Alien's Concubine, The (7 page)

The rope was snatched upward again
before Gaby could grab it.

“
Hey!”

“
Just a minute,” Mark
called. “I’m coming down, too!”

Gaby ground her teeth. Was the whole
fucking team coming down, she wondered angrily, to ‘rescue’
her?

They were. The moment Mark
disentangled himself, he gave the rope a jerk and again it
disappeared.

“
Fuck!” Gaby muttered
under her breath before she thought better of it.

She needn’t have worried. Neither Mark
nor the professor gave any indication at all that they’d heard her.
Dr. Sheffield had flicked on the floodlight and both men moved like
zombies toward the frieze that covered the walls of the
chamber.

Gaby stared at them irritably for
several moments before her gaze was drawn to the figure seated in
the alcove. Without quite realizing it, she moved toward him,
tilting her head back to stare into his glittering green
gaze.

Warmth flooded her as she stared up at
him. With surprise and more than a little embarrassment, she
realized it was desire stirring to life inside of her. Images
flickered through her mind that built upon the burgeoning warmth. A
shiver went through her as the images became so profound she could
almost feel his skin brushing along hers, felt her belly clench as
if she could feel his cock surging inside of her.

“
Anka,” she said on a
breath of sound, unaware of the yearning in her voice.

“
What?”

Jolted out of her absorption, Gaby
glanced at Dr. Sheffield blankly, wondering when he’d come to stand
next to her. “What?”

“
I thought you said
something,” he said absently. “Anka?”

Adjusting his glasses, he leaned
forward slightly at the waist, as if trying to bring the image into
focus. “Is that what he’s holding?” he asked doubtfully. “My god! I
believe you’re right! This is … I don’t know what to make of this,
to be honest.”

Gaby glanced up at Anka’s eyes again,
but the odd, almost electric current that had enveloped her before
had vanished. “His name is Anka,” she said, rubbing at the ache
between her eyes that hadn’t been there moments ago.

The comment drew Dr. Sheffield’s
attention to her again. He studied her thoughtfully. “You should go
to your tent and try to get some rest. I know this has been an
ordeal for you.”

His concern would’ve been more
touching if he’d seemed the least interested in helping her out of
the chamber instead of coming down to explore and ignoring her as
if she wasn’t even there, Gaby thought irritably. She didn’t argue
with him, though, or address the implication that the experience
had somehow ‘disturbed’ her mind.

Turning away, she moved to the altar
to gather up her belongings. She noticed when she climbed down
again that Mark had followed her. He barely acknowledged her,
however. He was focused on the altar.

“
What’s this?”

Gaby noticed he’d touched the oily
residue of the lubricant she’d sprayed on the stone. He was rubbing
it between his fingertips. “Oil. I sprayed the stones down last
night to make sure scorpions couldn’t crawl into my sleeping bag
with me.”

His eyes were bulging as he looked
directly at her for the first time. “Oil?”

She caught the disapproval in his
tone. “It didn’t hurt the rocks,” she said dryly, turning and
stalking to the shaft and securing her bundle in the
rope.

“
You sprayed oil on the …
in this …. You didn’t consider the possibility of damaging
something irreplaceable?” Dr. Sheffield demanded, obviously
outraged as he moved to examine the edges of the altar.

Gaby turned to glare at the man as the
workers began hauling her sleeping bag up in response to her tug on
the rope. “I consider my health and well being of some importance,”
she snapped.

Instead of responding, he looked
around as if searching the room. “I haven’t seen any scorpions in
here.”

“
It’s dark in here,” Gaby
responded testily. “Just because you haven’t seen any doesn’t mean
there aren’t any.”

“
But the tomb was sealed,”
Mark objected.

“
It isn’t a tomb,” Gaby
shot back. “This is a temple to the fertility god, Anka, and this
is the sacred breeding ground.”

That statement caught the attention of
everyone present. She glanced around at them, feeling more than a
little defensive at their expressions.

“
How did you arrive at
that?” Sheila demanded.

Gaby gave her a look. “The frieze
along the walls?”

Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not
stupid. Anyone can see the depictions suggest fertility rites. But
how did you arrive at the conclusion that this was the chamber
where the rituals were held? If this chamber is any indication, the
temple must be massive and filled with dozens of chambers. And how
did you get the idea he was called Anka? That’s Egyptian, isn’t
it?”

Frowning as it sank into her that she
had no idea how she knew, Gaby searched for something to
say.

She’d dreamed it, she realized
abruptly, feeling hot color begin to creep into her cheeks. Before
she could embarrass herself further, Mark drew everyone’s
attention.

“
Hey! I don’t think this
is an altar at all! The slab of rock on top is just resting on the
supports. I think this is a tomb!”

She’d been sleeping on some dead
person’s tomb, Gaby thought, horrified?

Having sex on somebody’s tomb, her
mind corrected.

God! Was that worse than dancing on
somebody’s grave?

Chapter Four

Amusement settled over Anka as he
watched Gaby’s flight from the chamber. It was typical of the
conundrum that was Gabrielle that, as intelligent as she was, she
refused to accept anything that fell outside the order that she
demanded of her universe. He frowned after a moment, though. As
amusing as he found her disordered thoughts, he did not find his
own turmoil nearly as pleasing.

She was struggling very hard to
dismiss everything that had passed between them.

Let it go, he told himself.

But he could not. It piqued him
mightily that she was determined to thrust it all neatly into the
back of her mind and dismiss it as something that had not happened
at all.

He did not have to search long or hard
for the reason for his own turmoil.

She had more than surprised him when
he had come to her. She had stunned him.

