Seized by the Alien: A Scifi Alien Romance (Fated Mates of the Titan Empire Book 3)

by Tammy Walsh

  Traes’ eyes narrowed.

  “What you’re saying is, you want me to pay you a hundred credits a week,” he said.

  “It’s not what I want,” I said. “It’s what Cleb needs.”

  “And he needs a governess that costs twice the amount of a very experienced one that comes complete with references.”

  Had I pushed too hard? Would he buckle and decide he didn’t want me to teach Cleb?

  I stood on eggshells waiting for him to make his decision.

  “Fine,” he said. “One hundred a week. You must have your reasons for needing it.”

  Sure do. One thousand of them.

  “But I want your word that you won’t suddenly quit,” he said. “Cleb has had enough people leaving his life. He doesn’t need another one.”

  I blinked at that. What did that mean?

  Suddenly, I felt bad. I’d gotten what I wanted—well, if I got what I wanted, I would have gotten a thousand credits upfront and be on my way—but ten weeks teaching that cute little boy wasn’t exactly a hardship for me. And neither would having to put up with his grouchy uncle every day.

  Now I looked like someone who only cared about the money. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wished I could tell him the real reason I needed the money but I couldn’t take the risk. I bit my tongue.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “See Waev,” Traes said. “He’ll take you to your room.”

  He bent over his paperwork and continued to read documents with letters so tiny he needed a microscope to see them.

  “Okay,” I said. “Right.”

  I got up and moved for the door. I looked back once at the huge desk and Traes who scratched at the paperwork behind it. He cut the loneliest figure I’d ever seen. A lone soul in that big old house, behind his big desk covered with piles of boring paperwork.

  And now I had become just another one of his many employees. I felt sad as I shut the door behind me.

  Waev was surprised to find I had no other luggage besides the S’mauggai leather bag. Still, he insisted on carrying it for me as we ascended the stairs to my room.

  “As governess, you aren’t a traditional part of the household staff,” he said. “Your rank is roughly the same as that of the head of the household.”

  “Which is you, right?” I said.

  He nodded with a smile.

  “I run everything inside the house,” he said. “If you have any issues or problems, please don’t hesitate to speak with me directly. I’m most often on the first floor or in the garden.”

  We turned a corner and walked in silence. It occurred to me that Waev would know Traes better than anyone else in the house. He might be able to shed some light on the situation I found myself in.

  “Traes is Cleb’s uncle?” I said.

  “That’s’ right,” Waev said. “He’s also his godfather. In case anything happened to his sister and his brother-in-law, Cleb would pass to him to take care of.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Almost three months now.”

  “What’s their relationship like?” I said.

  It was a personal question and not one I expected to get a straight answer to, so it came as a surprise when Waev looked me in the eye and said, “Not good. Traes is stuck in his ways and is too used to working. Cleb needs someone to play with, someone to care for him the same way his parents used to. The staff and I do our best but we’re not blood relatives. It’s not the same.”

  “Traes works hard?” I said.

  “Very hard. He built the company from the ground. No pun intended.”

  I didn’t understand what the joke was.

  “He owns a large mining company,” he said.

  I chuckled despite myself.

  “From the ground up,” I said. “That’s pretty good. Awful, but good.”

  “Traes is used to taking care of people, but they’re his employees. There are thousands of them. They’re at a distance and don’t live in the same house. He ensures they always have enough work but he doesn’t have to spend time with them on a daily basis or develop personal relationships.”

  “That’s where I come in,” I said.

  “It does indeed,” Waev said. “Right. Here we are.”

  He pushed an ornate set of doors open. The room took my breath away. It looked like something from Downton Abbey—a TV series I was addicted to for a while. The colors were plush and vibrant and rich, meshing together in a gorgeous, luxurious mix.

  “These are the governess’s usual rooms?” I said.

  Waev opened the curtains to let the warm sunlight in.

  “No,” he said. “They’re down the hall. Traes said you were to have the best rooms in the house.”

  “The best rooms?” I said, confused. “But we didn’t negotiate for me to have the best rooms.”

  “No. He informed me about your living arrangements before you went into his office.”

  That swine…

  He knew what I was going to ask for before we even hammered it out! He’d already decided what he was going to give me! And if he already knew what he was going to give me, it meant I could have gotten more!

  I growled and tossed my bag across the room. It bounced off the bed and landed on the other side.

  Waev looked at me inquisitively with a smile on his face.

  “Don’t worry about it, Miss,” he said. “There aren’t many people he doesn’t get the better of in negotiations. Besides, you’re here to do one of the most important jobs there is. And you’ve already succeeded better than the other governesses combined. You made the young master laugh. So far as the rest of us are concerned, you’re an angel in disguise. A boy of that age should never be so sad for so long.”

  The words didn’t have the effect he hoped they would. I was still fuming about Traes getting the better of me.

  “I’ll leave you to unpack,” he said.

