Guardian Read online

  That was what was so sexy about him the first time she’d spotted him that had made everything in her that was female respond with mating pheromones—powerful self-confidence and a build and way of moving that underscored that belief with a profound ‘yes its true’.

  And yet the next time she’d seen him he’d been dressed like and moving like a very bad imitation of a dork she remembered from an old tv show.

  And the time after that like a tough guy from a fifty’s tv show … rerun. Maybe the sixty’s?

  Which persona was the real Jarrod?

  Or were any of them?

  Who was he? And why was he trying so hard to fit in? And failing so dismally.

  It was almost like he was completely unfamiliar with American culture.

  But, despite the accent, he didn’t sound like a foreigner.

  It was weird. It was just really, really bizarre and she didn’t think it was just her imagination because she was so fond of mystery—suspense, romance and—well books.

  She found she really couldn’t focus on trying to untangle the mystery, though, with the exciting encounter so fresh in her mind.

  Mentally smacking herself every time she found her mind wandering down a path toward dreamy—hot, sweaty—scenarios with her neighbor—the real kook of the piece, she told herself, she finally managed to get a grip.

  Yes, gorgeous, but very weird—Don’t forget that!

  She didn’t forget. She just kept dismissing it.

  Eventually, when she turned her attention to preparing a meal, the mundane task helped to steady her enough that she began to actually analyze her impressions from the collision she’d had with her neighbor, Gorgeous Jarrod.

  One thing immediately jumped out at her.

  She’d knocked his sunglasses askew and gotten her first glimpse of his eyes.

  And they weren’t human.

  * * * *

  Guardian for the Galactic Alliance—Earth Division, Jarowd el-Karaket, settled in his favorite chair and stared at the electronic box the Earth people called TV. The screen was black—because it wasn’t powered up—but he had other things on his mind besides watching the educational vids, however much he generally enjoyed that part of his job.

  Specifically Marilyn.

  He tried the name on his tongue several times until he was satisfied he was pronouncing it as she had.

  Of course, he was a cop—to use Earth vernacular—and he had tracked down her name as soon as he had gotten a good look at her. But he had not known how it was pronounced.

  Dissatisfaction began to filter through him as he replayed the incident in his mind that he had contrived when he had spotted her crossing the street toward him and seen that she was too deeply in thought to have noticed him.

  He still could not believe that it had gone down so precisely as he had envisioned that it was almost as if it was predestined. She had not only plowed right into him, she had lost her equilibrium and fell into his arms.

  She smelled … like something he wanted to chew on and lick all over. She felt soft in all the right places.

  She was … amusing and adorable when she was rattled.

  He liked that. Brains, beauty, a body to kill for, and warm and sweet.

  But totally unsophisticated.

  Innocent, he realized with a touch of amazement.

  She had a suspicious mind to go along with those brains, though, unless he was mistaken in his evaluation and he rarely was.

  The sneaking suspicion that he had aroused her suspicions—instead of sexually arousing her, which was what he really wanted to do—had grown since their encounter. He would have liked to think she was so nervous because she was so attracted to him, but he was not in to self deception. She might be. He thought there was interest in her eyes when she looked at him, but that did not account for her acute distress, he was convinced.

  Not that he had had much in the way of close interactions with the natives to completely trust his judgment. He did not need his superiors to tell him that could be very dangerous in a lot of ways.

  First and foremost because Earth people had no clue of their existence and it was deemed imperative to keep it that way since the Earth people were still very closely tied to their instincts—And those instincts inspired them to kill anything they found strange, unusual, and potentially threatening.

  And alien beings, no matter how advanced the civilization they hailed from, fell into that category.

  Secondly, they had to be able to move witnesses fast and place them in a safe place and they could not afford to get bogged down in the strangling politics of this world—and it was a stupefying tangle. He did not know how they could figure it out. His people could not.

  It was not his job, in any case, to form any sort of associations with the natives. His mission was secret. His mission was to see to it that the witnesses under the protection of the Galactic Alliance were seamlessly absorbed into the population to prevent them from being tracked down and killed before they could testify against whatever culprit they had helped to tie to a high crime.

  Granted, he had been thoroughly pissed off when he had not only been grounded over what he knew to be a righteous kill, but he had been banished to live among some pretty damned strange aliens—even if they did look a lot like them. And on top of that, he had been charged with ‘babysitting’.

  Marilyn had gone a long way toward reconciling him to his fate—punishment. At least enough that he had come to see that the place actually had a lot of potential and the job was almost as rewarding as being in the field catching bad guys.

  It was still babysitting.

  But it was rewarding when he managed to integrate a new citizen or family, and it was still his job to make sure they behaved themselves and followed the laws of the land. If they didn’t, and they ran, he had to track them down and they were either relocated or sent back to the home world to face charges.

