Romance: Bonded to the Alien Prince: (Scifi Alien BBW Romance) (Alien Invasion Space Opera Romance)

by Ruby Scott

  He glanced around at me after a moment and then dusted his hands on his jeans that probably cost him an absurd amount of money.

  “No, I was not. But it isn’t as if I’m still part of the family or anything. I have my own house, my own money, my own responsibilities,” he said smoothly. “I honestly don’t care who my father marries.”

  “And your mother?” I felt nosy asking, but hey, I was going to have to see him during all of my holidays and probably much more than needed.

  He looked up at me, eyes narrowed as if he were debating whether or not to tell me. “Divorced him a long time ago. She found out that he was banging her secretary and took off the Moment she secured a few million from his trust fund for me.”

  “What a bitch,” I said without thinking. I didn’t take it back when I realized how harsh my words were, however. Those are the kinds of things you can’t take back no matter how much apologizing you do.

  Bastian didn’t explode on me like I had expected. He simply inclined his head and took a few steps closer. I tensed warily, wondering if he was planning to shove me into the wall and hide my body somewhere remote or not.

  My fears were needless; he simply rested beside me. “That’s the day I learned to not depend on anyone else for money.”

  Wow. This asshole actually had a touching backstory. I had heard of those billionaires in books where they had come from nothing, yada, yada, and had been betrayed by someone they trusted, but I had never actually seen it in real life. Ever. “Wow,” I said out loud, not elaborating.

  “Not the dick you thought I was?”

  “Every inch of it, but hey, you do get some sympathies from the ladies, I expect.”

  Bastian snorted. “You think like a man.”

  “I think like one to escape them all.”

  Bastian looked down at me, his gaze unreadable. “You’ve dealt with our kind before?” He laughed at his own phrasing God, I feel like some sort of scientist. I meant a rich person.”

  “He wasn’t rich, but he had the ego and tendencies of a rich man. Ever heard the phrase beer money champagne tastes? Fit this idiot to the tee,” I said offhandedly, trying to cover any true feeling I may have still had about Eric.

  Bastian looked over at me and didn’t look away. I could feel his gaze on me and I felt uncomfortable suddenly, standing there next to him with his gaze searching my very soul. It didn’t even matter that I was standing there in only my dad’s old shirt. It didn’t matter that I could feel the kiss of cool air against everything but my torso. I could be wound from head to toe and still feel as naked as I did in that moment before him.

  For the first time, even though he had just told me what his past had been, I felt as if he was something more than just a spoiled little brat who took his father’s money and made his own money. I saw something in him that I don’t even think he meant me to see.

  It scared me because I was already falling for his good looks and snarky attitude (though I would never say this aloud if asked). What would I do if I found out that he was actually a good person? I looked away from his stare and turned to move another box off of the shelf.

  “Isabelle,” Bastian said softly. I jerked at the lack of snark in his tone. He had a pretty nice voice, I had to admit. Again, never out loud. I would suffer the pain of death before telling Bastian Nicholson that I thought that he had a nice anything. “No one should treat a woman like you like that.”

  “A woman like me?” I asked, bracing myself for the worst.

  “Someone with integrity and an identity that makes her stand out from the crowd.”

  I frowned. This was weird, coming from Bastian. He was known for dating airheads who had most likely been cheerleaders in high school for all of ninety seconds before dumping them and moving onto the next conquest. What did he know of integrity and an identity that was different than everyone else? “Well, I do try,” I said, turning before he could see the puzzled look on my face.

  He followed me, annoying bastard. “You think I don’t understand,” he said with revelation in his voice. “Because of my… history.”

  “Well you have left a legacy,” I said cheekily. Bastian snorted and leaned his forearm against the rail that held the shelves I was leaning up against up. The space suddenly became much more cramped as I found that the movement brought him mere inches from me.

  “I don’t think you understand my reason of doing that.”

