Alien Touch Read online

  Not that he was willing to admit it.

  Yes. We are mates, he responded somewhat belligerently.

  We are all mates, Luki pointedly out tightly.

  Of course. I just got the impression she didn’t link with you.

  Luki and Serge both sent him narrow eyed looks of resentment.

  I heard her question, Serge volunteered.

  Which was? Alaric prompted.

  What?

  That is what I am asking you.

  Serge looked uncomfortable. I’ve forgotten now.

  She was wondering if we were in here, Luki said challengingly.

  Alaric narrowed his eyes. She couldn’t tell that from the yelling?

  Luki surged to his feet. You are saying that I am lying?

  Alaric studied him for a long moment, highly tempted to take him up on the offer of violence purely for the relief of tension.

  But then that made Amber uneasy.

  She was a brave little thing, but she was also intelligent, and she would know that three brawling warriors could mean a lot of damage even if there was no intention of real harm.

  You will frighten our bride, he said pointedly and then dismissed Luki altogether. “Why come?”

  Amber looked disconcerted.

  “Need some ting?” Alaric tried again, searching his memory for anything he might have picked up of her language that could be helpful. “Sweet pea.”

  Stunned surprise washed over Amber in a tidal wave when he said that, and then a knot of emotion swelled in her throat. No one had ever called her that except her grandmother.

  How could he know?

  He certainly hadn’t guessed because it was clear he knew no English except what he’d picked up from her.

  Which made her wonder if she’d been completely wrong about them having been to Earth.

  “I’m … not allowed on the bridge?” she asked after a moment.

  Alaric stared at her, trying to interpret.

  She thinks she isn’t welcome here, Serge said.

  What would make her think that? Luki demanded irritably.

  Serge shrugged and then smiled at her a little shyly. “Welcome bride.”

  Amber blinked at him, feeling her jaw slide to half mast in stunned and not particularly delighted surprise. “What?”

  Serge frowned uneasily. “Welcome?”

  He’d said bride before and she wondered if it was just an unfortunate choice of random word or if he’d actually meant something by it.

  Not that she would’ve thought so if Alaric hadn’t already dubbed her bed the Furian mating bed. But would they understand that bride meant that in English?

  Was that what they thought had just happened, she wondered abruptly, feeling more than a little faint?

  She might have retreated to consider the situation, but Alaric surged from his seat and strode toward her, scooped her up and carried her to a seat where he settled her and tenderly tied her down to it. “Safe dis.”

  Amber gaped at him. “Are we going to do another wormhole?” she asked uneasily.

  He frowned in confusion.

  She made the same gesture he’d made before, forming a circle with thumb and forefinger and poking through it with the index of the other hand. “Hole ting?”

  He chuckled and then pretended he’d coughed.

  Luki and Serge snickered.

  She wasn’t in the mood to appreciate their sense of humor. She glared at them.

  Alaric laughed out loud at that. “Bad temper woman,” he said appreciatively, giving her a look of love that made her feel warm all over.

  “Need make happy,” Luki seconded, nodding and making the sign of the wormhole again.

  “Very funny,” Amber said irritably, crossing her arms over her chest and deliberately snubbing them by staring toward the nearest viewing port.

  If she hadn’t been so angry, she might have noticed sooner that they appeared to be moving, but the signs of it were so subtle it was possible it would still have taken a while to notice.

  They were in deep space, after all, with no ‘landmarks’ close enough to shift positions in her view and, despite the artificial gravity on the ship, there wasn’t actually any appreciable gravity pulling at them to create the sensation of motion.

  Moreover, once she’d emerged from her self-absorption, she realized that, despite the joking around with her, the guys seemed a little tense.

  It didn’t make sense that they’d be uneasy about jumping through a wormhole—even if that was what had made her uneasy.

  They must do it fairly often.

  She didn’t know that, of course. She just knew they’d jumped through one when they’d taken her from her home solar system.

  Which meant they’d made the jump to get there in the first place.

  And there would be no going back without making another jump.

  They had to be light years from Earth.

  In point of fact, even though it was colliding with the Milky Way Galaxy and moving closer, Andromeda was the next closest Galaxy and it was around four light years away.

  It wasn’t something she wanted to think about, but as soon as it entered her mind it prompted a whole slew of things she hadn’t considered before.

  Well, none of them had actually mattered before.

  Things had gotten a good bit more complicated than they’d been when they’d taken her. There was every reason, then, to be completely focused on getting home.

  Except she actually hadn’t been, she realized.

  Well, sort of.

  The lure of a galactic adventure had beckoned pretty hard on the heels of discovering they really didn’t mean her any harm.

  As soon as she’d gotten past the bulk of her uneasiness, she’d seen opportunity—the kind that usually didn’t even come around once in a lifetime.

  She’d told herself that she was just being reasonable and that she had to be careful not to rock the boat by being difficult if she wanted to survive.

