by Zoe Blake
His wide chest pressed against hers. "Don't insult yourself." His nostrils flared as his gaze narrowed on her. "And don't demean the pleasure we shared."
She succeeded in yanking out of his hold and stepped back. "I have to return the room key." She swept past him and toward the motel office. "Meet you at the car."
Her heart thumped wildly. She didn't look back until she was in the office and checking out of the motel. She got some stale donuts from the vending machine and poured two cups of coffee from the office pot. Cream for her, black for Drace, because she knew he'd like it that way. She just knew, and that was as irritating as it was scary.
It was more than a fuck. But how much more? Rachel all but stomped back to the car, which looked as decrepit and forlorn as it had the previous night when Drace resurrected it from the weeds. He was inside, waiting for her. She got in the passenger side and shoved the coffee at him. "Here," she said.
"What is going on with you?"
"I don't know." She held her foam cup in a death grip. His simple question opened the floodgates. She let it flow. "I'm confused. I feel like I've known you for a long time, but we only met yesterday. I can't believe I slept with you. I don't understand how I can feel so strongly for you, when I don't even really know you. It doesn't feel right." She pointed to his coffee. "You like that?"
He eyed the coffee, then her. "Yes."
"See?" She threw her free hand up. "How did I know that? I shouldn't know how you'd like your fucking coffee."
He said nothing, but watched her with those cool, silver-blue eyes.
She shook her head as if he'd asked her a question. "I can't get on that ship with you. I won't. Earth is my home. You know that, right?"
He cocked his head. "Earth is all you know. It will always be the home of your birth." He reached out, stroked his thumb down her cheek. His touch was petal soft. Fingers slid beneath her chin and tilted her head up. His gaze was earnest. His full, carved lips curved in the smallest of smiles. "Home is a state of mind, not a location in space. I think we need to explore this thing between us. Otherwise, we'll spend the rest of our lives wondering."
She was already "wondering," and they hadn't even parted ways yet. But the thought of exploring this made her belly tighten with nerves.
He laid his hands on the steering wheel and the car purred to life, idling smoothly. "I won't force you to come with me. But I won't allow harm to come to you. That's non-negotiable. Would it be so bad to stay on my ship for a little while, until Dept. 6 isn't after you? I will not keep you prisoner."
The reassurance sounded good. He was saying all the right things. So why didn't the nerves go away. "Why would Dept. 6 even care about me? It's not like I'm the alien."
He hesitated. “You’re on the run with one."
"Right." She waggled her fingers at the windshield. "Well, drive on then. Are you sure you know the way?"
He made the car accelerate forward and eased it onto the empty highway. "As long as the tires hold, we'll be fine."
"That's not reassuring. Did you look at these tires?"
"I did." He glanced in the mirror and changed lanes. "They were the best of the bunch. "We're being followed. Just so you know."
"Seriously?" Rachel looked back. A pickup truck and a motorcycle tooled along six car lengths behind them. Neither looked particularly suspicious. "Which one?"
"Both of them."
"The pickup." She peered into her side mirror. "Are they more of your Dept. 6 buddies?"
“Undoubtedly," he replied grimly. “They have an advantage with their vehicles. This car isn't going to last long on the dirt roads we'll soon hit."
"How did they find us?"
"They didn't capture us overnight, so they must have gotten a lead this morning." He pushed the car faster, and something rattled under the hood. “Did the person you spoke to in the motel act strange?”
Honestly, Rachel hadn’t been paying attention. Her thoughts had been deep in the chaos with Drace. She’d barely noticed the woman at the desk as she’d paid the balance of the room and returned the keys. She pressed tense fingers to her temples. “I don’t know.”
He jerked a nod. “She may have received an alert to look for us and called in the tip. The government puts them out for fugitives.”
Rachel’s chest contracted. “We’re not fugitives.”
He raised a brow. “Yes, we are.”
