Read Chosen by the Alien Above Part 2: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial Online
Authors: Nora Lane
Chosen by the Alien Above Part 2: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial
Chosen by the Alien Above Series
Nora Lane, May 2015
Copyright © 2015 Nora Lane
All rights reserved worldwide
No part of this book may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without permission from the author. The author respectfully asks that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this book at the authorized online outlets.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incident either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, business establishments, or actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older and who are not blood related.
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Chosen by the Alien Above Series
Chosen by the Alien Above Part 1
Chosen by the Alien Above Part 2
Chosen by the Alien Above Part 3 - Coming Soon!
Excerpt
* * * * *
The hatch swung open and Noah floated in the air beyond.
Oh my god.
He must've been seven feet tall. Huge. Maybe floating made you look bigger. He grabbed handles around the hatch and pulled himself forward, effortlessly gliding like a soaring eagle. His thick muscles flexed and rippled as he curled his legs forward and landed in front of me. He tucked his feet into straps on the floor.
He stood, looking down at me. Nope. It wasn't the floating. He was enormous. Made my five-five frame look like a a child. Even with all the curves.
He flashed a brilliant smile. It dazzled me into stunned silence. How was I ever going to conduct an interview looking into those eyes? How would I ever keep my mind on the questions? And keep it off the curve of his lips.
While his eyes held mine like magnets to the North Pole, I dimly realized that he wasn't wearing any clothes.
He was naked.
No, not naked.
But not wearing clothes in the normal sense.
A shiny gray fabric clung to him like a second skin. It accented his hard lines in all the right places. Less dimly, I realized it clung to him
there
too. And his size
there
was at least a match for the rest of him.
“Let's get you undressed,” he said.
My eyes flew open. Could he read my mind?
The crocodile in my belly switched directions.
He unsnapped the restraints across my chest. Even through the thick fabric of the suit, my skin was aware of his touch. Achingly aware.
No man had ever affected me like this. It was terrifying. Like I didn't have control of my own body.
Undress me?
Did he think he could just take me? Right here? Without so much as a handshake and a how-do-you-do?
What an arrogant ass!
“You overstep, Mr. Sinclair. You’ve made a grave mistake if you think I’m just going to jump into bed with you. If you think a smile is enough to open my legs.”
I said it. And it almost came out convincing.
His smile was
so
enough
to open my legs.
“Out of the suit, I meant,” he said with a grin. That gorgeous grin. The one that ignited on his lips and exploded on mine.
My pink ones.
Down there.
He unfastened the last restraint and immediately my body floated up off the seat. The crocodile in my belly went into overdrive.
Noah pushed me back into the seat and clicked the seal on my helmet. He rotated it a fraction and my ears popped as the pressure in the cabin leaked in. He lifted my helmet off and let it float off to the side.
I was catatonic. Rebuffing his crude—and wonderful!—suggestion took it all out of me. I had no more reserves.
He lifted me gently so our eyes were level. His sparked a low yellow fire.
“Welcome to Orbital One, Ms. Gabarro. I've been waiting to meet you for a long time.”
* * * * *
The stars shone like diamonds scattered on a black velvet blanket. I thought I knew what a perfectly dark night sky looked like. I’d been in the desert under a new moon sky. I thought I’d seen it as clear as night, when the Milky Way looked like a jellyfish strung across the sky.
But that was nothing compared to this.
The stars beamed a pure white light against the deepest black. It was like taking off a pair glasses that had a thick layer of grime that I’d never noticed before.
Until now.
I looked away from the round window and took a deep breath. I sat in the cockpit chair, my body restrained by the harness. I didn't drift up into the ceiling but my stomach felt like it anyway. I’d heard zero g was like being in a swimming pool. A high school swim career made moving through water second nature.
This wasn’t floating in water. There was no thickness to it.
The wall in front of me was a blizzard of glowing buttons, dials, and gauges. Only one made sense to me. I checked the digital clock that counted down the launch and now counted up the mission time.
What did Director Chu call it?
Mission elapsed time.
That was the amount of time that I hadn't yet died, after not dying when the rocket launched.
I was pretty surprised with all the not dying I’d managed thus far. Especially considering my condition.
The digital counter read one hundred-twenty-nine minutes. I must be getting close to Orbital One. Thank god because I seriously needed to fill four barf bags.
The bright orange suit’s circulatory system hissed in my ear. It was working hard and partially succeeding. My cold skin didn’t stop the sweat dripping from my forehead. It beaded above my brow and then raced into my eye. I swiped at it and succeeded in banging the clumsy glove on the closed visor.
This suit was a personal prison.
The bile I swallowed earlier burned in the back of my throat. The way my belly spun around, I knew a repeat performance was a distinct possibility.
The misery of the hotel room last night started to look pretty appealing. If I could've traded a thousand mosquito-bitten knuckles for floating through space, it would’ve been a tough call.
I glanced back out the window. Stars that were momentarily stable wheeled out of view. I locked my throat down to keep from hurling.
