COWBOY ROMANCE: Justin (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 1) (102 page)

Chapter Seven.

Tarys stood outside the operating amphitheater of the spaceship.

If only they had come a moment earlier.

If only he hadn’t killed that man’s brother.

If only he could have told her…

The door was yanked open, revealing a winded Kaharan with a bloodied lab coat.

The sight made his stomach churn. He opened his mouth to ask what had happened, but then he heard, “Tarys Brewer.” He turned to find a Kaharan standing at the end of the hall. His jacket, the medallion, and the sheer look on his face told Tarys that this was the commander.

“I was just anxious to learn the news on Moire.”

The Commander nodded as they continued down the hall together. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look bright for the poor woman. The bullet ripped right through her aorta…or so the doctors say. But thankfully we were able to get there before he got to you.”

Tarys bowed his head. They had stopped in front of a large window. There was nothing but stars as far as the eye could see. “He never meant to kill me. He went for her because I killed his brother in a conflict.”

The commander raised an eyebrow. “How could this happen? It is my understanding that you have been preserved for hundreds of years.”

Tarys didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Did you ever tell her about the Bonde?”

Tarys shook his head. “It was in my interest to get back to Kahara as soon as possible, and she didn’t want to leave her life on Earth.”

“If she had known of your unshakeable devotion to her, she would have.”

Tarys nodded. “Then where would we be? I have a life on Kahara. It was never in my plan to bond with her or with anyone.”

The commander let out a dry chuckle. “My friend, no one has a life on Kahara anymore. The planet has been wasted by a comet. The population of this is all that survived. Now everyone’s life is on Earth. I would have encouraged you to find a Kaharan and build our race. Tarys, you sacrificed your love for nothing.”

Tarys stepped away. His heart sunk down to the pit of his belly like an ossified corpse. He made his way back to Moire, not caring who stopped him. When he entered her room to find her in a coma, half dead, he knelt next to her. This was truly his everything. How could he have not seen it before…before it was too late?

And he wept.

Epilogue.

Moire’s eyes flicked open. Her jaw swung open, letting in a flood of air. The last thing she remembered was a man pointing a gun at her chest. Now she felt like a new person. She glanced around her at the small room she was in.

A hospital?

No. It looked too…luxurious.

She tried to sit up, but something obstructed her. She looked down to find Tarys’s arm. She looked over to see his face right next to hers, his eyes shut and the balls moving around below his lids as he slumbered. “Tarys,” she croaked. She winced. Her voice box was as weak as her arms.

His eyes immediately opened, bathing her in silver. He let out the deepest sigh. Then he planted a kiss on her forehead. “How do you feel?”

Moire furrowed her brow. “I don’t know.” The sound of a gun going off pierced her from the inside out.

Tarys caressed her cheek. “Our doctors pumped you with anything they could find.”

“Our doctors?”

“It worked. You helped me get in touch with the Commander. He got there just in time to save us.”

Moire nodded. She glanced around her at the room one more time. “So, what is this place?”

“Our space ship.”

Moire gasped, squeezing his arm. “Does this mean you’re taking me to your planet?” Her heart pounded, a nervous sweat sprouting on her forehead. The thought that she could have been taken millions of light years away to a previously undiscovered planet made her feel like she was falling.

Tarys’s face fell. He turned so that he faced the ceiling. “No. My planet has been destroyed.”

Moire’s heart crumpled at the thought. He didn’t have a home. “I’m sorry.”

He bit his lip. “Learning about Kahara was nothing compared to thinking you were dead.”

Moire’s eyes watered. “What are you saying?” She mustered up enough strength to prop herself up on her elbow. She knew better than to ask him to look at her. He struggled at just saying the words.

Finally, just when she thought she had gotten everything out of him, he added, “You were right all along. I love you.”

