Romance: Scifi Romance: Mated by the Alien (Abduction BWWM Paranormal Romance) (Interracial First Contact Space Romance)

by Linda Mathers

  She argued back that he didn’t really care about her, that all he wanted was to go and live in the city. Which was true: he did want that. And there was nothing wrong with that, but it couldn’t have been more opposite of the life that Eileen had envisioned for herself.

  There has to be some way that I can make this work, she kept telling herself. With or without Kyle by her side, she would get this to turn out like she needed to. She would save the farm, protect it, and preserve the legacy that her parents had left for her for another generation.

  Didn’t anyone understand what home meant to a person? Kyle decided he didn’t.

  The two of them had gone their separate ways after a particularly vicious argument, and Eileen hadn’t spoken to him since. He’d called a few times within the couple of weeks following their breakup, but Eileen hadn’t answered and he hadn’t left a message. She’d considered calling him back but in the end never did.

  But she did miss him.

  Or, at least, she missed the notion of him.

  Kyle himself she could probably do without. But she missed having someone to fill that role in her life. To walk and fight beside her. To love her. To make her feel that things were okay when it was all going wrong.

  And now, that loss hit her more acutely than ever, as she stood at the window gazing into her empty whiskey glass.

  I’d best not drink anymore, she told herself. She was getting emotional about all the things flitting around inside her head, and lately she’d been proving herself quite the pathetic drunk.

  She just wished that things could be different. That her parents were still here. Or that the hard work she put into the farm could pay off. Or that someone could love her.

  But what was the point in fooling herself? There was none. She was just torturing herself, the longer and longer she wished and drank. All she wanted to do was sleep. Maybe now she’d taken the edge off she’d be able to.

  She rinsed out her glass and sat it upside down in the sink, and was just getting ready to turn back in the direction of the stairs and plop down in her bed (probably not to sleep for a good three more hours or so.) But as she was turning from the window, something through the glass caught her eye.

  A light, shining down from the sky…

  Chapter 2

  She slipped into a bathrobe and slippers overtop of her pajamas, and crept outside to investigate.

  When she stepped through the doorway, however, the light had disappeared. She blinked hard at the spot from which she’d been sure the light had come. But it wasn’t there, and all she could see were the stars twinkling brightly from above, and a glowing sliver crescent moon. She let out a sigh, getting ready to head back into the house.

  But then she heard a sound, coming from the barn.

  She stepped inside to check on the horses, and found them all swaying nervously, whinnying and kicking the straw at their feet. She had no idea what was bothering them, and she moved from stall to stall, trying to calm them down. She whispered to them as she petted their muzzles, trying to think what it might have been that had disturbed them so.

  Could it be that they saw the same light through the barn window? That she hadn’t just been imagining it, but that there had been something out there that they had seen too? She turned to gaze out the window, in the opposite direction she’d been looking before. Her mouth fell open.

  Something was very, very wrong.

  She hurried out the door now toward the field, afraid that once again it might disappear without warning, becoming nothing more than a figment of her imagination. But this was no illusion, she realized, as she crept out toward the field, completely in awe of what she saw.

  Several rows of corn had been crushed to the ground, in what could clearly be seen, even from this low angle on the ground, to be a series of circular patterns across the field.

  Crop circles.

  “Oh my God,” she whimpered, bringing her hands to her mouth, her eyes widening. But before she knew what to do, the blinding white light from overhead flashed back on, beams shining down upon her. She broke into a run.

  Not knowing what the hell was going on, or what she could do to escape the humming space craft overhead, Eileen bolted as fast as she could for the opposite cow pasture field, feeling certain it was imperative that she escape the light shining down upon her at all costs.

  She ran and ran, her lungs heaving like wild in her chest, the scenery flying around her on all sides. But suddenly, her feet were no longer touching the ground, despite her limbs continuing to push and to pump in midair. She was being lifted, up into the air, drawn toward the light. Abducted.

  “Oh my God… Oh my God,” she cried, in hysterics now, trying to figure out what she should do. Suddenly, the sound of mooing hit her ears, and she tore her head around in all directions, to see several cows from the field being lifted up alongside her.

  WHAM!

  As she’d been staring at her cattle through their midair flight, the light had abruptly flickered off, sending them all hurtling back down to the ground, hitting the surface hard. Her immediate thought despite her own mortal peril at the moment was that the cows couldn’t possibly have survived such a fall. But before she’d recovered her breath, she heard widespread mooing as the animals lifted themselves back up again, and began to stampede around her, running for their lives after having already survived one brush with death.

  Had she been smart, Eileen might have thought to join them, but at the moment she was far too frazzled to do anything but crane her head up to the sky, and gawk at the alien craft above. Once more, her jaw dropped.

  There wasn’t just the one craft circling up above her head, but two.

  The one that had been sucking her up toward the stratosphere was burning furiously, fire pluming from its hull. And it was opening fire, blasting back at the other craft, doing its damnedest to knock the thing clean out of the sky.

