Page 2 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

Cooper shook his head. “I can’t do that. It’s hard to explain but letting you go right now might actually kill me.”

“Not letting me go will kill you eventually,” she said. “And it’s more likely to hurt while I’m doing it.”

“I understand,” he said. And he did. She’d been trained to escape if captured and take as many of the enemy out while she did it. He’d been trained the same way. Their techniques might be different but they were both supposed to get loose and get back to work.

“And yet?”

“And yet.”

She huffed at him. “Alright, so where are we going from here? You made your phone call and started driving so I assume you’re heading to a rendezvous.”

“Right now, I’m heading to my ship,” he said. “My call did not go unnoticed so it’s best for me, for both of us, if we get somewhere I can have some hope of hiding.”

“Of course you have a ship,” she muttered. “Silly me. Why wouldn’t you have a ship? Everybody else has a ship. And yours probably has some kind of chameleon circuit so it blends in and doesn’t take up any space but has everything you could ever want or need to take over a planet.”

He chuckled. “I’m not that kind of alien and we don’t have that kind of technology. It would be cool if we did but my people developed in a different direction.”

“Yeah, you developed in the direction of using first aid equipment for kidnapping.”

That stung. “If it helps, I didn’t intend to kidnap you. I actually didn’t want to hurt anyone. I’m still trying to figure out why I’m here at all.”

“If you didn’t intend to kidnap me, why did you?”

Cooper shook his head. “I told you, you’re my mate. I couldn’t leave you there and I couldn’t stay so you had to come with me. I was pretty sure you weren’t going to agree to just hop in my truck.”

“That you stole. From the base.”

“Right, that. And I was running short on time so I made you as comfortable as I could manage and took you with me.”

It wasn’t a great answer. It was the truth, as far as it went, but he knew she wasn’t going to be satisfied with it. If he were in her position he wouldn’t have been.

“And what makes you think I’m your mate?”

“There are signs,” he started, then shook his head. “And your species doesn’t have any of them. We’re not supposed to be genetically compatible so I have no idea how much of what I know about my species reproduction will translate to you. That’s something we’re going to have to experiment with.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. We are not experimenting with anything to do with reproduction. Aside from the fact that you kidnapped me, I’m not really an experimenting in the bedroom, kinda girl, so you can just keep all of that to yourself.”

He gave her a painful smirk. “Trust me, if it ever gets to the bedroom, it will be experimental for both of us.”

“What, human women aren’t your kink?”

“No idea,” he told her. “It’s never come up. I think I’m about to find at least one human woman is completely impossible to resist, though, and that has possibilities.”

They drove in silence a while longer, the rocky desert spreading out around them. He’d left the road a while back and should have been out of fuel by this point. He’d used an additive he’d found worked on human vehicles to stretch out the amount of fuel in the tank but it would still have limits.

“Does this thing stop me from needing to pee?”

Cooper glanced over at the woman in his passenger seat and lifted an eyebrow at her. “It shouldn’t, no.”

“Then I definitely can’t feel the pressure on my bladder and we’re going to need to pull over soon so I can take care of that.”

He nodded. “Alright, I can see that. I just need to get a little further out and we can do that. We’re not exactly in friendly territory right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a base your people were looking for when I arrived, that was moving around enough that you couldn’t get a good look at it on your satellites and knew how to hide from the drones,” he said. “It’s out this direction and we need to get on the other side of their perimeter before it’s safe for us to stop.”

“Wait, we’re driving through insurgent territory to get to your ship?”

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