The Alien's Major Dilemma (Alien Brides: The Chelion Conspiracy Book 1)

1. Chapter 1

Cooper had a problem. If he thought about it, he had several, but the one that plagued him the most was glaring at him from the passenger seat of the stolen truck he was driving. She was so beautiful, even if she was an alien, and he couldn”t wait to get to know her better. Once he convinced her not to kill him.

His list of priorities had expanded at an alarming rate when he met Major Marissa Ozark.

When he’d landed on the planet a few months earlier, he’d had one mission; Get Home. Unfortunately, he was out in the ass end of beyond and had to rely on the locals for help. Since the planet was officially uncharted and presumed to be uninhabited, that was going to be tricky.

The dominant life form on the planet resembled none of the other alien species he”d trained for or encountered, except little traits that would pop up in places he”d never expected. They had a wider range and variety among a single species than he”d ever seen on a planet with only one species capable of speech.

It had taken some time to get the color of his skin right for infiltration and there were enough minute variations between humans that he was always on the edge of getting the shade wrong. And there were times when his stress levels were high and his original coloring started to show.

Their brains were easier to get into than the last species he’d encountered, so learning the language had taken almost no time at all. Until he’d had to learn a second language. Then a third. And a fourth. He was up to a dozen languages learned and having trouble keeping some of them straight. A good torpor would help him organize the information better, but he didn’t dare rest like that. Not yet.

The problem glaring at him from the passenger seat had introduced another wrinkle to his mission. His people were the scouts and spies for their planet. Millennia of warfare and intrigue had bred them to be perfect for infiltration, espionage, and survival. It had also made their ability to breed highly selective. Most of his people required medical intervention when they were ready to produce children.

What happened when he met Major Ozark was supposed to be impossible.

By design, if the rumors were true, and certainly by tradition.

Chelions bred with Chelions. Every now and then he’d hear about a Chelion who had been selected to service the Dragor or sentenced to torture by the Ranel but they couldn’t produce offspring. Their genetics were just too far apart to be viable. This had proven true with every other alien race he’d encountered.

When Major Ozark had triggered his secondary maturation, he didn’t think about any of the consequences, he’d simply grabbed her to take her with him. Now, he was rethinking his choices. All of them. Every single one he’d made since he’d crawled from his egg and blinked his eyes at the world around him.

“I am really sorry,” he told her again.

“You will be,” she promised.

“I don’t know what came over me,” he lied. He knew. He was surprised that it had happened, shocked that it was possible, but he knew exactly what it was. Unfortunately, that meant that he knew what had to happen next if he was going to survive.

“I’m guessing the Good Idea Fairy,” she huffed. “Or perhaps Emperor Mong has decided to take his tribute from you.”

Cooper laughed. He couldn’t help it. She was mad at him, probably wanted to kill him, and she was still very funny. He was going to have so much fun getting to know his mate. If he survived.

“What am I wrapped in, anyway?” she asked.

“A stabilizing blanket,” he said. “It’s actually meant to keep someone still and functioning in the event of a traumatic injury to increase their odds of making it to medical help.”

“Well, that’s actually pretty clever. How long is it supposed to work for before I start losing circulation to my limbs?”

“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Has anything become numb?”

He tried to sift through her brain waves for signs of distress but she was frustratingly hard to read. Some of that, he knew, was because of his second maturation. The changes she’d triggered in his body had already begun messing with his mind and he really needed to get back to his ship before the bigger ones started.

At least, he hoped one of the changes was a bigger one. Or, rather, big enough to please his mate. How embarrassing if it stayed the same size now that it had activated.

“Nothing hurts,” she told him. “But I can’t move anything but my lips. That generally leads to issues in hands and feet.”

“Ah,” he said with a nod. “The blanket should actually help improve your circulation, but I understand that it’s frustrating to be unable to move anything else. I’ll be able to fix that soon, I think.”

“You could fix it now,” she told him. “Just take the blanket off.”

“Not while I’m driving,” he said.

“Then pull over and take it off.”

“You’ll run away.”

“Damn straight, I will. I’ll just be less likely to kill you while I do it if you let me out when I’m close enough to a base to walk back.”

