by Tasha Black
Drago
Stargazer Alien Mail Order Brides (Book 13)
Tasha Black
13th Story Press
Copyright © 2018 by 13th Story Press All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
13th Story Press PO Box 506 Swarthmore, PA 19081
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Contents
Tasha Black Starter Library
About Drago
Drago
1. Arden
2. Drago
3. Dr. Bhimani
4. Drago
5. Arden
6. Arden
7. Drago
8. Arden
9. Drago
10. Arden
11. Arden
12. Drago
13. Arden
14. Drago
15. Arden
16. Drago
17. Arden
18. Drago
19. Drago
20. Arden
21. Drago
22. Arden
23. Arden
Burton (Sample)
1. Tansy
Tasha Black Starter Library
Intergalactic Dating Agency
About the Author
One Percent Club
Tasha Black Starter Library
Packed with steamy shifters, mischievous magic, billionaire superheroes, and plenty of HEAT, the Tasha Black Starter Library is the perfect way to dive into Tasha's unique brand of Romance with Bite!
Get your FREE books now at tashablack.com!
About Drago
He’s her lab subject. She’s the subject of his forbidden fantasies…
When Arden Green was hired as a lab tech, she didn’t expect her duties would include delivering titillating movies to hunky aliens and retrieving their specimens. But when she finds herself in Stargazer, Pennsylvania doing just that, she figures things can’t get any worse. Until she starts to fall for one of the men she’s supposed to be studying…
Drago has made the extraordinary journey to Earth from faraway planet Aerie. But his life as a lab subject is simple. He eats, he reads, and he dutifully tries to click permanently into his human form. Most of all, he lives for his momentary daily contact with lab tech Arden Green, the woman he recognizes as his mate the first time he sees her.
But the delicate balance at the lab won’t last forever. When circumstances force Drago and two of his brothers to flee, Arden must help them escape. But can she keep her relationship with her subject professional? Or has science blinded her to true love?
Educated about humankind by the 1980s movies that came to them in an interstellar time capsule, these gorgeous gentlemen are eager to meet Earth girls...
About the Stargazer Alien Brides series:
Collection 1 focuses on three couples in a small Pennsylvania town, featuring Bond, Rocky and Magnum.
Collection 2 follows the story to a resort in the Catskills where three new couples meet and features Kitt, Remington and Indiana.
Collection 3 continues the adventure with three new couples in a small-town police academy, featuring Lobo, Conan and Hawkeye.
Collection 4 features Kirk, Buck and Solo, as they try to connect with their chosen mates at a comic convention.
Collection 5 comes back to Stargazer, and a small farm where love is in bloom for Drago, Burton and Riggs.
Drago
1
Arden
Arden Green was dreaming of peach trees.
In the dream, she was trespassing again.
Most days she managed to keep her head down in the lab. She documented every conceivable action of her charges from sunup to sundown with quick breaks for lunch and dinner.
But now and again the endless indoor routine got the best of her and instead of eating her lunch she slipped out the back, across the field and past the rhododendron hedge to the farm on the other side of the lab.
It was no surprise that this was where her dream had taken her.
Dream-Arden peered around the hedge.
Just as when she visited in her waking hours, there was no sign of life on the other side. Not only in the orchard - there were no sounds of people or machinery coming from the rest of the farm either. Arden sometimes wondered how a farm could be run with so little activity.
But for today, she was grateful for the opportunity to convene with nature for a moment.
She stepped into the orchard. The air was rich with the scent of dewy grass and loamy soil.
The wildly gnarled branches of the trees overhead were at odds with their prim, perfectly spaced rows. Feathery green leaves trembled lightly in the breeze.
Prunis persica - the common peach tree. It was not native to North America. Like the men Arden cared for and studied, it had been transported from far, far away.
Arden lifted her hands and let the leaves tickle her palms as she walked between two of the rows.
Feel the sun on your face, taste the summer in the air.
These things are timeless pleasures.
Compared with them, Drago is a passing thought.
But when she closed her eyes to soak in the sunlight, it was his fingers caressing her hands, his smile warming her face.
Suddenly she was aware of the breeze against her skin.
In the dream, she opened her eyes.
And Drago was there.
He stood in the same row of trees as Arden, his hands outstretched to mirror hers. Sunlight glinted golden in his hair.
Arden gasped.
He wasn’t supposed to be out of the lab.
Drago’s blue eyes blazed into hers as he took a deliberate step forward, and then another.
