Alexis alien surrogate a.., p.1
Alexis: Alien Surrogate Agency #3, page 1
ALEXIS
ALIEN SURROGATE AGENCY #3
TASHA BLACK
13TH STORY PRESS
Copyright © 2022 by 13th Story Press
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
13th Story Press
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Swarthmore, PA 19081
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Cover designed by Sylvia Frost of The Book Brander
CONTENTS
Tasha Black Starter Library
About Alexis
Alexis
1. Alexis
2. Tiago
3. Alexis
4. Tiago
5. Alexis
6. Oberon
7. Alexis
8. Tiago
9. Alexis
10. Tiago
11. Alexis
12. Oberon
13. Tiago
14. Alexis
15. Tiago
16. Alexis
17. Tiago
18. Tiago
19. Tiago
20. Alexis
21. Alexis
22. Oberon
23. Tiago
24. Alexis
25. Tiago
26. Alexis
27. Alexis
28. Alexis
Tasha Black Starter Library
About the Author
One Percent Club
TASHA BLACK STARTER LIBRARY
Packed with steamy shifters, mischievous magic, alien adventures, billionaire superheroes, and plenty of HEAT, the Tasha Black Starter Library is the perfect way to dive into Tasha's unique brand of Romance with Bite!
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ABOUT ALEXIS
If they want to find their balance, these two lonely athletes might have to lean on each other.
Tiago Torrn may be a championship fighter and the envy of all of Maltaffia, but his mateless condition leaves him longing for home and family. When the Midsummer Fertility Center arranges for Alexis to be his unconventional surrogate, he is instantly taken with the Terran ballerina. As their adventure brings them closer, Tiago is having a hard time remembering why he can’t let himself fall for her.
From a tender age, Alexis Clare has given her whole life over to ballet. The beautiful art form dictates where she goes, what she eats, and how she spends each hour of her day. When an injury turns into a more serious health issue that keeps her offstage, Alexis feels lost. And when she learns she can’t start the family she’s always dreamed of, her sadness turns to despair.
Until she hears about an option to have her fertility restored in the most romantic place in the known universe.
This couple may not have much in common on the outside, but on the inside, they’re two peas in a pod. At least that’s what Oberon, the AI who runs the Center, thinks. But even Oberon may have trouble designing and implementing a plan romantic enough to overcome Tiago’s trust issues and Alexis’s guilt and bring the two together.
ALEXIS
1
ALEXIS
Alexis Clare tightened her torso and pulled up from her belly, willing her spine to lengthen slightly so she could add speed to her spin.
The music began to swell, the beats coming faster and faster as it built to a crescendo.
She extended her leg and quickly swept it in again. The movement was rhythmic and mesmerizing, but its real job was to speed up the turn and maintain her momentum for the next one, giving her audience the impression that she was in effortless, perpetual motion.
In reality, there was a whole lot of effort involved. But onstage, it was the dancer’s job to make it look easy.
Her arms opened and tightened with perfect timing to add to her speed. Even her eyes had to remain on a precise spot at the back of the theater, her head whipping around crisply to find it again at the end of each turn, so that she wouldn’t become disoriented and lose her place on the stage.
The Black Swan included thirty-two of the dizzying fouetté turns in a row. The secret, though, was that dizziness was the least of your problems, as long as you spotted properly with your eyes.
The real danger was the difficulty of staying up en pointe while keeping the hips perfectly level through every single whip-quick spin, all while pulling up, and employing the arms for speed and beauty, and spotting, and, of course, smiling like it was all effortless, thirty-two times.
Alexis was almost there. She could taste that last turn, hear the sweet sound of the applause already breaking in her mind.
But the ghost of a twinge in her ankle pulled her instantly out of the fantasy.
Distracted by the expectation of pain, she let one hip lift slightly as she extended her leg and immediately lost her balance, nearly crashing to the floor on her twenty-seventh turn.
So much for that applause.
“Stop simulation,” she called out.
The stage, the velvet curtains, and the auditorium beyond disappeared, leaving her back in the plain gymnasium of the Midsummer Fertility Center on Maltaffia.
Alexis had been here for a week now, waiting for her match to arrive.
It was good in many ways to have a little time to lick her wounds before she got back on the horse.
It seemed like over the last two years, her charmed life had swiftly lost a lot of its charm.
She had grown up in the city on Terra-58, a beautiful planet with every modern convenience, as well as gorgeous green spaces planned and planted generously during terraforming.
