Page 1 of Kidnapped By the Beast
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ALEXANDRA
“Show me your breasts.”
“Excuse me?” Alexandra Tatum—Lexi to her friends—stared up uncertainly at the huge Beast Kindred looming over her.
To be fair to Dr. Brandt, she was sure he didn’t actually mean to loom. It was just hard to avoid since he was seven feet tall and extremely muscular. His air of austere dominance wasn’t helped by the fact that he was wearing a white lab coat which made him look stern and aloof.
Her prospective boss also had thick black hair which was pulled back and gathered at the nape of his powerful neck, making her wonder how long it actually was. He was a Beast Kindred and his eyes, gleaming like pure, melted gold proved it.
Lexi had never seen a Kindred wearing a lab coat before but then, she hadn’t seen many Kindred warriors at all until she had come up to the Mother Ship for this job interview.
But now she was beginning to wonder what kind of job she was interviewing for!
Her best friend, Natalie—who had married a Blood Kindred and moved to the Kindred Mother Ship not that long ago—had told her the job had to do with some kind of hazardous duty on a distant and dangerous planet.
“That’s why it pays so much,” she’d explained, when Lexi had called her up crying, asking if she knew of anywhere she could make a lot of money quickly. “It’s like combat pay or something. But why do you need money all of a sudden, Lexi? Are you having trouble paying off your student loans?”
As a matter of fact, Lexi’s student loans were a crushing financial burden. She should have known better than to get a Masters degree in 18th Century English Literature. But she had chosen to follow her dream of becoming a professor at an Ivy League school and spending her life sharing her love of literature with like-minded students.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t get a job at a reputable college without first earning a Ph.D. And that was going to cost so much more than the Masters she had earned, Lexi was afraid she would be buried in debt for life!
So she had put her dreams on pause for a little while to get a job and try to pay down the debt—which was how she found herself teaching high school kids, most of whom didn’t know Jane Austen from Alexander Pope and cared even less.
It was a soul destroying job, mainly because the school district Lexi was in kept putting more and more restrictions on teachers and paying them less and less, but she kept at it, chipping away at her student debt a little at a time. She was paying twice the regular payment every month and hoping to be debt free and able to start her Ph.D in a few more years.
The only reason she was able to keep paying so much, though, was that she had moved back in with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Herbert. The kindly old couple had raised her after her parents died and when Lexi had admitted the predicament she was in, they had welcomed her back with open arms.
But none of that was why she needed money so badly—it was her Uncle Herbert’s debt she was worried about paying now, not her own.
Lexi still shivered when she remembered the scene she’d witnessed when she had followed her elderly uncle through the rain last Wednesday night. Uncle Herbert had been acting cagey and looking extremely anxious for months. So when he snuck out to his old pickup truck without telling either Aunt Helen or Lexi where he was going, Lexi had felt compelled to follow.
She didn’t know what she expected to see. Uncle Herbert was too old to be having an affair and he wasn’t one to gamble or drink more than a beer or two at a time. So she’d been surprised when she followed him in her beat-up Honda Civic and found herself on the wrong side of town at a rundown dive bar called Bad Intentions which was known for having some pretty rough customers.
Lexi had kept her raincoat zipped and the hood up as she trailed her elderly uncle through the bar. Neon signs flashed on the walls and the atmosphere was thick was cigarette smoke and the smell of cheap whiskey and stale beer.
Uncle Herbert had gone straight to the back of the bar and walked around a corner, presumably leading to the back room. Confused about what he was doing, Lexi had followed him, keeping to the shadows and stepping lightly on the balls of her feet to keep from making a sound.
Down a dark hallway she saw a dim light shining. Uncle Herbert went down the hall and turned the corner again and Lexi crept after him, staying in the shadows until she could peek around the second corner.
There stood Uncle Herbert, twisting his John Deer cap in his hands with a worried look on his kindly, wrinkled face. He was standing in front of a green, felt covered poker table where a number of men seemed to be in the middle of a card game.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Butcher,” Uncle Herbert was saying to a burly, middle-aged man who had a heavy five o’clock shadow and a cigar stub clenched in his teeth. “But I can’t make the whole payment if you keep raising the interest rate! When I took that loan from you, you said it would be twenty-five percent. Now you say fifty—where am I supposed to get the extra money from?”
“I don’t give a fuck where you get it from,” the man called Butcher snarled. “But you’d better have it soon, old man. I’d hate to have to send some of my boys to teach you a lesson!”
“But that interest rate isn’t what we agreed on!” Uncle Herbert exclaimed.
Butcher had looked up, his squinty eyes gleaming through the haze of cigar smoke.
“The interest rate just went up to seventy-five percent. See that? It is what I say it is. And if you mouth off one more time, I’ll send some of my boys to your house to see about giving you some free knee surgery. How would you like that?”
“But—” Uncle Herbert began.
“Get rid of him!” Butcher made a curt gesture to several of the burly men standing around the room. “He’s interrupting my streak!”
Two of the big bouncer-looking guys had grabbed Uncle Herbert by his arms and physically tossed him down the hallway. He stumbled and might have fallen and really hurt himself if Lexi hadn’t stepped forward and caught him.
