Jonah & Aubrey's Story (Uoria Mates IV Book 8) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jonah & Aubrey’s Story

  Uoria Mates IV | Book 8

  Ruth Anne Scott

  Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Anne Scott

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Anne Scott

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Facebook: Ruth Anne Scott

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Personal Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Exclusive Story – The Dragon Slave

  Special Invitation

  About the Author

  Personal Note

  Thank you so much for your interest in this book and the Uoria Series as a whole. Uoria Mates launched my career as an author in 2015. Since then it’s been a multiple time bestseller and read by thousands of raving fans. I’m truly humbled by your support.

  This is the fourth Uoria Mates Series and should be read in order. If you’re a first time reader, worry not, I’m including the complete Uoria Mates I for your viewing pleasure to get you started. To read this book, please read the Uoria Series (now conveniently available in complete box sets) in the following order.

  Uoria Mates I

  Uoria Mates II

  Uoria Mates III

  A Uoria Christmas

  Another Uoria Holiday

  Again, if you’re brand new to Uoria, I’m including the complete Uoria Mates I to get you started. I’ve included some extras and goodies for you as well, don’t forget to check them out.

  Buckle up and let’s go on this sci-fi romance adventure!

  Ruth Anne Scott

  Chapter One

  Jonah felt like he had been staring up at the ceiling for hours, trying to will his body to go to sleep. Without the benefit of a clock or even a window so that he could see the movement of the sun, he was still struggling with keeping track of the time, and he hoped that he hadn’t wasted the entire night staring into the darkness rather than getting the sleep that he needed. His mind was stuck firmly on Aubrey and what had happened between them in the lab. It was entirely unexpected, and yet the desire and need had been building inside of him since the first moment that he saw her.

  In his mind, he knew that that was all that it was. It was a sudden, powerful attraction unlike anything that he had experienced since he had left Earth that was combined with hormones unaddressed for far too many years. Intensified by the sheer magnitude of the situation that they were facing, the urge had just been too much for him to deny. In his heart, though, he questioned if that was really all that pushed him into Aubrey’s arms. He felt something for her beyond just the immediate attraction. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew that there was something more that wouldn’t be there if she had been any other woman.

  As much as being with her had been absolutely incredible, thinking of it forced Jonah to think about the abrupt way that she had left immediately after. He could still taste her on his lips and feel the burn of her skin on his when she had jumped up from the table and rushed out of the lab, apologizing to him and telling him that what had happened between them had been a mistake. He hated that she felt that way and didn’t understand what could have caused her to change so quickly. She had seemed as in need of him as he was of her when he first kissed her, and offered her lush, beautiful body to him willingly and enthusiastically. As soon as their bodies had cooled and their minds had cleared, though, her thoughts seemed to have completely changed and she ran away from him as fast as she could, barefoot and half-dressed beneath her lab coat.

  He knew that he wasn’t ever going to see her again. This upset him not just because he already missed her even though he truly barely knew her, but also because it meant that he was on his own again. She had helped him immeasurably by giving him her access chip and had been a valuable pair of extra hands as they were going through the lab trying to find anything that might be helpful or illuminating. It was her presence, though, that mattered to him the most. Even though he wasn’t able to tell her everything about himself or even what he was really doing in the lab, just having her there with him had been encouraging. He could bounce ideas off of her and she would give him feedback that clarified his ideas and in small ways that would likely be imperceptible to her, helped him to understand this new version of the world that he had left behind.

  That was all gone now. He was back to being alone on this journey. But that was how he had intended it when he first began, and what he committed to doing. When he told Pyra that he was going to stay on Earth rather than going to Penthos with the rest of them, he had done it with the full knowledge that he needed to handle this part of the quest for himself.

