Bad Boy Romance: Nick (Romantic Suspense Alpha Male Romance) (New Adult Rock Star Contemporary Short Stories) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 2) (28 page)

Alexis tossed down her spade and
stared up at the sky, groaning to herself about the intensity of the sun that
afternoon. As soon as the thought left her mind, she gave a mirthless laugh.
After nearly two years she was still thinking about the sun. The blazing star
above her was the same concept, providing illumination and heat to the tiny
planet, but she had left what she considered the true sun, the sun she knew, so
far away it was now only a glimmer of a star in the distance on the darkest of
nights.

Of course, this star and the
second one that followed its path were suns in the most basic of meanings, but
when she looked at them, Alexis still felt a tug of homesickness in her chest. Joining
the mission to colonize this planet seemed like the perfect way to continue her
service as a military medic, and she had been filled with hope when they first
arrived. Along with her father, the commander of the mission, and more than
thirty other people she set out to settle the planet, one that as of yet still
had no name other than the string of numbers and letters that identified it as
one of the military's most secretive and well-guarded secret missions.

Nearly two years later, however,
only a handful of people remained with Alexis and James. The others were too
frightened of the unknown expanses of the planet and too weathered by the
extensive work it took just to make a small area inhabitable enough to sustain
them as they tried to cultivate and nurture the hot, dry planet into something
that may once be the salvation for the overpopulation and pollution of Earth.
James told them that in no uncertain terms if there were not strong enough to
withstand the challenges that faced them, and courageous enough to remain a
beneficial part of the mission, they were to go home.

Within six months, half of the
crew that arrived with them were gone. At the end of the first year, a third of
those who remained had also heeded James' harsh recommendation and were on a
shuttle back to the nearest space station where they would board a ship back to
Earth. Just 12 colonists remained, but Alexis refused to give up hope. Even in
her moments of longing for the familiarity and comforts of Earth, she was
determined to do as she had sworn to do when she joined the mission.

Now as she hacked away at the
hard-packed ground in what would hopefully be their next garden, she willed
herself to think through all of the ways that the mission had been a success
even as the prospective colonists left and her loneliness crept higher and
higher.

It had taken several months of
still sleeping in the original ship for them to build suitable housing for the
different members of the mission, but once they were up, Alexis found hers to be
nearly as welcoming and comfortable as the one she left on Earth. Two suns
meant there was precious little darkness, so she outfitted her home with heavy
curtains to block out the light and surround her like a peaceful cocoon when
she gave herself the time to actually sleep. The rest featured mostly items
built from the sparse but sturdy foliage they found on the planet and a few,
treasured items she brought on the ship from home.

James lived in his own, tiny
shack at the top of a hill that overlooked the rest of the village the
colonists built. Most leaders of his power and influence would have insisted on
the grandest and most luxurious of houses possible, but her father was the
complete opposite. As the leader, he told them, it was his responsibility to be
the strongest, most courageous, and with the greatest perseverance. He was to
concern himself with the rest of the crew before himself. So he threw together
a small home with just enough space for his basic needs and devoted the rest of
his time and energy to keeping the struggling little colony alive.

It was toward that little shack,
which James had yet to update or expand at all in all the time they spent on
the planet, that Alexis was headed when she heard the explosion. The ground
shook with the sound and for a moment she was dazed, trying to figure out where
the massive sound came from and what it could have been. She took off running
in the direction where she thought it originated and pushed herself up the
steep hill that bordered one side of the village.

As she crested the hill, she saw
flames shooting up into the sky and a pillar of black smoke darkening the
horizon. A few hundred yards away a mass of tangled metal smoked and burned.
She felt her heart drop in her chest when she realized that she didn't see or
hear anyone around the crash site.

Alexis started running again,
pushing herself as fast as she could toward the crash and praying that somehow
she would get to whoever was inside in time. The heat of the fire was intense
as she grew closer to the crash and she pulled down the sleeves she had pushed
up to her elbows in an effort to protect her skin from the searing flames.

Behind her she could hear
James's voice calling to her, but she didn't pause to acknowledge him. She
could see where the door to the mangled ship used to be and ducked down to run
inside. Tugging the neckline of her shirt up to cover her mouth and nose
against the acrid black smoke filling the space, Alexis ran through the inside
of the ship looking for any members of the crew. Around her all she could see
was the technological carnage of the crash.

Panels hung from the walls, the
internal components sparking and hissing. An eerie red glow from the emergency
lights cast shifting shadows on the floor and made the twisted metal of the
damaged structures look monstrous. Still she pushed forward, following hallways
and dipping her head into rooms as she called out for any survivors in hopes
they would hear her and call back. Finally she came to the end of the large
main hallway and found a set of heavy black sliding doors.