  The vessels zipped back and forth above Eileen’s head, and her eyes followed them across the sky, transfixed, and scared as hell. Now would have been the perfect time to run, she thought, but she was just too floored by what she saw to move. And at any rate, before she could move a muscle to depart, another light was shining down upon her. This time, it came from the second spacecraft, and pinpointed solely upon her.

  She tried to run, once more, but was completely rooted to the spot. It lifted her up into the air, and the next thing Eileen knew, she was gone.

  Chapter 3

  The floor shook beneath her as the vessel stuttered through turbulence. Eileen lay in a heap, blinded by the white lights of the room, her head in a fog. The first thing she saw when her vision adjusted was the strange, metallic face of a robot, leaning in close toward her.

  “Please, remain calm,” it said in an automated voice.

  This produced more or less the opposite effect and she let out a tremendous shriek, backing away from the thing as quickly as she could.

  “You are in no danger,” it assured her. “Not from us, though.”

  She panted like an animal on the floor, trying to make sense of what she was being told. Then her eyes flitted from the robot to a figure nearby, seemingly humanoid in nature, operating what looked like a control panel.

  She shakily got to her feet, and brushed past the robot in the man’s direction. But what she saw beyond him floored her, stopping her dead in her tracks.

  They were in outer space….

  She could see the stars sweeping past through the front windshield of the craft. Asteroids were spinning around them, planets drifting lazily by on all sides. The man at the controls was pounding the buttons furiously, firing lasers at a ship that kept swooping down toward them, firing right back.

  This is it, Eileen told herself. There’s no way I’m going to survive whatever the hell this is.

  In a few minutes, her body would explode from the hull of this ship and go hurtling through the vacuum of space. Her lungs would drain of air and the blood would freeze in her veins.
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  She’d been about to ask who she presumed was the captain of the ship just what the hell was going on, but he cursed and hit at the panel in front of him. All of the sudden, the ship took an immense plunge, and Eileen’s heart leapt to her throat. She slid uncontrollably across the vessel, scrambling to keep from crashing into anything, and only succeeding by a very narrow margin. She grabbed onto a post and held tight, then glared daggers at the ship’s captain and his robot, who seemed to have no trouble remaining upright as the vessel twisted and spun its way through the cosmos.

  “Captain Pan is very busy at this time, and must not be disturbed if he is to maintain his concentration,” said the robot matter of fact tone. He’d evidently seen her going up to him before the ship spiraled out of control and didn’t want her to disrupt his boss’s focus. Though of course, by this point, Eileen thought she might just have been smart enough to have figured that out on her own.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” she said sarcastically, and she clung more tightly to the post keeping her upright.

  Gradually, the ship leveled out, and she took her chances at venturing forward beside the captain’s chair, and peering out at the battle from over his shoulder.

  The captain, Pan, as his robot had called him, seemed utterly absorbed in his work, blasting away at the enemy ship, smashing his controls like a child playing video games. The enemy continued to shoot, blast, and to dodge their own fire. It quickly became clear to Eileen that the fate of the battle would be decided more by luck than by anything else.

  Pan lunged to one side, yanking the steering wheel in his direction, and sending Eileen flying across the hull of the ship again. She smashed hard into a wall, and the centrifugal force kept her pinned there as the ship spiraled through space, dipping between asteroids with incredible agility, leading the enemy on a deadly chase.

  Suddenly, the entire ship lunged and shook terribly. It was so hard that even the robot tumbled to the floor. The captain remained upright, but swore loudly, much to Eileen’s terror.

  She quickly turned, and saw the source of the disturbance. The ship had been hit. Flames visibly blooming from the back of the vessel through its rear window. Eileen’s pounding heart nearly broke free from her chest in alarm, and tears welled up in her eyes at the certainty that this was the end.

  They continued to spiral, but it was impossible to tell whether it was intentional or a result of the massive damage inflicted upon them. Pan acted quickly, flipping several switches that seemed to stabilize them, then hit one last button that sent a projectile flying back in the direction of the enemy craft.

  A bomb.

  Eileen screamed, as she watched it detonate, tearing through the front of the enemy’s ship. It knocked it off course into the surrounding asteroids which caused more damage, and set off a further chain of explosions.

  Pan let out a hearty, victorious laugh as they emerged from the asteroid field intact, and the explosion of the enemy’s craft slowly dissipated into space.

  “Oh, thank God. We made it,” wheezed Eileen, to no one in particular, as she still had no clue what the hell this man’s purposes with her might have been.

  But it seemed, moments later, as though she’d spoken too soon.

  The lights of the ship began to flicker, and then to die off completely. They stopped accelerating, and after soaring through the vacuum of space for a while with the momentum they’d built up, they came to a complete stop.

  Pan turned to Eileen, who was staring wide eyed at him. The look on his face did not reassure her. “That’s not good,” he said.

  He quickly turned back to his control panel and flipped switch after switch, trying to fix things somehow. Nothing seemed to be doing the trick.

