Alien's Concubine, The (19 page)

And why he had rendered the man
unconscious and slammed his body into the floor.

And then abandoned him to find a new
host.

He was still angry because of that,
and furious because he had found Gaby leaving the club with the
man. He was not so angry that it did not occur to him that Gaby had
a right to be confused, and that it was possible that she had not
realized it was not him inside the man any longer.

Just enough doubt lingered, though,
that he could not entirely tamp the anger.

“
You have not said why you
were at the club to begin with,” he muttered finally.

Gaby gave him a look. “Neither have
you!”

He held his hands out at his sides.
“As you see.”

Gaby narrowed her eyes at him. “What I
saw was you bending your elbow at the bar, and you looked like you
had been there awhile!”

He tilted his head curiously. “You saw
me at the bar?” he growled, his voice vibrating with anger
again.

Gaby’s eyes widened a fraction, but
then she heaved a frustrated breath. “Damn it, Anka!” She stabbed a
finger at his chest. “This man, this body! How in the hell do you
think I can keep up!”

He grabbed her, hauling her angrily
against his chest, and swooped down to kiss her.

To shut her up and end the dispute,
she didn’t doubt.

She tensed, but he had grabbed a
fistful of hair to hold her when he ground his mouth angrily
against hers. She resisted. The temptation was strong, though, to
simply give in and make up. She didn’t really want to fight with
him.

And she found his masterful possession
wildly exciting, truth be told.

He broke the kiss almost as abruptly
as he’d begun. “Shit!” he growled, fingering his swollen lip with a
mixture of surprise and anger.

Gaby looked at him in astonishment for
a moment before amusement descended. “You caught a couple of flying
fists to the face, I see. Come on. I’ll get an ice pack to help
with the swelling.”

He frowned, but he released her and
followed her into the kitchen, sinking heavily onto one of the
kitchen bar stools while she dragged a plastic bag out of the
cabinet and filled it with ice.

“
Next time, you should
consider blocking or ducking,” she said teasingly as she examined
his face.

He sent her a resentful glare. “This
one has had far too much to drink. I had difficulty controlling his
coordination.”

After sealing the bag and wrapping it
in a towel, she handed it to him and looked him over more
critically. “The cops beat the shit out of you, too.”

He shrugged. “Him.”

Gaby gave him a look. “If you feel
everything the body feels you’ve got to be feeling as if you had
the shit beat out of you, too.”

He frowned. “There is pain, but I can
find no permanent damage.”

She moved behind him, rubbing his
shoulders. “What you need,” she whispered, slipping her arms around
his shoulders after a moment and bending her head to kiss the side
of his neck, “is a bath and bed. You—he—reeks of whiskey, and some
less pleasant odors from rolling around in the alley.”

He rose a little unsteadily at the
suggestion. Catching her hand, he dragged her along behind him as
he headed into the bathroom. She helped him peel the clothes off
since he seemed a bit unsteady on his feet.

Instead of objecting when he climbed
into the shower and turned to look at her expectantly, she pulled
off her own clothes and joined him. Soaping up a cloth, she bathed
the battered, bruised body with tender care, wincing inwardly at
the sizable bruises she could already see forming on his
body.

No one compared to Anka favorably, but
this man was well built and strong, his muscles well developed,
though not sharply defined. Whoever he was in his ‘real’ life, it
seemed obvious he labored hard to have developed such strong
muscles.

“
Iron worker,” Anka
supplied succinctly.

Gaby lifted her brows
questioningly.

“
He erects the steel
structure of the buildings called sky scrapers.”

That explained the strength. It would
take a good bit to work with steel. She didn’t ask him to
elaborate. In the first place, he appeared to be ‘coming down’ from
his high and seemed to have more and more trouble just focusing on
staying on his own feet. In the second, she couldn’t bury her head
in the sand if she knew too much.

When they’d finished bathing, she
helped him to dry off and led him to the bed. He settled on it
heavily and fell backwards. It took a great deal of shoving and
tugging to get him turned around in the right direction, making it
obvious that Anka was sinking into the same oblivion as his drunken
host.

Sighing with a mixture of irritation
and relief when she realized he was out, Gaby curled next to him
and drifted to sleep herself, hoping whatever it was that Anka had
done to the people outside the club, no one was going to remember
them being at the scene of the fight.

* * * *

It didn’t occur to Gaby until she was
at work the following morning that she and Anka hadn’t really
resolved anything the night before.

They hadn’t because both of them had
been carefully avoiding an admission that might stir up even more
trouble between them, she realized uncomfortably.

She had not actually gone to the club
looking for trouble, but she hadn’t been looking for Anka either.
She wasn’t certain, now, why she’d gone except for the promptings
of her pride. She hadn’t really wanted to find a man, or take up
with one—but she might have if the opportunity had arisen. Mostly,
she just wasn’t about to be found sitting at home waiting if Anka
had come back.

Why had he been there, though? Just
looking for another host? Or had there been another
reason?

And why had the blond man been there
if Anka had abandoned him?

That thought prompted one she hadn’t
considered before. Anka had said the man was aware of her, and yet
she’d not believed he was really conscious of her in the sense that
he had total awareness of what was going on. But if he didn’t, then
how had he recognized her?

He had recognized her. Moreover, he
had deliberately misled her because he hadn’t made any attempt to
explain that Anka was no longer with him.

And what was that crack about ‘soul
stealing’ anyway?

Had he been angry that Anka had
‘taken’ him to start with? Or angry that he’d been
discarded?