  But the truth was, as scared as she was, she was also so drawn to the possibility of seeing space in a way she never could have without them that she’d closed her mind to dire possibilities. She’d focused on Alaric’s promise to take her home when they knew where to take her and let go of the bulk of her anxieties.

  Well, the trip through the wormhole had, almost literally, scared the crap out of her. Really, there’d been no physical duress to it. She couldn’t even feel movement.

  But she’d known she was in a hole and she’d expected it to close in and crush the ship and them with it at any moment.

  She supposed it was like a wild carnival ride in a sense—something used regularly that seemed safe, and should be, and yet it still had that element of danger that something could go terribly wrong any second.

  She definitely didn’t look forward to experiencing that again.

  Which wasn’t actually the main reason she was in no particular hurry to get back now that she’d settled in.

  As little as she liked to acknowledge it, she realized she was becoming very attached to the crazy aliens who’d rescued her.

  She thought it might all be in her head.

  Well, she was chemically attracted to them, too. There was no denying that when they’d had no trouble at all convincing her to do a ménage with them!

  Physically also—in the form she was getting used to.

  Scary when they were in beast form, but hot in this form.

  On a mental level?

  She shook her head at herself. Their communications were spotty at best. She had a mental image of their personalities that she had no clue whether real or not. It could be entirely made up—by her—using a ruler that didn’t apply to them—the human ruler.

  But she felt like she had a grasp of their personalities, a real understanding of them as beings if not human beings.

  Alaric was the leader, the alpha of the group. He made all of the decisi
ons.

  But he was kind and he was fair minded and actually pretty easygoing much of the time.

  Luki wanted to be the alpha and challenged Alaric at pretty much ever turn—which was where Alaric’s patience/easy going nature came in.

  Serge was a little dumb and a lot shy, but he seemed really sweet and there was no getting around the fact that he was cute.

  She’d actually seen what they did to the aliens that had captured her and she hadn’t been able to unsee it.

  She had been able to compartmentalize it, though.

  They’d been in beast form.

  She didn’t think for a minute that they had beast minds at that time to go with the form. She thought they were perfectly capable of making rational decisions.

  But she also felt like the bastards had had it coming.

  She wasn’t certain why. Maybe it was just because she’d felt like killing them for pulling her out of orbit and threatening her life.

  She didn’t think she’d incorrectly assessed the situation, though, prejudiced by her own situation or not.

  And then it occurred to her like a bolt from the blue that Alaric had suggested they were going through a wormhole and she’d been struggling to tell him that the lava lamp was proof they’d been to Earth just before …. Well, the ménage thing.

  Dismay filled her, so much that there was no room for doubt as to why she felt it.

  She wasn’t ready to end her adventure and go home.

  She wasn’t ready to accept the guys walking out of her life as abruptly and with finality as they’d entered her sphere.

  “Going home?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.

  Alaric whipped a sharp glance at her. She felt a little fluttering sensation in her head and then nothing.

  He glanced at the other two for many long moments, long enough she was sure they were discussing something.

  “Base,” Alaric said finally. “No home.”

  “Oh!” Amber gasped, relieved. “What are we going there for?”

  Again the guys seemed to discuss the question.

  “Gathering ob de clans.”

  “Really?” Amber gasped, torn between the thrill of discovery—getting to see an alien ceremony—and absolute terror at the thought of being in the midst of a lot more of them.

  She wondered if that was anything like what the white people had felt when they were ‘invited’ to join the natives.

  “No be scared,” Alaric added, his tone carefully soothing.

  It was enough to set off full blown panic, but he’d thoughtfully secured her to her chair and she only managed to grip the chair arms frantically when she saw the wormhole taking form beyond the viewing windows as the shutters closed.

  There was no sensation of movement any more than before.

  The difference was the damned ship sounded like an aluminum can someone was slowly crushing.

  “Oh my god!” Amber muttered.

  She closed her eyes then, wondering if she should just lean over and kiss her ass goodbye or if she might try prayer.

  Not that she believed in anything so silly, but it was something to focus on.

  Sort of.

  All she could actually think of was ‘please, please’.

  It seemed to take an eternity.

  The damned ancient thing they were traveling in screamed and groaned and made all sorts of scary noises.

  Weird how she hadn’t thought of the ship as being old until then.

  Even weirder to think of it being ancient when it was so far advanced to human technology.

  When all the groaning and moaning finally stopped the sudden silence was almost scarier. Fortunately, before she could have a heart attack, she heard the whir that told her the shutters were opening again and she managed to unclench her eyes long enough to verify that was what she’d heard.

  And the shutters opened to reveal a site that nearly made her heart stop.

  She could see a star nursery in the distance.

  It was the most awesome thing she’d ever seen with her own eyes.

