Alien Fighter's Baby (Captured Science Fiction Romance) (8 page)

D
amn
, Bran couldn’t believe he’d turned down sex with a pinup babe. He had to be losing it. The fact he’d never had the bump and grind with a real woman was not lost on him. But she wanted it too … he could tell she was primed and ready. He could detect that her pulse was beating faster, her skin was warmer, her amazing breasts were even firmer, as if swollen with need, and maybe other guys not enhanced like he was couldn’t sense it, but he could smell her arousal for him.

If he touched her slit … he knew she would be soaked.

So maybe he was a little bit snarly when he unhooked her voluptuous body from his and he ordered her sharply back into the Zach.

“Fix some clothes to put on, damn it.”

Had he said that last part? Idiot!

All he’d been detecting in her started disappearing. He could feel their closeness sucking backward and his heightened senses identified her pulse slowing, her skin cooling, and her nipples softening. Why did he have to be a damn rigid soldier to the end?

To save her.

Yes, okay, there was that. He needed his head in the game if he was going to save them and make sure that Starling and their baby were going to make it off the enemy planet alive. So he wasn’t a coward, so to speak, just focused on their survival. He rubbed his chin—it was hard when you really dug the lady, and you wanted everything to be good for her, especially making up for the past.

“Head in the game,” he muttered, brushing a silky strand of Starling’s hair from her face as she looked up at him.

But she was already mad at what he’d said, and she moved away from his touch, and then turned to flounce away. When he got into the Zach he was further irritated to see she’d wrapped herself up like a nun in one of the thermal blankets. Apparently, she found something to cut a hole in it so she could use it like a poncho to cover up her killer body.

He should be glad, because her shape distracted the hell out of him. He needed not to look at her curves, but keep his mind on their survival.

So he probably made his second, third, or fourth mistake with her by ordering, “Next time, you do not leave the Zach, no matter how excited you are.”

Bran heard her inhaled breath. That had hit wrong. But he wasn’t used to explaining himself or his orders. Especially orders that were obvious, like leaving the Zach left her more vulnerable, left them more vulnerable, left their best way of survival, and wasn’t something any soldier with any decent training would ever do.

That stalled his train of thought. Starling wasn’t a soldier with any training. Maybe he should go lighter, but maybe he should fix that.

“You can’t just order me around, like, like, some slave,” Starling whispered harshly.

Bran felt the kick in his gut, and just blurted, “Yes I can.” He inhaled, and then snapped as sharply, “Not slave. Soldier.”

“You can’t,” she said stubbornly.

He glanced at her, and then put the Zach in gear and drove it forward. In the tent she was wearing, her face and hair were like a beautiful topping, as her lips pouted in a way that made him want to kiss her.

Commanders didn’t kiss their insubordinate soldiers.

“Yes I can,” he said, quietly adamant. “Look, Starling, we need to think about survival here. To survive, someone is in command and the other one does what they say.”

That was when he got the silent treatment. He’d heard about it early in life from a couple of married soldiers before he’d entered the full Alpha-Force training, which didn’t allow such things as relationships or marriage. He might’ve scoffed back then at how silly it was, until it happened to him.

Then he realized how damn powerful it was. No talky meant no combined lip action, no handholding, no body rubbing or any of the intimacy that they had been building together.

Bran sighed. At least he didn’t have to worry about their second time together and how he wanted to make it good for her, because it wasn’t going to happen, not with the silent treatment bearing down on him.

He was wondering how he was going to get through to her, when he saw light piercing the darkness, which meant they were closing in on the far opening of the cavern. He shut down the vehicle well back in the darkness of the cave.

“We will be spending the night here, Starling,” he said quietly, while she continued not looking at him with a cute, stubborn look on her face. “Please stay in the Zach until I scout it out.” When she didn’t say anything and stiffened her shoulders, probably at him picking at the wound between them with his instructions, he added, “I’ll be on the mic if you need me.”

When Bran jumped down from the Zach, he was happy to hear the sound of water someplace close by. If it were drinkable, that would be perfect. He switched his sight to night vision and did a quick scan through the darkness, checking for any cave-dwelling creatures.

Beside the Grubs, which the military had guessed were largely insect-based DNA, he hadn’t seen any other aliens on the planet. But the planet wasn’t the Grubs’ home world, only a place for one of their major bases. So the life forms on the planet were various; however, he’d never seen the Grubs pick a planet that had another sentient race on it.

It had made it difficult to try to pinpoint their multiple bases dotted throughout the rim. Bran knew for certain the planet he was on was not the one he’d been captured on. He was lucky his team had been able to find him.

Above him, Bran scanned over a smaller, but long life form and he upped the zoom on his night scan. It looked like a long caterpillar, only twenty times the size. Immediately, he wondered if he could eat it, as he studied the creature. It would probably stay where it was, but he didn’t want to take the chance it would move or even sting or bite he or Starling.

