Enemy Overnight (2 page)

Another guard handed over her flats, which she stepped into gratefully. The biologic pad lining the ship’s interior was a brilliant innovation, absorbing biological byproducts and returning oxygen and nitrogen to the atmosphere, but she’d had enough of its squishy moistness under her feet.

Of course the bald one tried to hand her what was left of her underwear. The tattered scrap of lace looked ridiculously tiny in his gigantic fingers.

“Keep them as a souvenir,” she snapped.

“Thank you.”

Her eyes widened when he raised the fabric to his nose. “No! I was—”

Zannen inhaled so deeply she was surprised it didn’t disappear into one of his nostrils.

“You’re disgusting,” she told him.

He grinned widely, baring enormous white teeth. “You’re the one who just pissed herself.”

Flushing scarlet, she turned away, knowing there was no comeback cutting enough to top that.

“You may as well be seated,” Ensign Verr suggested. “You’re not going anywhere until we know Dr. Teague is safe.”

Jasmine sat, keeping the towel securely around her while avoiding Shelley’s reproachful stare. The scissors still lay on the table, a stark reminder of how ineffective she’d been. Why hadn’t she stuck those back into her skirt pocket when she was done cutting Monica’s hair? She still wouldn’t have posed much of a threat to Shauss, but she might at least have been able to take her own life before he outed her as something other than human.

Maybe it wasn’t too late. After all, no matter which way this went down, she came out the big loser. She’d either suffer and die at Shauss’ whim, and possibly take her father down with her, or go home with her tail between her legs and suffer her father’s undying contempt for the rest of her life.

All it would take was one good, hard jab straight up between—

“I’ll take these.” Zannen’s hand covered the scissors and slowly slid them off the side of the table. “Little girls shouldn’t play with sharp toys.”

Damn it, couldn’t she catch just one break today?

Keeping her eyes on the table, she muttered, “Bastard.”

“You have no idea. Yet.”

Her breath caught at the silky insinuation. He was just waiting for Shauss to come back in a rage and turn them loose on her.

Another tremor shook her. She wanted to stay strong, to face whatever happened to her with courage and dignity, but she didn’t know if she could. She’d just about lost her mind when Shauss jumped on her earlier, and she hadn’t even really believed he would obey the commander’s order, or at least not at first. Now that she knew what was coming, she might be able to handle it if he came back and finished what he’d started. She’d earned his wrath, and the idea of being punished for her sins was somehow acceptable. Honorable, even. If her father became a target as a result, he’d just have to roll with it—he’d known the risks going in as well as she had.

But there was no honor in ending up a
piece of ass
for this ugly brute. The degradation would be unbearable.

He trailed a fingertip along her jaw and she jerked her head to the side, glaring up at him. There was no way she’d let him have her—she’d tear his eyeballs out first.

“Lieutenant,” the other man said in a warning tone.

Zannen just smiled and resumed a watchful stance over her.

Too discouraged to deal with Shelley’s condemnation, Jasmine rested her forehead on her crossed arms and started praying in earnest.

Please, God, let Monica be okay…

* * * * *

Three days later she was still praying, though her tone had gone from plaintive to aggravated.

God, please let me out of this hellhole!

Ignoring the burning in her biceps and abs, she clung to the bar and pulled herself up in another gorilla chin crunch, and then another, and another, blowing out with every one.

Three whole days! It was just unbelievable. Monica had been rescued, the ambassador was in custody, and the Garathani
had
to believe that Jasmine had been duped into cooperating in the abduction…and yet she was still a prisoner in her own quarters. Why?

All she’d wanted when Zannen and Ensign Verr shuttled Shelley and her back to the surface was to pack up her stuff and watch the Beaumont–Thayer compound disappear in her rearview mirror along with the rest of snowy Montana. Instead, the bastards had ransacked her room and confiscated her laptop, her extension phone and even her cell phone, which was lying dead in a drawer because there was no reception out here anyway. She’d screamed bloody murder the whole time, but they might as well have been deaf for all the attention they paid her.