Cooper shook his head. “I can’t do that. It’s hard to explain but letting you go right now might actually kill me.”

“Not letting me go will kill you eventually,” she said. “And it’s more likely to hurt while I’m doing it.”

“I understand,” he said. And he did. She’d been trained to escape if captured and take as many of the enemy out while she did it. He’d been trained the same way. Their techniques might be different but they were both supposed to get loose and get back to work.

“And yet?”

“And yet.”

She huffed at him. “Alright, so where are we going from here? You made your phone call and started driving so I assume you’re heading to a rendezvous.”

“Right now, I’m heading to my ship,” he said. “My call did not go unnoticed so it’s best for me, for both of us, if we get somewhere I can have some hope of hiding.”

“Of course you have a ship,” she muttered. “Silly me. Why wouldn’t you have a ship? Everybody else has a ship. And yours probably has some kind of chameleon circuit so it blends in and doesn’t take up any space but has everything you could ever want or need to take over a planet.”

He chuckled. “I’m not that kind of alien and we don’t have that kind of technology. It would be cool if we did but my people developed in a different direction.”

“Yeah, you developed in the direction of using first aid equipment for kidnapping.”

That stung. “If it helps, I didn’t intend to kidnap you. I actually didn’t want to hurt anyone. I’m still trying to figure out why I’m here at all.”

“If you didn’t intend to kidnap me, why did you?”

Cooper shook his head. “I told you, you’re my mate. I couldn’t leave you there and I couldn’t stay so you had to come with me. I was pretty sure you weren’t going to agree to just hop in my truck.”

“That you stole. From the base.”

“Right, that. And I was running short on time so I made you as comfortable as I could manage and took you with me.”

It wasn’t a great answer. It was the truth, as far as it went, but he knew she wasn’t going to be satisfied with it. If he were in her position he wouldn’t have been.

“And what makes you think I’m your mate?”

“There are signs,” he started, then shook his head. “And your species doesn’t have any of them. We’re not supposed to be genetically compatible so I have no idea how much of what I know about my species reproduction will translate to you. That’s something we’re going to have to experiment with.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. We are not experimenting with anything to do with reproduction. Aside from the fact that you kidnapped me, I’m not really an experimenting in the bedroom, kinda girl, so you can just keep all of that to yourself.”

He gave her a painful smirk. “Trust me, if it ever gets to the bedroom, it will be experimental for both of us.”

“What, human women aren’t your kink?”

“No idea,” he told her. “It’s never come up. I think I’m about to find at least one human woman is completely impossible to resist, though, and that has possibilities.”

They drove in silence a while longer, the rocky desert spreading out around them. He’d left the road a while back and should have been out of fuel by this point. He’d used an additive he’d found worked on human vehicles to stretch out the amount of fuel in the tank but it would still have limits.

“Does this thing stop me from needing to pee?”

Cooper glanced over at the woman in his passenger seat and lifted an eyebrow at her. “It shouldn’t, no.”

“Then I definitely can’t feel the pressure on my bladder and we’re going to need to pull over soon so I can take care of that.”

He nodded. “Alright, I can see that. I just need to get a little further out and we can do that. We’re not exactly in friendly territory right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a base your people were looking for when I arrived, that was moving around enough that you couldn’t get a good look at it on your satellites and knew how to hide from the drones,” he said. “It’s out this direction and we need to get on the other side of their perimeter before it’s safe for us to stop.”

“Wait, we’re driving through insurgent territory to get to your ship?”

He nodded uncomfortably.

“What in the blue hell made you decide to hide your ship behind enemy lines?”

“The entire planet is enemy lines,” he snapped. “The fact that these people are your enemies had no bearing on my decision to land where I did.”

Though it might have contributed to it at bit, he thought. This was one of the places his computer had said would give him the best chance of being unobserved while he landed and the only one he could get to with the time and fuel he had.

They were quiet for a little longer and Cooper could feel his skin start to twitch.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “Are you part of an invasion?”

“I’m here because something in, on, or around this planet interfered with the instrumentation on my ship. I think. To the best of my knowledge, my planet doesn’t even know your planet exists so, no, I’m not an advanced scout for an invasion of your planet.”

“Were you an advanced scout for an invasion of a different planet?”

“That’s classified.”