He took his tack-pistol out and adjusted the shot to very small, then he aimed. His first shot dropped the caterpillar onto the cavern floor near the entrance, knocking up dust.

“Bran?”

Bran blinked, but watched the bug for movement, as any hard shell could have saved it from dying and it could only be stunned, while he smiled slightly at the break in the “silent treatment.” Seemed as if he now had one way to get around Starling’s tactic.

“Yeah, baby,” he said lowly, and tried for seductive.

He had some enhanced hearing and heard Starling’s small, breathless inhale. Bingo.

“Um, what was that?” she asked, sounding soft and oh so kissable.

Right before he fully explained exactly what it was, he remembered her reaction to the snake. So he pondered for a second before he lied. “Just breaking loose a few rocks overhead. Don’t want them falling.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s smart.”

Bran nodded with a smile. Yeah, that was smart of him. If he’d been a humming type of guy, he might have hummed as he got rid of more of the caterpillars through the immediate chamber, plus a few spider-type creatures, several ugly cockroach-looking things, and one nice, fat yellow snake.

Dinner.

An hour later, Bran heard Starling above where he crouched.

“I’ll do it.”

He started to look up, and slowed seeing her bare legs. Nice. More bare leg, then thigh. Nicer. Then a short skirt. He even liked that. Really. He wanted to see it from behind. Then, looking higher still, he saw that she’d tied the bottom of her tee shirt into side knot under her breasts, which left the center of her tender belly bare.

That made him gulp.

Nicer.

Looking higher, he saw the new tightness of her shirt cupped and accentuated her large breasts. Also showed the poky centers.

She must be cold, he thought, fighting the rise of his reaction to her new outfit.

He finally made it to her lush eyes and saw the challenge in them. He had to mentally kick himself to get his brain started, as he glanced down at the snake he’d been about to clean.

“This?” he asked, pointing the tip of his knife to the snake.

When he looked back up at her, she nodded firmly. “I need to help. You can’t do everything.”

Well, he did need to set up perimeter guards, and it was going to be dark soon. There was a panoramic view of a massive valley beyond the cavern entrance. Miles down, and not one sight on the horizon of Grub ships. Still, he’d never set any camp without the guards, unless he didn’t have them.

He’d be seriously impressed if Starling was able to clean the snake. He knew she was squeamish about it, and still she was making herself conquer that distaste. He started to say he would handle it, but then thought he should change his thinking.

She was right—it was better if they both did things for their survival. If anything happened to him, she needed to know how to do these things.

“Do you need any tips?” he asked.

She shook her head, looking determined in an endearing way. “No, I watched you before.”

“Okay then”—he stood and turned the handle of his knife toward her—“I’ll go set our perimeter guards.”

The knife looked huge in her small hand, but she lifted it with a grim smile. He watched her kneel in front of the snake, as he said, “I’ll be on the mic if you need me.”

She hooked her bottom lip with her top teeth, looked up at him, and nodded, then looked back down at the snake. As he left her, he wondered if she’d really be able to do it or not.

Gross. So gross. Gross.

It was all Starling could think as she sliced the alien snake.

“Yuck,” she muttered. Then she gave herself a pep talk. “You can do this. You can do this and make dinner out of it. You are useful. You can do this.”

It really helped to talk while she was doing the grossest thing she’d ever done in her life. Really, after the horrible stuff from the middle of the snake came out and was tossed aside, it wasn’t so bad. Scraping the scales off was easy, and she had plenty of water that Bran had said was not contaminated and that they could drink or clean up with.

So by the time she got down to just the meat of the snake, she wasn’t horrified any longer; instead she was thinking about how impressed Bran might be if she actually got it cooking. To do that she would need some sticks to poke the meat onto, as she’d seen Bran do before.

She was still mad at him for acting as if by her being half dressed she was trying to seduce him or something. But she could never seem to hold on to her anger for long. She’d try when she’d get really mad, but after a while, the intensity of it would fade and it was hard to get back the anger.

She really didn’t want Bran to know that and use it against her. She’d probably act mad for a bit, so he wouldn’t think she was a pushover. But she’d never been in a relationship before and wasn’t quite sure what the best thing to do was.

Still, she shouldn’t let him know she was so easy, because he was so bossy. The problem with him being so bossy was that he was hot and attractive while doing it. His lips would get firm in a hard line, his cheekbones would get sharper, and the silver in his eyes would go dark—and then little shivers would start all over her body at the deep command in his voice.

Even though she’d be furious with him, she still couldn’t help but notice how hot he was. Darn it. That didn’t help her staying mad at all. She wasn’t ready to admit Bran was completely right, but she had to admit that she really needed to learn how to take care of herself without conveniences. Learning to do things like cutting up alien snake to eat.

