Raelor Read online

  By taking a trip to Urdiv and looking at all the beings, humans would think everyone was a part of the military. Each Humavrian living on the planet had a similar body type. The type that came from hard work and made the Earth ladies swoon. While all the beings of Urdiv received military training, they were not required to live the military life. This was the legacy that Raelor’s father would be known for. After centuries of the same rules, High Commander Brog declared that while all beings on Urdiv would continue to be required to train and serve the military in their 20th year of life, after they served their time, their decision to continue with the military life would be their own. This rule had drastically changed the happiness and well-being of all the beings of Urdiv. This allowed the planet to be at peace with its leader and opened up the door to join the Galactic Alliance. This was both a positive move for the planet in terms of its safety within the universe and also a solid political move for the High Commander.

  For the first time in history, the Urdiv beings were at peace with their leader, and his approval ratings were higher than his two predecessors. This strong commanding stance was made with Raelor in mind. High Commander Brog wanted nothing more than for his son to be as successful and loved among the beings as he was, but the only problem was he would not live to see it. Therefore, Brog had no choice but to do everything in his power to set up Raelor to be the leader he always dreamed he would be.

  Raelor, on the other hand, did not always appreciate his father’s help. Often times, they butted heads when discussing the type of ruler he would eventually be. Eventually Raelor came to terms that the best way to deal with his father was to go under his radar and stay out of sight and out of mind, so when an opportunity to join the Trekkers fell into his lap, he took it. His father worried about his safety, but Raelor knew he could handle anything the Trekkers threw at him, and so far he had been right.

  Just as he was about to head into the cafeteria for his usual breakfast, he was given an order to report to the bridge’s communicator. He followed the twisting corridors before running into a friend, Julan.

  “Finished your run again?”

  “Always,” Raelor responded.

  “Then where’s the fire? You’re flying down this hall.”

  “I’ve been summoned to the bridge. There’s a communication for me.”

  “Oh yeah, your dad called, I think.”

  “My father?” Raelor was stunned.

  “Yep, good luck!” Julan patted Raelor on the back as he walked by him.

  As he made his way to the bridge, Raelor ran all possible reasons for his father to call him. There was a part of him that hoped it was something small, just to put on appearances that he was following his great father’s lead by example. Another part of him wished that this was his chance for something great and exciting. He continued to imagine that he was being asked to lead a group of warriors on a mission to save Urdiv and send a message to the galaxies that they were the superior beings and they must all bow down. Hell, he dreamed that he could be a warrior under someone else’s command, anything to give him a taste of asserting his power and using his skills in a way to help his planet or the Galactic Alliance. Things had been so quiet since Aevar and Nash had left the ship with their mates.

  After making his way across the ship to the bridge, Raelor stood outside the doors, pausing to take a few deep breaths. Any conversation with his father meant he would need to be extra patient and level headed to avoid irritating the High Commander any more than he already did. He was the older of the High Commander’s two sons and therefore the rightful heir. However, he and the other members of his family knew that if it were in fact up to his father, his younger brother would be the chosen heir. And no matter how much effort Raelor put into showing his father he could handle leading in his own way, his father would never be convinced. But no one on this ship knew about his background, or who he truly was. A communication on the bridge would change all that. There, nothing was private.

  The heavy doors to the bridge pulled open and Raelor was welcomed by the High Commander’s personal guards. So this wasn’t a communication—he was actually here. Swuya, something was really up. The proud twenty men stood perfectly still, upright and dressed in full Urdiv armor made of shiny blue Urdivium, the new metal that the planet was most known for. As Raelor passed by, each guard stood stone-like, as if they were stuck in place. Any other Urdiv warrior would salute as Raelor walked past, but the High Commander’s personal guards had only one job, which was the protection of the High Commander, and they were not permitted to pay attention to anyone else.

  No one else was on the bridge; the ship had clearly been put into auto pilot and all of the Trekkers were sent away.

  Raelor approached his father, who was sitting in the Commander’s chair, scanning some documents and refusing to peel an eye away to acknowledge his son’s presence. Raelor also had no intention of being the first to break the silence. The power struggle between father and son was intense. The air in the room fell flat as if it was squeezing the two of them closer and closer until one would smack into the other. After waiting nothing more than a few moments, Raelor was sure that he had been standing and waiting for hundreds of years. Finally, it was the Commander of the Titan who entered the room. His entrance brought not only the end of the tension but also the air back into the room. The suffocation Raelor felt was immediately lifted with the smooth sound of his voice.

  “Oh, there you are. Good morning, lieutenant.”

  Raelor responded, “Sir.”

  “Looks like you have a visitor. Someone I was unaware you were related to.”

  “Yes sir, the High Commander is my…”

  “Father,” he interjected. “Now I have some business to attend to with my son. Commander, I appreciate your hospitality upon this fine vessel, but of course I won’t be staying long. I just need to tell my son some news.”

