Alien's Concubine, The (21 page)

Anka, she discovered when she finally
turned to head back to bed, had followed her. It gave her a start
when she saw his dark form leaning against the bedroom door frame.
She lifted her hand to her painfully hammering heart.

“
You startled me,” she
said quietly.

He pushed away from the door and moved
toward her. Reaching her, he slipped his hands caressingly along
her arms and finally took her hands in his. “You should rest,
Moonflower,” he said caressingly, lifting her hands one at the time
and placing a light kiss in the center of each palm.

Gaby smiled up at him teasingly.
“You’re sure rest is what you have in mind?”

To her surprise, he merely pulled her
lightly against his chest. Wrapping his arms around her, he cupped
the back of her head, guiding her head to rest against his shoulder
and then lightly stroked her hair and back. “Just now, yes,” he
murmured, his voice husky with some emotion she couldn’t quite
identify.

Vaguely disappointed at the answer,
she allowed him to lead her back to bed.

He seemed in a strange mood, she
thought, curling against him willingly enough when he merely
cuddled her and told her to go to sleep.

She didn’t worry about it overmuch,
then, but she couldn’t help but notice he seemed almost distant.
Days passed, and he not only made no attempt to initiate sex
between them, he firmly, if gently, refused her when she tried to
steer him in that direction.

Confused and hurt by his strange
behavior, Gaby wracked her brain to figure out what she’d done to
cause it, but nothing at all came to mind.

They’d been together a full month,
though, she realized after a while.

Maybe he’d realized he couldn’t make
her fruitful?

Once that thought had jelled in her
mind, she couldn’t shake it or the sense of impending doom it
brought with it. The anxiety that caused her surpassed everything
that had gone before. She went from expecting to find Anka waiting
for her each time she returned home to expecting to find him
gone.

His behavior didn’t do a thing to
alleviate her concerns.

He blew hot and cold so regularly that
she couldn’t decide what to think. Days would go by when he would
merely watch her with a brooding expression on his face, erecting a
wall between them that she couldn’t seem to breach even when she
was desperate enough to try to initiate sex herself. And then he
would make an about face and behave as if he couldn’t get enough of
her, making love to her over and over with a fierce driving need
that sometimes felt almost more like punishment—though she couldn’t
tell whether it was her he was trying to punish or
himself.

On top of that, the discovery that
she’d lost half a day in time bothered her. Try though she might,
she couldn’t remember anything, but there was a sense that, behind
that closed door, was something horrendous. She’d felt weak and
achy for almost a week, bruised, jumpy—not entirely
herself.

She couldn’t simply dismiss it, but in
time the anxiety over it diminished.

* * * *

I’ll get use to this, Gaby told
herself every time she looked at the man that wasn’t Anka, but some
unfortunate soul that had caught his interest.

I can do this … for him. There’s no
other way that he can enjoy the things we take for
granted.

The man won’t remember later. What’s
the loss of a few days, after all? If he’d had the chance to
choose, he might even have welcomed it. Anka had told her he
enjoyed the sex, too. When else could a person enjoy such a weird
and crazy kinky three way?

She clung to those thoughts with grim
determination for days on end, a week, two weeks, wringing every
ounce of pleasure she could from the time they spent together,
lavishing him with the carnal pleasure he craved.

She couldn’t keep the world out
forever, though, no matter how hard she tried, or salve her
conscience no matter how much salve she applied, or even get used
to seeing a stranger’s face when all she wanted was
Anka.

She’d never rode such a wild roller
coaster of emotions in her life. She felt like weeping at least as
often as she felt deliriously happy. The rest of the time she was
just plain scared, afraid that the CIA, FBI, state and local police
and maybe even the military would show up at her doorstep any day
and haul her in for ‘drugging’ the guy and using him as a sex
slave.

Her own lapse in memory, she thought,
was what finally tilted the scales. If she hadn’t experienced that
herself, she might have been able to continue lying to herself
right on. Under the circumstances, she couldn’t, because she
reached a point where she could no longer bury her head in the sand
and merely accept.

As much as she felt for Anka, she knew
he could not feel anything like that for her. He used people
without any regard for their sensibilities. She didn’t condemn him
for it. She accepted that he was simply not human and couldn’t
fully grasp that what he was doing was just wrong. But that made
her realize that she had to include herself in the category of
‘unimportant’. How could she mean anything at all to him if no
other human did?

She was almost relieved when her boss
called her into his office to speak to her.

This, she knew, meant the end. Her
life was about to change again, and she was almost as fiercely glad
as she was devastated.

It wasn’t at all what she’d expected,
though. She’d been so distracted by thoughts of Anka when she was
supposed to be working, so anxious to leave work each day and
return to him, that she was instantly certain when she was summoned
that she was about to be fired.

It penetrated her mind fairly quickly,
though, as she settled in a chair across from his desk, that Dr.
Mendoza was struggling with excitement not anger.

“
Dr. Sheffield gave me a
call last evening. He’s asked me to send you down to the dig site
again. They’ve found something.”

Chapter Twelve

“
I have to go,” Gaby said,
tension in every line of her body as she dragged her bags from the
floor of her closet and set them out to pack. “Dr. Sheffield wants
me back at the dig and my boss will send Paul if I don’t
go.”

Anka/the dark stranger, was sprawled
on her bed, watching her with interest, his arms propped behind his
head. “Then let Paul go,” he responded coolly.

Gaby sent a glance in his direction,
but she didn’t actually look at him.

