A jolt went through her when she found herself facing a wall of flesh that so closely mirrored the mountain of a man now behind her that she thought, for too many seconds, that she actuallyhadencountered a mirror.
His hand shot out before she could do more than gape at him. He caught her index finger in an unbreakable grip before she could even instinctively snatch it away. Two hands settled on her waist from behind. Her flight instinct kicked in once more. For the space of a few hundred thundering heart beats, Clair executed the ‘cornered feline’ escape maneuver. She became a blur of twisting, jerking, flailing movement, evading a firm grip on her by either man, but she discovered in the end that they’d still managed to cage her so effectively between their bodies that no amount of wiggling or jerking could free her.
That conclusion wasn’t what made her stop abruptly. It wasn’t even the fact that she’d run out of breath from hyperventilation. It was the sudden realization that the meaty thuds banging against her, back and front,wasn’ttheir thighs. It was something long, cylindrical, and it was getting hard.
Panting for breath, she gaped upwards at the man still holding her finger for a moment before fear sent a shaft of reviving anger through her. “Don’t eventhinkabout using those things on me!”
The man in front of her cocked his head to one side curiously. “I have no weapon—and neither do you.”
The man behind her speared the cleft of her buttocks with his ‘weapon’, poking her several times pointedly. “What? This?”
When she whipped her head around to gape at him, she saw his eyes were gleaming with both humor and anger, his hard mouth twisted in a grim smile. “You aren’t Dr. LaMotte, so why don’t you tell us who you are?”
A flicker of resentment filtered through Clair’s shock. It was her mother’s house—herhome, really! Thenerveof the bastard asking her what she was doing there whenhewas the intruder! That realization gave her pause, but her thoughts and emotions were seesawing so drastically from one thought and impression to the next that a sense of caution was no more dominant than anything else. In point of fact, the resentment, compounded by the anger that had seethed in her from well before her arrival at her mother’s home, shifted to the forefront when it might not have otherwise.
She was dimly aware that a sense of self-preservation should’ve overruled all other considerations, but her emotional distress wreaked havoc with good sense. “I’mnot the intruder here! You are! So why don’t you tell me what the hell you two are doing in my mother’s house?”
The two men exchanged a look that Clair could only categorize as startled even though there was little evidence of it in their expressions. Before the sense of satisfaction that flickered to life could really buoy her self-righteous anger, however, the man in front of her knocked the wind from her sails.
“You are not,” he said flatly.
Clair gaped up at him. Indignation flashed through her. “Excuse you!” she snapped. “I most certainly am!”
“Dr. LaMotte doesn’t have a daughter,” the man behind her responded coolly, the inflection in his voice accusing.
His calm assertion knocked her off kilter again, but she twisted her head to glare up at him. “This is …unbelievable! You two break into my mother’s house and you have the gall to act likeI’mthe one in the wrong here!” She tried to squeeze from between them. “We’ll just call the cops and let them sort this out!”
The hands at her waist tightened, preventing her attempt to escape. “We’ll sort it out alright,” the man responded with grim agreement, “but we don’t need the cops.”
Before Clair could entirely assimilate what was happening, the man behind her shifted his grip from her waist to one arm and walked her into the living area, applying just enough force that she had to walk or fall on her face and then giving her just enough of a push toward the chair that she overbalanced and plopped into the seat. She gaped up at his grim face with a mixture of uneasiness and indignation. The only reasonable explanation for their presence that presented itself was that they were from the company. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with that idea since that didn’t explain what the two of them were doing strolling around her mother’s house naked, but she couldn’t think of anything else that even came close.
If they were burglars, surely they wouldn’t have taken the time to make use of her mother’s bath? In any case, she hadn’t seen any sign at all that there had been a search for valuables. She’d look for signs when the light had failed to come on automatically as it should have.
To her partial relief, as soon as she’d settled in the chair the man who’d escorted her strode back toward the bathroom, returning a few moments later wearing a pair of trousers. He hadn’t bothered to fasten them completely or to don a shirt, but she felt less vulnerable, for no reason that she could readily identify, by the fact that he’d ‘holstered his weapon’. His twin, who’d stood guard over her for the few moments the other was out of the room, disappeared and returned wearing trousers, as well.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
The two men exchanged a long look. Finally, they almost seemed to shrug. She didn’t know why that made her belly clench, but it did.
“I’m Seth. He’s Simon. And you are?”
Clair’s lips tightened. “Tired of this bullshit!”
Seth dropped to a crouch in front of her the moment she tried to rise, planting a hand the size of a serving plate in the middle of her belly and effectively pinning her to her chair. “Not nearly as tired as you’re going to be,” he said grimly.
Clair eyed him with a mixture of growing uneasiness and irritation. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo from your boss?” she said with a little less bravado. “The judge awardedmemy mother’s estate, damn it! Now … get the hell out of my mother’s house or Iwillcall the cops!”
The following is a short story gift by Kaitlyn O’Connor:
Alien Enslaved:
Spoils
Copyright ( c ) Kaitlyn O’Connor, October 2016
Cover Art by Eliza Black, October 2016
New Concepts Publishing