Starling set Bran’s huge knife down on top of the container they used to cut up the meat, and then stood and dusted off her hands, while looking down at the nice chunks of alien snake she had. She knew before that Bran had used a fission-burner from inside the Zach to grill the meat.

She had a good memory for watching somebody do something one time and being able to replicate it, so she was confident that she could get the fiss-burner set up again. She just needed something to poke the meat onto, so she grabbed the knife and decided she could peek outside to see if she could find a few branches to cut off some of the alien vegetation.

She didn’t tell Bran over the mic he’d made her wear, because she wanted to surprise him with how useful she could be. Her one problem was that he was at the front of the cave, but that was solved a second later when she noticed that she could see light in a crack beyond where the water gathered in twin pools.

“Perfect,” she whispered.

She would slip out there, saw off a few alien branches, and be back in minutes.

S
tarling ran from the light
, and maybe she was a fool, but it whirled and hissed right toward her, until she was certain it was going to explode. The light was like an insect that wanted to buzz around her, only it was huge. However, after climbing to the outside through the side cavern entrance, she realized too late that the light was indeed an alien insect.

Its huge, buzzing presence chased her as she raced through the dense vegetation. As she ran, crazy memories of Otball’s hunters pursued her, racing through her confused mind, while she gasped short and frantic breaths. It was just like the night Otball’s hunters had captured her. The denseness of the wilds around her was humid, dark, and scathingly verdant.

It was as if the alien wilderness was a living, breathing entity with the snatching fingers of grasping vines and a mind of evil. Small squeals of desperation and fear wrenched from her throat, as perspiration dripped down her body.

“Bran!” she cried.

She was more afraid of the alien wilderness than of escaping the large, aggressive insect. Suddenly, vines with bumpy black and sticky stems twisted around one of her wrists and another looped around her hips, directly beneath the short skirt she wore. Everyplace that the sticky excretions touched began to burn like fire against her skin.

The vines stopped her forward motion with a jerk, and she screamed sharply, then more of the lethal vines fell around her shoulders and tangled into her hair.

It felt as if the vines wanted to gnaw on her. The aura around her was dripping with a desire to devour. She screamed and twisted her body, trying to get loose, but only became more trapped in the vines … and then she could feel them slithering on her skin.

They were crawling. They were alive!

“Bran!” she screamed. “Help me! Please, Bran, help me!”

She couldn’t halt her panicked tears as the excretions burned her skin in more and more places.

“Damn it, Starling!” Bran bellowed.

Starling hadn’t known Bran was there. She couldn’t lift her head to see him, but she could feel the strong tugs he used on the creeping plant, which thrashed her body within the octopus of vines.

“Help me, Bran!” she bawled.

“Damn it, they’re carnivorous!” he shouted. “Yes, baby! I will get you out of there.”

Suddenly, Starling felt a heavy weight knocking into the back of her body, and it threw her forward with whopping force. The air shot out of her lungs with a huge woof, while her body seemed to take flight and the motion of it all snapped the vines around her.

Then Bran’s arms closed around her from behind, while her eyes clenched with the only physical motion she could manage.

“Hell no!” Bran shouted.

There was an edge.

It was a cliff, or an incline, Starling frantically realized at Bran’s bellow, as his hold around her was torn away by the law of gravity, then she hit the mud!

Mud?

She screamed … more of a squeal, as she thrashed her limbs and her body twisted with the instinct to try to catch a hold of something, to stop her downward slide. Only the mud was slick, and her body moved like a sled down a sharp incline.

“Bran!” she shrieked.

But it was useless screaming for his help, because he was sliding behind her, and his heavier weight was trying to move faster than she was. Mud coated her completely, while she revolved on the slide, turning around with no control.

It happened so quickly, with only seconds to panic, barely enough time to understand the terror of where the mudslide could end.

But then she was saved by the mud itself, as it came along with her haphazardly skidding flight. Great, oozing piles of it, so when she reached the bottom that would have been a rocky death, or certainly a broken limb, instead she plopped right into the middle of a huge mud hill, which had been made by her precarious and sliding flight down into a stream at the bottom.

In that split second, she screamed shrilly, when she realized that Bran would crush her. But miraculously, with an impossible effort of physical strength, Bran somehow lunged over her. She watched with mud dripping off her nose as he rolled and came to a stop with an ominous thudding sound, just in the water, at the edge of the stream.

Bran was on his back five feet in front of her as the mud hill she sat on slowly edged toward him, lowering her in its middle, while the thick mud languidly oozed outward.

“Damn it!” Bran said, while she watched his prone body heaving once like one sharp tremor of an earthquake.

Bran was okay.

If he was cursing … he was alive! She was so relieved. If Bran was cursing, that meant he wasn’t hurt too badly. She was surprised by the sudden heart-jolt of emotion she felt, and she realized that it had to mean she cared for him. Oh, no. More. She loved him.