When she fell in love with ballet, her father had signed her up for training in the ancient Terran art. She quickly abandoned everything else in her life to follow the dream.
She left school and took courses online in the corridors of the Great Theater. Her only friends were dancers. She lived to push herself harder, to make wild demands of her mind and body.
Growing up in the darkened theater, she learned about the world from the stories of the old ballets, which described a life so different from the world of Terra-58 that it hardly bore comparison.
Love would be the same in any circumstance, though, or so it seemed.
Her father lost his job, but by then she had a position in the company and trained for free. She even received a salary that was just enough to share an apartment with three other dancers and pay for the healthy food she needed to keep up with the demands of her art. It wasn’t much. But it was all she needed.
Then came the ankle injury.
It happened onstage, when she was dancing a soloist’s role in a performance of Cinderella.
She wrapped the ankle and danced the rest of the performance, then went to the company doctor.
It took months for the ankle to heal enough for her to dance on. And it was so tender, she could hardly stand it.
The doc assured her it would heal just fine with time. But the kiss of death to a dance career was to be injury prone, so she got back to the barre the day she was allowed, and worked through the pain.
Late at night, icing the swollen joint, she researched how to reduce the pain. Weight loss was highly recommended for overweight patients.
Though she was already an athlete, and anything but overweight, the idea was compelling. Less weight would also make her easier to partner. She would be more likely to be promoted to principal if she were even lighter than she was.
That was the beginning of a downward spiral.
The ankle hurt, she cut her calories, she was low in energy, she was sloppy and forgot to baby the ankle, it hurt again, she cut her food intake, and on and on it went.
Her father would never have allowed it if he had been there to see, but by then, he had moved out to a low-cost suburb to start over.
By the end of the season, she was haggard, hobbled, and haunted. And the company doctor told her that she was being pulled for six months to rest the ankle.
It was a big blow, and it was tough to take. But she had one more thing driving her. The last light in her heart was the idea of finding true love. Every single ballet she had ever performed in ended either with a happily ever after or with a tragedy of lost love.
But on Terra-58, if a woman wanted to be eligible for marriage, she had to first produce a primary heir. This was done with the help of a fertility clinic.
Alexis had always been too focused on her dance to worry much about all that. So maybe this was a blessing in disguise. She decided to spend the time she was benched from ballet working on having a baby so she could start that other part of her life.
But from the very first appointment at the clinic, she learned she had destroyed that hope, too. A restricted diet coupled with extreme exercise meant she hadn’t experienced her monthly in a year. And that meant no babies.
Meetings with a nutritionist came next. She watched her body fill out enough to bleed again.
And though she was scared at times that she might never dance again, the return of her nutritional health brought back her positive outlook.
Suddenly, though things were worse than ever on paper, she was beginning to feel better.
But then her first fertility procedure didn’t work. Neither did the second. And that was the end of her meager savings.
At the end of the six months, the doctors did more scans and determined that her ankl
She went back to dance for the company, in the corps now instead of as a soloist. And she took a second job at a grocery store stocking shelves overnight to save for a final treatment.
And that one failed too.
But Alexis had always been a positive, motivated person. Instead of letting the bad news drag her back to hell, she decided to relax for a day or two and spend as much time as possible in the park, brainstorming what to do next.
Then her friend, Haven, from the fertility support group feeds, told her about a special opportunity - an agency that would match her with a man from another planet who wanted a child.
His seed would awaken her womb, whatever that meant, and she would bear him a baby. She would be paid handsomely, and on her return home, her own treatments would be more effective from the interspecies encounter. It all sounded like a bunch of non-scientific nonsense to her, but science hadn’t gotten her too far up to that point.
The only downside was that certain species required a physical mating act and even the use of the surrogate’s eggs as a donor as well as a surrogate.
As soon as Haven finished telling her about it, Alexis was on the hush rail with her medical files loaded up on her bracelet.
She never would have imagined agreeing to such a thing a year ago.
But the more time she spent in the real world, outside of the theater, the more she realized she wanted to be a mother.
Children played in the park, sang in the schoolyards, ran up and down the city streets asking their parents for ice cream money.
Their joy reminded her of her own happy childhood, and the simplicity of life in those days.
A child was no longer a means to an end for her.
Now it was the end goal. It meant everything. She didn’t even care about finding a love match anymore.
She was determined to have a child.
And assuming the child would want to eat, she needed to nail these turns so that she could take a larger role at the company.