  So really, he was doing his old job and just had a new job added on top of it and that seemed more like an atta boy for a job well done than punishment for a job fucked up.

  Which it actually was, however he preferred to look at it.

  But he knew he had been lucky and he did not want to push it. If he fucked this up he was going to get bumped down from detective/babysitter to desk jockey. And he was too damned young to give up his career this early in the game.

  Besides which, he would have to leave Marilyn—possibly before he had even had the chance to get to know her as thoroughly as he wanted to.

  The question was, he supposed, was it totally reasonable and imperative to get closer to see just how much she’d figured out?

  Or was that playing into his own desires to get closer and would it turn out to be a mantrap he had set for himself?

  Chapter Four

  Shaking his unaccustomed confusion after a little while, Jarowd powered up TV and used the TV flipper stick to search through available documents until he found one that appealed to him. It was a historical document from the quality of the piece, but seemed to suggest it was a future document. It was called Escape the Great City, though, and it was a cops and criminal piece regarding a giant prison.

  More importantly, he immediately identified with the main character who almost seemed to have been modeled after him—super tough cop who had been wrongly convicted of a crime and imprisoned.

  That was why he felt so at home on this alien world.

  Because it was so similar in so many ways to his home world.

  And he could understand the aliens, or thought he could, because they had so much in common.

  As deeply engrossed as he was, when the piece broke away from the main story so that they could try to sell something to him, he got up and retrieved the object he had palmed from pretty lady’s bag, turning it over several times before he crossed the room and placed it inside the object transporter. When he had sealed the door, he keyed in the coordinates and shot it off to be studied.

  He had no idea what i
t was, but it did not seem to belong with the other objects she carried around and he had thought it worth palming it to check it out.

  Which he still thought was a good idea. Not so good, he was fairly certain Marilyn had noticed it was missing and that was what she had been hunting along the foot walk.

  So much for thinking he might slip it back to her without her noticing once he had had it analyzed.

  * * * *

  “You’re losing it,” Marilyn muttered. “Totally losing it.”

  She’d only gotten a glimpse, she told herself, wondering why she’d instantly jumped to the conclusion that his eyes were alien.

  She might have just imagined it.

  She spent most of her days marveling over how strange he seemed to be.

  She supposed that might have been what inspired the notion that he was an alien, but why think that instead of assuming it was just another indication of how peculiar the guy was? He was probably just wearing some of those weird contacts they made for people for dress up.

  And he certainly had given her the impression that he was ‘in’ to dress up.

  Maybe he was an actor, she thought with sudden enlightenment?

  That would certainly explain what seemed to be costume changes and character adaptations!

  Or an aspiring actor?

  Or an internet celebrity wannabe?

  “Oh my god! That’s it!”

  She chuckled at herself, feeling like an idiot.

  She should have thought about that!

  But the truth was she just never had put everything together. She’d just picked up little things here and there and she was usually so bowled over when she saw him she had a hard time walking, let alone thinking.

  That possibility would also explain why he never seemed to work, but he never seemed to need money. He was making money online … doing something.

  She felt really bad now that she’d talked to the cops.

  What did it say about her that she’d immediately jumped to the conclusion that he was up to something evil?

  She’d just gotten too jaded by people from the internet and watching the news.

  It made her sad to think she had used to have such a positive view of her fellow Americans—humans—and she’d lost that belief in the basic goodness of people.

  Was she just glossing over everything, though, because she wanted to believe good things about him now that she’d felt him up all over and she was more addicted to him not less, she thought sometime later as she lay down and composed herself for sleep? She didn’t get any further because that only occurred to her just before she fell off the cliff into deep slumber.

  * * * *

  Jarowd’s expression was grim as he studied the analysis report he had just gotten from the lab.

  The almost innocent looking object he had filched from Marilyn’s purse was a weapon.

  Deleting the report, he jolted up from his chair and paced his apartment.

  He supposed that answered the lingering question in his mind about his pretty lady’s suspicions. She was suspicious alright and nervous because she was scared shitless.

  “Gods damn it to hell!” Jarowd growled. “Now what?”

  He knew what.

  He was going to have to steer clear of the lust of his life.

  He was going to have to move his entire operation.

  Except he had an entire family coming in.

  “Shit! Hell, damn it! Fuck!”

  Well, there was no hope for it. He had to stay put until he got the new group situated.

  He checked his chrono and saw he had a few hours before the new group was due to arrive, though, and decided he was going to have to use the time to check out possible relocation sights.

  It totally pissed him off.

  Beyond the fact that he liked being close his lady so he could keep an eye on her and enjoy the view, it was a real pain in the ass to maneuver in the human society.

  He had had to enter a contract to get the hab he had and he had had to go through all kinds of shit just to make the contract.