The doors stood partially open
as if someone inside had given a command for them to open but they had failed
partway through. She wrapped her fingers around the edge of one of the doors
and pulled, trying to force it the rest of the way open, but it wouldn't move.
Finally she stood and directed a hard kick in the center of the door. The
impact shook the door, but didn't open it. She kicked again and again, grunting
with the exertion, until finally she heard the mechanism in the door give way
and was able to push it aside.

Beyond the doors was a compact
control cabin. From the size of it Alexis wondered if it was not the main
control area, but a panic room designed for emergency control of the ship if
the main room was compromised. The large screens on the wall in front of her
were all shattered and some were spitting bright sparks onto the floor. She
squinted deeper into the darkness and saw that beneath that shower of sparks
was the form of a man.

****

Alexis dropped to her knees
beside the man on the floor, ignoring the twinge of pain as bits of glass and
metal bit through her pants and into her skin. The man was contorted on the
floor, twisted so that his chest and face were pointed away from her. She grabbed
him by the shoulder and gently shook him, speaking loudly to him. Around her
she could hear a series of smaller explosions as other components of the ship
submitted to the flames. She knew she didn't have much time to get out.

Calling into use all of her
military training, she tucked her shoulder under the man's arm and climbed to
her feet. She dragged him along behind her as she moved as fast as she could
down the main hallway and back out of the broken door to the ship. James caught
her as she stumbled out into the sunlight. He took over half of the weight of
the man and together they pulled him to safety away from the ship.

"Put him down here,
Dad," she commanded when they reached the foot of the hill.

"We need to get him further
away from the ship. It could explode."

"We need to make sure that
he doesn't have any severe injuries that need to be stabilized before moving
him any further. Put him down and let me examine him."

James complied, lowering the man
to the dirt and stepping back so that Alexis could quickly look over him. She
knew that if the man had any neck or back injuries they could have made them
significantly worse the way they carried him out, but in the few moments they
had there had been no way to take better precautions.

At first glance there were no
obvious severe injuries, but when she carefully pushed a lock of pale brown
hair away from his face she realized it was damp underneath. Moving the hair
further, Alexis discovered a large cut along his head, stretching from his
forehead to behind his ear. She touched it gingerly and her hand came back wet
with a hot green liquid. Alexis pressed her hand to the cut again and more of
the liquid seeped through her fingers.

"Dad," she said, not
looking away from the man's face.

"What is it? Is he
hurt?" James asked, rushing back toward them from the top of the hill
where he had gone to look and see if more of the colonists had heard the crash
and were coming to help.

"I think so."

James crouched down beside her
and Alexis held her hand out to him. It shook slightly and her father grabbed
onto it to look at it more closely.

"What is that?" he
asked, examining the green liquid that stained her fingers and dripped onto her
palm.

"I think it's his
blood."

On the ground the man suddenly
groaned, writhing in the dirt as if waking up.

"We need to get him
somewhere safer," James said, leaning down to lift the man again.

"But what is he?"
Alexis asked.

She had encountered other
species before, but not like this. The man now draped across her father's
strong back looked completely human, and breathtakingly beautiful.

"I don't know, Alexis, but
that doesn't matter now. What matters is that you are the only doctor on this
planet, literally, and therefore the only one who can help him."

Alexis nodded, knowing that what
her father said was true. She had had little opportunity to use any of her
medical training since arriving on the planet, but this was exactly why she had
come.

"Bring him to my
house," she said, "We never finished the clinic and I wouldn't be
able to take care of him properly there."

James nodded and carried the man
over the hill and down toward Alexis's house. She followed behind them, one
hand on the man's back to keep him steady. When they got to the house, James
carefully lowered the man onto Alexis's bed. The stranger groaned again and
stretched against the covers.

"I'm going to go back to
the ship and see if I can find anyone else. If you need me, use your
messenger."

James rushed out of the house,
leaving Alexis alone with the stranger. He thrashed again and she worried that
he had injuries she could not see. Trying to keep her focus on his medical
needs rather than his unworldly beautiful face, she brought her hands to the
buttons on the front of his thick green canvas jacket and released them. She
moved quickly, removing the jacket and tearing away the shirt he wore under it
so she could examine his torso.

His body was equally as
beautiful as his face and she let her eyes drift across it, searching for
wounds even as she drank in the planes and curves of the muscles beneath his
golden-tinted skin. She didn't see any signs of other injuries, and turned her
attention back to the cut on his head. The bright green blood was matting in
his hair and she went into the bathroom to fill a basin with water.

Setting the basin on the table
beside the bed, she dipped a cloth in the water and gently dabbed the cut. The
blood loosened and washed away, revealing the extent of the cut. Alex dried the
area carefully, then opened her medic kit to retrieve a needle and thread.

