Cross: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Beast Battalion Book 1)
Table of Contents
Cross
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Romancing the Alien
Thank You!
CROSS
BEAST BATTALION
BIG SKY ALIEN BRIDES
INTERGALACTIC DATING AGENCY
Elsa Jade
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A strange bargain…
Tyler Lang took the offer for a data-processing job in Sunset Falls, Montana—“Big Sky Country: Where the stars are close enough to touch!”—as a chance to escape a humiliating breakup. Mr. Evens’ Odds & Ends Shop sounded like a great place to hide and focus solely (meaning ALONE) on her beloved numbers. Except she’s constantly distracted by the looming presence of the shop’s weirdly hot security guard. What kind of thrift store in the middle of nowhere needs protection? Not to mention a guard literally hot enough to make her computer smoke. These numbers just aren’t adding up.
A secret task…
As captain of his banished beast battalion, Wyvryn Cross will take any job that keeps his fighters free from intergalactic incarceration. He’ll even work for a devious Dirter who claims to be reopening a defunct Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost on Earth. Cross doesn’t believe in a “universal mating algorithm”…until his smoldering gaze alights on the shy female who doesn’t know anything about aliens on Earth and doesn’t even realize she’s writing a love code. Unfortunately, suddenly smoldering eyes are a bad sign in a Wyvryn.
A last chance…
They should just do their jobs and go their separate ways, but when a mysterious saboteur tries to shut down the Intergalactic Dating Agency before it opens, Tyler and Cross must work together to perfect her code. Even if that demands some hot kisses under the bright Montana stars.
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Read all the BEAST BATTALION
CROSS
SOL
ZENITH
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And find all the Intergalactic Dating Agency books at RomancingTheAlien.com
Copyright © 2020 by Elsa Jade
Cover design by Croco Designs
ISBN 978-1-941547-41-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Chapter 1
So this was the place?
Evens’ Odds & Ends Shop was exactly as Tyler Lang had imagined it. And she’d been forced to imagine it because it didn’t show up anywhere online. No social media presence, no search engine optimization, no digital footprint at all. Like, did it even exist if it didn’t have an email address?
Which was exactly what she wanted right now.
Tilting back her denim baseball hat, she studied the quaint storefront across the street with its old wavy-glassed windows framing piles of used books, second-hand furniture, knickknacks, and an antique steamer trunk—brass buttons gleaming—labeled “Mystery! Box! 100! Dollars!”
Ugh, mysteries. Who would pay good money for uncertainty and likely disappointment?
Life provided plenty of that for free.
Squinting against the gleam of the low September sun across her glasses, she lifted her gaze to the trio of narrow windows on the second floor. The windows were just slightly opened, no screens, the scalloped hems of white curtains peeking out. What century was this? But the eponymous Mr. Evens had promised on-site lodging along with the job, and the idea of not having to go anywhere or encounter anyone wasn’t just what she wanted, it was what she needed.
Yeah, this was the place, all right.
Reaching back into her rented Jetta, she grabbed her computer bag. She locked the door behind her. Locking up probably wasn’t necessary in Sunset Falls, Montana—hence the open windows—but since almost everything she owned was in the car, she wasn’t taking any chances.
She didn’t like chances any more than mysteries.
Glancing both ways before crossing the street (probably also not necessary here) she strode up to the shop. The gilt-like paint of the name on the door had flaked in a few places. Yeah, she knew how that felt, but if Evens wasn’t bothering to touch up the paint and had to trick someone into spending a hundred bucks on a rotting old trunk, how could he need—or afford—ground-up enterprise data systems architecture? She grabbed her phone from her back pocket to triple-check that the first installment payment really had cleared.
“No signal?” Uuuugh, the only thing worse than a mystery.
The front door opened with the cheery clang of a cowbell.
“No signal!” came an equally cheery voice.
With a resigned sigh, she tilted her hat up again. “I swear I just had a couple bars.”
“You might’ve. It comes and goes. Like a lot of things in Sunset Falls.” The man—tallish, lean, maybe a decade older than her twenty-seven although he had the sort of face where it was hard to tell—smiled. “Ms. Lang, I presume? I’m Evens. And I’m thrilled you’re here. How was the drive from San Francisco?”
“Long, but pretty most of the way.” She dredged up a return smile since those zeroes had been in her account last she checked, which made him her boss. “And Tyler is fine. Less fine, though, if I can’t get a reliable connection here. The ‘most amazing opportunity to create the most unique algorithmic database structure in the world’”—she quoted his effusive initial email back to him—“won’t mean much if no one can access it.”
“Universe,” Even said.
She blinked at him. “Sorry?”
“I said it will be the most unique algorithm in the universe.”
Oh man, now she really needed to confirm that payment had gone through. “Yeah, the universe.”
