Alien Overnight (6 page)

The sound of her office door closing had never been more welcome. Monica yanked off her glasses and collapsed facedown on her desk with a long moan, the relief of having the commander gone so exquisite, it was practically orgasmic. Or so she imagined. If that persistent tingling down south got any more intense, she might find out for real, which was an eye-opening thought. God, he smelled
so
good, and she was
so
hungry…

Perhaps you should concede this battle of wills before the guards have to drag me off you
.

Yeah, right. Obviously the man’s reputation for strategic warfare was well-deserved. He’d certainly zeroed in on her Achilles’ heel with ruthless precision. Jesus, the mental picture he’d drawn of guards fighting to drag his massive body off hers was enough to make her whimper. But not with fright.

Her stomach rumbled and Monica straightened with another groan, wondering how early she could possibly get away with taking her lunch hour. The groan turned to a laugh—page one of the recruit roster was stuck to her forehead. Yanking it off, she scooped it back in with the other documents and forced her mind back to the job at hand.

This unsettling distortion of her reality had better right itself overnight, she thought dismally, or she was in for a hell of a day tomorrow, too.

28

Alien Overnight

Barely an hour later, Monica slid her lunch tray down the line behind Shelley’s.

She’d gotten all kinds of funny looks on her way to the cafeteria, thanks to her cadaverous pallor, high-water scrubs and funked-out hair. A glance in the mirror on her way out the door had wrung a curse from her—for what she’d paid, that dye job should have lasted into her golden years.

“Jeez, Gothchild, are you loading up for some kind of dairy crisis we haven’t heard about yet?”

Monica glanced down at her tray as she plopped a fourth carton of milk onto it and shrugged. “I like milk. So sue me.”

She noticed that Shelley took two milks herself, but didn’t comment on it. After all, she, at least, had the excuse of being six months pregnant. With twins, no less.

“You do realize a milk moustache really screws with your image.”

Monica grinned as they scooted their trays down the line. “Beats a real moustache.”

“And since when did you give up fruits and vegetables? Do you know what eating all that crap will do to your arteries?” Shelley shook her head, wide-eyed at Monica’s lunch of two steaks, two ramekins of nutmeg-sprinkled custard and an extra-large slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream. “You’re not knocked up, too, are you?”

“You know better than that,” Monica said severely. “Anyway, who died and made you the cholesterol cop?”

“Well, forgive me for wondering what the hell is going on with you,” Shelley growled as they headed for an empty table at the back of the cafeteria. “For the better part of a year, you’ve eaten nothing but salads for lunch, and now you’re suddenly sucking down calories like a war-starved refugee.

“And what makes it really freaky,” she continued as they settled at the table, “is that you’re losing weight anyway.” She paused, looking hard at Monica. “You’re not sick or something, are you?”

“Not that I know of,” Monica said. She let her gaze slide away, wishing she hadn’t switched out the sunglasses after her headache subsided. Sometimes Shelley’s probing eyes saw too much. “And I’m not losing weight. I’ve gained five pounds in the last few weeks. Like I really needed that.” She looked down at her tray and frowned. It was no wonder she was edging closer to that dreaded two-hundred-pound mark every day.

But the strange food cravings she’d had lately were just too overwhelming to deny.

“Are you sure? You look thinner to me, especially in your face. Have you been working out? Maybe you’re gaining muscle mass.”

29

Robin L. Rotham

“Yeah, right,” Monica snorted. “Me, working out.” The mere sight of the

gymnasium door was enough to make her hiss and writhe like a vampire confronted with a cross. She cracked open a carton of milk and guzzled it down in a few hard swallows, then did the same to a second before tucking into her steak.

“What in the…” She stopped chewing and shifted her food around in her mouth, disgusted to feel something hard in there. As discreetly as possible, she spat the whole mouthful into her paper napkin.

“What, are they serving teeth and toenails in the meat again?” Shelley asked. “I hate it when that happens.”

Peeking at the mess in her napkin, Monica gasped. “Holy cow! You called it.” She held up what looked like a tooth, narrowing her eyes as she examined it.

“That doesn’t look like a cow tooth to me, holy or otherwise,” Shelley said. “You didn’t lose a tooth, did you?”