Why didn't somebody tell me being an astronaut was mostly an exercise in not puking? Chu mentioned I might feel some nausea. But I didn't “feel some nausea". My entire body had to vomit so bad I felt it in my pinkie toes.
Note to self.
Tell all those kids that say they're going to grow up to be an astronaut to dream up a new job. It’d be a service to their future. I’d be saving them the heartache, the belly ache.
Stars traced across the window. It was odd to think of it as a window. A window back home was something you could throw open to catch a fresh breeze. I was pretty certain throwing this window open wouldn't be refreshing.
I watched the window, despite the uneasy sensation of the universe rotating around me while I sat perfectly still.
You know those people who think the world revolves around them? If they really knew how that felt, like I did now, they'd lose that attitude real quick.
A flash of gold sparked through the glass. One star wildly brighter than the rest. It slid to the edge of the window and then stopped. The universe stabilized again.
My stomach couldn't have been more grateful.
The flash waned and the true shape of the star revealed itself. It wasn't a star at all. It was a space station.
Orbital One.
The personal mansion of the richest recluse the world had ever seen—Noah Sinclair.
I wondered if he had to pay property tax, or if being 300 miles above the surface got you out of it. I added it the list of interview questions. Maybe one of the first ones. Something soft and easy to get us both comfortable.
Before I hit him with the tough ones.
Like why the hell did you pick me?
And what's so important that you broke ten years of radio silence?
The suit's comms crackled to life.
“Ms. Gabarro, you hanging in there?”
Noah.
I recognized his voice, not to mention his gently mocking tone. As if everything in life was a game. As if life was a game.
Maybe it was when you were always winning. Being the richest billionaire in history probably warped your view of reality.
I couldn't relate. My life was a game that I was one hand away from losing.
“Ms. Gabarro, are you there? I didn't lose you, did I? Please respond.”
The casual confidence in his voice fell away like an ill-fitted disguise. Concern came through clear as starlight. It touched me. I didn't expect it.
“Yes Mr. Sinclair, I'm here. Not doing great, but I'll make it.”
“Yeah, the first time in space is pretty rough. A lifetime of gravity trains our bodies to expect certain things. And up here, you get none of them. Not without a lot of effort.”
The space station grew larger in the window. The general shape emerged. It looked like nothing so much as a bicycle wheel with four thick spokes and the axle still shoved through the middle. It didn't look anything like the piecemeal junk yard that was the International Space Station. It looked like another level of technology.
Like you saw in movies.
Like you never believed you’d see in real life. Only I was. Right this second. I had the feeling my life was changing. Like vast currents pushed me toward horizons I’d never seen, much less imagined.
For starters, I wasn't one of those kids that always dreamed of being an astronaut. And yet here I was.
Technically, I was a reporter. One whose story happened to be in outer space. Maybe that was a stretch too because I was more accurately an aspiring reporter. I had my own website and tracked stories from around the world that I felt needed more exposure.
Not that my site succeeded in doing that.
I didn't get much traffic, but I didn't have any better options. Apparently no one was looking to hire a girl with no work experience. And, oh yeah, one who was not likely to live out the month either.
Orbital One grew noticeably bigger in the window. From a distance, it looked as smooth as snakeskin. But getting closer I could see that there were bumps and corners and crannies. Still, it made the ISS look like a 1978 Buick.
Flat gray metal stood in stark contrast to the bright gold panels that lined the axles. I guessed those were the solar arrays. They resembled the ones that dotted roofs back home, except for the flashing gold.
It was all so strange. So different.
Suddenly, more than anything, I wanted to be back home. I wanted to be back in something familiar. My heart ached for the scorching sidewalks of a Florida summer.
I shut the longing away. Locked it up and threw away the key. Of course, in this environment, the key would just float around my head, tempting me to take another look.
There was nothing left for me back home. My familiar was a death sentence. At least up here, everything was an unknown.
Especially Noah Sinclair.
Getting there was taking forever. I wished Noah had invented a teleporter beam already. The one that dissolved your body and then reassembled it somewhere else. I always wondered how often a teleporter got it a little bit wrong. Like maybe every one in a million times it might attach your ear to your butt.
I didn’t like those odds.
My sickness proved I could get hit by even longer ones. So maybe it was a good thing my particles weren't dissolving. Who knew what would end up on my butt.
“Mr. Sinclair,” I said, “how much longer until I get there?”
“Cosmo please respond,” he said.
Cosmo's voice echoed in my suit's comms.
“There is a 98.2163—“
“Round to the nearest integer,” Noah barked.
“98% chance that she will arrive in eight minutes and thirty-one seconds.”
“Thirty-one seconds, huh?” I said.
Noah laughed. “Cosmo loves precision. And I'm thankful he does. It's saved me on more than one occasion.”
Saved him?
I didn't like the sound of that. Were space emergencies something that happened all the time? Like every week? Like you nearly died, but squeaked by, but then next week was right around the corner?