****

The needle plunged into the
stranger's skin and his eyes snapped open. Expanses the color of honey with
streaks of blue met hers and Alexis's breath caught in her throat. He was most
certainly not human.

Placing a hand on his shoulder,
Alexis gently pushed him to counteract his attempts to sit up, pressing him
back down into the mattress.

"I need you to lie
still."

"What's happening?" he
asked, his voice powdery and strained.

"You were injured in a
crash. I'm a medic, and I need you to calm down while I fix you up. Just relax.
It will be over in just a minute."

The man nodded and Alexis went
back to work stitching together the long, jagged cut. She was nearly finished
when she heard him draw in a sharp breath and felt his hand reach over the edge
of the bed and grab onto her thigh. His fingers dug into her, but she kept
stitching, drawing his skin together and closing it. When she finished, she
snipped off the thread, knotted it, and tossed the needle into the basin.

He had his enticing eyes
squeezed closed and kept them that way as she wrapped a strip of gauze around
his head to protect the new stitches.

"I'm finished," she
said softly to him when she secured the end of the gauze and tossed her
scissors onto the bedside table.

"Who are you?" he
asked through gritted teeth as if trying to distract himself with the words
rather than focusing on the pain.

"My name is Alexis. I'm the
colony medic."

He opened his eyes and looked at
her questioningly.

"Colony?"

"We traveled here from
Earth almost two years ago to colonize this planet. My father is the commander
of the mission." She paused, trying to choose her words carefully, and
finally deciding to go with the ones he had used with her, "Who are
you?"

"I'm Tyrok."

He stopped without elaborating
any further and she looked at him.

"Are you…." she
trailed off, not wanting to offend him.

"Human?" he asked with
a hint of laughter in his voice and she nodded, "No, just a stunning
facsimile."

He laughed but Alexis found her
heart beating a little faster. Stunning was absolutely right.

"Where did you come from,
Tyrok?" she asked, fighting the urge to look at his bare chest again.

"A planet not too far from
here. You've likely never heard of it."

"Where were you going when
you crashed?"

Tyrok didn't respond and Alexis
turned her attention from the medical kit she was organizing in her lap to his
face. His eyes were wide, his mouth partially open. The color had drained from
his skin and his body was shaking.

"Tyrok?" she said, reaching
out to touch his arm, "Tyrok? Are you alright?"

His convulsions became more
intense and Alexis dropped the kit to the floor. She took Tyrok by his
shoulders and looked down into his eyes. They stared blankly back at her and
she heard faint gurgling sounds coming from his throat. This was something she
had never seen before, but had studied in her intensive training program before
leaving on the mission.

Leaving Tyrok on the bed, Alexis
scrambled out of the house and ran as fast as she could toward the partially
completed clinic on the other side of the village. It was a small building she
had insisted they build in the first few weeks of being on the planet, but one
they had used only a couple of times to handle the illnesses and minor injuries
they had encountered. It was not equipped to handle the severity of what Tyrok
was facing, but she knew that somewhere in the containers that filled the back
room were the supplies she needed to hopefully get him through.

"Alexis!" James's
voice called to her from outside the clinic.

Alexis dug through the
dust-covered containers, desperately searching for the small black box she knew
was on the inventory list. She heard her father call out her name again and she
screamed back at him without removing her attention from her task.

"What are you doing?"
James asked, coming into the room.

"He's crashing."

"What?"

"Tyrok, the man I found on
the ship. He's crashing. I stitched him up and he was absolutely fine, and then
he started convulsing and is unresponsive."

"What does that mean?"

Alexis finally wrapped her hand
around the black box and brought it out of the storage container with a sigh of
relief.

"It means that I need to
get this to him as quickly as possible if he is going to have any chance of
survival. Then I need you to come back to the ship with me."

"I didn't find anyone
else."

"Exactly."

Alexis pushed past her father
toward the clinic door.

"What do you mean?"

"The ship wasn't burning
anymore, was it?"

"No."

She nodded.

"Just wait for me."

James nodded in agreement and
she ran out of the clinic and back toward her house. She could hear Tyrok
gurgling in the bedroom as she ran through the kitchen.

"Hold on, Tyrok," she
said when she got into the bedroom.

His eyes were still fixed on the
ceiling above him and his body arched and thrashed with such violence it sent
her pillows skittering across the floor. Alexis spread the contents of the
black box on her bedside table and scanned them, trying to draw the
instructions from her training back to the front of her memory. Tyrok made
another strangled sound and she grabbed a large syringe from the pile. Lifting
it above her head, she brought the needle down into Tyrok's heart.