Her breath caught and her heart beat nervously when she saw the clear box where Angus had been all that time was now empty. Then her relieved gaze finally landed on Angus and his no longer fat arse lying on a nearby table. She raised a hand to her chest to calm her heartbeat as she neared him. The sheet covering him moved up and down. It was all that kept her from thinking he was dead.
He’d spent over four weeks in that fecking box, and now Angus was a changed man, at least physically. She put a hand on his arm. It was warm to her touch, thank the Goddess. She had feared they might turn him into one of the cold ones.
Some of the aliens had much lower body temperatures. Their clothing kept them at a chilled level that would have had her building a peat fire in the hearth of her little cottage back home. How she missed that little house now, even the broken stove and the misbehaving flue. She missed everything. But Nate had warned her to not dwell on the past since there was no going back to it. He said going back was scientifically impossible and looked like he believed what was said.
“Angus,” she whispered in his ear. “Are ya alright? Speak to me, for feck’s sake. I’ve been waiting weeks for ya to come around. I don’t like being the only one scared shitless here.”
His eyes blinked open and a turquoise gaze finally met hers. She wanted to lay her head on his chest and weep with relief that he lived.
“What the feck happened to me?” Angus asked, moving to sit up.
Grateful she was so strong, Erin pushed him back down. “No, don’t raise up. Ya have been very ill. Take it slow for a bit. No one means ya harm here.”
“Apparently that fellow I drew my gun on did,” Angus said dryly.
Erin shook her head at his sarcasm and wondered if even death could have defeated it. “He’s the least of our concerns now, Angus. I haven’t seen him since I got here.”
His grip on her arm was warm and urgent. “Did those men hurt ya, Erin?” he asked roughly.
Again, Erin shook her head. Men could defile ya themselves when they took a notion, but then they’d take a knife to anyone else that tried. And they thought women were hard to understand.
“No, Angus. They’ve all been completely kind. When ya are well enough, I will explain what I know of things. It’s very confusing here, but once ya adjust, they let ya move around with just one guard.”
“Is this… is this a prison then?” Angus asked.
Erin could tell he was fighting sleep and losing. “No. I don’t think so. It’s just very different from Lisdoonvarna. Sleep now, Angus. We’ll talk in a bit when ya are more alert. They let me come visit ya whenever I want.”
“Good. Come back soon then,” Angus said.
She felt him pull her hand to his chest. Even covered with a sheet she could feel the hard muscles beneath her palm. Angus felt under her fingers like Toorg looked. The heart-breaking bastard certainly hadn’t felt like that before he went into the fecking box.
She sighed now thinking about the one time she’d found herself under him. Even with no muscles like those he currently possessed, Angus had shown her a slice of heaven she’d never seen before. It had been wonderful right up to the part where he’d called her ‘Mary’ just before finding his relief.
But that was water under a bridge neither of them would ever see again.
Nine years Angus had mourned his wife, and nine years Erin had waited for him to stop. As far as she knew, there had been no other woman but her under him in all that time. Angus no doubt preferred his own hand, especially if there was a oversized glass of ale in the other one.
Erin snorted at her wicked thoughts. “I can’t believe they’d think I’d ever love a wreck of a man like ya. Obviously, the Universe 1 version of me was completely daft to love her own. Unless yer version here was made better… and I highly doubt it.”
She stopped talking when she saw Angus was unconscious again. Running her hand down his chest, she let her fingers bump over all the ridges. Why hadn’t they bothered to do this to her body? She was soft around the middle and it might have been nice to have a tighter butt and a better lift to her breasts. Thirty-eight wasn’t old by any definition she had of aging, but it wasn’t like she was twenty-five either. Angus felt twenty-five now… or at least thirty-five.
They’d sent her through some fecking beeping machine and not touched her again afterward. That decision, given what they’d done to Angus, was just one more thing she didn’t understand in this fecking place.
