Alpha Star: Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #1 (Intergalactic Dating Agency): Intergalactic Dating Agency (3 page)

“May I join you?”

She jerked in surprise, and a little splash of coffee blurped up out of the hole in the lid.

The dark-haired man who’d approached from the blind side of her peripheral vision looked down at her clenched hands. His nostrils flared, and his piercing blue eyes narrowed.

Every
thing in Zoe flared, and all her focus—what was left of it—narrowed on
him
.

Yow. Where had he come from? Well, out of her tunnel vision, obviously. But how had she missed him as she walked through the park?

He was built along the same lines as most of the elite adventurers who swung through town on their way to challenge the mountains and whitewater: tall, broad-shouldered, and long-limbed but not particularly bulky. He held himself like someone who had challenged the wilderness…and won.

But…he was too pretty. The lean, strong lines of his body were refined to an impossible symmetry in his features. A stern jaw rose to high cheekbones framing a hawkish nose, perfectly mirrored. Even his dark brown hair—a little longer than hers—fell in flawlessly harmonized waves on both sides of his face. And those eyes…too, too blue. Obviously fake.

His silver-studded black leather jacket fit him perfectly, as if molded to his body, but something seemed just slightly off about the design. Considering she was clad in alpaca yarn with burrs still stuck in it, she didn’t have a right to criticize his fashion sense, but there was a touch of avant-garde, haute couture edginess to his clothes that didn’t seem right for the setting, as if he’d been dropped in Sunset Falls from somewhere else, somewhere far away.

A crazy possibility stunned her: was she the first person in Sunset Falls to actually meet a guest from the exclusive resort?

Cool. This story would rival Delaney’s favorite about being chased by a grizzly. This guy was no animal, but Zoe sensed he might be every bit as dangerous. If she was a lowly, dusty brick, he was like a wide vein of quartz: sharp and glittering.

Something she wanted to touch, even though she knew it would bite her.

Oh jeez, if he would bite her…

She closed her jaw with a snap when she realized she might be drooling.

He frowned and touched a fingertip behind his ear. The gesture shook her out of her unlikely lust; she recognized that move from her time in rehab with other TBI patients, some of whom had suffered hearing loss. Did he have a hearing aid? Was he like her?

As if in answer, he said again, slower and more deliberately, “May I join you?”

She nodded, hard enough to slosh more coffee through the lid. “Sure. Please. Of course.” She gestured at the next swing over. “It’s wide open.” Like her babbling mouth. Or other parts of her… “Careful. It’s wet.” Oh jeez, she was babbling
and
talking about being wet…

He bent down to swipe his sleeve along the seat, same as she had, and she wondered if he’d been watching her. But why would he…

Distracted by the taut muscles of his butt cupped by fitted denim, she forgot what she was wondering.

He turned around to sit and she snapped her gaze guiltily to his face. No hardship, really. Had he been in a movie she should’ve seen? With all her time working overseas, she’d missed some of the biggest blockbusters, and he didn’t seem the sort to settle for anything less than big and busting. She studied the hard outline of his pecs visible through the open V of the leather jacket. The fabric of his shirt looked almost silky, clinging to the sculpted muscle like a swooning starlet…

Oops, gaze wandering again.

He was watching her expectantly when she looked up, and she wondered if he’d said something.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “What… I spaced out for a second.”

A line creased between the dark slashes of his brows. “Spaced out?” He spoke the words carefully, with an accent she couldn’t place despite all her years in the international community. There was a touch of Scottish lilt, underlain by more guttural consonants, like some Arabic sounds. He touched behind his ear again. “Ah. I’m boring you already.”

Heat burned in her cheeks, and she slipped forward on her seat. “What? No! I didn’t mean…” When his lips curled upward, she slouched back between the chains. “I just haven’t finished my coffee yet.”

He nodded. “Drink, and then we’ll go. You’ll find no more of that larf-piss on my ship.”

She paused, the cup halfway to her lips. “Excuse me?”

He frowned again. “Of course. You have no larfs here.” He paused. “Cat piss, I suppose you’d say.”

