“I’m just heading out now, Mrs. Kallson,” Jac Wright called out, her hand on the back door as she paused for a moment to listen for a reply. “You make sure to lock the door up after me.”

“Thank you, Jac. I’ll be there in a minute.”

The weak reply, punctuated by coughs, made Jac frown. Mrs. Kallson had been suffering with the flu virus from hell the last couple of weeks, and the damn thing just wouldn’t let go to allow her to recover. Each time it seemed she was getting better, it hit again, and harder than the last time. Seeing the normally exuberant woman so drained and listless wrung Jac’s heartstrings.

“Okay, love. Well, you’ve got my number. Call me if you need me, okay? I’ll be right over.”

“I will do. Thank you so much, honey. You get off now before it gets too dark.”

“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye!”

Closing the door carefully behind her, Jac slung her bag over her shoulder and shoved her hands in her pockets as she headed down the path and onto the sidewalk. Her steps rang out in the growing darkness as she walked quickly. She’d spent as much time as she could with Amanda, far more than she was paid for. All too soon, though, she’d had to leave for her shift at the bar on the other side of town. As much as Larry felt sorry for Amanda, being late was a sacking offense.

Jac sighed as she walked, feeling guilty anyway for leaving. Amanda had looked sicker than ever, the cough racking her already thin frame. Jac didn’t know how she did it… got up every day and carried on. The universe just seemed to crap on her no matter what she did. One child dead from an overdose of off-world drugs, one kidnapped by those alien barbarians, one in a walking coma and now the flu… she couldn’t seem to catch a break.

At least she’d been able to talk to Jessica, the daughter kidnapped by aliens. News of the Lathar, the race of aliens who had attacked Sentinel Five, had been all over the media since it had happened. Even Jac, who had never followed the news or ever been star-struck over any celebrity, had been glued to the screen for any new snippet of information.

The few images she’d seen of the aliens, played on repeat by every news channel there was, proved they were hot. At first she’d thought it was some kind of prank. That someone had made up a news story to panic people. She’d read about that happening once. People had mistaken some radio show back in the day for real reports of an alien attack and gone batshit over it.

The aliens… the Lathar, they called themselves apparently… were so like humans that she’d thought they’d just gotten hot actors to play them and there would be a camera crew leap out and yell, “Surprise!” Sure, some of the aliens seemed to have weird eyes, but… hello, contacts?

But no camera crew had leaped out, and then they’d showed a clip of the aliens next to one of the captured Sentinel crew. A soldier, he’d looked like a kid next to the alien. They were biiig. Like, hella big. That hadn’t escaped the notice of a lot of the female population. Speculation was rife in women’s mags and online as to whether they were built as big all over… Signs had sprouted up in most gardens—invites for the aliens to come kidnap willing women.

She shook her head as she reached the bar and headed for the staff entrance. Men were men, and in her experience were mostly assholes. Why would hot aliens be any different? If they were into claiming women like they had the female population of the Sentinel base, they were probably bigger assholes than any human guy.

As she shucked her coat off, she hung it and her bag in the tiny staff “room,” aka the little closet behind the bar. Ducking through the door, she nodded to Larry wiping glasses by the register and started to pull chairs from the tops of the tables to get ready for opening. A hammering on the door made her jump. It was at least five minutes still to opening time. Taking a quick look around the bar, she caught Larry’s eye.

He nodded. “Yeah, let them in or we’ll have a damn riot on our hands. Huckby’s were laying off today so they’ll be wanting to drown their sorrows.”

“Crap, really?” She winced and reached up on her tiptoes to pull the top bolt down. Huckby’s cannery was the major employer in town. If they were laying off, there were going to be a lot of families looking at lean times coming up. “Gonna be a rough night then.”

“Yeah. Batten down the hatches. We’ll get through it,” Larry replied grimly as Jac swung the door open and headed behind the bar before the stampede started.

Sure enough, the first few customers were through the door in seconds. All Huckby men. All silent as they sat in front of the bar, downing shot after shot. Jac and Larry poured, keeping conversation to a minimum. With their long faces and general aura of hopelessness, it wasn’t hard to work out that these men had been given their marching orders.

Hours later, it was still the same story, multiplied. The bar had filled, as it usually did. It wasn’t that Larry’s was the most popular bar in town, although Larry claimed that. It was more that it was the cheapest bar in town, and in a town that lived from pay check to pay check, every cent counted.

On her break, Jac leaned in against the door of the staff entrance, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, and looked up. Even the weather was miserable, barely a hint of the stars she loved peeking through the murky clouds. She’d always loved the stars and wanted to travel. She’d even applied to the colonies once upon a time, but there wasn’t much call for wanna-be nurses with no qualifications. She hadn’t even qualified as a colony bride thanks to a history of heart disease and diabetes in her family, so looking up was as near as she was ever going to get to traveling the stars.

Movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she turned to see a guy walk across the parking lot toward the main entrance to the bar. No surprise there. Most of the male population of the town ended up in Larry’s eventually.

And that was the problem… He was definitely not local.

Tall and broad-shouldered, his long, blond hair flowed over his shoulders like a cape. And his muscles? Jac had never seen quite such a perfect specimen of masculinity in all her life. She blinked a few times to convince herself that no, she hadn’t accidentally nodded off in the doorway and yes, she really was seeing what looked like a modern-day Viking god striding across the lot.

That was it. Perhaps there was a movie filming nearby and this guy was one of the actors. As soon as the thought occurred to her, though, she dismissed it. If that had been the case, it would have been all over the local news. Hell, the level of the local paper was Old Man Jensen’s prize-winning pumpkins, so a movie set nearby? They’d have a twenty-four/seven feed set up.

That and the entire single female population of the town would be camped on their doorstep, probably half the married ones as well, all hoping to catch the eye of a famous actor and a meal ticket out of Dull-McDulls-ville here.

“Hey, handsome,” a raspy voice sounded out of the darkness by the main door as Betty, well known in the town for her… friendly ways, peeled herself off the wall by the main door. She dropped the cigarette she’d been smoking, crushing it underfoot as she blew smoke up into the air. “Fancy a good time?”

Most men, faced with Betty’s sultry makeup and in-your-face sexuality, had absolutely no defense. Either they made a run for it, or they were all up for Betty’s brand of friendliness against the wall at the back of the bar.

Tall, blond and utterly lickable stopped. Even from here Jac could see the ice in his gaze as he swept a glance down the woman in front of him. It was so cold she shivered in sympathy. Betty took a step back, her hand hovering in the air for a moment before she dropped it to her side.

“Sorry to have bothered you—” she murmured, barely audible to Jac in the shadows.

The guy leaned forward, bending down to whisper something in Betty’s ear. His voice was a deep rumble, but the whisper was too low for Jac to make out what he said. Betty’s shoulders stiffened and she leaned back to look into his face. When she lifted her hand again, Jac expected her to slap him, but she didn’t. Instead, she touched his cheek gently and smiled before walking off.

The guy watched her go, not moving as she walked across the lot and got into her car. The rumble of the engine starting up filled the night air and Jac expected him to turn and go inside but he didn’t. He waited until Betty had pulled out of the lot before he moved.

For a moment, he glanced toward Jac. She stopped breathing, shrinking backward into the shadows. Had he seen her? For some reason she didn’t want him to know she’d seen him and Betty. It felt like she’d intruded on something personal. Intimate.

What the hell had he said to her?

She stayed in the shadows until he pushed open the door and disappeared inside. Her mug empty now, she pushed off from the wall, only to raise a hand as a car pulling into the lot about blinded her. It slid to a stop diagonally in a squeal of brakes and she sighed, knowing who it was before the door was flung open.

Buck Johnson. Her ex. He was also a Huckby’s man, and if they were laying off… Buck was exactly the sort of pain in the ass employee who would make the first cut.

She ducked back through the door and emerged into the bar.

“Heads up. Buck incoming,” she warned Larry, just in case there was going to be any trouble.

She hoped not. She really couldn’t afford to lose this job.

Earth was not at all what Rynn had expected.

He sat at the rear of the entertainment facility, his back to the wall and a drink in his hand as he watched the humans interact. The drink was alcoholic, but nothing that would impair his responses if anything untoward happened. Although, even half drunk, his warrior’s training and sheer size would ensure he came off the winner against even the biggest of the human males in the place.

Copying the actions of a drinker near the bar, he took a healthy swallow. Then he resisted the urge to crunch his face up. It was weaker than kervasi piss and tasted like engine degreaser. He kept his face level and even managed to make a small sound of pleasure like the males around him had on their first swallows. It was all part of the act.

A master of blending in, he’d already switched out his warrior’s jacket for a top made of some stretchy material he’d pilfered from behind one of the dwellings. It had been attached to some sort of line arrangement with other garments. Figuring they wouldn’t miss one, he’d picked the biggest he could find, but still it strained across his heavier build. He was fairly sure he’d ripped the arm seams putting it on.

It had some kind of kervasi on it, but this one appeared to be deformed. Mounts on his world were six-legged apex predators with fangs and claws. Used in ground combat in the past, they could defend their rider if he lost his seat, and it was known that a well-trained kervasi could make the difference between life and death in a battle.

But this one looked rounder and softer than the war mounts of his home planet. It also only had four legs, which meant it would be slower, and its open mouth revealed blunt teeth rather than a predator’s fangs. Poor thing. In fact, the only thing it appeared to have in its favor was the sharp spike in the middle of its forehead. A formidable weapon indeed. Which must be how it killed its prey. Or it could breathe fire, he supposed, casting a glance down at the image. Fire-breathing would make up for its other shortcomings.