THE END

Kahara Lords

Book 10

(Can be read as a standalone book)

By: Lindsay Blanc

Bred by the Alien Lord

Prologue

“Shit!” Evelyn cupped her mouth with her right hand, her left clutching the crystal cocktail glass a little too tightly. Women in bars always looked so glamorous in the movies. Yet, as Evelyn smoothed out her corduroy skirt and downed the last of her scotch in one, quick swoop, she couldn’t help but feel more like a drunk fish than a buzzed heroine. She knew she would regret this whole drinking-by-the-bar-alone thing.

She scanned the thin crowd with a smirk on her face, her eyes catching the lithe movements of the men around her, swooping in on this blond, making eyes at that brunette. Moments passed, and yet there she sat, alone with her dark auburn hair and the glasses that were always just a little too thick and a little too big to be considered fashionable.

Her drink was starting to wane but when she glanced at the perky blond with the big tits and the showy glass-flipping skills, she saw the woman darting around, laughing, talking, busy.

Evelyn leaned over the bar and stared even more intently at her. She focused her energy. As a young child, it was always, “I wish you wanted to….” Etcetera, and the subject of her imagination would yield. Now, it was something else. Years of nuance had taught her that wishing someone would do what you want is never the answer.

So Evelyn listened and she waited and she caught it. She could feel Perky’s energy like a wave of cool water. The woman knew what she was doing and felt the support of everyone in the room. So Evelyn planted the small seed of a tiny, yet volatile emotion: doubt. “I’m missing something.”

And, like clockwork, Perky jerked her head around, abandoning her conversation and scanned the bar.

Evelyn made eye contact, a grin of satisfaction stretched across her face.

“Stiff drink.”

Evelyn froze. The last thing she had expected was a voice in her ear. She tried to postpone the act of investigating the owner of the voice as long as possible. Being a Seven, she was used to being propositioned by Fours or lower, and she liked to wallow in the idea of a hot one-night stand.

“What did you expect? A white wine? Cosmopolitan? Mojito?” Thank God that witty comment slipped out before she got a good look at the man who was at least a 9.99.

His strong jaw jutted out, a thick, manly neck holding up a head she could just imagine squeezing between her hands as he pressed his heavy body on top of hers. “God forbid I accuse you of being feminine.”

Evelyn raised an eyebrow, waving the bartender over for another drink. She had just gotten a good look at his eyes. Blue and wide. Deep, like the bottom of a Fiji spring. Heavyset, like a man who has lived a thousand years. Bright, like a child who only eats red M&M’s. “God forbid I am charged with the offense.” She could feel his warm breath on her face, her epithelial cells expanding toward him, beckoning to him.

His plump lips stretched into a crooked smile. “Yes. God forbid. You’d rather die than be mistaken for a woman with a heart.”

“As opposed to a woman without one?”

He gave a quick nod before making eye contact with the perky bartender. “Two more of whatever she had.”

Evelyn bit her lip, moving her hands from the bar top to her lap, not sure what to do with them all of a sudden. She glanced over at the man’s. They were large, his fingers like sausages, but the skin above them soft and tough. Leather. “Top-shelf bourbon?”

He hardly batted an eyelash. “Oh, I see. You don’t need me to buy you a drink.”

Evelyn flexed her jaw. She had always fancied herself unavailable, like a locked journal. Yet, he was making all the advances, wowing her, surprising her. She didn’t like the way he read her.

She swept his body with her gaze, watched the way he sat in his thick, leather jacket. Her eyes were like lasers, grabbing every bit of detail inside that bar, looking for anything to latch onto and use as a spring board for an intelligent comment. But Hobbes and Wollstonecraft had no place in a bar, and for all of his articulate phrases, she doubted he cared. So, she settled with a disappointing, “Are you at university?”

Her next sip of bourbon drowned out his response. She tried her best to look past the seductive way his lips folded around each word that came out of his mouth and actually catch the meaning behind them.

She labored, with her tongue wet from the bitter liquid, to commit his name, Paran, to memory, to come up with a snarky response to his admission of being out of school and out of a job for almost two years now, or even to his declaration of complete dedication to the study of human beings.

A psychologist. She was falling for a psychologist. Her heart thudded from the way his eyes rolled a little out of focus when he wasn’t entirely sure of himself. Her skin burned for the coy excuses he found to place a hand on hers, to fiddle with her blouse, to “fix” her hair.