When they were done pawing through her belongings, they’d locked her in. From that point on there were two guards posted outside her door at all times and her meals were delivered like clockwork by said guards. Except for Noah Beaumont, who’d dropped by to personally deliver her pink slip that first day, she hadn’t seen nor talked to another human being since. It was depressing and frightening. What motive could the Garathani possibly have for detaining her?

Shaking with the effort, she finished her last few crunches and dropped to the floor. Thank God they’d left her workout equipment and DVD player or she’d be out of her mind by now. As it was, she was starting to feel like Sarah Connor after her stay in the mental hospital—lean, mean and a danger to herself and others. If they didn’t let her go soon,
she
was going to go Terminator on someone’s ass.

Jasmine scowled. After her performance on the
Heptoral
, the Garathani would probably laugh themselves silly if she put up her dukes.

She unhooked the pull-up bar with a sigh and shoved it under the bed. Peeling out of her shorts and athletic bra, she eyed herself critically in the bathroom mirror. She
was
lean and mean, more so than she’d ever been in her adult life. Though she hadn’t intentionally set out to lose weight, her mother’s death had killed her appetite for weeks, and then once she was over the initial shock, she’d decided now was as good a time as any to get back in shape. Isolation and loneliness had become her friends, driving her to move and keep moving, rain or shine. When the weather was decent, she ran for a couple of hours on the compound’s quarter-mile track, and when it wasn’t, she ran on one of the treadmills in the exercise facility. She’d ordered a BowFlex and the pull-up bar and made it a point to use one of them whenever she watched TV.

Of course she’d eventually had to order a whole new wardrobe to go with her new body, but such were the hardships of getting in shape.

Now three sleepless nights had created dark circles under her eyes and anxiety was etching permanent frown lines on her forehead. She may not intimidate the Garathani, but her biology students back in Denver would probably back slowly away at the sight of her.

The bruises on her wrists and upper arms still stood in stark purple relief against her pale skin, and she rubbed the thumbprint on her left biceps with unsteady fingers. Shauss was the one element of her ordeal aboard the Garathani vessel she had yet to work through. She’d had no trouble consigning Lieutenant Zannen to her mental File Thirteen—she hated him, period. The minister and Commander Kellen had been harder, though she’d eventually accepted having wronged them and paid the price, thereby compartmentalizing her encounters with them.

But no matter how she approached it, she couldn’t even begin to sort out the conflict with Shauss. There was simply too much to process and she got agitated every time she let herself think about it. Just trying to reconcile that hate-filled snarl with his typical coolly amused expression made her stomach twist with dread. It would have been horrifying enough to see such a transformation as an innocent bystander, but to know she was the cause of it…

Jasmine dropped her hand and turned away to start the shower, putting him firmly out of her mind. Time enough to plow through all that emotional crap when she was well away from here.

The hot water felt good while it lasted, which as usual wasn’t nearly long enough. Afterward she blew her hair dry and pulled it up in a ponytail then dressed for comfort in thin thermals, blue jeans and a baggy ski sweater. Not that she was going anywhere—she just couldn’t stand to open the door to a Garathani warrior in her nightclothes. Plus, it was freaking cold on the north side of the building. The Garathani must be hogging all the heat—the offices were always unbearably hot.

She pulled on wool socks and her sheepskin slippers and then glanced at her watch. Almost three hours to kill until dinner.

Sighing, she pulled a DVD out of the rack and popped it in.
Independence Day
—that was a good one. If she couldn’t whip some alien butt herself, might as well watch Will Smith do it.

While the previews were running, she grabbed her nasal spray out of the bathroom and stuck it in her pocket so she didn’t have to get up for the next dose. She pinched a few dying leaves off her plants and dropped them into the trash can on the way back to the bed. Then she closed the blinds to cut the glare of sun on snow, kicked off her slippers and stretched out to watch the movie…

Coming to on her stomach, Jasmine grabbed wildly for the bed. Adrenaline pounded through her, leaving her shaking. God, she hated waking up like that!

She stiffened as several things hit her at once. She couldn’t reach the edges of her mattress. It sounded as if half the candidates were holding a rally right outside her door. The air was suffocatingly warm and humid. And her bed smelled strangely earthy, kind of like—

Her eyes popped open.
Biologic pad.

