Alien Touch Read online

  Where were all the others, she wondered when she’d made use of the facilities and headed back to what she supposed must be her quarters?

  Their people?

  She couldn’t accept the possibility that there were no others, but what else could she think when there weren’t any others on the ship and Alaric had said they had no home world?

  And what might have happened to their home world, if she hadn’t misunderstood and that was true?

  She wanted to know.

  She told herself that it was crucial to understand everything about them—especially how to communicate—for her survival. True, she didn’t actually feel threatened by them. They hadn’t done anything to make her feel the least bit threatened. In point of fact, just the opposite. They’d respected her ‘space’ and kept their distance. Even though they’d been determined to save her and had hauled her out of the capsule, alien ship, and shoved her into their hold she’d finally realized that all of that was necessary, as far as they were concerned, to protect her. Otherwise, they’d kept their hands off of her and kept their distance.

  Of course, that might have been their quirk—not something they consciously did to make her feel comfortable.

  It didn’t actually take a lot of thought to come up with a possible explanation for it.

  If their world had been destroyed and most of the people with it, then they had no one to interact with but each other. That would either make them distant or it would make them turn to one another for comfort—and she hadn’t seen anything to suggest the latter beyond a certain brotherly sort of interaction.

  She thought that might also account for the shortness of their temper with each other—they’d been together and separated from everyone else long enough to get on each other’s nerves.

  She couldn’t ask them, though, she realized.

  Even if she was able to talk to them or learned how, that wasn’t a subject she could broach.

  They would tell her if they wanted to and not if they didn’t want to talk about it.

  And she would just have to respect that however much it might eat at her curiosity to know.

  It made her really sad for them to think it might have happened, though.

  She’d felt isolated and alone after losing her grandmother, but she’d still been surrounded by people.

  * * * *

  “I have given some thought to our courtship of Amber,” Alaric announced.

  “We are courting Amber?” Serge asked with an obvious mixture of surprise and pleasure.

  Irritation flickered through Alaric. “I understood that we had agreed that she would suit.”

  Luki stared at him for a long moment and then looked at Serge questioningly. Serge beamed at him.

  Annoyed, Luki shook his head and returned his attention to Alaric. “I did not know that it was settled,” he responded finally.

  “Well, we had settled that we would,” Alaric said pointedly, “but I did not have it settled in my mind how we would go about it. We are … handicapped. We do not know what her customs are and we certainly cannot ask her to explain them.”

  “Exactly!” Luki agreed. “And then there is the little problem that we had told her not to worry that we would take her home. So I don’t see that we have time to figure it out.”

  Alaric’s lips tightened. “If you would shut up I would explain,” he growled.

  Luki glared, but he folded his lips.

  “She is not Furian, of course, and even if she was we would have difficulty with our own customs …. But she is a female, clearly, and they would all have certain things in common.”

  “Yes!” Serge said, nodding wisely. “She will have a nice little hole for our tangs!”

  Try as he might, Alaric could not prevent the comment from affecting him. As casually as he could, he lifted one leg and crossed it over the other to hide his erection. He’d had no problem, at first, naturally enough because he had not realized Amber was a beautiful female beneath that bizarre thing she was wearing. Since then, however, he had thought of very little else and it was wreaking havoc with his thought processes.

  “We are discussing courting, you moron!” Luki growled.

  Fortunately, Serge was too shocked by the comment to take exception to the insult. He stared at Luki blankly for a long moment. “This is about fucking, yes?”

  Alaric rolled his eyes. “We must convince her to allow that first,” he said tightly. “Of course that is part of it—and clearly the most important, to you, at least, but she would not look at it the same way. And if we allow her to think we are only interested in fucking, and not mating, then she will reject us out of hand.”

  “Oh!” Serge exclaimed. “How are we going to do that?”

  “I am still trying to get to that,” Alaric said dryly.

  Serge took the hint and subsided.

  “As I was trying to say—we don’t know her customs, but she is female and the objective is to mate so I feel like we have basically the same situation. Our customs are designed to convince the female that we will be good mates—that we are strong warriors capable of protecting, good hunters capable of providing, and that we will cherish them and our young. We must convince Amber that we can provide a very good nest for her to fill for us.”

  Serge gaped at him when he was done and there was something about his expression that told Alaric he hadn’t entirely grasped the concept.

  “What would she do with a nest? You think she nests?”

  Luki rolled his eyes. “Not literally, numb-nuts!” he growled.

  Serge punched him that time, square on the jaw.

  Luki slugged him back, knocking him from his seat and in a matter of moments the two of them were tied up, rolling around on the floor, punching one another.

  Alaric watched them dispassionately for several moments and then turned his mind to a mental inventory of their, by now, vast collection of things. It had been a while since they had returned to the base camp to unload, fortunately, so there was a good variety.

  Unfortunately, all he had to do was think about the collection at base camp and he was instantly convinced that the best stuff was there.