Goosebumps sprouted on the back of her neck when he placed his hand on her chin. She had only finished half of their first drink together, but suddenly she felt overwhelmed. The blood rushed to her head as he leaned in toward her, his lips dangling toward hers. The inside of the bar, which she had been only too aware of just a couple of moments before, receded to a mere blur in the periphery. The snippets of conversation that tugged at her nerves were dulled by the sensation of his warm breath on her skin.

Their lips touched, as if to fulfil the necessary end to a night of enriching conversation. His tongue jutted into her mouth, the strong muscle commanding the very pulse in her veins. One kiss led to another. One step after another, until he was paying her bill and leading her outside.

Evelyn let her cunt throb for him and her body heat as he pealed layer after layer of her January garb off and discarded it on his plush rug. He lowered her onto the ground, her bare back searching for warmth in the thick carpet.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, her fingers digging into his expansive back. His member dangled onto her belly, the throbbing organ sliding up against her skin as he pressed his body down onto hers.

Evelyn decided not to question it. She stopped looking for the missing link that took his Ten body and made it the Four she was expecting. She stopped seeking out the catastrophic end to this amazing night. She shut her eyes and let him enter her.

It was the best sex she had ever had.

Chapter One

Nine Years Later

Evelyn watched her meeting room fill up with college juniors. Metaphysics. One after another, the hip bodies took themselves from the door to the conference table, dropping their Herschel bags on the carpet next to their chairs, slipping their Apple phones and their MacBooks out, depositing the readings she knew they would have only skimmed on the table in front of them.

She glanced down at her own stack of books as she slipped her phone out of her back pocket. It was her third recitation that morning. Two agonizing, hour-long, one-sided conversations about Aristotle. He was basic, elementary. If anything, it should have been a leisurely discussion they could have all accomplished in their sleep.

Evelyn had been out of the game for almost half a decade. Now here she was, in her second year as a professor of politics, hating herself and everything around her, except for the thesis that was her motivation and her son, who remained convinced that she was the best thing to ever happen to the universe.

A lazy smile managed to find a place on her face as her mind wandered. She checked her phone again. Two minutes left. A sigh slipped from her lips. She couldn’t stand these moments of waiting when time held her hostage. Her mind would wander and she would daydream, and those daydreams would slip to reveal the memories they masked.

But those eyes never faded. She remembered falling into them that night, with the taste of bourbon in her mouth and his, and again the next morning with the sun streaming through the window of his apartment.

“Come with me.”

Her heart raced. In a lifetime of feeling just short of fitting in and of draining herself so that she could hide her abilities, even from a father who believed in, no,
expected
them, she had never felt more accepted and terrified all at once. “Can you be any more cliché?” She had laughed about it.

But Paran barely cracked a smile because it was a serious matter. “I don’t care how it sounds. I want you.”

I want you.

Those words hung in her head and, although it made no sense, she knew she felt it to. “How can you know that?”

She remembered it clearly: He ran his hand through her hair like he had done it a million times in the past even though they had only entered the twelfth hour of knowing each other. “Your father never told you about the bonde?”

She had scoffed. “Like I would believe a fairytale like that.”

A knowing smile. “Not a fairytale. A prediction.”

“How prophetic.”

“We’re compatible biologically, which means emotionally and physically. One day, we won’t know how to exist without each other.”

Evelyn’s own parents were evidence that this could happen, but fundamentally, she couldn’t reconcile it. It was hard enough teaching herself to be normal with her weird mind abilities and her supposedly alien father. Now, she couldn’t be just an auxiliary actor, an accessory to true Kaharan that was her father. Now, she had the face Kahara herself.

Alien.

Such an ugly word.

Evelyn snuck out while Paran showered just an hour later and felt slimy about it. She threw her mind into her studies and stayed away from that bar, truly believing that she could run from this, but she didn’t bleed for nearly six weeks.

A pregnancy test.