“You’ll believe it—the universe, I mean—when it gets dark. The stars here in Sunset Falls are beyond anything you’ve ever seen.”
“Since I try not to go outside too much, I’ll just take your word for it.”
He laughed. “I suppose a world-class data wrangler like you is focused on other things.”
“Universe.” She forced herself to keep her gaze steady, even as the humiliating memory of raucous laughter flushed through her. “I’m a universe-class data wrangler.”
Evens just nodded once. “Which is why I hired you.”
She let out a short, relieved breath. “Is this where you finally tell me why, exactly?”
“Indeed.” He stepped back into the shop. “Come inside.”
For just a heartbeat, she hesitated. Something about crossing that threshold suddenly felt…ominous. Or maybe that wasn’t quite right. Portentous, maybe? Feeling some sorta way. She’d always preferred numbers for exactly this reason. Numbers had a value, constant and coherent. Feelings were mess
y, changeable. Feeeeelings might be catalogued and squished into a box…only to leak out at the worst times like the horrible monsters from Alien or The Thing, morphing and murdering.
But Evens had paid for her data expertise, not her dating experience. And it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to be.
Pushing her glasses higher on her nose, she stepped inside.
The shop was even more eclectic beyond its windows. Lit by a dozen different fixtures standing, hanging, or affixed to the walls, the visual chaos made her blink again. Less easily shut out were the equally overwhelming scents of dust, mustiness, patchouli, and buttered popcorn. To her embarrassment, her stomach growled.
Evens halted. “I should’ve offered to get you settled first: a meal, a nap, a landline…”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m good. I’d really like to hear more about the work.” No point getting settled if this was all about to go sideways. If it did… She couldn’t bear to think of slinking back to the Bay with less than nothing to show for herself. And she really didn’t want to return any of those zeroes in her bank account.
“Can I get you a drink, at least? Sunset Falls has an excellent mineral water from local springs. You must try it.” Evens hustled behind the counter, ducked down for an instant, and returned with a clear glass bottle. He popped the cap with a soft hiss.
Reaching for the bottle almost made her hesitate again. What was wrong with her? She’d already taken his money. Just because no one knew where she was, in a town she’d barely found on a map, with no phone service was no reason to get paranoid.
She clutched the bottle. “Uh. Thank you.” She looked around. “So, am I designing a way to manage all these, ah, treasures? I could start with basic museum collection management, get this squared away in no time.”
“You could?” He looked too, eyebrows rising as if surprised at the chaos. “Interesting. But no, that’s not the reason I brought you all this way.” He returned his attention to her, his dark eyes probing in a way that made her shift her grip on the bottle.
If she needed a weapon…
Abruptly, he said, “Tell me about your last project.”
“I can’t. I signed an NDA.” Also, beyond signing the non-disclosure agreement, she didn’t want to even think about the last seven years. She took a long swallow from the water to wash down the swearing that tried to bubble up. “If you need me to sign something like that…” She twisted the bottle again to look at the label: Sunset Springs Mineral Water: Like a Happy Comet in Your Mouth. “This is so good—which is weird to say about water—but um, worst tagline ever? Not only are they ripping off Bob Ross, I’m pretty sure comets are just dust and frozen gas. And comets don’t even have feelings.”
Evens tilted his head. “Do you know any comets?”
She opened her mouth then pursed her lips. “Know any… Like, personally? No, I guess not. I saw a shooting star once. Does that count?”
With a negligent wave of his hand, Evens boosted himself up onto a stool behind the counter and then turned the finger-flick into a gesture at the chair nearest her. “I don’t need you to sign anything. I trust you.” He waited until she sat to add, “Although seeing one star would not be a challenge to any counting systems.”
“Gotta start somewhere to be best in the universe,” she said blandly.
He chuckled. “True, true. But I didn’t say best in the universe; I said most unique.”
She angled from one butt cheek to the other on the antique chair that managed to be overstuffed and yet hard as a rock. “You’ve not really said much of anything yet,” she noted. After the seventeen-hour trip, the numbness in her ass was matched only by her fading interest in playing around. She’d had enough of that from her last boss.
Not that she’d ever get involved with a colleague ever again. She didn’t need a complex decision matrix to figure that out twice.
Evens sobered. “I didn’t want to get into the details until I was sure you were someone who could bring my vision to life.”
Her heart sank like an obsolete hard drive through mineral water gone flat. Not a visionary, noooo. They were the absolute worst. Hadn’t she left those behind in Silicon Valley? But here was one lurking in Big Sky But No Cell Towers Country. She held the cool bottle against the ache in her clenched jaw where the pain in the butt had apparently migrated. “Visions won’t hold up without the numbers to back them,” she said though only partly gritted teeth. “I’ll need actual input to build the structures you want.”