  “I understand perfectly,” I said. I rolled my eyes. That cocky grin was back in place and gone were any deeper qualities I had seen in him. Even though I now knew that they were there, I found that they were completely overshadowed by the impossibility of me understanding how he could be so narcissistic.

  “You are so quick with your words,” he said. It was more of a murmur because of our proximity, and his tone made it just as intimate. I felt a shiver trace its way down my spine and told myself to snap out of it, to move, to do anything to let him know that he was not welcome and that he would not be getting a piece of this ass if I had something to say about it.

  My body didn’t budge. I opened my mouth to ask Bastian to step away, that it was making me uncomfortable, and that we were going to be stepsiblings, for Christ sakes. Nothing came out, and I just stared at his eyes, which were even more delicious up close, blue upon blue upon blue, and my mouth hanging open like a complete and total idiot.

  I didn’t even attempt to stop him when his lips slanted across mine, blisteringly hot and delicious in only the forbidden way. I didn’t twitch a muscle to get myself away. I wrapped my fingers around his biceps and pulled him closer, deepening the kiss. His tongue ran across my lower lip, finger fisting in my hair, and I felt another shiver go down my spine. I’d been kissed before, of course, but I had never been kissed like this. I let him in, and his tongue stroked mine in a way that was so utterly dirty and hot that I was instantly wet.

  I let out a noise that I would be ashamed of much later and pulled him closer, rubbing my hips against his denim-clad ones, trying to get some friction. His other hand had slid around my waist, fingers just brushing the edge of my panties where the shirt had ridden up, and I felt him tracing the edge tantalizingly.

  I have never been one for kinks of any kind, but damn, this turned me on more than anything else had in my entire life. The fact that we were practically dry humping each other in the garage of our very-soon-wedded parents held a kind of forbidden fruit that paired up just right with the way Bastian was biting my neck. He took his time, trailing his teeth down the tendon in my neck and sucking on my collarbone. I slid my hands under the sleeves of his shirt, feeling the fever-hot, smooth skin over supple muscle that twitched and flexed as he moved his arms.

  I bit my lip to hold back a noise as his nose slid aside the partially buttoned shirt and skidded along the swell of my breast. I could feel him now, hard and ready against my thighs and I couldn’t help but breathe,

  “Thank god, finally.”

  He glanced up at me, his lips twitching upwards in a slight smile before recapturing my own again and ravishing them. I moved my hands to feel his washboard abs, knuckles bumping along the obscenely defined muscles.

  “My god, how often do you go to the gym?” I asked breathlessly, breaking away from his mouth to look down at his stomach. The skin there was just as tanned as everywhere else, and I felt a shiver go down my body again, thinking about what he would look like in one of those sexy little Speedos that men sometimes wear to the beach.

  “Every day,” he responded, and his voice sounded almost lazy with desire. It was slow as honey and just as sweet. This man could make love to me just with his voice, and I would be content.

  But not right now. Right now, I needed him inside of me, pounding me deep and hard so that I would feel it the next day and the day after that. I slipped my fingers to the button of his jeans and flicked it open.

  “Do you really want to do this in the garage?” he asked, panting hot breaths of air against my shoulder with each
breath he released. He had rested his head against my neck, watching me take his pants off.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it, if you’re not scared of spiders,” I said breathlessly. Of course, I wasn’t really thinking. I didn’t have a condom, and unless Mr. Playboy carried them around in his pockets, we couldn’t do anything much more than what we were doing.

  I suppose that it was a good thing that the moment I palmed his long, hard length and he arched against me, letting out a hiss of breath that resolved into my name a moment later that Mom knocked on the door.

  “Breakfast is ready,” she said cheerfully, crashing me back into reality in a moment.

  “We’ll—” my voice was hardly my own. I cleared it and shoved Bastian off of me. “We’ll be a moment.”