  She almost felt like she needed to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

  She just hoped it was far enough away they wouldn’t get sucked in by the intense gravity!

  * * * *

  Alaric was alarmed when they emerged from the wormhole almost on top of the star nursery. What was worse was the fact that the bucket of bolts they were currently flying was as sluggish in responding to the turn as it had been to get up to speed.

  They managed it—by the skin of their teeth—but Alaric felt downright faint by the time they were out of danger.

  Fortunately, Amber didn’t seem to realize there had been danger.

  He supposed they might have avoided death, if that had been a strong possibility, by time walking.

  Theoretically, they could have done so with Amber.

  But he damned well did not want to put it to the test.

  Especially when it was possible if not probable that she was carrying their young.

  Well, perhaps probable.

  They had certainly had plenty of seed stored for use, he thought dryly.

  He frowned at that thought, though, wondering abruptly if Luki and Serge had been saving their seed.

  It had certainly been a long, dry spell since they had spilled it inside a female of any kind, but he could not be a hundred percent certain they had contained their impulse to please themselves.

  He shook the thought.

  He was alpha and while it was a known fact that a triad had to perform together and combine their seed in order to produce the next triad, as the dominant male it was his seed that was most important and he had damned well had a backup.

  He thought they could safely count on having claimed her with their seed.

  It made him far more cheerful about the gathering.

  Whatever the purpose of it, they would have the chance to introduce their mate so that she could be accepted by the others as a clan member.

  “What the fuck was that?” Luki growled. “I thought I would shit my pants when we came out of the wormhole almost on top of that nebula!”

  “It is not my fault!” Serge immediately exclaimed. “I did the calculations correctly! This old beast would not respond to the commands quickly enough.”

  “So—you are saying that your calculations were not at fault?” Alaric said dryly.

  Serge gaped at him in dismay. “I checked them four times before the jump.”

  “We may need to capture a newer, better mother ship,” Alaric responded without heat. “This one has been useful, but it is past that if we cannot rely on a timely response to commands.”

  Luki frowned. “We will continue to raid, then?”

  Alaric looked at him in surprise. “You have not forgotten that we had reason to believe there was a Basinini stronghold in that system, have you? We cannot leave a nest of the bastards to breed more.”

  “But … we will be fathers now,” Serge said with a mixture of dismay and hopefulness.

  The comment hit Alaric like a bomb. He felt a wave of dizziness as the blood rushed from his head. “Fathers,” he echoed through frozen vocal chords, struggling to jumpstart his brain functions.

  He could not seem to get past that one word, though, and he finally realized that it had thrown him so completely because it threw him back to the time when the fathers had died.

  He’d never thought of himself as a father, never thought he would be one.

  He hadn’t actually been thinking, he realized, beyond claiming Amber because he desperately wanted her, couldn’t bear to think of a life empty of her presence now that he’d found her.

  He managed a shaky chuckle. “I guess I hadn’t really considered that this changes everything. It’s been so long ….” He turned to study Amber thoughtfully.

  When he did, Luki and Serge also turned to study her.

  Amber g
aped at them when she discovered she had their undivided attention. “What?”

  Alaric had already opened his mouth to try to explain when it dawned on him that everything wasn’t settled.

  He considered that it was, but they’d settled nothing with Amber.

  They hadn’t even gotten her consent to impregnate her.

  Not inarguably, anyway.

  She was no child. In point of fact, he suspected she was not ignorant of a man’s touch as a young Furian bride generally was—would have been.

  She had been willing. He was pretty certain she had thoroughly enjoyed it, and she was intelligent enough and experienced enough to understand the potential results of their intercourse.

  They just hadn’t discussed making a family.

  And that meant she hadn’t actually voted in the positive—which she could and probably would argue.

  Especially since she had not stopped asking when they would take her home.

  Not that she harped upon it constantly, but she also hadn’t given up the notion and accepted them as her future.

  They would have to convince her and he still had no clear idea of how they would bring that about.

  He could not say that she had shown any particular interest in the gifts they had displayed for her—beyond the strange thing she had called a lava lamp. But even then it didn’t seem to be the lamp itself but rather memories attached to it—of her native home.

  With the best will in the world he simply could not imagine that she was going to be so thrilled when she saw home base that she would give up the idea of returning home straight away and embrace the new life they were offering with joy.

  She might be thrilled when she realized she was breeding, but he did not think they could count on that.

  Chapter Ten

  Alaric took his offer of teaching Amber her way around their kitchen a lot more seriously than she’d expected. In point of fact, she quickly began to suspect this wasn’t just a ploy to spend more time with her in a more intimate setting—although it had crossed her mind and that had actually appealed to her.

  Learning how to make alien dishes with alien kitchen technology and alien ingredients didn’t especially appeal because it seemed like way too much effort for a return that would end up being useless to her.

  At least, she’d seen it that way.