“Would you like to go again,” a voice seemed to come from all around her, snapping her out of her thoughts and back to the present.
“One more time,” she called out. “From the turns.”
“Are you certain?” The voice was so perfectly modulated it almost sounded real.
The more time Alexis spent with Oberon, the AI who had designed the Midsummer Fertility Center and who ran its immense programming, the more she had begun to consider him almost a friend.
It wasn’t like she had anyone else here. And he certainly understood better than anyone else could what she was going through.
She had signed an NDA when agreeing to come. And her friends who were already in the program were seldom able to send a comm.
“My ankle doesn’t really hurt,” she told him. “It was just a twinge. Like a ghost of a pain.”
“I understand the concept of pain,” Oberon said. “But I have never experienced it. What you are describing sounds like an echo in programming, when data is stored in its original form in one place and a copy resides elsewhere as a back-up, unused.”
“So, I felt a reference to my actual pain, but not the pain itself,” Alexis said thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s actually pretty close.”
“But if you felt no pain, then why did you adjust the angle of your left hip by two degrees?” Oberon asked.
“Gods, you’d make an amazing choreographer,” she said, shaking her head.
“I would not,” Oberon said without sadness. “I understand the limitations of the human form, but not what is pleasing to watch.”
“Watch enough ballets and that part is easy,” she said.
“I have just watched Afternoon of a Faun, Agon and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Oberon said. “I do not understand further than before, but I will continue and report back to you when I have completed through Zoraiya, if you wish.”
“You watched those ballets just now?” Alexis asked, incredulous.
“I downloaded streamed video of their recordings to my heart drive,” Oberon said. “But the critical literature I have scanned gives me to understand that nothing matches the breathless uncertainty of a live performance.”
“You can say that again,” Alexis said ruefully. “That’s how I hurt my ankle in the first place.”
“I have just received word that your match’s craft has landed,” Oberon said.
“Now?” Alexis asked.
Her heart began to pound. She was wearing her workout clothing and covered in a sheen of sweat. She wasn’t ready to make a good impression.
“You have approximately seventeen minutes until he is off-board and ready to meet you,” Oberon said.
“I’ll shower and change,” she told him, hoping she actually had time.
It was better that her match thought she was a little late than thinking she was smelly or careless about her appearance.
Though he would be from another planet - so she had no idea what he would consider to be beauty or ugliness. Maybe a sweaty woman in a cling suit was top-shelf where he was from.
But she would feel better if she thought she was more presentable.
Best thing I can do is build up my confidence, she told herself, heading for her suite. It’s all I’ve got.
2
TIAGO
Tiago Torrn adjusted his tie again as he walked barefoot down the beach toward what he hoped was his destiny.
Though Tiago had plenty of credits to spend, he had never taken a beach vacation before. And he had seldom worn a tie.
The blasted thing seemed to be trying to choke him out. He wasn’t entirely sure that a man with a neck as wide as his was even meant to wear a tie. It came up short on his button-down shirt when he compared it to how his manager’s ties always looked.
“The hell with it,” he muttered to himself, pausing to remove the cursed thing and shove it in his pocket. He was already carrying his socks and shoes in his hand, so why stand on ceremony with the neckwear?
And after all, he was paying for all this. Surely, the intended match could handle it if he toned down the formality slightly. It occurred to Tiago that he might even be overdressed. He had no idea what kind of outfit she might show up in.
He found himself wondering once again what she looked like.
He had only been told his match was Terran, the idea of which excited him.
Terrans were exceedingly receptive to Maltaffian matings. With any luck, he would soon have a baby in his arms, one with his massive horns and her slightly softer facial features.
Though he had started off wanting a baby for business reasons, the year he had spent waiting for a match forced him to face the truth - that he did want a family. And he didn’t want to have to answer to a mate to get it.
Life as a professional fighter had its perks, the first of which was money, and the second was not having to work in a tiny cubicle with a hologram stream half-hypnotizing you all your life.
But he didn’t have a normal schedule that could be easily coordinated with another adult’s to form a life together.
And of course, there were the inevitable injuries. Even if he experienced a true mate bond with a woman, which he hadn’t so far, he was fairly certain she wouldn’t understand why he had to have his face punched in a couple of times each standard year.
No. It was better to do this on his own. He could afford a great nanny, any exotic pets the child might want, and if he paid for private instructors, their family of two could live on the road quite happily for the next ten years or so.