Lowering the cup to her thigh, she stared at him. “Twinkle, Twinkle makes good coffee.” She should know, considering how much of it she drank. This guy might be Hollywood royalty, or maybe even royal royalty if his perfect features, arrogant bearing, and slight trouble with the language was anything to go by, but she’d learned a long time ago not to let anyone boss her around. Whether it was other kids acting tough on a new school playground or petty warlords puffing their chests, she knew backing down would only cause more trouble.

She gave him a hard look. “I suppose what you drink is so much better.”

To her surprise, he angled one shoulder against the chain of his swing and shook his head. “Not really. The freehold has no land under cultivation. We’re fortunate to have liquid water.”

Zoe blinked, nonplussed. Freehold? Was he a homesteader? She knew Montana had plenty of back-to-the-land, off-the-grid types, from apocalyptic preppers to tiny home sustainability fanatics, but she would not have thought this guy was one of those. She couldn’t decide if she was more annoyed or intrigued. “Where’s your property?”

He waved vaguely in an upward direction that she thought must mean somewhere in the mountains. “Unincorporated Jax system. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

Did he mean out by Jackson Hole? Okay, she was dressed like a frump and had ogled at him like a backwoods bumpkin, but even she knew celebrities lived out there. She decided annoyed edged out intrigued. He might be pretty to look at, but his condescension reminded her way too much of Will’s flyboy friends. After their parents died while she was in college—Dad of a heart attack while he’d been in the field, too far from a defibrillator, and Mom less than a year later of a broken heart, too far from her beloved husband—Will had been determined to “get her settled”. Like she was some poor relation to be married off to the highest bidder. Actually, that was one of her favorite kinds of historical romance novels, but still. She hadn’t needed his big-brother condescension, compounded by his sexist belief that she should
want
to be married off, topped by the implied worry that she couldn’t catch a man on her own.

Now she’d give anything to have him push another smirking aviator her way, just so she could tell him off and give him one more hug. But if she’d never let Will bully her, she certainly wasn’t going to listen to this guy condescendingly telling her she could drink her cat-piss coffee before they left. And just where did he think they were going anyway?

“Well, it’s been interesting,” she told him as she stood, pushing the swing out of the way. “I have to go.”

“Good,” he said, also rising. “That was less trouble than I expected. My ship is nearby. Follow me.”

She tucked her chin and stared at him. “Uh, I’m not following
you
anywhere.” The first niggle of unease tightened the muscles at the small of her back, and she was suddenly reminded of how her lack of peripheral vision impaired her. The sense of claustrophobia, that someone was sneaking up on her from where she couldn’t see, made her pulse stutter. Sunset Falls was so quiet and peaceful, maybe she’d let her defenses weaken along with her shoveling muscles. That ended now.

She widened her stance, the same way she’d done when faced with a pack of feral dogs or a pickpocket in an alley. They were essentially opportunists, preying on the vulnerable and unwary—kind of like how life had been treating her lately. Though her personal tragedies of the last few years had left her numb, confronting this jackass was bringing back the take-no-shit girl she’d been, not the one hiding behind a thrift shop counter while the rest of the world adventured around her.

He was sizing her up with the same guarded tension in his posture, and she was pricklingly aware that he had almost a foot height advantage and easily a hundred pounds on her. Will had taught her basic self-defense moves when she was in junior high, and she’d studied more herself in college. Not so much to protect herself during her international service semesters but for frat parties. She angled herself to reduce surface area and kept her knees loose and mobile in case she needed to evade a grab.

He mirrored her movements, and his blue eyes widened. “Why are you fighting me?”

She was surprised he recognized it. Most bros were too clueless and self-absorbed to realize a gal was getting nervous. “I’m not fighting you”—yet—“but I’m not following you either.”

“Then why…” He straightened, abruptly shedding the caged force in his body. “Aren’t you Zoe Nazario?”

She blinked, then forced herself to keep her eyes open. She couldn’t let her compromised vision lessen her readiness, and she wasn’t going to stand down just because he did. “Do we know each other?”

“You matched my profile.”

Matched profile? “Like…dating?” The word popped out of her. Why would a man like this need a dating service? He must have a list of message requests as long as his…arm.