“I don’t…” Feeling around, Monica was shocked to feel a gap on the lower left side of her mouth. “Oh my God, it
is
mine. I lost a tooth. Oh, that’s just lovely,” she groused.

“Like I’m not already the walking freakazoid of the universe.”

“Let me see it,” Shelley prodded.

Monica handed the tooth to her with a sigh, tonguing the gap in her mouth, disturbed by the metallic taste of blood. That was all she needed right now, for her teeth to start falling out. She must have pulled some really bad shit in a previous life to be saddled with this crappy excuse for a body.

“This looks like a baby molar,” Shelley finally pronounced.

Startled, Monica took the tooth Shelley held up and turned it over in her palm.

“Yeah, it is,” she said, relieved. She’d almost forgotten that she still had a handful of baby teeth. The dentist swore she had adult teeth hiding in there somewhere, but they’d never shown any eagerness to emerge. “Maybe I’ll get a quarter from the Tooth Fairy.”

“A quarter,” Shelley scoffed. “No way! Those babies are worth at least a dollar nowadays.”

“Works for me.” She dropped the tooth into the pocket of her lab coat and got back to her steak. It was kind of weird trying to grind up the tough meat with her new gap, and of course, it had to be on the side that she favored for chewing.

“Don’t look now, but your boyfriend’s back,” Shelley muttered behind her hand.

For one shocking second, Monica thought she was talking about the commander and felt scorching color surge all the way up to her scalp. It was almost a relief to realize Shelley was referring to her new shadow, Lieutenant Shauss.

“Just ignore him,” she advised. “That’s what I do. I’m sure Commander Kellen asked him to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t, you know…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud.
Get drunk on their sex hormones
.

“I don’t like the way he’s looking at you,” Shelly insisted. “You need to nip his little
thing
in the bud before it becomes a problem.”

30

Alien Overnight

“I saw his
thing
in xenoanatomy,” Monica snickered, “and believe me, it’s far from little.”

“Damn it, I’m serious! He’s looking at you like…” she trailed off, biting her lips.

“Like?” Oh, the suspense was killing her. Truly, how often did a prime cut of male look at her like…anything?

Looking both directions first, Shelley leaned forward and hissed, “Like he wants to bonk your brains out.”

Smothering a laugh, Monica told her, “God, Shel, you are too much. Maybe you need to see a therapist or something. Sounds to me like you have your own little
thing
to deal with.”

“Fine,” Shelley said, obviously insulted. “Just don’t come crying to me when you wind up naked in chains on the cover of some alien BDSM mag.”

There was no holding back this time. Monica slapped her hand over her mouth and doubled over, shrieking with laughter, and barely missed dipping her bangs in her whipped cream. She laughed even harder when Shelley just sat there, munching on her taco salad with a bored look that said,
You
’
re
sooo
immature
.

Then she caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Shauss as she turned to wipe her eyes and the last of her giggles lodged in her throat. He was just smiling at her, nothing too unusual about that. But it was the
way
he was smiling…

Shit
! Heat flashed in her belly and she quickly looked away, shaken. Shelley was dead-on about how he was looking at her and Monica had no clue how to react. Damn it, she wasn’t
going
to react. There was a reason men didn’t look at her like that and she’d damn well better remember it.

“Mmm-hmm,” Shelley hummed knowingly, still chewing.

“Just ignore him,” Monica repeated less firmly than she would have liked.
And
maybe he
’
ll go away
. He didn’t, of course, but she concentrated hard on chewing her steak and tried to shove him toward the back of her mind.

Which became even more difficult when Shelley whispered, “I think Jasmine has a crush on him.”

“On Lieutenant Shauss?”

When Shelley nodded, Monica slumped back in her seat and stared at her. The Stepford secretary, crushing on the cover-model alien? Oh, now that was too funny.

“No way.”

“Way. Watch her the next time he’s around.”

“He’s always around, and I’ve never noticed anything.”

“That’s because you’re not keyed in on boy-girl stuff. Alien-girl stuff,” she corrected with a grimace.

Monica turned her attention back to her steak, not wanting to travel any further down that road.
Alien
-
girl stuff
. God, maybe she and Jasmine had more in common than she knew.

31

Robin L. Rotham

“So what do you think it means?” Shelley finally asked. “Losing the tooth, I mean.”

