Drawn to Her Warriors: (Her Warriors Book 1) (Reverse Harem Sci Fi Romance Serial)

by Rebecca Baelfire

  I almost smiled. Alien or human, boys had to have their toys.

  “What was the tip-off?” Bob gestured for me to sit. I shook my head, remaining as close to the door as possible, though Bain Gorkan continued to block it.

  “I told you. She can see them.” Blondie regarded me. “You can see our eyes. As they really are.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Bob asked.

  There was no point lying about what I saw when I looked at them, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for them to know everything yet, so I just shrugged. I wasn’t sure how I could see their eyes if they hid their real appearances with tech.

  “Let me guess.” I dropped my arms addressing Bob, the one who was obviously in charge. “I know what you are, so you can’t let me go now.”

  “You guessed correctly. And you saw the money, which means you must know we shouldn’t have it.”

  “Yeah. What did you guys do, rob a bank?”

  “Define robbery.” Blondie’s eyes danced.

  Bob glanced at the ceiling. “What is your name, young woman?”

  “Rayne. Yours? Since I know it’s not Bob Black.”

  He smiled. “Yes, well, Kai and Gi said we should have come up with better names. I am Captain Tarik Salarin.”

  “And who are Kai and Gi? The two roommates?”

  “I’m Kai.” Blondie put up his hand.

  “And you’re Bain Gorkan.” I nodded to the warrior who still guarded the door.

  He gave a stiff nod.

  I looked at each of them. My mind buzzed with endless questions. Who were these aliens? Where in the cosmos had they come from? Why were they here? What was in their sink that set the alarm off?

  It was totally against my anti-social nature, but hey, I couldn’t have spent forty hours or more a week banging out stories about people from other worlds, then run into five of them living right down the hall, and not want to know everything about them.

  Plus, there was that need to be close to them.

  “I’d like to leave now,” I told Bain Gorkan with only the faintest shake in my voice.

  “It’s adorable that you think he’ll let you.” Kai grinned when I looked at him. “He really will tie you up if you give him reason to.”

  Bain Gorkan nodded, massive arms crossed.

  Perhaps the threat should have scared me, especially when the talk of tying me up brought the first hint of real emotion from that brutal, hard face. His eyes glowed with a hungry light. The implications did unsettle me, but not as much as they should have.

  “Well, I can’t stay here for the rest of my life, so what do we do?”

  “There are questions you must answer, Rayne.” Tarik stood up.

  “Like what?”

  “Like how you can see our eyes,” Bain Gorkan said crisply. “Are you a witch?”

  “A what?”

  “Bain Gorkan, enough. But he does have a point. You shouldn’t be able to see through our disguises. But I don’t wish to discuss anything more until Gi and Brin return.”

  A knock at the door sounded and the warrior moved aside. Two men stepped into the apartment. One looked almost identical to Kai, with the same the sun-streaked windswept hair. He didn’t have a dimple like Kai. The other man who’d come in was Not John Smith.

  “Any luck?” Tarik asked the two men.

  “None,” Kai’s mirror image said. John shook his head.

  “Damn.” Tarik ran a hand through his dark hair. “Well. We’ll find a way home soon. We have to. For now, we have another problem to deal with.” He nodded to me.

  John widened his eyes at me. “Are we telling humans our secrets now, then?”

  “That’s the question before the court,” Kai said.

  “Rayne,” Tarik added, nodding to the two men. “These are Gi, Kai’s twin, and Brin, my engineer.”

  “What happened that she’s with us?” Brin walked to the kitchen and came back polishing an apple on his Beastie Boys shirt. “Kai, what did you do this time?”

  “Hey. Why do you always assume it’s me?”

  “Because if it’s not you, it’s your brother.” Tarik’s smile surprised me as he looked to Kai and Gi. I could hear the fondness under his irritation. “She can see our eyes, Brin.”

  “How?” Brin looked intrigued as he plopped onto the couch. With his ripped body in those jeans and that tight tee, he still looked like a god, even in ridiculously dated acid wash. A very casual god, totally the opposite of Bain Gorkan. Instead of eating his apple, he tossed it into the air and caught it like a tennis ball.

