Alien Fighter's Baby (Captured Science Fiction Romance) (5 page)

B
ran lay
in the back of the Zach beside Starling and he stared at the roof in the bleak, dusky night light. It never became completely dark on the Grubs’ planet. Truth was he didn’t know if it was the Grubs’ planet. More than likely it was an outpost, because it wasn’t heavily populated. Good thing for Starling and him.

Starling slept underneath the only blanket he’d given her. She was snuggled beneath it, as if it were cold, while he lay on the deck feeling hot. He ground his teeth together. It was hard to just lie next to her and not think about the fact that she was such a sexy babe.

He eyed Starling’s slender calf and ankle, which had slipped out from beneath the blanket. He ought to go jack off, he thought, somewhat angrily. He could relieve the hard erection he had, which just kissing her produced … hours ago. But he couldn’t.

For one thing, it would be damn embarrassing if she found him doing it. The other thing was he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she’d tried to save him again, which made him a lousy horn-dog for only thinking about her for sex. Damn, she was more than that. But he couldn’t help it that she was hot besides.

Starling was having another nightmare. One of the terrible ones where she knew she was dreaming and she tried to push her mind to wake up, but couldn’t. She’d never had nightmares before the Trak-Grub-Walds had taken her from Master Otball’s slave ship and made her another slave. A breeding slave.

In her dream, she had run, being chased by Otball’s five mercenary slave catchers. She tripped down the front ramp of her home on Ergo, a satellite moon of Neptune, and ended on bloodied knees, while the hot smell of unwashed flesh had surrounded her. The smell of it had made her choke.

Then suddenly, she’d been kneeling and stripped naked in front of the obese Otball. He had her wrist in his corpulent lap. The tattoo needle he’d used to brand her had made her cry, just as the thick fingers he used to prod inside her, to check her virginity, had made her scream. The scavenge hunters had held her limbs splayed at all four corners, with her knees bent in supplication to Otball’s inspection.

“Young and sssweet” Otball had lisped with a sickly, high-toned voice. “A virginss,” he’d hissed. “Yesss.” Otball’s double chin had rolled on his bloated chest as he licked his puffy lips, and he sneered. “Grubss payss fifty thousssand for virginss.”

“Wake up, Starling!” Bran winced at Starling’s terrified scream, while he tried to hold on to her without hurting her.

The first he’d known anything was wrong was when he’d woken to Starling’s first scream, and then he’d felt her thrashing. To keep her from hurting herself in the small space in the back of the Zach, he grabbed her and corralled her limbs with his arms and legs, until he had her subdued against him.

“Bran!” she screamed against his throat, while she fought him and he hugged her tighter. Then her head arched back and her eyes popped open. They looked wild. The green of her irises was startling, they were so close and so filled with emotion. “Take my virginity! Take it. Take it!” she cried, as she struggled under his arms, while her pale pink lips parted with pants.

Bran’s mouth dropped open, but he quickly managed to tighten it into a grimace as he turned Starling onto her back. Then he moved and crouched over her on his hands and knees. “You want me to have sex with you now?”

His voice had been harsh with amazement. And yeah, okay, hope too.

Starling’s eyes blinked open and closed slowly as she lay with her arms fallen out to her sides. Something was wrong—he had to admit, because she hadn’t gotten the least bit prissy or upset over his use of the word “sex.” Of course, he’d known she wasn’t in her right mind, but the straining erection between his thighs, strangled in the snugness of his pants, demanded that he try and get some.

So he’d been trying to compute the justice of simply helping himself to Starling’s prime little body, while she was in a sleepwalking or lying and semiconscious state.

Hell, she had begged him, hadn’t she?

“Bran? What happened?”

Bran jerked his gaze to Starling’s. Hell, it was too late.

“Nothing, Starling, not a damn thing!” he snapped, and he’d said it more harshly than he really intended. So then he watched incredulously as Starling’s big, beautiful eyes began to fill with tears. “Ah, damn,” he grumbled, while he reached up and gently brushed the hair from her temple. “You just had a bad, bad dream, sweetheart,” he muttered.

“I did?” Her curving bottom lip quivered. “Otball,” she whispered, and her voice cracked.

“Who’s that?”

Her gaze jerked to his, just as he’d been thinking it was a strange name, but vaguely familiar. Yet he’d known it was a name.

“No one,” she blurted, and then she began to wiggle her body with the attempt to escape his crouching body, he guessed.

“Now just a minute.”

He planted a hand over her tenderly sloped belly and brought her wiggle, firmly but gently, to a halt. He watched as she rubbed her wrist with an unconscious gesture, while she warily peeked up at him. Her shy peeking conflicted with the mutinous pout on her desirable pink lips.