  Of course, the need to create all the proper paperwork for his existence had been there anyway, but all that background stuff had taken a lot of time and effort to fake and he was pretty sure he was going to have to start from scratch or there would be no point in relocating.

  He used every ‘bad word’ he had gleaned from the human languages—several of them because he’d found he was fond of them—under his breath as he locked up and left to do a search.

  * * * *

  With time and distance—contempt, Marilyn thought wryly. Or clarity, anyway.

  She’d slept on it and woken with a far more clear mind and the certainty that pretty much everything she’d concluded the day before was the result of overtaxed hormones frying her brain.

  Jarrod might be playing the part of an aspiring actor, she decided, and that did seem to fit what she’d noticed, but she thought that was his cover.

  She hoped she was wrong. She’d be lying to herself if she refused to acknowledge that, but she also didn’t want to just accept that when something had triggered an alarm about the hunky guy.

  Call it intuition. Call it ‘the sight’. Call it instinct, but she still felt like there was a lot more to the guy than anybody else had noticed.

  But she had to accept that the cops just weren’t going to pay her instincts any attention.

  By the time she got to work the following day, she’d decided she was just going to have to take matters into her own hands.

  Obviously the cops aren’t going to take her seriously unless she had some sort of evidence to present to them. But as resentful as she was that she was going to have to do their job for them, as scary as the prospect was of playing amateur detective, she wasn’t stupid enough to do anything that was actually dangerous. She’s just going to keep her eyes and ears open, watch and wait and report when she had what she needed.

  Then maybe the dicks could do their j-o-b.

  With that in mind, when she got off work she headed downtown to a thrift store to look for a jogging suit. She had decided to take up jogging even though she usually just did a short workout routine in her apartment to stay in shape because she thought, hoped, it would give her more opportunities to watch her neighbor—not because she had any intention of following him. She might see something useful if she was out jogging. It wasn’t at all likely that she was going to if she stayed safely cooped up in her apartment.

  The remote possibility that she might find herself in the middle of something dangerous, though, prompted her to look for a few things for self-protection—a whistle and a taser and bear spray to replace her lost canister of pepper spray—because she decided she didn’t want to have to get close to a potential assailant if she could help it.

  She worked out regularly. She was convinced she was in great shape, but she was a woman and women just weren’t as strong as men.

  She damned well didn’t want to test it!

  * * * *

  It was amazing, Marilyn reflected, how much better she felt just to have weapons close to hand! She’d always avoided anything that had to do with violence—even to self protection. Deep down, she knew cops were only there to ‘keep the peace’ by investigating crimes and hunting down the person who had committed it. They couldn’t arrest anyone who hadn’t committed a crime and that meant she was on her own, most likely, if she was in the middle of danger. The cops couldn’t get there fast enough to prevent something from happening to her. They would come in afterwards to investigate who’d assaulted her or killed her.

  It was terrifying to think of having to defend herself from something besides harsh words—which she actually never had been terribly good at. But it was empowering to think she had a better chance of survival because she had a way to fend off terrible things.

  She felt great about it all the way home, buoyed by the fact that she’d taken a bold, active role, taken steps to defend herself, and she was able to consider wa
ys she might find the evidence she needed to find without feeling like she might poop herself.

  She felt great right up until she neared the second floor and Jarrod stepped into view.

  She looked up instinctively when she caught a glimpse of movement, gaped in horror when she saw it was Jarrod, and clutched her bag full of weapons to her chest.

  Unfortunately, she was so distracted she hung her toe on the tread of the last step and tripped, slinging her bag full of weapons across the hall as she tried, instinctively, to catch herself before she could face plant on the floor.

  Jarrod was fast, but she was short and a step below him. He made a grab for her as she flew toward the floor and only managed to grab clothing.

  Which did not prevent her from smacking into the floor hard enough she bounced when she struck.

  It rattled her brains. It threw her into a state of shock so profound she couldn’t figure out what had happened just at first or what to do about the pain that was beginning to filter through her.

  Jarrod stooped over, shoved his hands beneath her and lifted her off the floor …. By her breasts.

  It just went to show how rattled Marilyn was that he’d hauled her all the way up before she realized he had a hand on each boob.

  He seemed to realize it at the same time. He let go and grabbed her shoulders to steady her. “You ok?”

  Marilyn looked at him hazily, trying to figure out where she hurt and how bad it was.

  Her shin hurt like hell and so did the toes she’d driven into the step.

  She really, really just wanted to go in her apartment and hide to die.

  “You dropped your stuff.”

  That comment was enough to bring her mind back to those moments when she was trying to save herself and had flung her arms out.

  She turned her head with an effort and discovered she’d thrown the damn bag against the wall everything that had been in it was strewn across the hallway. Her eyes nearly bulged from their sockets.

  Shoving away from him, she fought for dominance, trying to get to her purchases and shove them into the broken bag before he could pick them up and study them.