  “Look, can’t you just wipe my memory or something?” I suggested. “You know, like in Men in Black?”

  “In what?” Bain Gorkan asked.

  “We don’t have a neuralyzer,” one of twins said.

  “Interesting trick though,” his brother added.

  “If we could wipe your memory, we wouldn’t have to have spent so much time and money into putting together human identities for ourselves.” Their captain crossed his arms and sat back on the arm of the couch. He gave Brin a cross look as Brin continued tossing up and catching his apple.

  “And you wouldn’t have had to put that Vulcan nerve pinch on me.” I worked my aching shoulder. “That really hurt, by the way.”

  “The what?” Bain Gorkan again. This time he sounded impatient.

  The twins snorted, letting me know they got the reference. They watched Star Trek? An involuntary affection for them rose in me.

  “I am truly sorry I had to do that to you, Rayne. You’ve complicated matters, coming in here.”

  “Would you rather I hadn’t helped you? That I let Raul evict you?” It disturbed me that these men discussed me so causally. The implication I was a problem that had to be handled made me defensive.

  Brin said nothing, and neither did the others. He tossed the apple up again.

  “Stop that.” Tarik gave him another annoyed look. The apple thumped into Brin’s hand and stayed there. The captain looked at his knees. “We don’t wish to keep you here against your will, but we can’t let you leave until we find some way to ensure you won’t tell anyone about what you saw.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Raul,” Kai said.

  “The FBI,” Gi added.

  “Mulder and Scully.” Both the twins at once.

  “I say you let me keep her here, Captain,” Bain Gorkan put in.

  “I vote no.” I glared at him when he walked toward me. He stopped, jaw tight. His eyes glittered with that fierce light. I swallowed, but remained where I was, refusing to let him know he intimidated me.

  Brin once more started playing toss the apple. I heard a metallic noise, and then a blade flew through the air. It struck the apple right through. The blade dropped to the floor, the apple falling, split in half.

  I gaped at Bain Gorkan, who had a knife missing from his sash, and who glared at Brin. “Focus,” he growled darkly.

  “I don’t like it,” Tarik said smoothly, bringing my focus back to him, “but as I said, I do what I have to in order to protect my crew. Bain Gorkan is correct. Until we can find a way to prevent you from telling anyone about us, we will have to keep you with us at all times.”

  My gaze flitted between all of them, anger and alarm spearing me. “So you’re just going to keep me here? You can’t.”

  “We can, and until we return home, we will.” Bain Gorkan walked over, then picked up and sheathed his blade.

  Helpless for an argument, I dropped my arms. As someone who’d lived most of my life with a secret of my own, I knew far more than I liked about why they wanted to keep me here. “I don’t suppose it will help if I promise not to say anything.”

  “It doesn’t,” Bain Gorkan rumbled.

  “He’s right.” Tarik’s voice held kindness. “I feel your sincerity, but we don’t have any reason to trust you not to expose us.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool that you’re so calm and all,” Kai—or was it Gi?—said, “but why? Yo
u should be screaming that we’re going to abduct you, or passing out or something.”

  “So you’re worried because I’m not hysterical?”

  “Yes.” Tarik, in the same calm tone. “It suggests you’re accustomed to people from other worlds, and on this planet, the only people who would be that aware of us are agencies who’ve seen us and would prefer to put us in a lab somewhere.”

  It sank in what he’s talking about, and I analyzed my reaction to them for the first time. Not only did I feel safe around these men, but a strange sort of calm enveloped me in their presence. A sense of what I could only call a connection to them buzzed under my skin.

  Ordinarily, I’d have wondered if my reaction had something to do with my powers, but being in these men’s presence seemed to have shut those off. Or did it? I could see their real eyes when I shouldn’t be able to. Nothing made sense.

  “I don’t work for some secret organization that hunts aliens, trust me.”

  “Then how are you so accepting of us, Rayne?” Tarik asked.

  Unable to risk them knowing the truth, I gave the only viable answer I could think of.

  “I’m a writer.” My words were met with a room full of confused looks. “I spend most of my days making up stories about aliens from other worlds. I’ve done so much reading about them, I guess it’s not as much of a shock for me to see real aliens as it would be for others.”