In all the time he had interacted with
her kind, no one, not one had asked him for the gift she had
demanded of him.

They had begged for riches. They had
asked for power. They had pleaded for fruitfulness. They had wanted
all manner of ‘things’ and petitioned him for those gifts they
thought would bring them happiness and fulfillment.

And yet when he asked her to tell him
her heart’s desire, offered to give her whatever that was, she had
not asked for what he had expected. She had said ‘you’.

The memory threw him into turmoil all
over again.

He did not know what to make of such a
request.

He did not even know how to respond,
or if he should respond.

He was more than merely intrigued by
her now, though.

She had awakened his hunter’s
instincts. She had stirred to life an appetite for the things he’d
long denied himself—the corporal pleasures of the flesh.

* * * *

Gaby managed to make it out of the
chamber before the workers could gather the equipment Dr. Sheffield
was bellowing for. When she left, Dr. Sheffield was trying to coax
some of the workers down the shaft to help remove the
slab.

Ignoring the argument that was growing
more heated by the moment, Gaby shifted the bundle under her arm
and struggled out of the pit with it, no mean feat considering she
had to climb three ladders to reach the level where the tents had
been set up.

She wanted to bathe, but she wasn’t
certain all of the workers were occupied in the pit … or would stay
down below. From the voices, it sounded to her like some of them
would be walking off the job. Deciding after a moment to dismiss
her uneasiness over it in favor of her current needs, she grabbed
bathing supplies when she dropped off her bedding and headed to the
‘facilities’.

Privacy wasn’t exactly insured. The
john and the camp shower had been set up in a tent and canvas walls
did nothing but block the view. With everyone at the dig site,
though, Gaby had far more privacy than she could usually count on.
Having relieved herself, she went into the bathing area, took off
her clothes, and, after taking a deep breath, plunged beneath the
drizzling shower head. The temperature of the river water wasn’t
particularly cold unless one happened to be particularly hot when
one plunged into it. All that could be said for it was that it was
a way to get clean with some privacy and some assurance that the
water was actually clean and free of harmful bacteria and/or larger
living organisms.

She felt better when she’d bathed and
changed.

She didn’t know why she’d been creeped
out by the discovery that she’d slept on a tomb. She wasn’t
superstitious. Dead was dead and they couldn’t be offended by
anything anyone did above their burial spot—not even something as
disrespectful as fucking.

She examined bones all the time. Most
of them had been dead centuries, at the very least, but she’d
examined skeletal remains for the police a few times when a body
was found that had been buried long enough there was little left
for them to go on to solve the case.

She wasn’t repulsed by bones. Decaying
tissue had an ick factor, depending on how old it was, but bones …
no.

She didn’t need to sleep, or to rest,
but she didn’t particularly want to rejoin the party in the crypt
at the moment and she didn’t feel like standing in the hot sun.
Finding a place to settle beneath the shade of one of the open
tents, she stared absently at the jungle, trying to sort through
her thoughts.

She knew she had to have dreamed the
bizarre things that had been dropping into place in her memory
since she woke, and yet it didn’t have the ‘feel’ of a dream. In
the dream, she’d thought she was awake, shielded from what she was
seeing by an odd sort of lassitude, but alert enough that she’d
been looking for an explanation for the strange lights.

A breathless sort of thrill rushed
through her when she finally allowed herself to recall the
sensations she’d experienced when Anka had made love—ok, fucked
her. The sense of happiness and satisfaction she’d felt upon first
waking, she knew, were because of that … wet dream, which was her
first ever and brought on by what? Some sort of weird fascination
with the statue?

Was that why she couldn’t remember
Anka actually doing anything? She remembered looking up at him. She
remembered, in shivery detail, everything she’d felt—except she
couldn’t remember him physically touching her beyond that first
brush of his hands that had made her clothing vanish.

And what was up with that, anyway? Why
would she even dream in terms of magic?

He had been wearing some kind of
leather looking breechclout. She certainly didn’t remember him
taking it off. So how could he have had sex with her?

What was she thinking!

The whole thing had been a dream! Why
was she quibbling over the details?

And why was it that remembering it was
enough to make her feel all hot and bothered all over again? God!
She was so pathetic!

Granted, she could barely remember the
last time she’d gotten laid, mostly because she’d tried like hell
to forget it, but it wasn’t as if she went around hassling after
men, fantasizing, looking desperately for somebody to scratch her
itch. She rarely felt an itch. Mostly, she didn’t even think about
having sex because she never saw anyone that interested her enough
to put it in her mind.

Last night sure as hell shouldn’t have
put her ‘in the mood’!

She stewed over that awhile and
finally remembered she had been pretty fascinated with the
fertility god’s dong. She didn’t remember feeling aroused, though.
She’d just been … sort of awed and unnerved at the size of
it.

Why had she felt compelled to spout
all that nonsense about the temple, anyway, she thought irritably?
Now she was going to either have to explain that she’d had that
weird dream, or just leave it hanging. Either way, she would sound
like a hysterical female.

She had not been hysterical! She’d
been upset, unnerved, but she damned well thought she’d handled
herself well under the circumstances.

The worst thing she could do, she
finally decided, was to slink off with her tail between her legs.
She’d be better off to brazen it out and, somehow, just pass off
the comments.

Having made the decision, she got up
resolutely and headed to the dig site. The workers, from what she
could tell, seemed to have decided to stay, although it also
appeared that they’d flatly refused to go inside the temple … or
tomb, whatever it was. Several of them glanced at her as she made
her way to the shaft, but they averted their gazes almost as
quickly.