  Waev shut the door behind himself and left me alone.

  I was getting the money I needed, so what difference did it make?

  It made all the difference!

  He won and he knew it.

  Maybe governesses earned more than fifty credits a week. How would I know?

  I should have checked their contracts!

  Urgh! Rookie mistake.

  I estimated the cost of a long-haul flight on Earth and compared it to how long it would take for me to earn the amount in my old job. It was roughly about the same. Okay, so he probably didn’t rip me off. But I still had a right to be angry!

  I was going to have to make sure I did the very best job I could and do better than he ever thought possible.

  That would show him.

  The wardrobe door hung open. When I tossed my bag, it’d knocked it loose. A sleeve poked out from behind the door. I drifted to it and opened it.

  No…

  I swiped through the rows of dresses. I picked one at random and held it against myself.

  It was in my size. They were all in my size!

  I growled and shoved the dress back in the wardrobe and slammed the door shut.

  How did he do that?

  Traes’ library was larger and better stocked than most public libraries back home. There were entire sections dedicated to histories both ancient and more recent, describing seminal moments in the Titans’ past that no human anywhere had even been aware of before. Just a single book could provide more inspiration for stories than Alice could hope to write in a lifetime.

  Alice.

  Boy, I missed her. I missed all my friends. Over the painful past few weeks, I thought about them a lot. I wondered if they were in the same predicament I was, if they too were slaves to a cruel master, or if they’d been lucky enough to enjoy a better fate.

  I hoped they had.

  They didn’t deserve to be abducted and subjected to the whims of a random alien species.

  Neither did I.

  I wondered where Asshole was. Stinky must have shat out the rai
nbow-colored wrapper and its key by now. Maybe I’d get lucky and it wouldn’t come out. The creature had swallowed plenty of things over the past few weeks and they’d never been seen again.

  I shook my head. It was no good thinking that way. Much better to assume the worst.

  Asshole got the key and released himself. He was out there looking for me. And he would find me.

  But not yet. Not before I saved the money I needed and got far away from him.

  Considering just two days ago I was chained to his wall scrubbing his floors with a mop and wire brush, and this morning I was still traveling through interstellar space on my way here with no plan of what I was going to do when I arrived, and now I had a well-paying secure job and was on my way to buying my return ticket home, I didn’t think I was doing too badly.

  Cleb shifted position on the hardwood chair and tried to get comfortable. He had a large book spread out before him on bugs and plants of Arcturon Prime’s natural world. Why was it so important for young Titans to learn this stuff? I didn’t know.

  But Cleb clearly wasn’t a bookworm. He spent most of his time chewing on his pencil and doodling in the margins of his notebook. He would never get anything done at this pace.

  I grabbed the book he was studying, snapped it shut, and tucked it under my arm.

  “Come on,” I said.

  I hustled toward the exit. He struggled to keep up with me.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “Outside,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day. If you want to learn about bugs and plants and flowers, it’s best to learn about them in their natural environment.”

  “The other governesses never let me study outside,” Cleb said, clearly excited.

  “But I’m not a governess, am I?” I said with a wink.

  Once we reached the back garden, I opened the book to the flowers and plants section.

  “Okay,” I said. “First, take a look at this Trachean flower. It looks like… tracheas? Weird. Go out into the garden and see if you can find one. Snap it off and bring it back to me when you do.”

  Cleb ran around the garden, returning with various flowers. It took four attempts, but finally, he was successful. Then we read through the book together and identified all the key parts. We cut the flower open and peered more closely at its inner workings.

  Cleb’s eyes glinted with excitement. He was barely focusing and he was remembering far better than he had in the stuffy old library. When we cut open other plants and flowers, I asked him to identify everything we already learned. He was thrilled to realize many of the flowers consisted of the same parts.

  “We’re all connected,” I said. “Every plant and animal is linked. We might not look much like a plant but they have to attract each other the same way we do.”

  “I’ll never attract a girl!” Cleb said. “They’re smelly!”

  “Oh, we are, are we?” I said, and I grabbed him and tickled his belly.

  He giggled uproariously.

  After we went through the flowers and plants, we proceeded onto the bugs. I didn’t need him to bring them to me as I wasn’t a big fan, but he did anyway. We didn’t kill the bugs to look inside them. My fault again, as I had always been on the squeamish side.

  We repeated the same exercise in the afternoon until Cleb could recite all the major body and plant parts off by heart.

  “Right,” I said. “You’ve worked hard and I think you deserve your first mission. Do you think you can help me?”

  He turned serious and sidled up close.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I want to study your uncle but he’s always working,” I said. “We need to spend more time around him. That way, I can get information on adult Titans too.”

  “He won’t let you in his office. Not when he’s working.”

  “You know, sometimes people surprise us,” I said.

  “Not everybody,” Cleb said. “Some people are always the same.”

  “I want you to do me a favor tonight,” I said.

