Tamed By The Alien Barbarian by Celeste King
Candi
It was too close to call. Last we checked, Consolidated Mining and Terra Firma Mining were neck and neck in ore production, but the deadline was fast approaching, and I was starting to sweat.
The explosion had set me back, but I was ready to dig back into work. I needed to try and put Jaxil out of my mind—at least for now. It seemed like the harder I worked to keep him out of my thoughts, the quicker he re-entered my head, though.
“Hey boss,” Mandy greeted me, appearing at my pod door. “How’re you feeling?”
In truth, I still ached all over. My lungs were sore, but I was recovering. Of course, I couldn’t feel thankful for my life without feeling thankful for Jaxil, which threw me into a state of internal turmoil.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “What’s up?”
Mandy strutted in and sat across from me, crossing her long, smooth legs over each other. “We need a game changer,” she told me bluntly. “Things are going okay, but just okay—not great.”
“I know,” I confirmed. “What can we do, though? We’re working around the clock. Everyone’s exhausted as it is,” I said in a lower voice, gesturing out to the larger control room where my staff of women were chattering with field operators.
Mandy gave me a tight-lipped smile and said, “Look at you. You came back from the dead. You’re a force of nature. You’ll come up with something.”
I rolled my eyes, but I knew she was right. It was swim or sink, eat or be eaten. Now was not the time to get soft and mushy.
Just as Mandy walked out of my pod, the screen of my comms system lit up. My heart stopped when I saw the message heading: it was from Dae’ish, Jaxil’s assistant. My first thought was that something might have happened to Jaxil—had their operation suffered an explosion too? Wouldn’t we have felt it from this side of the mountain?
I opened the message and Dae’ish’s face popped up on the screen. He spoke in hushed tones as he said, “Jaxil’s engineers have developed a prototype for a new machine to mine ore with far greater efficiency. We’re willing to sabotage the machine—for the right price. The prototype is almost ready, so send me your offer soon.”
The transmission disappeared, and I was left staring at my own reflection on the blank screen, my head spinning. If Jaxil’s assistant was really willing to auction off the success of this new prototype, it must be a game changer. With our production levels so close already, I couldn’t afford to let Consolidated pull ahead in output.
I was left with an enormous question to consider: how badly did I want to win?
If I paid Dae’ish to sabotage the prototype, I could slow down Jaxil’s operation and possibly even pull ahead in output. If I did nothing, this new machine would certainly give Jaxil the competitive advantage, and I was running out of time.
I loved the idea of coming out on top, but I didn’t know if I was willing to play that dirty to do it, especially when Jaxil had just saved my life. If he hadn’t rescued me, I wouldn’t even be here to receive this message from his traitor assistant.
I sat back in my chair and kicked my feet up on my desk, crossing my ankles and looking at my reflection in my patent black heels as I mused.
“What a scumbag,” Mandy said, re-entering my office. She was looking down at her notebook, scrawling something with the pen she usually kept tucked in her hair. “He’s a smart businessman, though.”
I stretched my arms out in a questioning motion. “Were you listening in on my private transmission?” I asked, exasperated.
“Of course,” Mandy told me in her matter-of-fact way. “This is what assistants do: assist you when you have big decisions to make.”
I laughed, rubbing my hands across my face. “No, I think your job description is more like daily status updates and grabbing me coffee,” I corrected.
“Plus collecting the occasional genetic sample from your boyfriend’s house,” Mandy added.
“Not my boyfriend,” I said sternly, but I felt a little pang in my stomach.
“Exactly,” she burst out a little too loudly. “He’s your business rival.”
I was getting frustrated. Mandy was an old friend, but she was overstepping her bounds now. “You think I don’t know that?” I seethed. “You think I’ve forgotten for one second that if I make the smallest misstep, I could lose everything I’ve built?”
Mandy backed down. She leaned forward in her chair and said quietly, “I know you haven’t forgotten. I also know you’re sweet on Jaxil—sweeter than you ought to be.”
I retorted with a scoff, “I’ve got it under control.”
“Okay,” she conceded with a shallow nod. “So what are you going to do?”
The truth was I had no idea. For some reason, at that moment I thought of my ex-boyfriend. I remembered walking into the bathroom on the shuttle to find him getting blown. When he told me he’d been cheating for months because I was too focused on my career, it barely stung—it was easy to choose my company over my relationship in that instant. This was so much harder.
If I sabotaged Jaxil’s prototype, would he hate me? He risked his life to save mine and made sure that I was cared for while I healed. Could I really repay him by cheating him out of the win?
Mandy interrupted my introspection to say, “It’s not personal. It’s just business. You have to remember that.”
I laughed, thinking back on all the times I’d turned down dates with big spenders after they’d tipped me thousands of dollars in a single night. I used to tell them they should have known better than to get attached to a stripper. It’s just business.
Maybe Mandy was right. Maybe Jaxil would expect this type of backlash from me. Still, it didn’t sit right in my stomach.
“I don’t think I’m that person anymore,” I told Mandy.
“What do you mean?”
“That person who has to justify being a bottomfeeder just to scrape by. I’m better than that,” I said, drawing my shoulders back.
Mandy sighed and leaned over my desk to turn my comms screen toward her. She pulled up the latest figures from Chioma—Consolidated Mining was collecting almost exactly the same amount of ore as us this week.
“You can get as sentimental as you want, Candi,” she told me in a low voice. I suddenly became aware that the women in the control room might get worried if they realized our operation was stalling. “These numbers don’t lie, though. If you give Jaxil an advantage, Consolidated will pull ahead, and Terra Firma can kiss Mars goodbye.”
I stared down at the screen. It was painfully close—one day we’d be ahead slightly, then the next day Consolidated would take the lead. There was no doubt that if Jaxil’s prototype was successful, Terra Firma would be dead in the water.
“Maybe we can develop our own prototype,” I suggested. I was becoming frantic. I was desperate for a solution that didn’t require me to turn on Jaxil. “Can you talk to Chioma about meeting with some engineers?”
Mandy jotted down the note but she shrugged. “It’s too late,” she said. “We’re running out of time, and Jaxil’s machine is already developed.”
She was right again. I was grasping at straws. I kicked my feet against my desk to back away and tapped my heels on the ground impatiently.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, you’re right. I’ll figure it out.”
At the end of the day, it was a simple problem: the man I loved happened to be the one who could ruin everything I’d worked for. I had a chance to cut him down first, but it might cost me our relationship. The more I tried to make light of the situation, the darker it felt.