  Trying to tear his mind away from Aubrey, he instead thought about his investigations of the lab. He had gone over it so many times. Each time that he explored it, he tried to go deeper, to think of places where someone might hide something, or different ways that he could look at the space or the things that he found within it so that maybe he could find something that would be of some use to him. As many times as he had been through it, though, he hadn’t found anything that really helped him, at least that he understood, and he was getting frustrated at himself. It seemed like he should be able to understand this better. He should be able to break through whatever barrier was standing between him and figuring this out, but he just couldn’t. Everything was at a distance from him and no matter how hard he looked, and how hard he tried to decipher the information that he did have, nothing was speaking to him.

  He knew that he had to move on from Ryan’s lab if he was going to have any chance of finding anything else. He had exhausted that space and what little he had found there was stacked among the rest of the information that he had, undeciphered and relatively meaningless. He didn’t know where to go from here. When he first found the patient file and the pristine, strangely preserved examination room, he felt like everything was laid out in front of him and all he needed to do was piece it together. Now it was as though he had stepped up to a wall and had nowhere to turn. He wondered if he was really ever going to be able to do anything beneficial by staying here in the basement and returning to the lab and the abandoned medical facility over and over in search of something that he couldn’t even identify, or if he should have just listened to what Pyra had told him and gone to Penthos with the rest of the team. They were readying themselves to fight a war
that could change the future. Maybe it was time that Jonah put his focus there and put the past behind him.

  Chapter Two

  “Aubrey?”

  Aubrey jumped slightly and turned to look at the lab assistant beside her, who was staring at her through narrowed eyes.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Are you finished with those calculations yet?” he asked in a tone that was just a touch too snide for her to be able to tolerate in her current state of mind. “I need them for the next step in this experiment.”

  “I’ll get them to you when I get them to you,” Aubrey snapped back at him, wondering how long she had actually been staring blankly at the blinking cursor on her calculator and holding her pencil poised over the sheet in front of her.

  “And when do you think that’s going to be?”

  Aubrey slammed her pencil down on the paper, turned off her calculator, and started unbuttoning her lab coat.

  “After I get a cup of coffee, stuff my face with a cheese Danish, and take a walk through this beautiful spring weather. How’s that sound?”

  She tossed her goggles onto the cart beside the door and stalked out of the lab, finding some level of satisfaction in Jamie’s creative muttering as she left. As soon as she had stepped out of the lab and approached the door to the courtyard, however, any hint of amusement that she had gotten from her brief taunt of her annoying coworker was dashed. Instead of the bright sunny morning that had greeted her when she stepped outside for her first coffee break of the day that would have been perfect for a mind-clearing walk around the grounds, hard streams of rain dashed across the glass and outside the clouds were so dark that she could barely see the building on the opposite side of the patio space. It seemed that the weather had heard her complaints that the day was simply not appropriate for how she was feeling and decided to change to better suit her mood.

  Rather than crossing the courtyard as her shortcut to the cafeteria, she went the long way, walking down the maze of hallways past smaller labs and reading rooms. Inside she could see the rows of white-coated scientists, assistants, researchers, and technicians leaned over their projects, fully immersed in what they were doing as if there was nothing else in the entire world that mattered. She wished that she could focus on her work the way that they were. The project that she was supposed to be working on was one of the biggest that the University had taken on in years, and it really did need full focus and commitment from everyone on the team. Unfortunately, she just didn’t have it in her to put herself into her work.

  She couldn’t get her mind off of Jonah. What had happened between them in the lab was impetuous, and impulsive, and incredible. No matter how spectacular it was, or how much she wanted him, though, she knew that it was a bad decision on her part, one that she should have been able to avoid if she had simply taken the time to think it through. Instead, she had let the draw that she had felt to the mysterious stranger and the tortured reality of the mission that he was on take over and compel her into something that was reckless and potentially disastrous. Jonah had far too much happening in his life to have someone coming in and messing with his thoughts and emotions, distracting him from what he needed to be doing. He also had obligations on another planet, responsibilities that she couldn’t even begin to fathom, that he would have to attend to when he was finished with what he needed to do on Earth. It wasn’t a position that she should have put either of them in.

