Page 1 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

1

TAYLOR

"Iam not getting paid enough for this shit."

Which was ironic, because I wasn't getting paid at all. I was paying them — that's how archaeology works when nobody will hire you. The employed get salaries. The rest of us write a check and get called volunteers.

I spat out sweat that had dripped onto my mouth and reminded myself not to speak unless I absolutely had to. My messy bun had surrendered before breakfast, and damp brown strands kept welding themselves to my cheeks and neck. What I'd thought would be the smart way to stay in my field between jobs that never materialized — pay my own way onto a volunteer dig, keep my trowel hand in, maybe find something cool — was in fact a horrible idea. The mosquitoes in Minnesota were bad. These ones were throwbacks from the Jurassic era, and they had zero respect for DEET.

Not to mention the snakes, which I'd learned were venomous, not poisonous, thanks to a twenty-minute lecture from Mansplaining Mike on the first day. And the cute but very deadly jaguars. I craned my neck and scanned the canopy, trying to pick out the ring-shaped spots of a jaguar's coat before one of them jumped down and crunched my skull.

"Watch where you're going, Taylor!"

A fern frond the size of a dinner table smacked me in the face. The guy in front of me had walked right past it without a backward glance. Awesome. Assaulted by vegetation and it wasn't even nine.

Then Bitchy Bob brushed past me, intent on getting through the jungle as fast as humanly possible. He'd been complaining about my speed since we'd set out from camp that morning.

Wait. If Bob had passed me, that meant I was last in line.

I looked back. Nothing but bent vegetation springing upright to seal the path behind us. I swallowed and hurried as fast as my tired legs could carry me and a forty-pound pack of mapping equipment. Last in line meant prime jaguar snacking opportunity. Tasty Taylor Treats did not have the kind of ring I wanted to hear.

I picked up my pace — let's be honest, probably a five-seconds-a-mile improvement — and trudged through the muck, boots squelching, mud sucking at my soles. Still morning, but the heat was already unbearable. Sweat pooled in the collar of my shirt. My back ached. My shoulders burned.

We were heading to a previously unexplored sector where drone footage had flagged strange stones jutting from the ground. I was carrying the radar mapping equipment because it was very expensive and very heavy, which meant the salaried scientists were happy to let the paying volunteer haul it. If I could have fobbed it off on someone else, I absolutely would have.

I stopped for a swig of water and wiped my face.

When I looked up, something moved in the shadows.

My body went still before my brain caught up. Not breathing. Not blinking. Just staring into the darkness of the canopy above, eyes adjusting, pulse climbing so fast the edges of my vision flickered.

More movement. I stopped hearing the mosquitoes.

It shifted, and a shaft of light came down through the canopy and found it. Sleek black rosettes on tawny fur. Green eyes, sharp and intelligent, fixed on mine. A jaguar. Muscular, motionless, watching me with the patience of something that knew exactly how fast it could move.

I ran.

Feet slipping in the mud, arms flailing, part of my brain screaming that once I left the hacked path I'd be lost forever. A future exhibit of bones for some luckier archaeologist to find. Hopefully not in a pile of jaguar poop.

The lizard part of my brain didn't care about navigation. It cared about the claws tearing through the brush behind me and the plants snapping as two hundred pounds of apex predator closed the distance. How long? Five seconds? One?

I kept running. I wasn't going to die lying down.

I tripped. Stumbled down a small incline. Looked up — a broken opening in a stone-carved wall, a few feet off the ground. I scrambled toward it, ducked under an overhanging slab, heard a growl and a heavy thump behind me. My arms slid out of the backpack straps and I dove through the opening, hit the stone floor in a graceless roll of elbows and knees — diving onto stone: not recommended — and scrambled around to block the entrance.

Too late. But I didn't need to.

The jaguar couldn't fit. He shoved his head through, growling, then pulled back and swiped a paw in my direction. I scooted across the stone floor, staring, as he rammed his muscled bulk against the wall again and again. It didn't budge.

Thank you, ancient architects. I'd have kissed the floor if I weren't actively questioning what had been living on it. I checked. Surprisingly clean. Odd.

I caught my breath while the jaguar — really, it was stunningly beautiful — kept trying to force its way in. Thank god I'd lost weight from a week of jungle trekking or I wouldn't have fit through the opening myself. That cat would have had me for breakfast, then dragged the leftovers up a tree like something out of a National Geographic special.

I scooted back until I hit the wall behind me. The chamber was small — a hallway before a collapse, from the look of it, lit only by the faint light filtering in around the jaguar's growling head.

I stood slowly, keeping my eyes on my new friend. Then turned to see what I'd bumped into, praying it wasn't something straight out of Indiana Jones. Bodies on spikes. A wall of tarantulas. I shivered at the thought.

Nothing with more legs than me. But the stone wall was covered in symbols and carvings, and when I focused on them, my archaeologist brain elbowed my panic brain aside. I didn't recognize most of the writing. It looked nothing like the carvings at Tierradentro or any other Colombian site I'd studied. Either my adrenaline-scrambled brain was misfiring, or I'd stumbled onto something remarkable.