  When he’d gone through every button, he let out a deep sigh, trying to get a hold of himself. “Okay… Okay, let’s not panic. Sparky, please contact emergency services, and have them send someone out here as soon as possible.”

  “Right away, captain,” the robot said, and a light lit up on his metallic chest.

  “What the hell is going on?” Eileen shrieked, furious that no one seemed willing to tell her a damn thing.

  Pan sighed. “Please calm down. I just saved your life, is what’s going on.”

  She blinked at him hard, still feeling like she should be angry at him. “What?” she asked, and for the first time, despite her fury at him, she began to take in the actual reality of the man. He looked, strangely, very human. And God, was he attractive.

  His body coursed with muscles, bulging visibly due to the overall lack of clothes across his body, save for a tight black tunic which left little to the imagination. By all appearances, there was nothing much about him that distinguished him from a white human male. Yet there was something about him that she couldn’t quite define that seemed to reinforce the nature of him being an extraterrestrial life form.

  “That guy, who we just blew up? Not the best man you want chasing after you.”

  “But why was he chasing after me?” she asked, a mixture of exasperated and impatient welling up inside her.

  “Okay, let me catch my breath here. Hold on… Alright,” he took a deep breath. “He and I hail from a distant planet called Panron 5. We were sent on a mission to colonize earth, under the impression that it was devoid of intelligent life, and that there would therefore be no problem in us making use of its natural resources. However, when we discovered you humans living there on our initial visit, my friend and I had a bit of a disagreement on what we should do.

  “I was of the opinion that we should just leave you all alone, in peace, and look for someplace else to colonize. Nax, my friend there, was of a different opinion. He wanted to abduct an earth specimen, such as yourself, and make you his slave. He wanted to find out everything you knew about growing crops on your planet. Then to have you… Sexually… And finally, once he was done with you, to dispose of you, and share the information he gleaned with our leaders.”

  “Jesus,” said Eileen, wide-eyed, unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “I’d like to offer my most sincere apologies for such behavior. I knew I couldn’t let him go through with his plan, and so I took it upon myself to rescue you.”

  “Oh. Well - well thank you,” she said, smiling feebly, and Pan smiled back at her. The sight of his smile seemed to soothe her, easing the many anxieties welling up inside her chest. Her lips spread wider, and the grin she gave him was fuller and more sincere.

  An intense and unexpected chemistry seemed to be forming between the two intergalactic companions.

  “Yes, well. It doesn’t seem as though I’ve gotten the two of us very far, now does it?”

  Just then, Eileen recalled their situation. The blackness of space and death that awaited them in the event they didn’t get this ship back up and running. And although she still took comfort in the man’s gaze, a sense of dread welled back up in her chest that she couldn’t ignore.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked, trying to retain some measure of confidence in her host, even though things weren’t looking all that bright for them.

  ‘Well,” he said, calm. “Emergency services should be here soon, and they’ll get us up and running again. Then I can take you back home, and everything should be fine. Of course, we’re in a rather distant part of the galaxy at the moment, so it could take a while. But I’m almost certain they’ll be here before anything too bad can happen.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well that’s a relief.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “And now we wait.”

  “I’m Eileen, by the way, she thought to say, extending a hand to him, and he smiled at the sight.

  “Pan,” he said, reaching back for her, and the two of them shook. His grip felt warm and pleasant as it sank in around her fingers, her heart rate elevating as she peered into his eyes.

  Chapter 4

  For hailing from two entirely disparate corners of the galaxy, Pan and Eileen found themselves coming up with an awful lot
to talk about while waiting for emergency services to arrive. Pan asked her several questions about her life on Earth, and Eileen opened up to him in a way that she seldom found herself doing with anyone else. She found him easy to talk to, not to mention interesting, and she clung to his every word as he gave her detailed descriptions of life back on his home planet. It seemed like an incredibly advanced place, and Eileen found herself wishing she could go there. But Pan, it seemed, was feeling less than optimistic about his return home. He seemed to hold views on just about everything that differed from the popular consensus back on his planet, and he had a feeling that his planet’s leadership would not respond especially well to his having shot his partner out the sky, regardless of how pure his motives may have been.

  “It’s just difficult, I suppose,” he said, staring off into the stars. “I love my home, but I’ve never really felt like I belonged there. It’s not an easy feeling to live with.”

  “I - I understand, I think,” she said, and he gazed into her big brown eyes, with such an intensity that he couldn’t help but smile at her. She smiled back, flustered, and quickly cast her eyes to the floor. “I mean, my situation isn’t quite the same as yours, of course. But I feel like I’m trying to do something with my life and it doesn’t matter to anyone. No one understands what that place means to me - the farm, I mean. They don’t think it’s worth my time, or worth fighting for, or whatever. I know they all think I’m crazy for trying to save it.”

  Pan, now, was shaking his head. “No. No, that’s not crazy at all,” he insisted. “I know firsthand that sometimes people just don’t understand things. But there’s absolutely nothing crazy about fighting hard for something you love.”