  If they found the explanation lacking, none of them showed it. Well, except Bain Gorkan, but I had a feeling he was suspicious of everyone.

  “I hope you’re telling the truth.” Tarik tilted his head. “It would be a shame to have to deal with it if you betrayed us.”

  I wanted to tell him not to threaten me, but, again, I knew why he felt he needed to say such a thing. He did what he had to for his men, and I respected the hell out of that.

  Ways to escape flitted through my head. “Well, here’s the thing, Captain. I have a book to publish. It’s my job. I won’t run, but if I’m going to be stuck here, I need a few things from my apartment.”

  “No.” Bain Gorkan crossed to me and put his mammoth hand on my chest when I made my way toward the door. Suspicion dripped from his tone. The weightiness of his palm and the heat of it sent a jolt through me. “Stay right there, human.”

  “What are you going to do, let Spock knock me out again?” I stood toe to toe with him, chin high. His nostrils flared, and the spicy, male heat radiating off him made my head swim.

  Tarik moved to my side, signaling calmly for the warrior to back off, and when he did, the captain looked at me. His silver eyes seemed to see right through me, his closeness intensifying that odd draw toward him, until it felt it like electricity running through my veins.

  “You have a job to get back to. I understand. We will not inconvenience you more than is necessary. But I have a job to do as well, and right now, that’s getting these men home to their families and the world they know, without exposing us to the people of your planet. Do you understand me, Rayne?”

  “I do.” I understood what he was saying as much as what he wasn’t.

  “Fine. I will take you to your apartment to retrieve what you need to work, but nothing more. I don’t wish to threaten you, but if you do anything to expose us, you won’t leave this apartment again.”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t work out what scared me more, his words, or the fact that my blood heated so much hearing him say them. There was something about seeing a man turn badass to protect others that made me hot. His unerring calm only accentuated that.

  “I understand,” I said with a coolness I hoped matched his.

  He nodded, though I could see it in his eyes, he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.

  “Here, Cap.” One of the twins tossed him a black shirt with—of all things—an image of Taylor Swift on the front. Tarik pulled the shirt, which looked at least two sizes too small, over his head. The material stretched across his impressive muscles until it looked like it would have ripped if he breathed too deeply.

  I suppressed a laugh behind my hand and looked at the twins. Both wore shit-eating grins, Kai’s gorgeous dimple in full effect.

  The dismissive way Tarik wore such a girly shirt told me he had no idea he wore anything odd, while the winks the twins gave me told me the cheeky bastards knew exactly what they’d done.

  Holding all of my attention once more, Tarik turned and stalked for the door with me. He had a hand on my shoulder, a firm, commanding grip that ensured I wouldn’t bolt.

  “I still think this is a bad idea, Captain.” Bain Gorkan shook his head, but he made no other move to stop him.

  “Your opinion is noted, Bain Gorkan. Rayne, let’s go, before anything more can go wrong today.”

  We stepped out into the hall and Tarik shut the door. One of the tenants from down the hall came out of his apartment. Tarik removed his grip from my shoulder and slid his hand into mine an instant before the man glanced in our direction.

  “Walk with me like you’ve known me all your life.” His mouth brushed my ear, his soft, calm voice melting my bones.

  My heart battered my ribs, adrenaline rushing through me. As usual, nothing from his mind again, and that ever-present connection to him pounded though my veins. His hand was warm in mine, his drugging presence making my head feel light.

  I gave the smallest nod to let him know I understood, then I let him lead me down the hall toward my apartment. Wouldn’t want my neighbors to think he was my captor.

  The neighbor disappeared down the hall, but I noticed Tarik made no move to release my hand even as I opened my door and let him inside.

  For the first time in my life, here I was, able to hold hands with a man, to touch another person without fear, without having my mind shredded by his. The realization hit with the force of a battering ram, the possibilities swirling through my mind like a storm.

  Too bad he was a kidnapper and a bank robber.

  And an alien.

  THE END

  If you liked this book, watch for book two of the Her Warriors serial, Kidnapped by her Warriors, coming soon!

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