She hadn’t gotten used to not seeing
the Anka she knew. She was never going to get used to it and she’d
gotten to where she almost hated the sight of the stranger. He was
a constant reminder that she was just as guilty of using him as
Anka was … more guilty really. Anka didn’t understand that it was
wrong. She did.

He rolled onto his side. “This man who
dwells with me is completely satisfied with the arrangement. You’ve
no reason to feel any guilt.”

Gaby glared at him. “I wish you
wouldn’t read my mind!” she said testily.

His expression relaxed. A faint,
indulgent smile curled his lips. “If I did not, then I would not
know what was going through your mind. You will not say. You will
only look at me as if I have hurt you or offended, and you will not
say how.”

Guilt jolted through her at the
comment, and pain. She struggled against feeling them, wondering if
he’d been hurt by those things he’d sensed or just
annoyed.

Annoyed, she suspected.

What did she really know about him,
after all? He wouldn’t tell her anything. Any time she asked, he
would either ignore the question all together, change the subject,
or tell her something cryptic that she couldn’t make heads or tails
of.

She was as tired of trying to batter
down the solid walls he’d erected around himself as she was of
pretending she was content to live a lie.

It was a lie, regardless of how Anka
perceived it. He was there, yes, but in a stranger’s body and she
was aware of it every moment she was with him—that she was with
him, but with someone else. As hard as she had tried to convince
herself that it was ‘cool’ and ‘kinky’ she just felt guilty about
it. Even when she was thoroughly enjoying herself—especially
then—she felt like she was being unfaithful to Anka.

She hated that.

She hated the way it made her feel
about herself.

She let out a huff of irritation. “How
do you know he doesn’t mind? Do you listen to his thoughts,
too?”

“
Yes,” he said calmly. “He
has been graciously compensated for the use of his body, and he is
satisfied. I do understand the way of your world, regardless of
what you seem to believe.” His tone was chiding. It really
irritated the hell out of her when he spoke to her as if she was a
mere child.

She was thirty five years old for
god’s sake! Sure he was older, a lot older—she was never going to
know how much older, but that didn’t mean she was less mature. She
had more life experience than a hell of a lot of people
did!

Gaby plunked her hands on her hips.
“How has he been compensated?”

Anka shrugged. “He enjoys fucking you
as much as I do. And I have helped him obtain the position that he
wanted. He is in no great hurry for me to leave. He knows he will
have to keep his position without my help once I am
gone.”

The first comment distressed her in a
way she didn’t even want to contemplate, especially knowing that
Anka delved into her mind whenever he pleased. She felt slightly
mollified by the last, though. She stopped what she was doing and
studied him intently. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel
better?”

“
Yes, but it is also
true.”

Gaby let out a relieved breath,
feeling a great weight drop from her shoulders.

“
So, now you do not need
to go.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Yes, I do,
because I need my job and I’m not about to let that snot Paul take
it. As you pointed out, it’s the way of my world. I have to have
money to live and I’ve no desire to play underling to Paul, or look
for another position.”

“
Why do you not like this
body?” he demanded abruptly. “This is a very good body.”

Gaby felt a knot of misery well in her
throat. “It isn’t you!” she said angrily.

“
The image you hold in
your mind is not me either,” he said tightly, coming off the
bed.

She looked at him sadly. “I know. In
my head, I know.”

He looked at her strangely for several
moments, his anger vanishing abruptly. Finally, he closed the
distance between them. Reaching her, he settled his palms on her
shoulders. “But in your heart, Moonflower?”

She did not want to talk about her
heart! Or the pang it gave her to have to face the truth. He’d
begun life as he was, not as a human who’d become something else.
She realized she’d thought of him that way, though. She’d wanted to
believe he was really the same as her in every way that mattered.
The out of body thing was just a … special gift he had that made
him seem different when he really wasn’t.

But the way she’d first seen him was
Anka to her. Even though, on an intellectual level, she knew her
perceptions were faulty, she couldn’t separate the being he was
from the image she held of him.

And she couldn’t accept that she could
never really be familiar with anything about him beyond his
personality. It was the essence of what made a person that really
mattered—their thoughts, their personality—without that the body
was nothing but an empty shell. But in her plane of existence, the
laughter, the loving, the warmth of a touch, the sound of a
voice—all of those things were just as necessary, just as much a
part of the person as the spirit that dwelt within.

She drew in a shaky breath, forced a
smile, though she didn’t meet his gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I do
understand. I just have to … accept.”

“
Accept what?” His hands
dropped from her shoulders as she turned away.

“
That some things just
can’t be changed, no matter how much you’d like to change them. I
have to go. This is important to me, important to my
career.”

She hesitated, unwilling to say what
she knew she needed to say. She busied herself with dragging first
one thing and then another from her chest of drawers and shoving it
into the bag. “I need for you to accept and understand me, too,”
she finally said. “You won’t find what you’re looking for with me.
I’d like for you to go, please. I’ve always heard there’s someone
for everyone. You just have to look. I’m sure you’ll find the right
woman if you just look.

“
But I’m not the one. I’m
not. And ….

“
You could be pretty much
anyone you want to be, can’t you? If you just looked around, I’m
sure you could find some gorgeous idiot just waiting to throw his
life away … there are always lots of them, addicted to the thrill
of cheating death ... or just addicted to drugs—race car drivers,
actors, singers—pretty much anybody with enough money to
self-destruct. And then you’d have a perfectly good body that you
wouldn’t have to share. It’d be yours by default, you
know?”