Badass Alien Boss (GAL Friday #2)
Chapter One
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Here we go. Korsan had warned her. She adopted a neutral, friendly expression and spun around in her chair to meet suspicious golden eyes. “My name is Michaela Perine. I’m your GAL Friday.”
“I didn’t hire you.” Pain flickered across his scarred, pale-green face as he approached, dragging his left leg.
“No, your brother did.”
The tips of his pointed ears darkened. “Did he now?”
She held his gaze, saying nothing to avoid engaging him in an argument.
“What exactly does a GAL Friday do?” he bit out.
“Whatever you need me to do. Call me a personal assistant, a project manager”—bodyguard—“I’m here to help.”
“I don’t need a nursemaid!”
“That’s not why—”
“You’re fired.”
“With all due respect, since your brother hired me, only he can fire me.”
“Pack up your stuff. You’re leaving.” He limped out of the room.
She got Korsan on hologram. “How did it go?” he asked.
“He tried to fire me. He’s headed your way.”
“I’ll take care of it. You’re staying. He’ll never admit it, but he needs you.”
“If you say so.”
As a GAL Friday “security consultant,” she’d had clients who ignored her advice, but never one who flat out didn’t want her. Of course, they’d had chosen to hire her; they hadn’t had a secret bodyguard forced on them.
Normally she didn’t accept assignments to protect reluctant clients, but the account of how his younger brother had been attacked and critically wounded hit her where it counted.
The only girl sandwiched between four rough-and-tumble brothers, family meant everything to her.
As one of “the boys,” she’d done everything they had—and more.
If they climbed to the top of the water tower and rappelled down, well, she did it, too.
If they signed up to take martial arts classes, she trained right alongside them.
After they enlisted in the military, as soon as she came of age, she marched down to the recruiter, too.
The downside to the GAL Friday gig was the separation from her family. She missed her brothers when work took her to faraway planets. They were her best friends. But she couldn’t pass up an opportunity to further her goal of starting her own investigations company.
GAL Friday—Galactic Auxiliary Labor—provided human temp help to aliens.
When the agency had added security consultants to its lineup, she’d leaped at the chance to broaden her experience and make more contacts in the industry before striking out on her own.
And the handsome pay package would help a lot, too.
This gig would be her last contract. After this, she’d return to Earth and hang out her shingle. Hopefully, she and Ruyn could get along, or it would be a long six months.
She wished she could be honest and tell him her real role—to assess and protect him from further threats and try to find out who tried to kill him in the first place.
Investigators lied all the time to gain information, but they shouldn’t ever lie to a client, although, technically, Korsan was the client. He’d hired her.
“You have to understand my brother,” he had said.
“He served twenty years in the Luturnan Space Force. He’s fought on hostile planets all over the galaxy.
I’m older by four years, but I’ve always looked up to him.
I could never have done what he did. He was the roughest, toughest man I’ve ever met, a total badass.
He’s having a hard time accepting he’s not what he used to be and never will be again. ”
In their hologram communications, Korsan had made it sound like Ruyn had become a near-invalid, completely disabled by his injuries, but there was still a lot of badassery in him.
He projected power and aggression. Although he limped, and his face bore still-healing scars, he had don’t fuck with me written all over him.
His visible injuries had made him more intimidating, insinuating a willingness to fight.
While Ruyn registered his protest, she opened the police dossier Korsan had forwarded.
Having met Ruyn, she wanted to review it again.
She had received some drone footage of the attack this morning, but she’d wait until Ruyn wouldn’t walk in on her to view it.
She wished she’d gotten it sooner, but the government had taken its sweet time sending it.
The dossier noted his twenty years in the military and the many commendations he’d received and provided the official report of the attack.
Home on leave, he had been ambushed by four men who’d broken his leg in two places, slashed his face, and stabbed him in the gut.
The latter wound had been the near fatal one.
All in all, the dossier yielded few clues to help with her investigation. Maybe the drone footage would provide some, but she doubted it. If the authorities knew more, they might have caught the attackers, and there would have been no need to hire her.
“The authorities deemed the attack a random act of violence,” Korsan had told her. “They don’t seem too interested in solving it, and I won’t feel comfortable until the thugs are caught. Ruyn is physically disabled. He’s an easy target now.”
It might have seemed ludicrous to hire a five-foot-nothing, pixie-haired human female as a bodyguard for a six-foot-plus former badass soldier, except brains counted as much, if not more, than brawn.
Security was 99 percent prevention. If a client encountered a physical threat while under your protection, you’d failed at your job.
The problem with men, she had observed, was their default inclination to settle disputes with a fight. They seemed to suffer from a delusion of invincibility, causing them to take foolish risks. She had termed the condition, “masculine-stupid.”
Nothing in Ruyn’s dossier indicated he was masculine-stupid, but she’d know more after they interacted. And since the law enforcement investigation had stalled, Korsan hoped she could bring a set of fresh eyes to the case and see something the Luturnan police had missed.
Her GAL Friday contract committed her to six months, with an option to extend another six if needed. Hopefully, by then, he wouldn’t need a bodyguard anymore, but if he did, it would have to be somebody else.
This was a short-term gig, nothing more. In six months, a year max, she’d return to Earth.