Her hand drifted lower as she continued to ponder their situation. Angus jerked in response to her stroking fingertips and woke again under her touch. She snatched her hand away, mostly because it wanted to keep exploring what she’d accidentally found beneath the sheet.
“Damn it. We’ve been kidnapped,” Angus said with worried eyes, then rolled his head to the side and slept once more.
Erin nodded, though Angus could no longer see her. “That’s close enough to the truth of it,” she agreed quietly.
She tucked the covers around him and laid her head briefly on Angus’s chest just to hear his heart beating for a moment. The sound of it reassured her. Seeing him in that box the first time, she hadn’t known if he’d been dead or alive. She’d screamed at those close enough to hear and had wept openly over not being able to change their fate.
Some medical person had put a piece of metal against her neck and then she’d gotten very calm. She vaguely remembered them explaining to her that Angus was healing from his wounds.
But what wounds?
She had wondered then and still wondered now. Nate had ordered her not to worry about it, but he couldn’t order her to forget. Angus and Agent Black had never fought at all.
Among her many problems, she’d quickly discovered her weakness for Angus MacNamara was a matter of public record here. Everyone she encountered treated her like his concerned wife, though she was as far from that as it was possible to be in any of their blessed universes.
At least Angus didn’t know she had ever worried herself ill over him being in that box. Goddess willing, she’d keep her pride and figure out how to keep him from finding out.
She opened the door and found Toorg waiting patiently. He nodded and for once said nothing to her at all.
“I guess I’m ready now. Let’s go see the lasses,” she said in resignation, watching his face beam his delight.
Chapter Three
“Toorg!”
Erin rolled her eyes as a chorus of female voices called out in welcome when they entered the draftees common area.
“I am Toorg,” she heard him answer proudly, smiling and waving at his adoring fans.
She also watched his concerned gaze slide to the light mocha-skinned female staring out the window. It covered every inch of the woman before he could make himself look away. It was the same reaction Toorg had every time they entered the room and Prudence was hiding away from everyone in her own thoughts.
Fifty-seven of the fifty-eight females in the draftee area always called out to her handsome guard, but Toorg seemed only interested in the one who never even turned his way. The alien’s reaction had convinced her beyond doubt that males from every planet were all the fecking same. They wanted the hunt more than the catch.
The good-looking alien could have crooked a finger at any of those who called his name and had an abundance of what he so obviously wanted. But no—feck no—Toorg wanted the one who ignored him. Handsome bastard had no idea that Prudence was still reeling from finding out her entire family had been slaughtered in cold blood. She was only here because their murders were after her as well. The woman was grieving her kin and grieving them hard. No blond alien god with chiseled muscles was going to hasten that kind of mourning along.
She looked at her sad alien and tried to harden her heart. “I’ll be here a while, Toorg. Lock me in and take yerself a break.”
“I am Toorg,” he whispered softly, nodding his head in agreement.
Sighing, Erin reached out and rubbed his muscled arm. F
eck her soft heart. “Prudence’s still hurting, Toorg. Give her time. She lost her entire family and now feels all alone in a world she has to leave shortly.”
“Pretty,” Toorg whispered even more softly.
She had quickly learned the boy understood all language perfectly. He wasn’t slow in any regard. He just had limited verbal responses to offer back to things. “Pretty” was what he secretly called Prudence Sheffield. Though when ya got right down to it, the one word said what was most important for a woman to know anyway.
Bowing his head in resignation, Toorg left and closed the door of the women’s common area behind him. Erin rolled her eyes at his depressing exit. She should be pissed over feeling sympathy for her guard dog—majorly pissed—and she was in some regards. But then she’d see Toorg looking all sad and dejected over Prudence, and something in her always melted. Her urge to fix his situation was enough to make her scream. The only reason she didn’t cut loose was that she’d scare all these other fecking condemned females.