After another couple of swallows from his glass, he leaned back in his chair and looked around, playing the part of a normal human male, his thirst partially quenched and paying attention to his surroundings for the first time. That appeared to be normal here but, he cast an experienced eye over the males around him, the local males didn’t appear to be warrior trained. Instead, they had the broken-down demeanor and expressions of menial workers. They looked the same the universe over, as did entertainment facilities.

This one was scruffy, heading into “dive” territory and the majority of the clientele appeared to be male. There were a few females, and that fact still surprised him even though he knew humanity didn’t have the procreation issues his people had. The Lathar had lost their women in a devastating genetic plague that had killed them all within a generation. Now the species only continued with genetically altered gestational “hosts.” The oonat. Beings of lower intelligence, cattle basically, used as walking incubators. But even they only carried male young to term. Pregnancies with female young were never viable.

The discovery of humanity had changed everything for the Lathar. Not only were they compatible for procreation, they were genetically related, descendants of a long-lost Lathar colony expedition. Even more surprising… they still held information in their DNA, which would allow the Latharian master healers to repair the damage done to Rynn’s race over the years. Which… was the reason he was here.

His mission was to collect the Lady Jessica’s sick sister and get her back to the healers on Lathar Prime. According to the emperor, she was the only other person, apart from Lady Jessica herself, with a unique section of DNA that could put back together the broken puzzle that was the Latharian genome. And hopefully save them all.

Which would mean that bars on his home planet might one day have women again, like this one.

He took another swallow of his drink—called a “beer” apparently, whatever that meant—and looked around again. He still couldn’t get over the fact the human women were just walking around alone and unprotected. Before they’d all succumbed to the plague, women had been so rare on his planet that they’d never been allowed out without an escort or protection of some kind. Kidnapping had been a common problem, women taken from their families and forced to breed, even when they were sick themselves. Something that only hastened their eventual deaths. It was sickening to read the historical records.

It was truly sickening to know his kind were capable of deeds like that… a sigh escaped him. To be fair though, he didn’t have to read the historical records for that. The purists were draanthic as bad as anything in history, and they were alive and kicking. A shudder rolled down his spine at the thought of any of those assholes getting to Earth. It would be a blood bath.

His glass tankard almost empty, he leaned back. Enough with the depressing thoughts. He was on a brand-new planet, had arrived without blowing his cover and had already located his primary objective ahead of schedule. It was a good day.

Although, of course, he really should have secured Lady Jessica’s sister and already been on his way. Getting his charge back to Lathar Prime was a mission of the utmost importance. But… the drives on his long-range shuttle had been battered in a solar storm on the way here and he wanted to let them run through a diagnostic pattern before starting back.

He snorted to himself at that one. Yeah, it was a thin excuse but… this was Earth. He’d been to many planets in his time serving the empire and seen many species from the feather-covered Altarians right through to the Drakchen who lived in the outer-wastes. Unless he was in disguise, every one of them either recognized him on sight or quickly worked out that he was Lathar.

Earth, though, was different. He was the first Lathar to ever set foot on her surface and, thanks to the contacts covering his vertically pupiled eyes, the people around him assumed he was human. Just like them.

In a way, he supposed he was. Humans were descended from Lathar, so they were like mini versions of his people—the same build but way smaller. Definitely the same attitude… he could already see a couple of obviously inebriated males squaring up on the other side of the bar. Take away the location, make them bigger, and put them in leathers and they could be any warriors he’d ever met.

But they were his secondary consideration. Most of his attention was on the delicate little female who appeared to be the barkeep. Her male partner had served him when Rynn had first arrived, but he hadn’t missed the woman bustling around, cleaning up dirty glasses but also serving drinks.

For a moment he wondered if she was for sale. Often the wait staff at such facilities were available… for the right price. He’d never bothered before. Usually they were oonat or another species that, while biologically compatible with the Lathar, he didn’t find remotely attractive. But the little female with her short dark hair and pale eyes roused responses in him he’d never experienced before.

He waited until she turned toward him, meeting her eyes, and smiled. Instantly he knew she wasn’t a pleasure worker. Her eyes widened as she sucked in a short breath, and a flush spread over her cheeks. It was pretty. He liked it. Especially when she ducked her head, letting dark curls cover her face for a moment as she made her escape.

He smiled as he swallowed the rest of his drink and stood, intending to make his way toward the bar and perhaps engage her in conversation. Just because she wasn’t a pleasure worker didn’t mean she wouldn’t be open to a night with him. His conversations with the human women on Lathar Prime had indicated human women weren’t backward about sex, and he couldn’t think of a better way to mark his visit to Earth than getting to know one of its inhabitants.

If he was lucky, getting to know her very well indeed.