Even though she thought he looked like a huge mud statue. A toppled Adonis. A giggle escaped her. The surprise of its appearance opened her mouth before she had considered the muddy consequences.

“You’re giggling?” Bran shouted, followed by a string of outraged curses.

Starling tasted mud, and then she spat it out by instinct. Unfortunately, that flying mud happened to land on … er, Bran.

“And spitting on me!” he bellowed, and his mud-caked body convulsed. Then his large frame curled into motion and he began to get to his feet.

Her wide-eyed gaze followed his shape, etched in mud. He was masculinity sculpted in sinewy strength. The large hills and valleys of his mounded muscles were outlined in sharp detail by the mud coating him.

He was so good-looking.

Oh my.

But what woman wouldn’t think he was hot?

Bran’s shoulders were broad and heavy with strength, and his biceps were mounded heaps. His belly was lean, tight, and ridged with muscles, which she saw as his vest came off and he slapped it aside angrily.

“Of all the mindless things to do, Starling!” he yelled, glaring at her through mud-hole eyes. “Damn it, woman! This is not a game. This is my life! Your life,” he shouted, while his chest expanded and the buttress of sinew over it rippled.

That breathtaking display of Bran’s virility instantly aroused her. It was like a touch. A pinch of her nipples and an intimate caress lower. Deeper. Her breath faltered. It was like a rapid flick across her clit.

Her feelings were expanded, because her knees were bent and her bare legs were tumbled open is if in invitation, where she sat facing Bran on her slowly deflating mud hill. Then her surprising arousal bubbled higher, building even stronger, as she watched Bran begin to use angry and jerky motions to take off his mud-soaked pants.

The entire time Bran had been shouting at her, her shocking arousal had been spiraling. He was chastising her … thoroughly. She blew a mud bubble as she sighed, while she looked up at him with dreamy eyes. He had saved her three times. He’d left his ship because of her, and now he yelled at her, all because he cared.

Rough around the edges, solid, and secure, Bran cared for her. He’d even sealed his affection intimately with his kisses.

That had made her feel as if he cared for her and passionately craved her. Though she was a virgin, she’d secretly explored ways to pleasure herself, while imagining what lovemaking could be like. Especially imagining what a man could be like when in the throes of hot lovemaking. At the top of her list, though, were the many times she’d imagined what a man’s shaft must look like, feel like … or even taste like … maybe.

Suddenly, Starling gasped, because the real-life product of her young imagination was right before her eyes. Bran’s erection! It was straight, rigid, and thrust forward as thick as a pole from between his thighs. It didn’t even spring when he moved, the stiffness was so solid.

She’d been too afraid in the Grub prison to look then, but now, she couldn’t tear her gaze away. It had to be as long as her hand … no, as long as to her wrist. Her eyes widened … no, longer!

Her core clenched with heat. Even the mud on her skin felt sexy. The aches she felt were deep, hot, and hungry, while her gaze lingered over his thick shaft.

“Damn it, Starling! Are you listening to me?” Bran demanded, with his fists planted on his hips and his legs braced apart, while he glared down at her.

Starling blinked, as Bran’s voice snapping her name registered through her passion-soaked mind. Her gaze jerked up to his, but then his gaze lowered to where she had been looking. It seemed it had suddenly dawned on him, bypassing his anger, just what it was she’d been ogling.

His dark head bowed and he seemed to be looking down at his rigid shaft. The muscles in his belly rippled once, and a moan escaped her, before she had any chance to hold it back. Bran’s heavily thrusting erection bucked at her moan, as if seeking her, while the sinew over his powerful thighs flexed deeply.

An answering charge flashed through her body, sparking her nipples, belly, and then lower. She tried to scramble to stand through the slippery mud, with the thought of fleeing. It was the tug and pull of her femininity wanting to give in, yet fighting his power over her. Fighting the liquid answer that was readying her for him, even then.

She managed to stumble to her feet at the edge of the mud, facing Bran, but her denial caused her hands to clutch between her thighs. It was a hopeless effort to try and pull back her response to him.

Bran didn’t move, though his gaze rose enough to watch her hands cupping between her thighs. The aura surrounding him was like a heat wave. She moaned and gasped instantaneously, but a louder sound behind her foreshadowed her whimper, as Bran’s head jerked up.

“Starling!” he shouted, and his large body started to coil into some type of action. Just as the heavy sound of liquid earth moving made a loud sucking sound behind her.

Surprised, Starling threw her arms out, just as Bran reached for her. But he’d moved too late to pull her free, and a short wall of mud slammed into the back of her knees. It toppled her forward. She squealed as she fell toward Bran. With the effort of trying to catch her, he toppled back into the stream. She went with him, forced by the mud’s impetus, while her arms windmilled, then her hands caught Bran’s waist.