Arden froze, waiting for him. Her heart pounded as if she had just run a marathon.
They were alone. She had never been alone with him.
He moved faster now, his jaw rippled with tension as if he were angry.
But Arden knew better. She could feel the sizzle of lust that hummed in the shrinking space between them.
Her own body ached in sympathy. She needed him too. Burned for him to wrap his arms around her, tear off the clothing that separated them, and possess her in the way they both had wanted since the first time their eyes met.
He stopped just in front of her.
Arden gazed up at him, pleading mutely.
Drago pressed his palms to hers.
Something powerful passed between them, a current that electrified her blood and made her bold.
Arden went up on her toes to kiss him.
There was a sound in the air, as if the breeze had strengthened and was sending the leaves of the peach trees into frenzied applause.
But Drago brought his mouth down to claim hers and Arden forgot everything but the warmth of his mouth and the feel of his hard body pressing against her softness.
She pressed back, stifling a moan.
Drago cupped her cheek with one big hand and gripped her hip with the other, as if he were afraid she would try to get away.
She kissed him back, drunk on the taste of his mouth, the feel of his big body in her arms at last.
He broke the kiss to gaze down at her.
“Arden,” he whispered, his eyes tender now instead of fierce. “Arden.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but something was wrong, she couldn’t speak.
“Arden,” Dr. Bhimani’s voice crackled as it came through the intercom
.
Arden blinked and the orchard faded away.
She was back in her bunk, tangled in the sheets, dreaming about one of the men she’d been brought to Stargazer to observe.
“Yes, Dr. Bhimani,” she replied, hoping her voice didn’t give away that she wasn’t fully awake yet.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Dr. Bhimani said. “I wondered if you might be able to visit me today during your dinner break.”
“Of-of course,” Arden stammered, hoping she wasn’t in trouble.
“Thank you so much, Arden,” Dr. Bhimani said. “See you at the lab.”
There was a crackle and the intercom went silent.
Arden grabbed her phone. It was still early, but she might as well get up. After all, she certainly wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep again.
She headed for the showers, grateful no one else was around.
Most of the lab techs left for the weekends, so Arden and two of the male techs were the only ones around. She got some extra pay, and she had no place to go over the weekend anyway. Her family was all out west, in the suburbs of Glacier City.
Once she was showered and dressed, Arden felt more like herself. She buttoned a fresh lab coat over her clothing and pulled her hair back in its usual ponytail.
She walked across the field to the lab, trying to ignore the scent of peaches in the air. It was just the fragrance in the shampoo she’d bought at the grocery store in town, not real peaches. It was too early in the season for there to be any fruit on the trees yet. The shampoo was likely the reason she’d dreamt of the peach orchard next door in the first place.
“Hey, Arden,” one of the male techs said as she walked in.
“Hey, Tom,” she replied.
She could tell by the sounds in the lab that the first session of the morning had started early. Tom held an empty box in his hands, and their colleague, Russ, was already halfway down his row.
“You got an early start, huh?” Arden asked.
“We’re going into Philly tonight,” Tom said, waggling his eyebrows. “Hitting the Stackhouse. You want in?”
“No thanks,” Arden wrinkled her nose.
She had no interest in spending her free time, or her meager stipend, at some casino. Knowing how much they made, she doubted Tom could really afford to be a high roller either. But she supposed everyone needed to blow off a little steam from time to time.
“Suit yourself,” Tom shrugged.
Arden grabbed her own box of VHS tapes from the shelf at the end of the lab.
The titles popped out at her garishly.
Frontin’ the Booty
Flashpoint X
A Clockwork Orgy
Much as she tried to view her job as scientific, some parts of it were easier than others.
She made her way to the first booth and tapped on the frame.
The curtain moved aside and a masculine face greeted her.
“Good morning, Arden,” the man said.
He was as stunning as an underwear model, and wearing nothing but a terrycloth robe. But he had an innocence about him that made things a little easier.
“Hello,” Arden replied. She wasn’t supposed to make small talk at this point in the experiment.
She stepped into the booth and put a tape into the small TV/VCR combo that was the only thing in the booth besides the man, a plastic specimen cup, and a container of wipes.
“You know what to do,” she said.
He nodded, his hands already eagerly tugging at the sash of the robe.
She moved on to the next booth, and the next.
Sounds of pleasure were echoing through the laboratory, the keens and cries of a hundred porn stars begging for five hundred movie orgasms.