He’d never seen baby-soft lips like Starling had. Forcefully, he tore his thoughts back to his curiosity over the action she used to rub her wrist. Then, with swiftly trained motions, he had a hold of her wrist so fast, she couldn’t get it away from him.

“What are you doing?” she asked with a yelp.

It was no struggle, really, because he understood he could toss her with one arm … that was barely engaged. He turned her finely boned wrist to his gaze and he saw the tattoo. His eyes adjusted vision to magnification without thinking. What he saw was very small, and it made him instantly furious that someone had branded her.

What could it mean? He knew instinctively that Starling hadn’t done it to herself. Not freely. The tattoo was too crude. It was a snake tattoo with a penis head, nestled in a tiny rosebud, and the whole of it was outlined with a deep red circle or the letter O.
As in Otball?
he wondered.

Starling tried to jerk her wrist free from Bran’s grasp, but he was having none of that. His irises were doing strange things in silver metallic. They expanded and contracted with pinpoint black pupils in the center, which she’d never seen before.

“What is this?”

Then he was looking at her, with his eyes in that strange, nearly nonhuman way. Starling took the opportunity of his distraction to snatch her wrist from his fingers.

“Nothing,” she mumbled, and she tried once again to scoot out from underneath him.

But suddenly she stopped, because she was shocked when she’d felt his large, calloused hand clamped over her bare inner thigh. She’d not realized the tee shirt she wore was wadded up so high on her body.

Bran’s fingers moved higher and took a fuller hold on her inner thigh, while she clamped her legs together with the instinct to stop him. Only she realized it was a mistake, because now both her inner thighs had his big hand pressed against them.

“Nothing?” he asked, and his irises changed to swirling, dark silver. “Do you know, Starling, that you just begged me to take your virginity? Was that nothing?”

His fingers moved higher and she could feel his knuckles brush her—

“Bran, I—”

She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move or think of anything but his powerful hand that held her. If he moved it any higher—she would die. And it wouldn’t be death from disgust, either, because a warm heat had been building between her thighs, and then her nipples had drawn taut and achy.

It was amazing because Bran’s otherworldly eyes turned to her nipples as if he could sense them tightening, and as if his extraordinary eyes could see them through the thin fabric of her shirt. Incredibly, his look only made her nipples ache more, and she just managed to catch a moan, while her inner thighs tightened around his big hand.

Oh Jupiter, what was he doing to her?

A
ll of a sudden
, the Zach’s control panel lit up like an ancient Christmas tree with lungs. Bran’s senses snapped to attention as his tall frame tensed, and Starling screeched louder than all the buzzers that blared at them. Bran’s immediate opinion was that beautiful but helpless women were a liability in an emergency.

They took precious seconds off a man’s normally swift reactions to danger, while that man tried to decide what the hell to do with them. He had a vivid image of Starling bursting into tears as he barked out direct orders with his normal, but harsh, commanding voice. It wouldn’t occur to her those orders could save her life, because she’d be too busy crumbling, and she would have already forgotten what the orders were to begin with.

He realized he would have to compromise and adjust every instinct he’d honed to split-second efficiency over his lifetime career in the Alpha-Forces. He brought his thoughts back to the present, while he did a quick scan of all of the Zach’s flashing displays and he zeroed in on the blue-shadowed ground display. At the same time, he grabbed a retiring bag and he unceremoniously began shoving Starling into it.

What he’d seen on the ground display was a Bug unit that was closing in on their location. They were closer than they should be able to get before the Zach’s radar had picked them up and started blaring the alert. Then, under all his thoughts about the advancing enemy, it registered in his mind that Starling was being surprisingly bendable, in a quiet and wild-eyed way.

He’d managed to get all of her curves wrapped up to her neck in the retiring bag. But then, eating up precious time, he kissed her on the lips, quick and hard.

“Trust me, baby, this is for your own good.”

Her muffled response went unheard as he finished closing the retiring bag over the top of her head. Then he strapped his wiggling, feminine, mummy-like prize into the sidewall storage cradle, before he quickly turned back to the Zach’s displays.

“Now I can work on saving our butts,” he muttered.

What he hadn’t been able to figure out was how the Grubs had found them to begin with. The Zach should have been literally invisible when its shields were up. However, all the blinking colored displays showed a Grub ground unit was closing in with unerring direction. It was nearly on top of them … only fifty clicks away.

“Hell, how did they know we were here to begin with?” Bran asked, as he flung back into the driver’s seat.

There wasn’t any point in trying to hide by not firing up the Zach, he concluded, as he stated the code to turn off security on the ignition, and then the tactical vehicle roared to life. The problem with the fact they had been spotted by the enemy was that he’d been certain he and Starling had gotten away from the Skitter undetected.

