halfway up his forearms like he'd plunged his hands into a vat of dye. It colored his feet the same, and splashed over his hips and groin, and the upper half of his face starting just beneath his startlingly green eyes.
The color there faded into the black of his horns, which swept back over his dark hair, in texture like a ram's horn, but following a graceful, double curved shape rather than curling around.
His hair, black as night, fell around his shoulders in a shower of tiny braids, many of them decorated with beads and discs of metal. In some places, designs
in gold like tattoos crossed his dark skin, including a simple but striking pattern of arches across his face. She had thought they were natural at first glance, but looking again the lines seemed too deliberate.
As for the part of him he was currently declining to cover with clothing, that part was as familiar as it had ever been, save for the color. He even had it pierced she realized, a golden prince albert glittering from the underside. Jasmine felt an unexpected stir of interest fluttering in her belly.
"You have slept too long," the man declared, stepping down into the bed, "I am tired of waiting."
Jasmine, ignoring the flicker of arousal in the face of the potential serious danger she was in, struggled to get her feet beneath her, sliding on the silk sheets.
She let the sheet drop, deciding defending herself was more important than her modesty, and grabbed the strange headboard to pull herself up. When she touched it, the headboard thrummed to life, humming and pulsing colors. She jerked her hand away with a confused shout.
"Where am I?" she turned on the strange man to demand answers, her eyes flashing, "Who are you?"
"I am Gwydion," he answered, stepping steadily closer across the sunken bed, unconcerned by her anger or her defensive posture, "Aetheling of Taliesin. And you are my Amorent, soon to be Amorentessa of this palace, where you will bear and raise the heirs I am about to impregnate you with."
His expression as he stared at her was one of cool hunger. He wanted her, and expected to have no trouble in taking what he wanted. Jasmine couldn't wait to wipe that look off his face.
"Like hell I am!" she lashed out with a ferocious kick which landed solidly just below the unprepared stranger's ribs. She darted, expecting him to go down, but he only stumbled, then turned and grabbed her by the waist, throwing her back down onto the bed.
Jasmine, well experienced in grappling, turned as she fell and when he came down on top of her, she quickly got her legs around him and began peppering his face with blows.