Gasping, she pushed up on one elbow and gazed into a forest of ankles. This time she
had
to be dreaming. There was no way in hell she was back aboard the ship.

Someone staggered and she rolled backward in time to avoid getting stepped on before springing to her feet. Holy crap, she
was
aboard the
Heptoral
, in the cavernous transport bay—only this time it was bursting at the seams with women.

What in God’s was going on here? The candidates weren’t supposed to be beamed up for weeks, and she sure as hell wasn’t a candidate.

Grabbing the first arm she saw, she asked, “What happened? Why are we here?”

The boxy blonde looked frightened. “The compound was under attack, so they evacuated us.”

“Under attack! By whom?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t you hear the jets?”

“No, I…” Jasmine frowned. Yes, she’d heard jets, but she’d been dozing off and thought they were part of the movie.

Well that was just fabulous. Was she ever going to get away from these brutes?

She made her way toward the edge of the bay, taking note of her surroundings. There were a dozen or more guards lining the bay’s upper tier, watching over the crowd like long-haired cowboys minding a herd of cattle.

She shuddered.
Cattle
. That was an apt analogy for what these women were to the Garathani, who were paying eight-figure settlements to the families of every candidate who accompanied them on the one-way trip to Garathan. Most of them had been selected for their ability to bear the aliens’ extra-large offspring, and the rest for their ability to accommodate the aliens sexually. Garathani males couldn’t ejaculate unless both their primary and secondary sexual organs were buried to the hilt in a female, which was why they’d come to Earth, looking for women when most of theirs were wiped out by the Narthani biowar virus. While human females didn’t have corresponding nooks to accommodate the spurs like Garathani females did, their anuses had proven an acceptable alternative for receiving the finger-sized secondary projections.

Deliberately blinking away the memory of Shauss’ spur emerging above his rampant penis, she stood up on tiptoe and looked over the sea of feminine heads for Dr. Snow’s white pompadour. The idea that all these women were basically selling their bodies to aliens made her skin crawl. It would be different if they were doing it for love—love made even the oddest matches acceptable—but they weren’t. They were letting a computer and some alien committee determine which males they wound up with almost sight unseen. God only knew what the rest of their lives would be like.

And God only knew what hers would be like if she didn’t get her
perfectly good piece of ass
off this ship, pronto. She had to find Dr. Snow or Noah Beaumont. If any Terrans aboard knew what was going on, they would.

Her watch chimed. Going tense, she patted her pocket and sagged with relief to feel the outline of her nasal spray bottle. After a quick look around, she pulled it out and inhaled two quick puffs in each nostril before stuffing it back in her pocket. Crap, it was hot in here!

She pulled the sweater off and hooked it over her shoulder before weaving her way through the crowd again. Too bad she hadn’t worn a T-shirt instead of this thermal undershirt—she was going to die in this heat.

Twenty minutes later the only thing she’d discovered was that they were locked in. Damn it, where were the medical and support personnel? Between doctors, executives and maintenance, there’d been at least thirty men living at the compound, but so far she had yet to see one of them. In fact, all she’d seen were the candidates, and there was no way she wanted to be included in that cattle call.

“Could someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?” she finally yelled at the top of her lungs.

A handful of female voices echoed the call.

“The minister will address your concerns shortly,” a disembodied male voice announced.

“That’s not good e—ow!” She tried to jerk away from the fingers pinching her elbow.

“Haven’t you caused enough problems?” Shauss growled in her ear.

Her face flamed. Why him of all people? Hadn’t she been humiliated enough? “Get your hands off me!”

In an instant, everything around them disappeared into a white void.

“The candidates are already on the verge of revolt,” he said, glaring down at her. “The last thing they need is a former compound employee with a grudge leading the charge.”

“I’m entitled to a grudge or two, don’t you think?” she snapped, trying to pry his steely fingers off her. “You’ve kept me locked in my room for the last three days. I don’t know what you call that on Garathan, but on Earth it’s known as false imprisonment and punishable by several years in prison.”