Bracing herself for what she had to do, Erin walked chin up into to her office and came back out. She glanced at the paper in her hand and finally made herself read the name on it aloud. Though she’d done this once before today, it still didn’t feel any more right. She wondered how her predecessor ever developed the stomach for what they had to do here.
“Mia Johnson, yer number has been chosen. Come see me in the office in fifteen minutes.”
Ignoring the one squealing woman, and the fifty plus ones groaning in complaint because their boredom would continue, she stomped back into what Nate had called her “office”. It was a tiny room with a view of the same fecking rock Prudence currently stared at. It didn’t have a proper desk, just a slim table. A magical tablet came up and out of one arm of her chair when she needed to write something down. Well, if ya called what she did writing. She had to use a thumb and a couple fingers to peck it out of the alphabet on the screen.
Erin sighed out the irritation she was feeling and turned her seat to face the window. Prudence wasn’t the only one who liked to spend a considerable amount of time staring at nothing. It was currently the only break from the madness she could get.
Mia poured over the five photos in her folder. “How am I supposed to pick one? They’re all good looking.”
“Yes. No one could say otherwise without lying,” Erin replied. “Yer going to want to flip that page over and look at the description of an average day on their planet. Good-looking won’t change near zero temperatures or a heat that will cook the skin off ya. A decent location might make for a more pleasant life.”
“Only one thing really keeps me happy. I wish these forms rated their bedroom skills,” Mia said, staring at the one photo she kept coming back to.
Erin grinned and snorted. “That would still tell ya nothing, Mia. Every male thinks he’s the best between the sheets. Have ya not been around enough to know that?”
Mia giggled. “Yes, but I’ve also been around enough to know some really are as good as they say.”
Erin shrugged. “Well, I hear ya can try out all the aliens in yer folder, if that’s the biggest criteria ya have for picking. I also hear a couple of them will renege on their offer for ya if ya do. But it’s yer call, not theirs. I’m told the important thing is to make a match yer going to be happy with in the long term. It’s not like ya get a second chance at this.”
Her first thought after the girl joked about really good men in bed was Angus MacNamara. It was going to be a bloody long life for her in Universe 1 if Angus using her for a substitute for his dead wife ended up being the pinnacle of her sexual experience. But where she came from, ya couldn’t be a rounder and still be respected. Women like that ended up working at Paddy’s and sharing strange men’s beds for a fee. She’d had a bit more dignity about herself, no matter how lonely her life had been.
Maybe she ought to take one of the guards for a spin just to clear her fecking mind of Angus. Someone like Toorg would be perfect if she could set the image of him mooning over Prudence to the side. Oh, who was she fooling? She had a wicked tongue on her, but she wasn’t a mean harpy at heart. Being a substitute for Prudence wasn’t going to help her in any genuine way and using Toorg as one for Angus MacNamara would just be cruel to the boy as well.
Her sigh over her weakness was loud and long. Sighing was all she could do these days. She felt more freaking helpless than she’d ever felt in her life and she didn’t like it going on forever as it seemed to be. A body ought to be able to take some proper steps to change their feelings when things got this bad. Her second sigh was louder than the first one.
“I’m sorry, Erin. Am I taking too long?” Mia asked.
Erin shook her head. “No, lass. Ya need to take all the time ya need. I’m sighing for my own reasons. My ma would tell ya that I’m just a sigher. I always have been.”
Mia smiled and nodded. “My mother was a sigher too. She died when I was sixteen. My dad was never all that keen on being a father. He turned me over to adult placement services the day her body was officially incinerated. I modeled there to support myself and the common house where I lived with thirty-three others like me. Lexi found me a year later. He made me his mistress the moment I legally turned eighteen. There were other men in my life, and Lexi knew it, but he had a wife. We learned to give each other space and both liked our arrangement.”
“If life was so good with yer fella, how did ya end up here?” Erin asked.