Evelyn gave her eyes a squeeze, but it was too late. The memory was already behind her eyes. Nearly eight and a half years ago, she sat atop a toilet seat with her black lace panties around her ankles and her flip phone sitting open, the timer at three seconds. By the time it went off, she was already looking at the test.

Lines. Dots. Plus sign. Minus sign. She used all kinds and they all told her she had a little person rolling around in her belly, a little person whose father she had only ever seen once in her life. Her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach, sweat sprouting out of the pores on her forehead. Fatigue gripped her eyes, the red balls burning in their sockets, leaking salty liquid down her cheeks.

2006. She had choices. And yet, somehow, it didn’t feel like it. With two parents who were now making more money than they knew how to spend, she knew they would help her. But her father would insist on finding Paran and he would use everything in his power to make sure he succeeded in this. She made herself a deal. If she could justify it to herself—something beyond “I’m not ready,” something besides “I don’t want it”—if she could find a reason, she would get rid of it.

Of course she couldn’t. She had the money. She had the means.

And she hardly wanted to. This was a consequence of her night with Paran. And now that it had been deposited inside her, she didn’t want to get rid of it. That night stood out in the memory of her life like a sore thumb. He was unreal, a prince that the universe had concocted out of her wildest dreams. And now she would have a living talisman of it for the rest of her life. One that would love her and ground her, one that could fill the hole in her chest she would sooner pretend wasn’t even there.

By the time the last student on her roster settled into their place, her heart fluttered with the same excitement she had felt just ten years ago.

Her class ended quicker than she thought it would, and before she knew it, she was sitting outside of one of the best private schools in the country, watching the stream of little children pour out of the doors and scanning the crowd for the little ones.

There he was, little Pelyn. At eight years old, he had already found his perpetual smirk. He had a twinkle in his blue eyes that reminded her so much of his father, and the cut of his cheeks would eventually grow into a bone structure that could stop traffic.

Evelyn hated how much she admired her own son. It made her feel inadequate, dependent, and vulnerable.

“You got the stuff?” he asked as soon as he climbed into the backseat of her Volvo. He jutted his thin arm out toward her, his long fingers extended to their full length.

Evelyn smirked, glancing up at him through the rearview mirror as she pulled out of the car-rider lane. “Not until you give me the deets.” Her smile grew wider at the sound of his groan.

“We talked about families today.”

Evelyn clenched her jaw, her hands tightening their grip on the steering wheel, because she knew what would come next. She wouldn’t dare check back in the rearview mirror to find her son gazing back at her with eyes so sharp they could see right through her.

“Oh did you?” Her voice shook. Her head throbbed. Eight whole years and she had managed to avoid the question.

“Mom?” He sounded nervous but resolved. Always ”but resolved.” No matter what he did, he was resolved. The little boy had more volition, more security in his own actions than she did in her entire life.

“I have to write a story about family, and I have to draw a picture.”

“That sounds interesting…” Her heart fluttered in her chest. She internally kicked herself. Why hadn’t she thought longer and harder about this moment? Why hadn’t she worked through each and every possible approach, prepared for everything, devised an exit strategy? Now all she could do was await execution.

“Can you find Daddy?”

She clenched her jaw to stop herself from stomping on the breaks.

“I need to write the story.”

Evelyn wanted to scream, if she ever found Paran, if
he
ever found
her
,  she didn’t know what she’d do, didn’t know if she had the strength to deny him herself, deny his request that she leave everything behind.

She had his child, and that gave him claim, which was why she could never let Pelyn go looking for him. She had to make sure he acted as normal as possible and in doing that, she forced herself to forget her powers. . Because if he found her, she would lose all control of herself. She would be gone.

“Well, can’t you do it without him?”

But he was already frowning. “I guess.”

It was halfhearted.

Evelyn pulled into the driveway of their town home and cut the engine. “What’s wrong?” She didn’t want to look back and see his face.

“I just don’t want to.”

Evelyn had always known she hadn’t made the right decision in running and hiding. But in all of those years of ruminating on her mistakes, she hadn’t quite figured out what the right answer was.