“That’s bullshit. We didn’t break the law.” Things had suddenly taken a more disturbing turn. "I thought this kind of thing happened only on TV."
He glanced at her from the corners of his eyes. "If they released your picture, they know a lot about you."
"Yeah." She chewed on her lower lip, turned back again. The pickup and motorcycle were the same distance from their car, despite their increase in speed. She couldn't make out the drivers. She knew exactly what Drace was trying to tell her––Dept. 6 likely had control over her personal records. That meant they had control over her life. They knew where she lived and could easily take her if she returned home.
He bared his teeth at the rearview mirror. "They're starting to close in."
"What do we do?"
"We lose the car and go somewhere they can't take their vehicles."
"Can't you stop them with your...mind powers?"
"I can't operate this car and disable theirs. I can perform one mind feat at a time."
Rachel pointed to a fork in the road. "Did you say your ship is in Blackridge Mountains State Park? There's a turnoff for it."
Drace took the left and the road turned to gravel. With every pothole they bounced over, the ailing car groaned "Now to find a place to ditch this junker where those guys have to leave their vehicles behind."
"Where is your ship hidden?"
"On the bottom of Trout Lake."
She managed to keep her jaw from dropping. ”I assume you have a method of driving, hoisting it, whatever, to the surface?"
“I do.”
She slung her purse crisscross over her shoulder and gripped the safety handle above the door. Their only real chance of escaping their pursuers was to lose them in the woods, but the likelihood of that happening was low. More than likely, this would end in a fight, and forget it if those men had guns.
"Get ready to jump." They were on a road that snaked along a steep, rocky cliff and overlooked a sweeping pine forest. It was supposed to be lovely and scenic. It was currently the opposite of that to her.
"For what?" Her heart bumped hard enough to crack a rib. "To fall to our deaths?"
His gaze was hot and intense. "You will not die here." He pulled off to a scenic overlook spot. "Get out!" He leaped from the car before it had completely stopped. The truck and motorcycle roared up behind them, kicking up dust from their tires.
She jumped out. Drace stood in front of it, and held out a hand for her. Again, she didn't think, she only ran and clutched his hand. He gripped her by the waist and hoisted her over the waist-high guardrail before he vaulted over it.
The sounds of heavy boots running on the gravel parking area were as loud as her desperate heart. Drace was leading them straight to the cliff edge. There was no path down––only a drop of jagged rock and a few scrubby pines clinging to the rock.
"Drace!" she screamed.
He jerked her into his arms. "Do you trust me?"
"Yes." The word came without thought.
"Good." His mouth crushed hers for a hot flash of a second. His arms locked her against his hard body and he hurtled them both over the edge.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rachel's scream was swallowed by the rushing air. Absolute terror stabbed icy knives through her gut. She'd been betrayed. She'd trusted and lost.
And now she was going to die. Horribly.
Drace tightened one arm around her. The other left her body. She squeezed her eyes shut and clutched him tighter, despite her fury at him. If she was going to die, he was, too. That may have been the plan. If there was no way to escape De
pt. 6, death was better than whatever torture that group had in store for them.
He buried his face in her hair, kissed her neck, and all of a sudden, they hung still. It wasn't a jerking stop, but a controlled one. Rachel opened her eyes to see him gazing down at her. Amusement played at the corners of his eyes.
"You didn't think I'd let you fall, did you?"
“I—I...What is happening?” She took in their situation. Her feet were not on the ground, much to her distress. Drace had one hand and one foot on the rock face, but he wasn't gripping or straining to hold on. It was as if gravity worked sideways with him, holding him to the cliff wall like a magnet. "How are you doing this?"
"This rock contains heavy amounts of iron. It’s a metal. I have a way with metals."
Adrenaline flowed heavy in Rachel's shaking limbs. Seconds ago, she'd been facing certain death. "I nearly peed myself. In fact, I may have."
"There was no time to explain. Only to act."
