Page 2 of Infala: The Alien's Bond
Coffee. I need some freaking coffee.
Darla rolled the windows down, cranked up the radio, and pulled out onto the road. It was late enough that any respectable coffee joint would be long closed, but this wasn’t about a steamy cup of the nectar of the gods. This was survival coffee. It didn’t have to be good, as long as it would get the job done.
Like Dylan, she mused with a chuckle.I wonder where he is these days.
The fleeting thought left her as soon as she hit the road. Ten minutes later she pulled into the twenty-four-hour mini-mart attached to a run-down gas station. Bypassing the pumps, she nosed her car into a space right outside the doors and made her way into the cool greenish fluorescent lighting.
“Coffee?” she queried the scruffy man behind the plexiglass barrier at the register.
He nodded his head in the direction of the hot dog machine, full of wieners that had clearly been there most of the day, if not longer. Beside it sat a pair of coffee pots. One sported the orange top of the dreaded decaf. As Darla was fond of saying, the eleventh commandment should have been, “Thou shalt not partake of decaf.”
Luckily, fortune smiled upon her. The pot of the good stuff beside it was full of a wicked smelling brew.
“Buy you a cup?” a raspy voice asked from over her right shoulder.
She glanced at its owner. Average height, lean, but with that wiry kind of muscle from years of hard use. He had to be in his late forties, judging by the silver sprinkled through his hair and stubble, offsetting the dark brown nicely. His eyes were a bright blue, sparkling with mischief, a nice contrast to his dark locks. Despite herself, Darla found herself replying.
“I’m good, thanks,” she said, immediately reaching up and mentally smacking her own forehead in her mind.And this is why I’m still single.
He didn’t falter, his smile setting in place with a wry little gleam of mischief in his eye. “Okay, okay. But if you don’t mind a little company, maybe I could join you for a cup. If you’re up for a little talk, or something.”
The way he saidsomethingboth creeped her out and excited her at the same time. It had been so long since she’d had a mindless fling, and what a story this one could be. Picking up a handsome stranger on the road home?
Wait a minute, Dar. That’s how you wind up on This Weeks Missing Persons Report, and that’s not the kind of story you want to be in.
“Thanks for the offer, but no thanks,” she said, declining but still more than a little conflicted.
He flashed a warm smile and chuckled. The rusty timbre of his laugh gave her a little tingle in her belly. He just oozed testosterone.
“Well, if you change your mind, I’m filling up over at pump number three,” he said, giving her a little nod and heading out to his car.
Truck, actually, she noted, and abigone at that, all flared fenders and gleaming chrome. It suited him. An overt statement of masculine confidence in steel and rubber.
Darla paid for her coffee and walked back to her car, contemplating the handsome stranger whose gaze she could feel admiring her ass without even needing to look. At least in this instance the attention wasn’t totally unwanted. The gas station was well lit, and the man doing the looking wasn’t some drooling meathead cat-calling with his buddies.
She turned and gave him one last look before sliding back into her car. It would be so easy to take him home. To let him do all sorts of wonderfully naughty things to her. But then cruel reality raised her ugly head. She had work in the morning, and if she was to take him home, there would be a very real chance she’d spend the next day suffering for it.
With her luck, it wouldn’t even be worth it.
She gave the stranger a little nod, then fired up her engine and pulled out into the night.
It was still going to be nearly a half-hour drive home, and on dark roads to boot. Darla sipped her cup of bitter brew and sighed.
There’s just a serious lackof good men in this town, she mused.Hell, it’s hard to even find one who’s good enough for something less than serious.
Her gaze shifted to the car stereo, her hands fumbling with her phone, which was stubbornly not connecting to the car’s speaker system.
“Come on, you son of a bitch, I need music,” she grumbled.
Making the drive with coffee helped, but tunes would make it much better. Finally, the devices linked up and music began thumping from her speakers.
“That’s more like it.”
Darla reached down and grabbed her coffee, but as she was raising it to her lips, her stereo blasted out loud static and a bright light filled her vehicle with blinding illumination. She swerved. Or at least she started to, but in an instant Darla’s world went black.
CHAPTERTWO
Darla’s head was slowly pounding, a steadythump thumpin time with her pulse filling her ears. Everything was dark, though she tried her best to orient herself to her situation.