The visionary beamed at her. “Exactly why you’re here.”
“Why. Am. I. Here.” She put each word into its own query box to make it simple for him.
“To launch my universal matchmating algorithm.”
The fizzy water—which really was weirdly good for just two of the most basic atomic elements bonded together—frothed in her stomach. “You want a dating app?”
“Not at all. This is something unique, a matchmating that’s completely out of this world—”
“Stop.” She pushed to her feet. “Sorry. I’m not the right developer for a project like—”
A low voice interrupted her from behind. “Everything under control out here, Mr. Evens?”
She let out a little eep of surprise and took a sideways step. Unfortunately, the heel of her Vans snagged on the chair—the carved lion foot grabbing her like a cat’s paw snagging a mouse—and she stumbled, losing her grip on the water bottle. She steeled herself for a real pain in the ass.
But an even more steely hand gripped her upper arm, holding her in place at an acute angle. She gazed up into dark amber eyes. Dare she say a meet-cute angle…
No. No no no. She knew how rom-coms worked and they did not work on her. But wow, he didn’t even strain to hold her. He had one of those ruggedly masculine faces that wouldn’t look out of place on a movie poster and would look even better on her pillow, and there was a quirk to his wide-set mouth that made her world tilt a little more…
Oh shoot, probably she was the one who needed to get her feet underneath her.
Scrambling, she put her traitorous sneakers back on solid if scuffed linoleum. But even standing straight put her head below his chin, perfect for resting her head on his chest…
Nooooo! She had to sleep alone and aligned straight on her bed now. That was better for her stress-induced nighttime teeth-grinding.
And absolutely vital for her broken heart.
But if she was going to create a dating app, just like starting a universe with one shooting star, she’d begin with this dreamy guy.
“No problems here, Cross. Ms. Lang was telling me about her doubts regarding my proposal.”
She was not doing proposals of any sort. Especially not ones that happened in rom-coms. Most especially definitely not any of those indecent type proposals…
Apparently satisfied that she was upright and not about to sprawl at his feet (a size 12 boot, she’d guess, matte black and unbranded, which matched the unadorned black of his half-sleeved shirt and trousers that clothed his six-foot, one-eighty-ish bod—damn it, why was she cataloguing his stats?) the newcomer handed her the water bottle she’d dropped. Wow, she hadn’t even realized he’d snagged it out of mid-air before it fell.
He took a step back, his expression blanking, those big hands tucking out of sight behind him as he settled into parade rest.
But even set in neutral, he had the sort of face and stature that might set a vulnerable pulse racing: preternaturally symmetrical features honed to austere planes and sleek edges, enough bulk around his shoulders and thighs and, er, elsewhere to signal strength and virility, a graceful balance to his stance that promised a ready response to any call to action.
She straightened her glasses. Good thing she wasn’t vulnerable to such primal responses. After all, she’d tripped before she’d seen him.
Mentally, she revised her dataset. If she had been inclined to formulate a matchmaking algorithm, this guy would be an outlier, a unit of observ
ation too far beyond the decision boundary to provide practical real-world metrics.
Except Evens hadn’t said matchmaking, had he? He’d said…matchmating.
Well, that might demand a different criterion.
The bubbles in the spring water seemed to fizz out through her blood…and obviously short-circuited her brain. She cleared her throat.
“It’s not doubt,” she corrected. “It’s disinterest. The world has enough hookup apps.” When Evens opened his mouth, she added quickly, “Fine, the universe has enough hookup apps.”
The man in black, Cross, inclined his head. “She’s right. She shouldn’t be involved in this project.”
And right then, her contrariness—which she had to admit would definitely be coded as a potential relationship problem—kicked in. “That’s not really your call though.”
“It’s my call,” Evens reminded them. “I hired you, Cross, to be the brawn, and you, Tyler, to be the brain, while I am the unifying heart.” Evens linked his hands together in front of his chest with a beatific smile. “And I have a feeling this is going to be perfect.”
Tyler rolled her eyes and inadvertently caught Cross doing the same thing.
He really did have the most beautiful eyes, an unusual mutable brown, shifting from dark gold to hammered bronze and other metals forged in hidden fires.
Wait, she only cared about data points, not poetry.
Cross gave Evens a look as hard and unyielding as the antique chair cushion. “I’m here for defenses and fortifications, not feelings. So if you’re sincere about the security of this project and this place, you should listen to me.”
Tyler glowered at him over the top of her glasses. Was he questioning her ability or her integrity? While she understood the need for security around proprietary developments, Sunset Falls didn’t exactly seem like a hotbed of industrial espionage. Maybe that was part of Evens’ reasons for choosing the location; not having a digital connection to the outside world definitely cut down on the likelihood for those sorts of problems.