"I get that." She looked down. They were not at the bottom, but in the tree line. "We're still not out of danger."
"No. And I suspect our pursuers are regrouping to find another way to the bottom of this valley."
"Do they have guns?" She peered upward, but the surface was out of view. "Can they shoot us?"
"No guns." He shifted her onto his back and began working down the slope, which he managed in places the human way of grasping rocks and roots. "They know I can take control of them."
"Can you?"
"Depends," he grunted, jumping down onto a boulder. "I need a certain amount of concentration, and I need to at least see the thing I'm manipulating. Touching is better. Hard to do that while running. Speaking of running..." He glided them down the rest of the cliff, smooth as an elevator ride. At the bottom, he slid Rachel off his back and to the forest floor. She sighed as her feet touched solid ground again.
“Time to go.” He tucked back a lock of her hair. “We have some distance still to cover. Are you ready?”
She nodded and they started off through the woods. Without a trail they had to work their way through brush and tree branches in the dense pine forest. His coat snagged on a branch, and he abandoned it. He moved with deliberation, stopping occasionally and holding out his hands, palms down, and then beckoning her onward. It occurred to her that he must have some homing connection with his ship.
He'd better have something going on. With no lake in sight and the revving of off-road engines in the distance, she hoped he had a little extra magic stashed up his sleeve.
Just when her lungs were burning, the forest opened. A wide, glass-smooth lake stretched out before them.
On a hiss, Drace snatched her around the waist and pulled her behind a tree. "They're here," he whispered.
"Where?"
He pointed to an outcropping of rock halfway around the lake. "There."
Rachel squinted, just making out a figure in green fatigues crouched at the base of the rocks. "How do we get to your ship?"
"I'll draw the ship up, but I need to touch the water. And I need time."
"How much time?"
"A few minutes."
"I can draw their attention while you...do your thing."
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Absolutely not."
"What other option is there? Can we wait them out?"
He shrugged. "Helicopters with thermal detection are probably on their way."
"Well then." She pulled away from him. "Better get that thing out of the water quick." She darted into the open as he hissed what had to be curses in an alien language behind her. The Dept. 6 soldier across the lake motioned to someone hidden elsewhere around the lake and headed toward her. Rachel pretended she couldn't see him. She looked around, feigning disorientation, and called out, "Hello?"
The man didn't respond but kept coming. She glanced back. Drace was no longer behind the tree. She caught a glimpse of him near some boulders. His hands rested in the water, his brows were knitted, his eyes closed. Her heart pounded.
Showing herself to the soldiers may have been a worse idea than sleeping with Drace, but there was no undoing it now. She doubled back toward the trees. She’d just reached the forest’s edge when she heard a bubbling, hissing sound coming from the lake. A silver disk-shaped ship the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool rose slowly, steadily. Water, mud, and lake grasses streamed off the sleek, curved hull.
Rachel froze in place and gaped. She momentarily forgot about the men coming after her. All she saw was the strange ship hovering just above the water. Somewhere out of her view, Drace was making this happen.
Strong hands grabbed her by the upper arms and jerked her into the line of trees. She recognized the camo-clad soldiers as their pursuers. She yelped, twisting, fighting their hold on her.
"Shut up," one of them growled. "Tell us where he's hiding."
Rachel screamed, "Drace!"
The ship slammed into the lake, sending up giant waves of displaced water.
"What the f––" one of the guards began, but cut off when he saw Drace hurtling toward him. Rachel pulled in a breath at the sight of her lover. His eyes blazed blue light, sharp as a laser. His soul markings glowed brightly on his straining muscles. His lips were peeled back over gritted teeth. He didn't look anything like the tender lover of this morning or the injured patient of the previous night. He looked powerful and vengeful and the sexiest thing Rachel had seen in her life. Good God, he took her breath away.