  Raelor’s heart dropped but he didn’t move to speak. Was it his mother? Or his brother? Why had his father come alone?

  Raelor’s annoyance and confusion with his father’s presence on the Titan was evident in his body language. He stood with his hands behind his back in typical warrior stance, but his jaw was clenched and his chest stretched out. Sure, a year or so ago he would have used this conversation as a platform to lash out. While he never quite attacked his father, there was a time or two the High Commander’s personal guards cautiously stepped in between Raelor and his father, and the guards were fair game.

  Raelor was the first to admit he had some wild times in his younger days. But now he knew better. He knew as the heir to the Urdiv throne, he would eventually need to calm down and be a little more responsible. He had slowly been easing off the outlandish acts mostly to stay out of his father’s reach. The Titan had given him the opportunity to be his own man. But the High Commander saw it as another dangerous stunt meant to undermine his authority and risk his legacy. Raelor had tried time and again to prove he had changed, but nothing worked. He was still an irresponsible heir who was more of a liability than an asset.

  The Titan’s Commander, an older man with gentle eyes, bowed his head to Raelor’s father. “Please let me know if I can be of any service. It would be my highest honor.” He turned and exited the bridge, leaving Raelor alone with his father and his twenty guards.

  Very sternly, the High Commander addressed Raelor. “My son, you have been called to serve your planet by the order of the Galactic Alliance in a new way.” As the High Commander continued to rattle on the boring directives that gave the history of the system and specific codes and regulations for why he would have to follow these orders, Raelor couldn’t help but get a tingle of excitement. Orders from the Galactic Alliance could only mean one thing—he was finally getting his chance to prove to his father that he could be a strong Urdiv warrior. Maybe he would even get his own fleet. This must have been of the highest security clearance for the Titan’s Commander to not even be involved in the conversation.

&
nbsp; His father continued, “Your assignment is to represent the great planet of Urdiv in the new Alien Exchange Program.”

  Raelor’s excitement quickly turned to shock and then just as quickly back to rage. His father was still babbling on, giving him his official orders, instead of just speaking to him like a father spoke to their son when they were punishing them. Because that was exactly what this was. If Raelor wanted to be on the Titan, his father would make sure he couldn’t be.

  Raelor wanted to cut in and interrupt his father, and it took more self-restraint not to than he ever thought he had. However, for the first time in his life, Raelor realized that if he was going to change his father’s mind he would need to keep a calm, level head. At this point, an outburst was just what his father wanted him to do. This would prove he was still not mature enough to lead the planet and provide further disappointment in the leader he would become. But Raelor kept it in. He listened to every miserable and revolting word that came out of the High Commander’s mouth. He could see the personal guards out of the corner of his eye, and they appeared to be standing at ease. But to Raelor’s well trained eye, they too were shocked at the news and ready for him to revolt at any second. And to their surprise, he never did. He knew this was a test. And this time, this was a test he was going to pass.

  Raelor regained his composure without ever letting his father know he was overcome with anger to begin with.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The High Commander was left shocked and speechless.

  “It would be my highest honor. I’ll leave immediately to prepare. Good day, sir.”

  The air in the room was seeping out faster than he could walk and he needed to get out as quickly as he could. Raelor made it past the line of personal guards and to the end of the bridge. When the giant doors closed behind him, he took a deep breath. One that he needed to take as soon as his father gave the news. But he couldn’t risk his father seeing him lose his composure. If this was the way for Raelor to prove to his father that allowing him to become a Trekker had been a valuable move, then he would do it. He wasn’t going to be happy about it, but this was his call to service. But he needed to get the tension out of his body. He took off down the hall at a sprint.

  After going for another very long run, Raelor took his sweaty clothes off to take a shower. The water rolled over the curves of his broad shoulders and the drops bounced off the hard, tight muscles that were still engaged from an anger fueled workout. As his muscles began to relax, Raelor breathed a sigh of relief. The AEP was only a thirty-day program. Surviving thirty days in another galaxy was not going to be enough to earn his father’s respect. But there was a subdivision of the AEP, that crazy dating agency people always talked about. Was that the purpose of this mission? Was his father trying to assign him to some woman to tie him down?

  Swuya.

  Chapter 3

  Marci

  Marci thought long and hard about the docking station pickup. According to AEP guidelines, the host had to report to the port to pick up the being and begin the assimilation to their new life. Nowhere did it state that she needed to do it alone. While Marci wanted nothing more than to drag someone along with her to pick up an alien from the AEP docking station, she was having a hard time explaining the situation to any of her friends and family. She was more of a lone wolf at this point in her life and the thought of having to explain how she got herself into the situation was just as mortifying as standing alone in the station holding one of those signs, waiting for someone she had never met. The thought of asking Dr. Wilson, her backstabbing bitch of a therapist, had crossed her mind, but she was still overly annoyed with her form of active therapy. Marci was pretty sure that if she never saw Dr. Wilson again, that would still be too soon.

