She couldn’t resist struggling with ‘what if’ scenarios and trying to come up with a way to protect him from the outside world—supposing no one ever showed up to take him away from her—but nothing realistic occurred to her.
Little by little, she let her guard down, though, becoming convinced with each passing day that nothing horrible was going to happen. She’d found him and now he was hers and it was safe to focus on taking care of him.
To that end, she began to research medical possibilities online, hopeful she could pass his appearance off as the result of a disease or birth defect or maybe a combination ….
She hated the thought of branding him as a ‘freak’ of nature, but thought that beat the hell out of allowing people to believe he wasn’t human at all.
God only knew what might become of him then.
Better to be ostracized than …. Be a lab rat.
She was so lulled by her conviction that they’d gotten away clean and no one would be coming after ‘her’ little boy that she almost dismissed the sounds that warned her.
Except her survival instincts weren’t as dormant as they seemed to have become.
Someone was outside and approaching the front of the house.
Emma shot up from her chair, glancing toward ‘baby’ in his playpen uneasily.
Relieved to see he was asleep, she’d already taken a step toward him when she heard thefootsteps on the front porch.
Her brain erupted into chaos, survival instincts urging her to run and, at the same time, trying to convince her she didn’t have a chance in hell of outrunning anyone carrying the baby.
She didn’t actually make a decision that she was aware of.
Instead of racing to the playpen, snatching baby out and running with him, she strode to the door and snatched it open, ready to demand to know what they were doing on private property.
There was a veritable wall of flesh on the other side of the door, however.
And it took no more than two seconds for her brain to identify this wall of flesh as non-human.
Due to the skin color, the giant bat wings she could see behind his shoulders and the horns growing out his forehead.
If Satan himself had landed on her front porch, she couldn’t have been more stunned.
Chapter Three
Bemused, Kadin stared down at the pretty little heart-shaped face roughly chest high to him, feeling a little like he’d just run into a wall he hadn’t thought would be there. For a handful of moments, he could not recall what he was doing there … or really where he was. The demand he had intended to make died in his throat.
Then she slammed the door in his face as abruptly as she’d opened it and the ‘curtain going down’ was all it took to knock him from his stunned admiration of the prettiest female he had seen in—well, maybe ever—and throw him into high alert.
It did not occur to him that his appearance alone might have had that effect upon her. It leapt into his mind that he had found his quarry.
* * * *
Emma slammed the door, bolted it, and ran to the playpen. Baby was groggy and dead wait. He set up a wail immediately at being so rudely awakened.
She was already jogging to the back of the cabin and through the tiny kitchen. “Shh, sweety! It’s ok! We’re just going to take a little walk…!”
She snatched the door open just as she heard a crash from the front of the cabin, leapt the narrow stoop and the two steps leading up to it and took off with no clear destination in mind. It was dusk, the winter light fading fast, but not nearly dark enough to hide them even if they could reach the cover of the woods.
The tiny cave she and brother had discovered as children leapt to mind. It wasn’t much of a cave, though—or in actual fact a cave at all, just an alcove formed by an uprooted tree. She recalled it had seemed big when they were children, but she doubted she could actually hide in it with the baby. Maybe in the darkness …. Assuming they couldn’t see any better than she could in the dark.
Unfortunately, she discovered fairly quickly that she wasn’t going to have time to figure out whether it would work or not.
Even as she charged across the back yard, she saw two more aliens come around either side of the cabin. She hadn’t reached the trees when the first alien emerged from the back door of the cabin.
Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide and she could barely catch her breath after the short run.
Without the baby she might have some chance. With him ….
But then he was the point of the entire race.
Casting around for help, her gaze lit finally on a weapon of sorts—a tree branch.
She had a bad feeling it was probably rotten or it wouldn’t be on the ground, but she couldn’t fight them off with nothing.
Setting the baby down carefully on the ground, she scooped the branch up and whirled to meet the three giants charging after her. To her stunned surprise the three skidded to a halt the moment she raised the branch to strike. “You stay away from us! Go away!” she yelled at them, waving the stick around threateningly.
The aliens exchanged a speaking look that was so human-like it totally blew her mind.
Then she felt a tug at her leg and glanced down to discover the baby had grabbed her.
Keeping an eye on the men, she bent quickly to scoop the baby up and settled him on her hip.
“She thinks she’s protecting him,”Kadin said slowly, struggling to focus on the issue at hand rather than his reaction to the female—which was not nearly as simple or easy as it should have been. And that circumstance stunned him.
