Alien's Concubine, The (14 page)

Before she could work herself up into
a rage of hurt and embarrassment, it dawned on her abruptly that he
had been angry when he left. She had felt defensive about it. She’d
felt inadequate, felt she’d failed to please her lover.

Because she had.

It wasn’t her fault, though. He had no
physical form. He could enjoy it in his consciousness, or his
psyche. Maybe he could even experience the things she felt and
interpreted in her mind, but he had no body filled with nerve
endings and nerve centers to feed those sensations directly into
his mind.

That was why he kept presenting her
with bodies he’d ‘borrowed’ for the occasion! It wasn’t just that
he needed a physical form to impregnate her. He needed it to
experience the completion of his passion as she did.

She examined that conclusion for a
while, but she decided it wasn’t flawed.

Well, maybe a little flawed. She was
assuming she knew his motivations, but she, damn it, didn’t have
the ability to read his mind as he was so underhanded about reading
hers!

It didn’t make it any easier to
accept, she realized. She still felt used, abused, and completely
inadequate as a woman.

It was unthinkable to use the body of
another person for his own gratification. She could understand why
he’d want to. She could even understand, she supposed, why he saw
no harm in it, but it was wrong regardless.

Moreover, she couldn’t be a party to
it, no matter how much she empathized with his plight. Ethics
aside, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of fucking a complete
stranger, one who might or might not be aware of the fact that his
body was being used and who might or might not be agreeable to
it.

Most of her early sexual experiences
had been of that nature, what young people these days called
hook-ups. She still wasn’t certain of what it was she’d been
searching so desperately for—probably the love she’d never gotten,
the acceptance she’d never felt—but it had always left her feeling
worse about herself than she’d felt before. She was just fortunate
she hadn’t paid the ultimate price for promiscuity and the
stupidity of youth.

She braked at that thought, realizing
she had in a very real sense, though not with her own life. Of
course that hadn’t been her decision, not completely her decision
anyway. She’d been pulled into the ‘game’ by her need to be
accepted. She didn’t think any of the boys had deliberately hurt
her. She’d never thought malice inspired it, but she’d lost all
desire to participate when she’d discovered it hurt, and they had
refused to stop.

Guilt at her part in it had kept her
quiet more even than their fearful threats—which had scared her but
wouldn’t have scared her enough to keep quiet about it if she
hadn’t felt so guilty herself. And of course there’d been no hiding
her injuries for very long and the infection had caused the
scarring that had ended any possibility of ever having a family of
her own before she’d even reached puberty. That was a pretty high
price to pay for stupidity.

She surged up from the couch where
she’d been sitting so long, as if by leaving the living room and
seeking the sanctuary of her bedroom she could leave the memories
behind, carefully stuff them back down into the dark recesses of
her mind. She hadn’t thought about any of that for years and years.
It was a sign of just how weakened her defenses were from
everything that had happened since she’d fallen ‘down the rabbit
hole’.

She couldn’t allow it! She was not
going to allow it! The past belonged in the past and she meant to
keep it there where it had no power to wound, no power to influence
the life she had now. She’d put all that behind her when she’d made
the decision that she was going to be somebody, that she was going
to do something of importance with her life, something
significant.

Maybe to most people what she did
really didn’t make that much difference, wasn’t of any
significance, but she knew that understanding the past was
important to the future.

Anka’s comment about ‘yesterday’s
trash’ piqued at her as she readied herself for bed. She would’ve
thought he of all people would be able to appreciate her work, but
it seemed nobody really did except the other people in related
fields.

And anyway, he wasn’t human, was he?
How could he be expected to understand that learning was what set
humans apart from the other animals they shared the world with?
Discovering knowledge that had been lost was just as important as
discovering the previously undiscovered. Every little tidbit of
information that was added carried the potential of changing the
future for the better.

She hadn’t thought when she settled in
her bed at last that she would be able to sleep for the emotional
turmoil, but she discovered she was wrong. She’d worn herself out
emotionally and Anka had drained her of the tension that had coiled
inside of her before.

She was still debating with herself as
she drifted off, though, as to how she would and should handle the
situation when and if Anka appeared again.

Chapter Eight

Despite every attempt to focus
completely on her job the following day, Gaby found her
self-discipline left a lot to be desired. She managed to focus
maybe half the time, but she emerged far too often to ‘feel’ about
her for some indication that Anka was nearby, watching
her.

He didn’t appear. She told herself she
was glad. She thought she was for the first few days, but by the
time a week had passed with no sign of him she was forced to
reassess the lie she’d told herself. She wasn’t glad. She wasn’t
unnerved because she still expected him to pop in on her when she
least expected it.

She felt abandoned.

Disgusted with herself, she took
herself to task. She hadn’t been abandoned, she told herself. He’d
done her a favor and left. Her life could return to normal. In a
little while, she’d hardly even remember the interlude. Maybe she’d
even realize that the whole thing had been in her mind and it had
never really happened at all.

With grim determination, she
persevered in her determined happiness that Anka had, apparently,
decided to take her at her word and look for a more likely
candidate to bear his off-spring.

More power to him, she told herself at
least ten times a day. She doubted it would work, whatever he
seemed to think. Obviously, he could use people as his little hand
puppets, but he certainly wasn’t a god and that meant he couldn’t
do a thing about DNA. If he wanted to think he could take a human
man and use his body to fuck a human woman and produce something
that was his, he had a right to his delusions, she supposed, but
she wasn’t buying it.