He’d been angry, she realized after
studying over it for a while, that Anka had abandoned him. He’d had
the fevered look of an addict when he had glared at Anka.
Imprisoned within his own body or not, it must have been a hell of
a power trip to feel a part of such an extraordinarily powerful
being as Anka and a serious let down to become nothing more than an
ordinary human again.

A shiver skated down her spine as it
occurred to her to wonder if he’d been trying to get even with Anka
somehow by deluding her.

Had that been his motivation for
following her outside?

She thought back over the exchange
between them. Try though she might, she couldn’t think of anything
in his expression that even hinted at malice. He’d behaved and
spoken to her as if he knew her, but either because of the drinks
he’d consumed, or faulty memory, he hadn’t behaved as if he’d
understood why she was angry with him.

He’d said he wanted to
talk.

His body language had said he had
something else entirely in mind.

She realized she couldn’t even,
positively, be certain that he had recognized her. He’d seemed to,
but he’d called her baby—not Gaby, or Gabrielle, or Moonflower as
Anka was so prone to call her. Maybe he had only thought to seize
the opportunity to get a piece of ass?

He had recognized Anka, though, she
realized in the next moment, not right away, but he’d certainly
recognized Anka’s name. That was when he’d made that snide comment
about soul stealing. That was when he’d gone from merely being
annoyed about the intrusion to an explosion of violence.

So—maybe his intention toward her
hadn’t been malicious, but could she count on that being the case
if she ran into him again?

Or had Anka erased everyone’s memory
when he’d done that—whatever it was that had seemed to freeze time,
or at least frozen everyone in place?

She thought he must have. Otherwise,
the police would have been looking for both of them by
now.

Why hadn’t he erased the man’s memory
to begin with, though?

Or had he tried, but just hadn’t
managed to remove all of the memories? Maybe it wasn’t just the
alcohol that had confused the man?

Finally, she simply pushed the
thoughts as far back into her mind as she could. She would deal
with it when, and if, she had to, she decided.

It might have been better to try to
get everything out into the open and work things out between them,
but she was keenly conscious of the fact that she was living on
borrowed time. She and Anka had no real relationship. How could
they? If they had, it would have been worth whatever arguments and
hard feelings might arise from battling it out, because there would
have been time and chances to resolve things and smooth them over
again.

As it was, she never knew from one day
to the next when Anka might disappear as abruptly and completely as
if he’d never been with her at all. She would have had trouble with
any kind of relationship simply because she wasn’t emotionally
equipped to handle them. She had little experience with any sort of
relationship. Anka was not even human, though, and she couldn’t
even apply the little she knew about her fellow man to him. There
might be no real rhyme or reason to the things he did, but even if
there were it seemed likely to be outside her
understanding.

He seemed to think it would be,
anyway.

At any rate, she had enough trouble
adjusting to the fact that she never knew what Anka would look like
when she saw him. She’d only just begun to grow accustomed to the
blond Germanic Anka, and now he was Seminole—she thought—definitely
an American Indian, anyway. And far stronger willed than the
Germanic man, Gaby suspected, completely unsettled every time she
glanced at the man and saw him looking back at her with his nearly
black eyes.

Except for the fact that he was
roughly the same size, weight, and build as Anka, and hailed from a
similar gene pool, there was really very little resemblance between
the host and Anka, but in some ways it was still easier to accustom
herself to the man, because he did remind her of Anka. She had
discovered early on that the eyes were the true mirrors, however.
Anka’s eyes were green and whenever he looked out of the man’s
eyes, they had the greenish hue.

If they were completely dark, it
wasn’t Anka staring at her, and it was very hard to get any sense
of the emotions behind those dark eyes.

She was certain that it was a given
that he wasn’t happy about the situation, particularly since it
seemed obvious to her that there was a great struggle for dominance
between them.

What she wasn’t certain of was how he
felt about her. Did he blame her for the situation? Did he feel
violent toward her?

Or was she completely wrong in her
estimation?

People were giving up more and more
freedoms every day just to be watched over and taken care of. And
more and more people were choosing to allow drugs to rule their
lives. Maybe the average person didn’t really want control of their
lives? Maybe yielding the responsibility to someone else and
allowing them to do the ‘driving’ wasn’t as repugnant to the hosts
Anka chose as she thought?

Maybe, and then again, maybe not. She
couldn’t salve her conscience with that possibility, she
discovered, because she just didn’t know.

* * * *

It occurred to Gaby with something
akin to pure amazement as she left work that she and Anka had been
together an entire month. The concept was so mind blowing she
dragged her checkbook out of her purse to study her calendar once
she’d settled in the car.

A whole month, she thought in wonder
once she’d checked it.

She hadn’t shared a household with
anyone for that length of time before!

“
My how time flies when
you’re having fun!” she muttered dryly, images flickering through
her mind of all the ups and downs they’d had in the time since he’d
moved in with her. A smile curled her lips after a moment, though.
As rough as it had been, as much emotional turmoil, aggravation,
and as many really scary moments as she’d experienced, there’d been
a lot more that had been good—pleasant, amusing, comforting, sweet
… and then there was the mind blowing passion.

Warmed by those thoughts, Gaby decided
as she headed to the grocery store to get their weekly supplies
that she would plan a special night to celebrate.

She had decided she would cherish what
she could and try not to think about the uncertain future, and
making the most of their time together should include a celebration
for such an important milestone, as silly as she would have
considered such a thing before.