  Shaking the thought, he got up and headed to the door. “I think I will go down to the hold and see what’s there that Amber might like,” he murmured to no one in particular.

  He was thwarted in immediately pursuing that goal by meeting up with Amber as she left her own cabin.

  Not that he was the least bit put out by that.

  In point of fact, he had it fixed so firmly in his mind by that time that things were in a fair way to being completely settled between them and lacked only the formality of the gift giving to tie up loose ends that he surveyed her with a possessive gleam in his eyes that stopped her in her tracks.

  She gaped at him, blinking, feeling warmth cascade over her in tingles of arousal. Still more than a little groggy from just waking, doubt warred with certainty that that gleam in his eyes was exactly what it appeared to be to her—keen sexual interest.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed that he was one hot male—because despite the language barrier, he had charm that transcended language and species and, beyond that, he was beautiful to behold.

  But she hadn’t previously encountered such a blatantly sexual look from him.

  And in the next moment it vanished and left her wondering if she’d imagined the entire thing.

  “Have hungry?”

  Amber blinked at him, searching her stomach for an answer. It wasn’t snarling and demanding food, but, now that he brought it up, she realized she was feeling pretty damned empty. “Yes,” she responded thankfully.

  He nodded, waited for her to approach and then turned and headed back in the direction he’d come from.

  She wondered where he’d been headed before, but all she could do was wonder. It would take way too much effort to try to pry that out of him.

  There was a good bit o
f noise issuing from the cabin she thought was his as they passed it.

  “What’s that?”

  Alaric lifted his dark brows questioningly, tilting his head.

  That was so damned cute the way he did that!

  “Noise?” she asked, covering her ears.

  He glanced at the door, but he only shrugged. “Luki n Serge.”

  Luki and Serge doing what? It sounded like they were going to knock a hole in the wall.

  She had a strong suspicion that they’d been engaged in a violent disagreement when the two met her and Alaric in the kitchen area some time later.

  They looked like they had been, but it would be rude to stare so she didn’t. She focused on the food Alaric had put together for her while they banged metal pots and utensils together and found their own food.

  Not that she wasn’t used to men, in this day and time, being proficient in the kitchen, but somehow they didn’t seem terribly proficient—not Luki and Serge anyway. Alaric had prepared the two of them a meal with the sort of efficiency only people well versed in the kitchen arts could achieve—minimal labor and effort.

  She smiled at him. “This is good. I’m not much of a cook myself—sorry to say. Grandmother always did the cooking and she wasn’t thrilled to have anyone else in her kitchen. She made a stab at teaching me, but I’m afraid I wasn’t really interested … then. And later …. Well I just never really got around to it.”

  Alaric paused politely and listened to that one sided conversation, but she doubted he understood a word of it.

  He surprised her.

  “Alaric teach.”

  She gaped at him, wondering if he actually had understood and he meant what he seemed to be saying.

  She wasn’t planning on being around long enough to learn, or hadn’t planned to. Now, she wondered what the plan was.

  But then it occurred to her that there was really next to nothing to do—certainly none of the things she generally did. She was going to be climbing the walls pretty quickly if she had nothing to do to keep herself occupied.

  In any case, it occurred to her that it would be a situation that would make it possible—necessary—to learn to speak with one another and that was the key to going home.

  If nothing else it seemed like an innocent reason to hang around him, that, hopefully, couldn’t be misconstrued and she wasn’t really ‘in’ to solitude.

  What could it hurt?

  She smiled at him. “You can try,” she responded with a chuckle. “It seems to me that it would be an uphill battle when I’m not that familiar with cooking to start with, can’t speak your language and—well I know nothing you have here by way of equipment or ingredients is going to be familiar to me.”

  Chapter Seven

  Amber discovered very quickly that solitude wasn’t something she had to worry about. It did make her just a little uneasy, at first, getting chummy with the big, bad alien beastmen, but she certainly didn’t want to get on their bad side.

  All three of them escorted her back to her cabin after they’d eaten.

  She wasn’t certain what they had in mind, but they followed her inside without waiting for an invitation and paused to look around.

  Alaric’s gaze fixed on the huge bed almost immediately.

  Directly after Amber flopped down on the edge because there wasn’t any other place to sit.

  He looked it over with pleased surprise and strode toward her, bending to press one huge palm down on the surface. “Dis fine bed!”

  Amber glanced from his face to bed. “Yes. Nice.”

  “Furian mating bed.”

  Amber’s ass came up off the mattress before the comment had actually registered in her brain. “It’s a mating bed?” she gasped, her mind filling with wild images she didn’t want to acknowledge. Mostly, though, she focused on the immediate assumption that he was saying it was a used mating bed. “You used … uh … this bed specifically?”

  He flicked a confused glance at her but then smiled broadly. “Dis bed fine bed. Big. Triad mating whole ting.”

  Triad? The three of them? The whole lot of them? At one time? But what else could he mean when he’d said big?