On her first day Arden had been red in the face and convinced she would quit by lunchtime. She couldn’t really be expected to hand out porn to a bunch of men like she was slinging burgers at a diner.
But these weren’t really men.
They were visitors from the planet Aerie.
At home, the citizens of Aerie were gaseous forms, floating among the crags and living on starlight.
But they had received welcoming transmissions from Earth in the 1980s, transmissions that were sent from the observatory next to the lab, right here in Stargazer, Pennsylvania.
After studying the movies and culture of the planet during that era, the scientists of Aerie had designed human bodies and transported the men into them so that they might visit their Earthly friends.
And they had designed those human bodies very carefully.
Each man’s form was perfectly crafted to inspire lust in the women of Earth. Each of them seemed to be taller and more muscular than the last.
Once they arrived, if the men clicked into the human forms they became human forever.
So far, the only way to do that seemed to be through the mating bond. The first three aliens to arrive had come in secret, and had been allowed to interact with human women outside the lab. They had fallen in love and each had clicked when he bonded to his mate.
Now Earth’s government and Aerie’s wanted to know if it could be accomplished without relying on something as unpredictable as love.
So Arden’s job was simple.
She helped the aliens try to click on their own, using nothing but good old-fashioned pornography.
At first they had used modern porn, but the men had been overwhelmed by what they saw. When Dr. Bhimani sent Tom to the old video store in town for VHS tapes they had turned a corner. Now these 80s and 90s movies were the soundtrack to Arden’s mornings and evenings.
She had grown used to it - as used to it as she could be.
Except when it came to the last booth in her row.
She approached it now, tapping timidly on the frame.
The curtain opened slowly.
Drago gave her a slow smile.
Something swarmed in her chest, like butterflies made of fire.
“Good morning, Arden Green,” Drago said, his blue eyes glittering dangerously. Somehow, this one lacked the innocence of his brothers.
“Good morning,” she said quickly, grabbing a tape at random from her box.
Drago chuckled.
She looked down at the cassette in her hand.
Weird Science XXX: Starring Kelly LeKnockers
The cover showed a woman with long brown hair in a ponytail and a lab coat. She looked oddly similar to Arden - except that Kelly LeKnockers’s lab coat was unbuttoned to reveal a pair of enormous bare breasts. A big blond man knelt at her feet, hands outstretched as if to touch them.
Horrified, but too embarrassed to back out, Arden leaned forward to insert the tape into the VCR.
Instead, she dropped it on the floor at Drago’s feet.
2
Drago
Drago studied Arden, wondering what she would do next.
He enjoyed their daily interactions, and none more than the few seconds he had alone with her as she leaned into the booth to deliver his movie, leaving behind the light scent of her hair.
She had brought him this particular tape once before, in the very beginning. He’d enjoyed the comparison for a moment, though the grainy vixen in the video had nothing on the very real and tantalizing girl who was kneeling before him now to retrieve what she had dropped.
The significance of her position wasn’t lost on Drago. He watched hours of these tapes each day, it was as if she had trained him in how to respond to the sight of her at his feet.
Even now he was rigid at the thought of her soft hands and innocent gaze.
As if he had called to her, she looked up, treating him to the sight of those hazel eyes. Her lips were slightly parted and her cheeks were bright pink to match.
By the three moons of Aerie, he wanted nothing more than to take her, and make her his mate.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’ll get you another one.”
He realized belatedly that the plastic tape she held was cracked.
“I don’t need it,” he told her. As if he wanted that silly thing. All he thought about when he released his seed was Arden.
Her eyes went straight to where his robe tented out as if his cock were pointing at her.
He watched, mesmerized, as she licked her lips.
Then she looked away, her cheeks reddening further.
Without thinking, Drago took her hands in his and pulled her gently back to standing.
They weren’t supposed to touch. Now he knew why.
Her skin was so incredibly soft, and the electricity that moved between them nearly sent him over the edge.
Drago was used to being in control. He had watched enough of Earth’s movies to know that every woman loved a cool guy. He felt anything but cool right now. His pulse pounded in his veins and his chest ached in an unfamiliar way.
“Arden,” he said, his voice husky.
“Everything okay?” one of the other techs called from the lab.
“Fine,” Arden said faintly without breaking eye contact. “I dropped something.”
“Stay,” Drago whispered.
“I-I can’t,” she stammered.
But she didn’t move.
He released her hands anyway. If she stayed, it wouldn’t be because he wouldn’t let her go.
As if the spell were broken, she instantly grabbed another tape from her box and slid it into the machine.