“Is it supposed to mean something?”

“Well, you only lose your baby teeth when your adult teeth are ready to come in, right?”

“Yeah, when you’re anything close to normal, which we both know I’m not. With my luck, they’ll all just drop out and I’ll have to gum my way across the galaxy.”

“Oh come on, Monica.” Shelley pushed away the crumbs of her salad and tore open the mouth of her milk carton. “Think positive, for a change. Maybe this is the start of something big for you.”

Monica shuddered. “God, don’t say that. Anytime something big happens to me, it’s usually something that really, really sucks.”

Shelley arched a brow at her. “Oh yeah? So tell me, Dr. Gothchild, what tall, brainy astronomy freak is going to be one of the first people on Earth to leave our solar system in just a few months?”

“Okay, so that doesn’t suck,” Monica admitted. “But it hasn’t happened yet, has it?

Something big right now could definitely screw that up for me.”

Like the pheromone thing. She shuddered again at the fresh reminder of how close she’d come to being scrubbed from the mission roster. She didn’t remember much about that day, but according to Shelley, Dr. Snow had stopped by her quarters to check on her less than ten minutes after the commander dropped her off. If Shelley hadn’t stuck around to run interference, totally trashing Monica’s eating habits and promising to help her make better nutritional choices from the cafeteria’s offerings, things could have gotten really ugly, really fast.

“You’d better be careful what you say,” Shelley warned as she smoothed a hand over the basketball that was now her belly. “I swore I was going to forget one of my birth control pills someday, and look at me now, the classic victim of self-fulfilling prophecy—with double indemnity.”

“Yeah, well, the difference is that unconsciously, you really wanted to get knocked up by your foot-dragging fiancé. My conscious and unconscious, on the other hand, are in total agreement about leaving the solar system. The two are as one,” Monica concluded in a sucky Kung Fu accent. “At peace with the universe and all who reside therein.”

Shelley rolled her eyes. “You’re so full of shit, Grasshopper.”

“Confucius say, it take one to know one.”

“Very profound. But seriously, I still think this tooth thing is significant somehow.”

“Well, I, for one, hope you’re wrong.” Monica shoved her dinner plate aside and laid into the pumpkin pie. “I’m finally happy with the way my life is going and I’m not about to let it change course now.”

*

32

Alien Overnight

“Commander, how is our little daughter of Sparna faring today?” The ambassador’s voice floated over the com screen behind him.

Our
little daughter? Turning his chair to face it, Kellen told him, “She shed one of her milk teeth just a moment ago.”

Pret’s eyes widened. “Are you certain, Commander?”

“Definitely. It’s in the pocket of her lab coat at the moment. I’ll retrieve it and examine it for verification, of course.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

Kellen smiled, baring his own large white teeth and wondering if Pret knew about the Tooth Fairy. “You’re better off not knowing. Plausible deniability.”

Pret sighed. “You’re probably right.”

“She’s also grown more than an inch taller in the last week and gained five pounds in the last two.”

“Mother of Peserin! That degree of acceleration can’t be safe. Or comfortable.”

Kellen frowned as he nodded. “She’s experiencing pain in her legs at night, and it will no doubt grow worse.”

“Perhaps it’s time to remove the good doctor to the
Heptoral
. Terran physicians will be of little use to her, especially when they have no idea what her condition truly is.”

“Not yet.” Kellen looked as forbidding as he could.

“We can’t wait too long, Commander. If they figure it out first, we might never get her off the planet.”

“Have no worries on that front, Pret,” Kellen growled. “I’ll level North America before I leave here without her.”

“As you will.”

When the connection was broken, Kellen lounged back in his chair and stretched his long legs under the massive custom-made mahogany desk, staring blindly at the darkened screen. He wasn’t as unconcerned about his little doctor’s accelerating transition as he pretended. In fact, he was more worried than Pret might imagine.

In the weeks since she’d become his aide, he’d grown somewhat attached to the little xenophile. Despite her annoyance at being commandeered as his aide, she’d displayed an almost childlike excitement at the prospect of having more concentrated contact with the Garathani contingent. She’d warned him, though, from the very first day, that her number-one priority was still her service to the females she would be tending and if he didn’t like it, he could just transfer her right back to the general pool.