  I didn’t look at him as I straightened my shirt and ran a hand through my hair. There were probably indentations of the shelves on my back made of dust, but there wasn’t anything I could do to get those off aside from taking the shirt off and shaking it, and I wasn’t about to do that.

  “That was…” I began, but Bastian interrupted me.

  “Meaningless? Nothing special?” he asked smoothly. Something in my chest tightened, but I didn’t flinch.

  “A mistake. And wrong,” I shot back. I walked away.

  A cold, hard reality check hit me straight in the chest as I walked to the door. I had almost just fucked my stepbrother. In the garage with my Mom and his dad just feet away, able to hear every small sound that came from our mouths. Yeah, not such a great idea.

  What the hell was wrong with me? I took a plate from the counter and ignored Randy’s searching look at my swollen lips and flushed cheeks. “Thanks for breakfast, Mom,” I said. Our extracurricular activities had made me voracious, and I stacked half a dozen pancakes on my plate and gave them all a generous amount of syrup. By the time I was done with that, Bastian still wasn’t in.

  “He wanted to pull the last few boxes down,” I said after a moment, as I realized that Randy was still looking at me. “He went and told me to come inside and eat and that he’d join us in a few minutes.”

  Just as I said that the garage door opened and Bastian appeared, looking no more ruffled than he had coming inside after shoveling the driveway. I scowled at him. How dare he look so goddamn perfect?

  “How is it all going? Are you two okay doing all that work?” Mom asked as we all began eating in an uncomfortable silence, the clink of silverware the only thing to keep us company.

  I glanced up at Bastian, daring him to say a single thing. The corner of his lip quirked up. “It’s quite, ah, demanding. But we’ll live, won’t we Isabelle?”

  “You bet,” I ground out.

  Mom nodded and smiled.

  ###

  The next few days, Bastian and I avoided each other like the plague. The only time we suffered each other’s presence was when we absolutely had to; dinner and breakfast.

  Randy and Mom most likely noticed the change, but no one commented on it. We all just pretended that everything was fine, all while Bastian and I kept each other distant. When we had to speak, the temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the room at the cool civility that we strove to keep between us. He didn’t even attempt to annoy me anymore, and though that hadn’t even happened for a full twenty-four hours, I found that I missed it.

  Everything had fallen into a kind of strange routine by the week’s end, and I felt that I was doomed to become the estranged daughter of a marriage that would become news over the entire city. Lovely title, it would be.

  I smirked as I thought of this while dusting the polished gemstones carved into animals on my windowsill. They were the one thing I still had of dad’s, besides some of his old clothes and his police badge. He had given one to me every year for my birthday until I turned eighteen. I had never asked him why, but now, after his death, I wished that I had.

  It had been the sudden kind of death that no family ever plans to experience. He had been shot in the line of duty on a drug deal gone wrong. I still remembered the day that his partner had walked to our door, tears in his eyes and told us what had happened. I had been packing for college.

  I sighed and leaned against the sill, looking out onto the dreary day. Mom had left to get groceries, and she had been gone a little too long. I hoped that she was stuck in the meat isle deciding between sirloin and T-bone steaks and not stuck behind some accident in her car whose heater had seen better days.

  A knock sounded on my door and I started, nearly dropping the owl carved from fossilized wood and let out a curse. “What?” I snapped, seeing Bastian standing in my doorway. His face was pale and his lips pinched.

  “We just got a call from the hospital,” he said, and everything rushed out of me, and for a moment, I felt like a blank canvas, empty, endless, nothing. “Your mother has been in a car accident.”

  A sob welled up inside of me before I could stop it, and Bastian was there, arms around me. I had never had any better arms to cry in.

  ###

  Ten hours later, I was exhausted. I had missed lunch and dinner, and was practically running on fumes.

  Mom had been driving along—carefully, of course—when her balding tires had hit a patch of black ice, which sent her spinning out of control. She had been strapped in, which had prevented her from going through the windshield, but she had hit her head on the steering wheel and had a minor concussion.