That fortuitous blast that had happened just as they’d left the darkness under the belly of the Skitter should have obscured their bailout. The Zach’s shields had all pointed to it being a clean escape. So why did it seem as if the Grubs could track them?

The answer hit him as fast and as furious as the Zach when he made it pop a wheelie through the brush.

“Damn it,” he muttered, as he glanced back at his precious bundle, wrapped in the retiring bag.

Those damned Grubs had put a tracking device into Starling, and it probably had something in it to disrupt the Zach’s radar too. If that were the case, he would never lose them. But it seemed to be the only practical answer.

As he thought through his options, he continued to plow the Zach through the overgrown wilderness of the Grub planet. It was a jarring escape, at full tilt. While he steered, he fiddled with the shield matrix and tried to reconfigure it to hide the tracking signal implanted in Starling.

After about twenty minutes of that futile effort, he reached the inescapable conclusion, which he’d been trying to avoid. He had no idea about how the Grubs’ technology worked. It was obvious that nothing he’d done was going to mask the homing signal.

That left him with only one option, and that was to get rid of the tracking signal at its source. Which meant he needed to find it, and then toss it out a window. He could only hope that it hadn’t been buried too deep inside of Starling.

He figured the bug had to have been injected under her skin somewhere. Because he’d had his hands and gaze on every inch of her full-figured curves enough to know that no major surgery had been done to bury it deeper, or he would have seen the scarring.

What in the hell did they want with her, and why the hell did they want her pregnant?

Before that, he’d still assumed the enemy Trak-Grub-Walds had intended to use Starling against him, through interrogation, only they’d not gotten around to it before they had escaped. Of course, it could be said that he’d been carelessly ignoring the baby factor, because it didn’t fit anywhere.

How could Starling have gotten pregnant during only one encounter? He knew it was medically possible, yet still … just one time. It seemed more rational to assume that the Grubs had done something to ensure it.

That thought made his skin crawl, and didn’t improve his frame of mind for what he had to do. Hell, Starling had been through enough, he thought, and his hands tightened on the directional shift until his knuckles turned white. She would hate him after he did what he had to do. What he had to do for them, after he put the Zach on auto-evade.

But he was a leader and a soldier and he’d been trained through hard decisions not to hesitate, so he forced himself to crawl into the back seat, where he reached for Starling bundled in the retiring bag. He hauled her beneath him as he crouched over her on his hands and knees.

There was no way she was ever going to understand what he was going to do, he thought, and he didn’t have the time to explain it to her. He needed to find the tracking bug and pitch it as quickly as possible, before they had an army of Grubs up their butts.

Starling’s struggles inside the bag were useless, and he could tell by the position of her flaying limbs and muffled exclamations that he had her turned slightly downward. He decided then he could use the bag to keep her restrained, and someday, if she ever spoke to him again, he could explain to her that it had been nicer than tying her up.

He started at her feet and unfastened the bag only a little bit, until he had caught both her ankles in his hands.

“Starling, I have to do this,” he said. “Stay still!”

He was amazed that she immediately stilled her struggles. Hell, he should have thought about asking her before. However, his grace period lasted all of ninety seconds. He’d searched her feet, arches, toes, heels, and then had started up her ankles, when her struggling resumed.

He heard her squeal an exclamation of denial inside the bag, but he held her firmly and moved his body around, while he held her calf up to inspection. His irises expanded to x-ray, but he knew the better bet was to feel the bug under her skin. He stroked and explored every satiny inch of skin on Starling’s calf, while he held it firm against her wiggling. He could only imagine what she thought he was doing.

All the while, the blue warning lights and beeping alarm had kept him moving quickly. But the more time he was examining, the more Starling’s struggles slowed, as if she were running out of energy. That was until he’d reached her inner thighs and had to switch positions, and he kneed her legs apart.

He realized then that Starling had just been saving her energy, and he had to plant his hand on her curvy hip to hold her still.

No way.

She was pissed and fought for all she was worth to protect the tender haven between her thighs. He couldn’t blame her. He wanted to treasure it as well. But for the moment, he turned away from her sweetness, and moved his hands and gaze toward her bottom, which was soft and smooth.

Damn, he could have spent hours on her bottom.

Starling had settled again, and her movements were only small undulations to each of his strokes as he tried to feel for the bug. It took him a minute of intense exploration over the slopes of her buttocks before he realized, in the back of his mind, that she liked his fondling. Instantly, that jump-started the thought to the head of the line, and then, no matter how much he tried to push it aside, it wouldn’t go.