At least with some other candidate, he
could delude himself. He would have found out soon enough that it
wasn’t going to do him any good at all to fuck her. He could bring
in a half dozen likely studs, and this filly wasn’t going to
balloon out with fruitfulness.

Anka had spent way too much time with
‘primitive’ minds. She was inclined to think they had convinced him
he was a god rather than the other way around. It actually seemed
likely the more she thought about it. Obviously, he had abilities
that human beings didn’t—just like they had abilities he didn’t
have. To primitive minds, those abilities would naturally have
seemed like magic, would have seemed miraculous, even though they
really weren’t.

Those suppositions seemed to be borne
up by the data she eventually collected from the
remains.

Anka, or at least the body he’d once
occupied, had been poisoned. The toxicology tests she ran were
inconclusive. There was too much deterioration of the tissue and
whatever the natives had used to preserve the body had further
compromised the tests available to her, but there was no disputing
the fact that his body had simply shut down. Every organ had just
stopped.

There was the possibility that he’d
contracted some disease, but there really didn’t seem to be damage
from disease, which left only two conclusions and only one of those
conclusions made any sense to her.

Either Anka had deliberately sabotaged
the body he’d inhabited and shut it down, somehow, himself. Or he’d
been poisoned and it had killed the body so fast and damaged it so
thoroughly that he hadn’t been able to stop it from shutting
down.

She wasn’t entirely prepared for how
her findings affected her. As difficult as she’d found it to
perform any of the tests on the remains, as hard a time as she’d
had trying to separate her personal feelings from her professional
objectivity in this particular case, she thought she’d done
tolerably well.

The discovery that he’d been murdered
demolished the wall she’d so carefully erected, though. The sense
of loss and anger was so profound it took all she could do to even
pretend for appearances that she found it ‘interesting’ instead of
devastating, that she was pleased about her discoveries, not
crushed.

After all he’d done for them, she
thought angrily, the ungrateful bastards had stabbed him in the
back! They hadn’t even had the balls to confront him over whatever
it was that he’d done, or they’d thought he had done! The sneaky,
underhanded, backstabbing cowards!

It occurred to her that maybe he had
done something horrendous, but she dismissed it as quickly as the
thought came to mind. He had his faults, but he wasn’t mean
spirited. He wasn’t callous. Even though he was certainly guilty of
a superiority complex, and he did take shameful advantage of his
ability to control people and manipulate them like puppets, he
didn’t actually harm them.

He hadn’t that she’d seen, anyway, and
she felt like she’d seen the ‘real’ him. She felt like she would
have sensed ‘evil’ in him.

She’d thoroughly pissed him off
several times and he hadn’t lost his temper and done anything
‘wrath of god’ like to her!

Of course, there were all sorts of
awful things attributed to the gods of mythology, but then she knew
people! They were always looking for someone to blame for their own
shortcomings. Maybe the old gods had been alien beings like him.
Maybe they’d done some of the terrible things blamed on them, and
maybe not. Whether they had or not, she didn’t believe for a moment
that Anka had a vicious bone in his body, metaphorically speaking,
of course.

He was sweet, even if he was annoying
as hell.

He’d been sweet to her, anyway, and a
generous lover. She wasn’t going to regret that or forget it. Those
were memories worth holding on to, even if they were
bittersweet.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved
or sorry when the South American authorities exerted their right to
the artifacts, packed them up, and returned home with them to
conduct their own studies, eventually to settle them in their own
museum. She was both, she supposed. As possessive as she felt about
the body, she knew she didn’t have a right to it. He wasn’t hers
even if she did feel like he was.

It was cathartic she finally decided.
She needed the closure. Anka was gone and now, finally, the last
physical remains were gone, too. She could lay everything to rest
and move on with her life.

Pathetic and pointless as it
was.

Three weeks had passed, the longest,
most miserable three weeks of her entire life, when there was a
knock on her door one evening just as she climbed out of her
shower. Her heart leapt instantly and crashed just as
fast.

It wouldn’t be Anka, she realized
belatedly. He wouldn’t have knocked.

Feeling abruptly annoyed when the
imperious knock sounded again, Gaby grabbed her robe and shrugged
into it, tying it at her waist as she reluctantly went to answer
the summons at her door.

The man standing at her door was a
complete stranger, a handsome stranger, she noted in a detached
sort of way, but she’d never seen him before. He looked Germanic,
she decided. Easily six foot, broad shouldered, heavily muscled—she
supposed he would have been most any woman’s dream—except hers. His
eyes were a pale gray-blue, not a vivid almost emerald green. His
blond hair was cropped close to his head. It wasn’t halfway down
his back and black as sin. His skin was tanned, but he wasn’t
swarthy.

His smile was nice.

“
Hello, Moonflower,” he
said huskily, his deep voice laced with an accent she couldn’t
quite put her finger on—guttural, though, not musical as Anka’s
voice was.

In spite of that, it seemed everything
inside of her budded with warmth, surged toward him in glad
welcome. “Anka?” she asked, doubt threading her voice.

He swept her up into his arms and
somehow they were inside, bumping the door closed behind them as he
carried her against it. His mouth was heated, feverish, possessive,
demanding as it closed over hers. Lava poured through her veins,
pooled in her belly. Turmoil twisted inside of her, though, in
spite of the fire that erupted at his touch, the dizziness of
desire that began to bake her brain. There was a subtle but
distinct difference in the feel of his mouth and tongue on hers, a
less subtle more pronounced difference in his taste and scent. He
was big and strong and muscular, and yet his body felt alien to
her, not dearly familiar.