“Reva doesn’t want to eat you.”
She has the intelligence of a child, he thought bitingly.
Seeing the tears threatening to spill, he thought to soothe her. “Let us go … I’ll take you back to Earth.”
Joy filled her face. “You’ll take me back?”
“I’ll take you. I’ll return you to your group, and Ulf and I will leave.”
“Thank you so much,” she said excitably.
Skars didn’t waste time ushering her to the elevator then inside.
“This is a big relief. I was terrified when your seeress mentioned having a meal with me. Milly warned me about aliens only wanting to come to Earth because we fill their food shortage.”
Skars turned his head to see if the woman was joking. She wasn’t. She truly believed what she was saying.
“Who is Milly?”
“One of the women in our group,” she happily explained. “She was our customer service rep at the bank. Customers complained about her all the time. Lucas finally had to put her in the drive-thru; that way, she didn’t have to have much interaction with the customers.”
Skars placed his hand on the door, stopping the elevator. Then he slid his hand upward and to the side.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
“You look exhausted. Would you like to shower, change, and rest before I return you to Earth?”
His wife nibbled on her bottom lip. “What about Ulf? Shouldn’t he have called before now?”
“I will inform you the moment he does.”
The door to the elevator opened, exposing his bedroom.
“Wow. Is this your guest bedroom?”
With a firm hand on the small of her back, Skars escorted her out of the elevator.
“Yes, you are my guest.” Unrepentantly, he let his ingenious bride believe the room wasn’t his.
“Milly doesn’t like you?” he asked, steering their conversation in the direction he wanted.
“How did you know?” Soft grey eyes stared at him curiously. “For an alien, you’re very intuitive.”
Skars turned the lights on with a wave of his hand then dimmed them by simply lowering his hand until he had the intimate atmosphere he wanted.
“Já, I am.” He had arrogantly told Thorsen that many times over the years. He was much more familiar with women’s behavior than his brother.
Skars cynically watched her eyes become worried at her own observation. Then she shook it off and went back to talking about the tispe. During his travels throughout the galaxies, he had met far too many tispe, women who were spiteful toward their own sex to make them subserviate to their demands. They all had one thing in common—they preyed on those they were most jealous of.
“Anyway … I tried to be friends with Milly, but she has disliked me from the get-go. I’ve never done anything for her to dislike me, but she does.”
Skars knew she was keeping something back from him, despite the innocent look she was giving him.
“What do you think is the reason for her dislike?” he prompted her, giving her a sympathetic glance as he tried to get to the bottom of what she had done.
“She blames me because Lucas—he’s our bank manager,” she explained, “or, at least he was. The bank is closed since everyone on Earth started bombing each other.”
“Raine …” he prompted her.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “One day, I was leaving for break to go to a coffee shop, which was next door. I nicely stopped by her desk, offering to bring something back to her. I always offered to do the same for the others, and I thought it would show I didn’t like her if I didn’t at least offer to do the same for Milly. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t see she had a cup next to her keyboard, and I accidentally knocked it over. She was on a call, and she started cursing at me. The customer on the other end believed she was yelling at them.” Raine made a face. “It became a big mess. The customer was the owner of a big corporation. They wanted her fired. Lucas was able to save her job, but she had to work the drive-thru. She wasn’t happy about switching jobs.”
“She is the one who told you the aliens want to eat you?”
Red flooded her cheeks. “She told me, to them, I look like a buffet.”
“Buffet?”
“Where more than one can eat,” she said with a miserable expression.
“She lied.”
“So, when the aliens are capturing the humans, they aren’t eating them?”
“No. The only aliens who eat humans haven’t made their way to Earth yet.”
“That’s good to know.” Giving a huge sigh of relief, she stared at him quizzically. “Then what are they doing with the humans?”
“Depends on who they are captured by.” Determined to switch topics, he went to the side of the room, and as he did, another door opened. “Would you like to shower and get changed?”
Raine gripped her pants tighter around her. “I don’t have anything else to change into. I’ve been searching for more clothes, but I haven’t been able to find any.”