So he searched against the sweet little undulations of her perfectly round behind. His hands were so large over each cheek that he could fill his palms with each pear-shaped globe. So sweet and tender, and the crease of Starling’s pretty behind had peach fuzz, which was light and airy along the inner curves.

When he touched that gossamer fuzz, the flesh on her buttocks drew into shivering goose bumps. Gently, he touched the crease, and his breath had hit a dead run, while his gaze settled on the lower portion of Starling’s rosy-pink slit. A slit that was wet, puffy, and smelled sweet. Then his eyes lifted to the rosy tightness of her—

Christ. Hell. Damn.

If there was a God in the universe, he was on their side, because at that exact moment, his middle finger on his left hand grazed over a bump on Starling’s flesh.

He had to clench his jaw twice, before he was able to turn his gaze down where it needed to be. Just along the under curve of Starling’s left buttock there was a tiny raised circle that was no bigger than the head of a pin. Bran expanded his irises up to two-hundred-times magnification.

“Gotcha,” he whispered.

Then came the tough part … he had to cut it out. There was no way in hell he wanted to do that, but it had to come out, so he untangled the bag from around Starling and slowly released her from its confines.

“You’re a monster!” Starling slapped Bran hard across his square jaw. “Ouch,” she yelped.

She’d hurt her hand more than the slap seemed to affect Bran. His head had barely moved with the slap, and then she ignored the regret on his face.

“You’re a pervert,” she cried. She pushed out of the bag Bran had held her prisoner in and shoved the wadded bulk at him. “Stay away from me!”

Tears filled her eyes.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry
. She scooted away from Bran, as far away as she could get, which wasn’t that far in the tight confines at the back of the Zach.

“I have to cut it out,” Bran muttered.

“Are you crazy?”

She’d yelled the question at him. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been doing, but the blaring lights and sounds from the vehicle had begun to worry her. What was wrong? She’d heard Bran say that he was sorry when he’d molested her. Which made no sense.

Suddenly, Bran pounced in front of her and his nose ended up right in front of hers. She yelped, and then cringed.

“There is no time, woman.” His voice was harsh and clipped. “Those warnings say the Grubs are nearly on top of us. You have a tracking bug implanted on you. It has to come out.”

Bran had shouted the last word at her.

“On m-my butt?” she stuttered.

That was where he had centered his attention. She reached under her to touch the area. She’d started to know that when Bran became as intently serious … he meant it. Then he took out his lethal-looking, huge knife, as she stared horrified at the curve of it, shook her head, and cringed.

“Starling.” Bran’s voice warned that he was going to do it whether she agreed or not. Suddenly, another, higher-pitched siren sounded, and it made her jump. “They’re within twenty clicks,” Bran snapped.

“Okay!” she cried, as she forced herself to be braver than she felt.

“Over my lap,” he ordered. “You’ve got to keep your hands away.”

Her chin quivered.

“Is it deep?”

She’d whispered the question as she crawled over Bran’s lap, while he’d sat with his legs crossed.

“No, sweetheart, it’s not.”

His large hand grabbed her waist and he positioned her, while she wondered if he realized that he’d used an endearment. Just the sound of him calling her “sweetheart” had worked to calm her. He didn’t want to hurt her. He was trying to save her, and she didn’t want the Grubs to catch them again. She grabbed the side racks with the hope it would keep her from reaching back, as Bran cut her.

“Maybe you should tie my hands,” she said, in a small voice.

She felt Bran pushing the shirt up over her butt. It exposed her lack of panties and a new worry assaulted her, while embarrassment heated her cheeks. He had to be able to see everything … even lower.

“You can do it,” he said. Starling was amazed that Bran had that much confidence in her. “Brace yourself, baby,” he warned.

Bran swiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and then lifted his knife, while he expanded his irises to magnification again.

Starling screamed when he made the small incision, and then a few moments later she’d obviously fainted. Her body went lax and he was relieved as he dug the bug out. When he finally had the tiny, bloody bug in his fingers, he opened the back window in the Zach and angrily flung it out into the alien wilderness.

Quickly, he turned back to Starling and put disinfectant and a small stitch bandage over the cut. The cut wasn’t large enough to need a real stitch, but it would hurt to sit on for a few days. He thought the fear of what had been happening to her and her pregnancy had helped make her delicate enough to faint.

“You are an ass,” he muttered, because he knew it was all his manhandling.

Bran pulled Starling’s tee shirt down and laid her out on the retiring bags, and then flung himself into the driver’s seat. It was going to be a dangerous ride, trying to get away from the Grubs closing in on them.

“And now they know Starling is alive, and moving on the planet,” he muttered, as he wondered just how much the Grubs wanted Starling back—and why?

Hell, he’d been avoiding the why of it for far too long.