The only thing more surprising was that somehow
she
had matched him. A flush of temptation made her heavy sweater much too hot.

No, wait. She squelched the self-delusion like an Anopheles mosquito. Come to think of it, her sudden fever and racing pulse were very much like the symptoms of malaria. And like malaria, all that could come of her fascination was headache, weakness, and general malaise. Possibly nausea.

She wasn’t even
on
a dating service. As the loon photographers had discovered, the peculiar composition of the mountains around Sunset Falls played havoc with all sorts of electromagnetic radiation signals—cell phone, wifi, GPS, radar, TV. Even microwave dinners weren’t reliable. So having a digital life was pretty much impossible. Which was nice in some ways, since then she could at least pretend she had a life at all.

“There’s been a mistake,” she said. She stifled a sigh at the fantasy so quickly come and gone, like a shooting star. “I’m not dating.”

“Very well.” He nodded decisively and reached for her arm. “Then we can proceed immediately to the mating.”

“
What
?” She jerked back before he could make first contact. “Hey, I don’t know what you think we—”

“I sent my profile,” he interrupted, speaking slowly again and making her blood churn with vexation. “You answered. We are a match.” He scowled down at her, and the blue of his eyes was so brilliant she knew he must be wearing colored contacts. “What more do you need to know?”

Okay, he might be pretty, but what a jerk. Now she understood why he needed a dating service. “Oh, how about maybe…your name?”

“Sinclarion Jax.” The haughty ring in his voice emphasized the unusual accent, and he paused long enough that Zoe wondered if she was supposed to know who he was. When she didn’t respond, he huffed out a breath. “You need more? Very well. The grand-matriarch of my clan demands I take a mate before claiming the freehold she offered as my inheritance. I have decided to honor her conditions, and I was told the dating agency would provide a match with someone in search of a new life, a bride willing to accompany me to a world beyond your imagination.”

Clan? Mating? Inheritance? The fuck? It was
all
her favorite romance novels, rolled into one tall, dark, and weird package. She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. Was this some lingering aftereffect of the TBI? When she opened her eyes and looked down the narrowed scope of her damaged vision, would he be gone? As gone as the hopeful little village where she’d lost her old life.

She cracked one eyelid.

Nope. Still there.

Her heartbeat stuttered. If she wasn’t hallucinating… Well, he definitely was. Maybe he’d been hit in the head with a bigger brick than hers. Half a pump station’s worth, maybe.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she hazarded. Like, where was the nearest locked ward mental institution?

His firm lips curled again. “Very far, as you know.”

“Okay, well, let me try to explain.” She parroted his slow, methodical speech, in case he was having trouble hearing
and
understanding. “I didn’t sign up for a dating service. I’m not interested in getting married.” Definitely not to a guy with more issues than her. “You made a mistake.”

He jerked back with the same quickness she had when he reached for her. “I’ve made many mistakes,” he said stiffly, “but not about this. The agency indicated our biological and mental markers are well aligned. You
are
a match for me.”

There was a new note in his voice, and if she hadn’t already seen how full of himself he was, she might’ve thought it was desperation. “Sometimes you can do everything right,” she told him, “and it’s still a mistake.”

For a second, she thought he might argue. His jaw flexed as if he was masticating a metric ton of argument. But then he took a long step back, his black boots kicking up a spray of tiny rainbows from the dew-jeweled grass as he retreated.

“My apologies.” He bobbed his head in an almost courtly gesture, and dark locks of his hair fell forward around his blue eyes. “You are correct. If you did not register with the agency, you cannot be my mate. Enjoy your…coffee.”

He swiveled on his heel and strode back toward town.

Zoe bit her lip as she studied the flex of his ass in those snug jeans until he crossed Main Street and disappeared from view. In his absence, the chill still breathing off the creek water made her shiver. Until he left, she hadn’t appreciated just how much his proximity had raised her body temperature and speeded her pulse. Now she felt…let down.

Better let down than abducted. All that talk about his ship and taking her away? Too bizarre. Montana was landlocked, so how far could a ship actually take her?