She took advantage of her attackers' surprise and twisted out of their grasp. She started to make a run for it, but one of them grabbed the back of her shirt. She tumbled to the pebbly sand. The other man pulled a long clear plastic blade from his belt and turned to face Drace. Plastic blades? The surreal scene reminded her of a samurai flick, until she realized the soldiers must fear Drace could use metal against them.
The air churned with the arrival of a helicopter. Her stomach dropped. They were outnumbered. Even unarmed, Drace might be able to take out these two men, but a helicopter full of sword-wielding men? No way. Not if they were going to escape. The soldier who’d knocked her down flipped her to her belly and ground a military boot into the middle of her back.
"Now stay put. Or you’ll never walk again." His heel dug into her spine.
Rachel bit back a yelp. Damn, that hurt. And she didn't doubt for one instant that the asshole meant what he said. From her vantage point of face mashed into the ground, she couldn't see Drace fighting the other man, but she heard grunts and the whoosh of a blade cutting through air. Please, God, not through Drace's skin. Part of his flying disk was in her line of sight, though. It was slowly sinking back into the lake.
The man with his foot on her back snarled, "Your freak alien boyfriend can’t beat all of us."
“He’s going to destroy you," she ground out. “And he’s not my boyfriend.” She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she felt compelled to add that last bit.
“You slept with him, didn’t you?” the soldier sneered back. “Disgusting. You deserve every invasive test you're gonna get at the lab."
Cold fear coiled in Rachel's belly. So that was their plan for her, and it was just as Drace said. "You can't do that. I'm an American citizen.”
“Not anymore. You’re a prisoner of war."
"What war?"
"The one that just started."
The words jolted through her. War? Everything Drace had said indicated his people wanted peaceful relations with Earth. It was a good thing, considering the superior Baylan technology. ”You want to start a war with a people who can control metal with their minds? "Good luck with that."
The man didn't reply. The pressure on her back increased, compressing her chest so she couldn't talk.
The helicopter sounded closer. It would be there soon. They were probably looking for a good place to release the reinforcements. She closed her eyes. This might be the last fresh air she’d breathe, all because she went for a guy from another planet.
A great roar sounded from the forest. Branches snapped as heavy footsteps pounded toward them.
The pressure on her back eased. Knowing this might be her only chance to get free, she rolled away, scrambled to her feet, and darted for the woods. Breath coming in sharp bursts, she threw herself behind a thick tree and peeked around the side. A new man burst into the clearing. Golden hair fell to his shoulders. Markings similar to Drace's blazed fire-orange on his naked torso. This had to be another Baylan. A thick beard hid most of the man's face, but his eyes were a fierce, glowing amber. Rachel gasped as the Baylan smashed his fist into the face of the soldier who had held her. Her attacker flew back six feet, hit the ground, and stayed there.
Was this newcomer friend or foe? She dug her fingers into the bark. If he was the latter, she feared for Drace and herself even more.
Meanwhile, Drace had taken out his attacker. The man lay on the ground. It wasn't clear if the unconscious man was alive. The plastic blade lay discarded.
She held her breath as the other Baylan walked up to him.
“Humans make pathetic fighters." The golden-haired Baylan picked up the discarded knife, curled his lips in an expression of disgust, and tucked it in his belt. "They are so dependent on guns, they lack skills to fight with any other weapon."
Drace gestured to the knife. "But they have numbers."
Rachel released her breath and sagged against the tree. They were friends, then, not another enemy to contend with. The men glanced up at the approaching helicopter, its deafening arrival kicking up dirt and leaves.
The two men exchanged a look, and then Drace grasped his comrade's forearm. The blond man took one of Drace's arms, and each raised his free arm toward the helicopter. The markings on their skin glowed as the helicopter suddenly turned around and headed off in the opposite direction. The two men remained still, bodies tense in concentration, until in the distance, a line of smoke trailed through the trees. No explosion. They apparently didn’t crash the helicopter, only disabled it.