Protected: Alien Mate Index Book 2: (Alien Warrior BBW Paranormal Science fiction Romance) (The Alien Mate Index) Read Online Free

home every day when Taggard got back from school. He usually had a fun sensory activity planned like digging in the sandbox or kneading dough for homemade bread. Sometimes I stayed and played with them, wishing I had such a happy home life myself. Taggard loved me and called me Miss Leah and Jackson and Emilio treated me like part of the family. It was like I was a sister to the two of them and an aunt to Taggard—but that was all. Absolutely all.
    “You’re talking about me staying at Taggard’s house a little while after school?” I said at last. “You’re upset about that?”
    “You’re damn right, I’m upset!” Gerald moved towards me threateningly and once more I found myself retreating. “You were in the house alone with that…that Jackson.” He spat the name like a curse. “I know what you were doing!”
    “What I was doing was finger-painting,” I flared back at him. “It’s part of Taggard’s sensory diet—it helps integrate his nerves and senses. Jackson was finger-painting too. But that was all we were doing.”
    “Bullshit!” Gerald stormed. He was red in the face now—a sure sign that he was about to explode. “You can’t tell me you spent over an hour in a house with a strange man and all you did was finger-paint.”
    “Yes I can because that’s all that happened,” I insisted, taking another step back. My heart was beating like a drum by now and I felt sick to my stomach. How had it come to this? What had happened to the sweet and caring man I had married to turn him into a monster? “Gerald, Jackson is gay,” I reminded him. “He would never be interested in me that way.”
    “Bullshit!” he shouted again, getting right in my face. He had managed to back me into a corner and his spittle flecked my cheeks as he screamed, his normally handsome features distorted with rage.
    “Gerald, please— listen to yourself!” I couldn’t understand how my husband could be so willfully blind. How he could get so enraged over a scenario that wasn’t even remotely plausible.
    “He was fucking you! I know he was! Did you give it up for him, Leah? Did you react with him like you never do for me? Tell the truth—you gave it up like a whore! You actually liked it for once!”
    I flinched at his ugly words and nasty tone. But the worst thing was the seed of truth in his awful accusation. Not that I had been with Jackson—that was ridiculous. But it was true I felt almost nothing when Gerald and I made love, though I tried to pretend—God knows I tried. Was that the reason he was so jealous? Did the fact that he was unable to make my body react, make him think I was seeking out some other man who could?
    I couldn’t get into this now. Deciding to ignore his oblique allegation, I confronted the direct one instead.
    “Jackson lives with another man—his husband!” I pointed out. “They’re gay. Exclusively and monogamously gay.”
    “He was fucking you! He was fucking you! He was fucking you!”
    He screamed it over and over and then the hitting started.
    In the past—well, the two times this had happened in the past I should say—Gerald had been careful to “punish” me, as he called it, in places no one could see. My upper arms, my stomach, my thighs—these were spots that could easily be covered so no one would see what he had done to me.
    This time he completely lost control.
    His fist looped into my vision like a runaway moon and slammed into my eye. Another punch plowed into my cheekbone, slamming my head against the wall so that I saw stars exploding in my vision. A third split my lip and I tasted blood, as salty as tears.
    I cried out, cowering against the wall, trying to shield my face from his rain of blows. Though he had hit me twice before, he’d never gone crazy like this. I was unprepared for this level of savagery, this outpouring of physical hatred.
    He’ll kill me, I thought, as I tried and failed to fend him off. My God, he’s going to kill me this time…
    And