  So, there she stood. At the bottom of the escalator holding a sign she made by scribbling a name onto a piece of paper: Raelor. Not exactly a common name on Earth, but at least she could pronounce it. In her research, she found that many of the alien names weren’t even spelled with letters. The names looked more like pictures and when she clicked the button to pronounce them, she heard clicking and high pitched beeps. Just another thing to chalk up on her mental list of how happy she was having an alien like Raelor follow her around for a month. Number one on that list was of course his phenomenal, hot, sexy body.

  Marci was pretty sure she wasn’t going to have any trouble spotting him even in the large docking station crowds. His face was burned into her mind. She had been dreaming about him since the day she opened her envelope and saw his picture. In Marci’s dreams she was bold and sensual and quickly seduced him with her feminine charms. She would run her hands up and down his prominent chest. She would reach around and caress his smooth back and playfully grab his firm ass in her hands as she tightened her grip because she just couldn’t take him in anymore. Her dreams were so real she’d been waking up hot and bothered. She had herself so worked up over an alien she had never met, she thought for sure her body would convulse in pleasure as soon as she laid her eyes on him.

  Marci scanned everyone in the port. The AEP was still fairly new, so the docking station was not swamped with a mix of aliens and humans. In the ten minutes that she had been waiting around, she had maybe seen five aliens, and four of those were the ugly little troll kind. When she caught sight of her sixth alien, she quickly realized it was him. Marci was suddenly overcome not with pleasure but with panic. She wanted to drop her paper sign and dart out of the port. The only problem with that idea was that voiding a contract with the AEP resulted in serious fines and a five-year jail sentence. Marci was certainly not going to jail, so she had to put on her big girl panties and deal.

  Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to burst out of her chest. Raelor was about halfway down what seemed like the longest escalator in the galaxy when Marci felt a new sense of fear come over her body. She was panicking trying to decide if she was going to vomit in front of the gorgeous alien man she had been dreaming of or just drop over dead. Both were super attractive greetings to her new alien.

  Suddenly, Marci’s nauseated feeling subsided and her head started to spin. The docking station lights became blinding, and before she could take action and find a seat, Marci fainted. Her paper drifted to the floor as her limp body collapsed, sprawled out on the floor in front of hundreds of people and a few aliens. Most horribly, in front of her alien.

  The only fate worse than fainting in the middle of the docking station surrounded by hundreds of strangers and her steamy hot alien, was not passing out into said hunky other life form’s arms. No. Marci’s fate was to faceplant into the filthy docking station floor. Her alien was too far away to catch her and instead, she was left with a fairly decent mark on her right cheek. Not only was Raelor a little too far away to even think about catching the lunatic who dropped over to eat dirt, but until the moment that she was laying on the ground staring at some stranger’s ratty shoe, Raelor hadn’t even seen Marci.

  Her plan had been executed precisely. Marci had spent hours planning the perfect casual yet flirty outfit. She chose her favorite just low enough cashmere sweater, a Christmas present from her overbearing mother who decided that her ex would pay a little more attention to Marci if her girls could make an appearance. Marci never got to wear it for her ex, but meeting the sexiest alien alive seemed like a more appropriate use anyway. Luckily, she opted for her favorite skinny jeans to complement the sweater. The pencil skirt she had picked out just didn’t have the right feel, and now she knew why—because she was going to end up on the floor. If ever there was a positive in this situation, it was that the entire docking station and her alien didn’t see her lady bits when she decided to take a little snooze.

  She also perfectly planned to pass out and land with a thump on the floor, all while holding her flimsy paper sign and never letting go. While her hands refused to let go, the paper gave way and tore apart. So not only did she embarrass herself, scrape up her face, and ruin her cashmere sweat
er that hugged her in all the right places, but she managed to let Raelor walk right by her without a way to stop him.

  Chapter 4

  Raelor

  Raelor was disgruntled, to say the least. The week-long shuttle to Earth was miserable. The whole anti-gravity floating around and chasing droplets of food, and the constant state of nausea, was both overrated and not his cup of tea. The Titan was never like that. Why couldn’t they pay for a decent shuttle?

  After the shuttle ride, all alien beings were brought into one Earth docking station. The Galactic Alliance had set this system up so that beings weren’t shuttled and dropped off at whatever docking stations they pleased. The same system was true on his planet back home and in all the other galaxy systems. One docking station was chosen as a layover stop on each planet. This system also served as the most secure customs agency on the entire planet. For obvious reasons, the customs stop had to thoroughly examine each being, their paperwork, and their luggage.

  As a prince and future Head Commander of Urdiv, Raelor was allowed some courtesies in the extensive customs examination process, though he would have rather just gone through the process with everyone else. While he still needed to offer up all his travel and AEP papers, submit to the full body scan, and have each piece of his luggage examined, he was shuffled past the “medical” examination.