  She had to have misunderstood.

  At a loss as to how to respond, she searched her mind for several moments, during which time he, thankfully, turned his attention to other objects in the room.

  Hands on his hips, he surveyed the pile that took up most of the room for many moments and finally turned and headed toward the door.

  He was gone a few minutes—not long enough for Amber to recover her wits sufficiently to charge to the door and shut and bolt it, or even move a step in that direction—but long enough to check out several other cabins along the corridor, because she heard the doors opened and closed again.

  When he returned, Luki and Serge were trailing him.

  They studied her and the bed and grinned abruptly. “Fine bed,” Luki said pointedly.

  “Dis good,” Serge agreed.

  “Fine mating bed!” Alaric threw in. “Our mate hab many fine tings! Much tings.”

  Uneasiness settled in the pit of Amber’s belly.

  After a fairly lengthy discussion in their native tongue, while she thought they must be discussing the pros and cons of this wondrous bed, they turned their attention to the ‘pile’ and began to pick things up. They examined each piece thoroughly and then carried it out the door, disappeared briefly and then returned for another piece.

  They must have been about a third of the way through when Alaric found something he was pleased to show her.

  She looked at the chair blankly. “It’s a chair, right?”

  He frowned, said the word in his tongue and then hers. “Dis fine chair. Amber like?”

  Amber looked it over. Deciding to get into the spirit of the thing since it had dawned on her that they were looking for things she might want to use, she moved to the chair and sat down.

  It was certainly pretty, but not terribly comfortable.

  “Well, it is pretty, but I think it was mostly made for looking pretty in a room. It isn’t very comfortable. The seat is hard and its high off the floor and too deep for comfort.”

  He didn’t look happy about her assessment although she knew damned well he couldn’t possibly have understood one word in ten. He seemed to grasp the gist of it, though. Looking vaguely insulted for some reason she couldn’t fathom, he lifted the chair and went out with it and came back empty handed.

  She considered joining them in the search for useful things.

  After all, she’d been taken when she was on her way back to Earth. She pretty much had nothing, nada, zero things that she needed for what might be a lengthy stay.

  But she got the sense that they preferred to look the things over and decide which they were willing to offer.

  It seemed more polite, since she knew nothing at all about their customs, to just wait to see if they were willing to allow her to use the things.

  Mostly, it looked like household goods and mostly she couldn’t see them as being anything she could use.

  Like toiletries.

  Clothes.

  Bedding—especially if the damned bed had been used as a mating bed.

  Not that she’d noticed anything really ick. The bedding that was on it just smelled a bit musty—not like fresh laundry or soap, but not wreaking of sex or body odors.

  All she really wanted to do was to leap into the middle of the pile and search for the things she needed—especially the bedding—and to dash off to the facilities again for another, more thorough bath.

  * * * *

  “I cannot help but think she does not seem especially interested,” Luki observed as neutrally as he could.

  Alaric sent him a distracted glance at that comment and then looked at Amber. At that particular moment she was examining her fingernails and he had to admit there was something about her body language that suggested acute boredom
with the ‘game’ they were playing and not even a little interest. Anger and disappointment flickered through him.

  He had convinced himself that she was open to the notion, that he had already hinted enough about his interest to fix hers.

  Or to at least get her on the same page.

  “She is just playing hard to get so that we will know that she is not easy and we will value her as we should,” he said, without a lot of conviction.

  “Impossible, more like,” Serge said with far more certainty.

  Alaric glared at him. “It will definitely not help to take a negative attitude!”

  Serge looked at him uneasily, hesitated, and then apparently decided not to contribute any further to the conversation. Instead, he focused on his search. Directly he unearthed a flimsy container. When he opened it, he discovered what appeared to be very colorful woven goods of some sort.

  “She will have no interest in that paltry stuff!” Alaric snapped when Serge hesitated in the act of tossing it aside to glance toward Amber.

  But almost before the comment left his mouth they both heard a gasp and discovered Amber had surged to her feet. She made a beeline for the box as Serge set it down, dropped to her knees and began to pull pieces out and examine each carefully. Some, she held up against herself—apparently to study the effect.

  Finally, she stuffed everything back into the box and beamed at Serge. “This is great! I’m sure I can find something to wear in here. I’m going to take another shower.”

  Serge was left watching her departure with a mixture of happiness and confusion.

  Alaric and Luki were angry and confused.

  Alaric abandoned the search for a bride gift and headed to the bridge to sulk and nurse the sense of ill usage that had engulfed him. After a few moments, Luki followed. He was wise enough, however, to keep his mouth shut until Alaric’s temper had cooled to a less volatile temperature.

  Serge decided retreat was the better part of valor.

  In any case, he was very pleased with himself and his efforts at courtship and he thought he should enjoy that elsewhere so that Alaric and Luki weren’t tempted to beat the fuck out of him.

  * * * *

  “I know you do not want to hear it …,” Luki began.