  The doctors said that she should wake up soon, but I was still freaking out about the entire ordeal. Nothing slaps you in the face quite like having your surviving parent put you through a scare like that. With dad gone, I only had Mom, and the thought of losing her when I was still in my twenties terrified me. No one should lose both parents before they fully knew how the world worked and didn’t have to fall back on the safety net of being able to come and stay with them until they got back on their feet and had gathered enough money to go and try again.

  The hospital where Mom lived was small and made me claustrophobic. The ceilings were too low and the lights too bright. It felt as if I were suddenly a tiny insect under a microscope being picked apart and examined.

  Then there was the smell. If death had a smell, this was certainly it. Antiseptic mixed with cold, harsh metal and the lingering stench of decay and rot was not how I wanted to go. I wanted to smell the breeze and watch the sun slide over my legs in my own bed when I died. I had decided that while sitting next to Mom and watching her chest rise and fall as the monitor kept careful record of each heartbeat.

  A knock sounded on the doorframe. I raised my head from my hands, expecting another nurse to ask me if I needed anything at all and if Mom had lifted a finger or twitched an eyelash. When I glanced, bleary-eyed at the doorway, I didn’t recognize Bastian at first. He was alien in this element, all hard cut lines of jaw and cheekbone, skin bleached by the punishing lights. But those blue eyes hadn’t changed a bit.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked softly. Randy had been in here most of the time, but had just gone to get some coffee saying that he was about to pass out from exhaustion. I had told him to attempt to get some sleep, but he had just shrugged and gotten up anyway.

  Somehow, this had drawn us all a bit closer. I no longer felt alienated from Randy as he had held my mother’s hand, tracing the shape of the diamond he had placed on her finger. “I love her,” he had told me. I had been holding tightly onto her other hand and had looked up in surprise.

  “What?”

  “I love her more than I have ever loved anything walking this earth, save my son. Your mother is a very special woman, Isabelle.”

  “I know,” I said mutedly. “My dad said the same thing.”

  He had looked up at me then, eyes tired and bloodshot. “I’m not trying to replace him,” he said after a considerable pause. “I hope you know that.”

  “I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

  There had been silence after that, but it had impressed me that he was man enough to say that
. Most boyfriends would simply ignore the daughter of the first marriage and pretend that she didn’t exist unless she could be of some use to them. That’s how my dorm mate said it went, anyhow. She had been wrong about Randy, at least.

  “I think that we’ll be a good family,” I said eventually.

  Randy glanced back up at me. “You think?”

  “Yeah.” The smile he gave me couldn’t compete with dad’s, but it gave me a small sense of relief and hope. A spark that maybe something good could come out of this strange arrangement, whatever it was.

  Now, I blinked a few times at Bastian. “Okay, I guess. As okay as I’ll be.”

  “Your Mom’s going to be fine,” he said, coming into the room and taking his father’s vacant seat. He didn’t reach out and touch her in any way, but he looked at her face for a long while. It was peaceful in sleep, more peaceful and unlined than I had seen it in years. “The nurses say that she should wake up anytime.”

  I smiled at him. “You don’t need to comfort me, they told me the same thing.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but it looked half-hearted. “Who said I was comforting anybody?”

  “You’d be a bad brother if you didn’t,” I joked. It sounded strained and weird in this place of death and dying. I winced at my own voice and subsided, gripping Mom’s hand again.

  “You look like hell,” Bastian said, and I immediately wound up to snap something back at him, but he cut me off before I could utter a single syllable. “Let me take you home. Randy will call us when she wakes up and then you can get back. But I haven’t seen you eat since breakfast, and you need to sleep.”

  I sighed. He was right. I couldn’t keep running on fumes like this until I dropped and then I’d be in a bed right next to Mom. “Okay.”

  “You must really be out of it. You didn’t give me a single iota of fight.”