“Lexi said he had the kind of open marriage that allowed him to have outside lovers, but I found out later he didn’t. He just wanted that kind. His wife was insisting he remove me from his life, but he didn’t want to… and I didn’t want him to either.”
Erin nodded. “A lot of men want that kind of marriage. It doesn’t surprise me that five hundred…” No, couldn’t say that. She wasn’t supposed to mention all she knew. It was fecking hard to remember the details of all her lying. “What I mean is… it doesn’t surprise me that some marriages these days officially include outside relationships. I suppose if I wanted a man who was with another, I’d prefer such a thing to be out on the table rather than hidden in a cupboard. Where I come from, being with another once yer married is called infidelity and considered a sin, but I read in books that it wasn’t like that everywhere.”
“Everyone knows you and Angus MacNamara are a committed couple. Have you two ever officially married, Erin?” Mia asked.
Erin shook her head and laughed. She refused to lie about this. It would never be believable. “No. We’ve not married the way ya understand it. Frankly, it’s put more than one man off making me his wife when he found out I wasn’t interested in cooking his supper for a living.”
Mia put down the picture. “But you’re a matchmaker. You should have the perfect relationship.”
“Perfect doesn’t exist, child.” Erin laughed and shook her head. “Don’t take my teasing wrong. I believe in love and marriage. Both are meant to support the right romantic mindset. I’d be quick to advise ya not to go that far if yer not interested in being physically faithful to the one ya pick. Love is one thing, but most people value loyalty in word and deed just as much. Sharing yer body with another after promising not to is about as disloyal as it gets, especially when the one waiting at home is thinking all turns belong to them.”
“But don’t you think men are just unfaithful by nature?” Mia asked. “It’s always seemed like that to me.”
Again, blasted Angus popped into her mind. Bloody hell. She had no idea if he had been faithful to his wife. She only knew he’d been faithful in death even while dipping his sizable cock into her. But for all she really knew, Angus MacNamara was secretly the world’s biggest womanizer. He was over two decades older than her. She certainly hadn’t known him as a boy.
Regardless of any fecking man’s morals, in her line of work she’d learned to keep her personal cynicism tucked away from the young and idealistic. Mia had the same nature of those types even if the life she
’d lived to date hadn’t allowed her the luxury.
“No. Some men remain faithful, even to their dead wives,” Erin said firmly. “I have experience of that kind myself. And some men sincerely want to love and be loved in return. Those are the ones worth really having, but ya have to look damn hard. I understand how distracting muscles, wide shoulders, and a nice arse can be to a woman. My best advice it to look into their eyes instead of at the size of their cock or purse.”
Mia sighed and picked up the least attractive male in the pile. He was still good-looking, just not the most handsome in the group. “This one looks like he has kind eyes.”
Erin leaned over and looked at the picture before nodding. She’d seen that one wandering around looking lost and unsure. He seemed like he’d be a careful sort with a woman. “I agree, Mia. Want me to set up a sweet meet for ya?”
“Yes, please. I don’t think I told you, but I heard you and Angus on a recording once. You sound so different in person,” Mia said. “Your in-person speech is charming though. I could listen to you all day.”
“Thank you.”
The lies just piled on top of each other lately. Worse, they rolled easily off her tongue without any effort these days. Angus MacNamara with his lying ethics was going to have the devil of a time covering his big arse.
“They have ways of fixing yer voice failings when they record ya. The village where Angus and I first lived was very remote. We did all our learning on machines and never traveled much. It kept our language unchanged much longer than usual. Angus and I are two of the only ones left sounding like we do. Perhaps in another few hundred years the accents will finally fade and we’ll sound as common as anyone else around here.”
She was relieved to see the girl nod. Nate had disturbing ways of making people forget their nosier questions about her. Worse, the person didn’t even remember the unpleasantness afterward. He’d already stopped some of the draftees from questioning the changes in her appearance.
Were Me Out: Shift Happens Book Four Page 15