  I felt like our relationship had developed to the point where I could ask for favors.

  “What?” he said.

  “When we sit down and have dinner tonight, I want you to ask your uncle to join us tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? What are we doing tomorrow?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. It depends on whether or not you ask your uncle to come with us.”

  “He won’t go if he doesn’t know what it is.”

  “You said he wouldn’t agree anyway,” I said.

  “He won’t. But he definitely won’t go if he doesn’t know what we’ll do.”

  “So you’re saying there’s a chance he will come with us,” I said.

  Cleb’s eyes moved to the side in thought.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Then it’s not impossible,” I said. “I bet if you ask him to go with us, he’ll say yes.”

  Cleb thought for a moment, chewing on his bottom lip as if running through the situation and imagining the different outcomes.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Have you asked him before?” I said.

  “He’s always busy with work.”

  “So maybe he’s only busy because no one ever asks him to do something else. Did you ever think of that?”

  Cleb shook his head.

  “Would you like for him to join us tomorrow?” I said.

  Cleb nodded.

  “Then how will he know that if we don’t ask him?”

  Cleb sighed.

  “So?” I said. “Will you ask him?”

  “All right. But he’s going to say no.”

  The dinner was a high-class affair with expensive dinner and the silverware. If I knew it was going to be a special event, I would have dressed up.

  “You didn’t need to go to all this trouble for me,” I said.

  “We didn’t,” Traes said, amused.

  “This is regular dinner here?” I said.

  Traes smiled as he opened his newspaper and the servants brought the silver trays around and placed them in front of us.

  It was nice for a one of a kind event, I thought. It seemed a bit much if it was for dinner every single day. Would breakfast be the same? Surely you would get sick of the pomp each and every meal.

  One thing was for sure: it beat eating Asshole’s leftovers off a dirty plate. I should quit complaining and just enjoy myself.

  We ate our meals and talked amiably about our days. Cleb spoke enthusiastically about how we went outside and learned about bugs and flowers and bees and insects.

  Traes smiled but was distracted with reading his newspaper. Did he even notice the passionate gleam in Cleb’s eye when he spoke on the topic of nature? I certainly did. I’d make sure to get him outside and exploring as much as I could in future.

  Finally, we came to a lull in the conversation and I looked meaningfully at Cleb, who suddenly turned shy. I glanced in his uncle’s direction with my eyes. Ask him about tomorrow, I was saying.

  Cleb peered back at me nervously.

  I nodded. You can do this.

  “Uncle?” he said.

  “Mm?” Traes said, turning a page of his newspaper.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What is it?”

  The asshole was still reading his newspaper. Why didn’t he put it down and pay attention to Cleb? I glowered with anger and Cleb hadn’t even asked his question yet.

  “Me and Bianca—”

  “Bianca and I,” Traes corrected.

  Cleb looked over at me. He really didn’t want to ask this.

  “Bianca and I… were thinking about doing something tomorrow,” he said. “And we were wondering if maybe you’d like to come with us.”

  “I can’t tomorrow,” Traes said without looking up. “I’ve got important meetings. Maybe some other time.”

  Cleb’s face fell. He knew what his uncle was going to say, and still, he asked, allowing himself to hope
he might be wrong.

  No. I had been the one to make him think he might be wrong, that his uncle would say yes.

  I was furious with him.

  Cleb sat there, staring at his plate for the rest of the meal. It was too much for me to bear. My anger throbbed stronger with each second that passed.

  “Have you finished dinner?” I said to Cleb.

  Cleb nodded.

  Traes glanced at his plate.

  “You haven’t finished your vegetables,” he said.

  “He’s finished,” I said.

  “But he still has lots of vegetables left—”

  “He’s finished,” I said, my voice louder than usual and bouncing off the bare walls.

  Traes looked at me, trying to understand my expression.

  “You can go,” I said to Cleb.

  “Will you come read me a story later?” he said.

  “Of course I will,” I said.

  I extended my arms and he came over and gave me a hug. I whispered in his ear: “You did great. I’m so proud of you.”

  He smiled but it was fleeting. He turned and crossed the vast expanse of carpet. A house guard opened the door and shut it behind him.

  The asshole was still reading his newspaper.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was going to blow.

  “Can you dismiss your servants, please?” I said.

  He peered over at me and noticed the look on my face.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “Can you dismiss your servants, please?” I repeated.

  If he didn’t dismiss them soon, I was going to erupt and to hell with what they heard.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He made eye contact with Waev.

  “Tell everyone to leave us for a moment, please,” he said.

  “Better make it outside,” I said as kindly as I could.

  Waev looked perturbed. When Traes gave him his nod, Waev carried out his orders.

  I wouldn’t speak until I was certain they were out of earshot.

  “What’s this all in aid of—?” Traes said.

  I raised a finger, silencing him. I heard a distant door shut and waited until there were no other noises.