  Even beyond those barriers, though, Aubrey had the sense that Jonah wasn’t being entirely honest with her about himself or what he was doing. He had explained that the rest of his team had gone to another planet to confront Ryan and the army of hybrids that he had created, but he hadn’t been entirely clear on why he had remained behind on Earth. He simply told her that there was more work to be done here and that he was tasked with finding out more information about the experiments and Ryan’s facilities. When she listened to him, however, there seemed to be more to it than that. He was holding something back from her and not giving her the full story, and that alone was enough to make their encounter a terrible decision. She couldn’t handle another dishonest relationship. She just didn’t have it in her.

  As she reached the cafeteria and started filling the largest cup she could with coffee so dark it very well might have been motor oil, her thoughts went to what Jonah had told her about Ryan and the things that he had done. She knew that the scientist, as highly respected as he was, was eccentric and not known for treating the women he encountered as he should, but she never could have imagined that he would have been involved in the types of unethical and cruel experiments that Jonah had described. She found it difficult to wrap her head around the idea that just below the floors of the laboratory was a subterranean complex used for breeding, creating, and enslaving weaponized creatures pieced together from a variety of species, some that she hadn’t even heard of. At the same time, she remembered the way that he had often spoken of the inadequacies in the military and how if they focused more energy not on the weapons that the armies were carrying, but what was carrying them, victories would not be so hard to obtain. Not who, but what. It struck too closely to what Jonah had said for it to be purely coincidental.

  The more that she thought about what Ryan was doing, she more her stomach turned. She thought of the brief time that she had spent as his assistant in his lab. During that time, she had never known exactly what type of projects they were working on, or the objective behind the individual tasks that he had her complete. No matter what they were doing, though, she had always felt like he was scrutinizing her, examining her in everything that she did. The things that he said to her were completely out of line and unprofessional, and deep inside her she was ashamed that she had never done anything about it. Like the other female assistants had undoubtedly done, she had just swallowed everything that she wanted to say to him and tried to ignore his advances, telling herself that she had far too much to lose to offend one of the most influential scientists in the community. When she finally couldn’t take it anymore, which took a far shorter time than she would have hoped her strength would have carried her, she still hadn’t told her superiors what had happened. Instead, she told them that she was more interested in the projects being handled elsewhere and felt that her skills and knowledge could be better applied in that work. Now that she knew what he was capable of and could think more clearly about the things that he had said to her, she wondered if she might have become another of the women lost to the experiments if her request hadn’t been put through and she hadn’t been reassigned.

  Aubrey knew then that she couldn’t just pretend that she didn’t know what Jonah had told her. She had to help in any way that she could to unravel what was happening and bring Ryan to justice, even if that meant doing some digging on her own.

  Chapter Three

  Jonah took the depleted lightstick down from where he had anchored it on the wall in the stairwell and replaced it with a fresh one. The new stick spread light that was far brighter and more intense than the glow from the dying stick, filling the entire space and allowing him to see much further in either direction than he had been since he had taken to keeping a lightstick in place on the steps. It was reassuring to him to have the light there rather than having to bring a stick with him whenever he wanted to climb the stairs. It allowed him to go up to the closet whenever he wanted to, and gave him a greater sense of security than he felt when he had darkness both ahead of and behind him and only the faint light of a smaller stick that he would carry with him.

  He felt like what he was doing was arbitrary. He had just been going through the motions, fulfilling basic tasks in the basement since Aubrey left him in the lab. Though he was doing what he needed to do to keep the human women and the hybrids that were still down there protected, he had done little to continue his mission of understanding what had really happened to the Nyx 23 mission. He suddenly felt himself missing the rest of the crew and the settlement that they had created on Uoria. I
t was a strange position to be in. He remembered the earliest days that they were on the foreign and unknown planet, grappling with the idea that their ship was completely destroyed and they had no way of either contacting those still on Earth or getting back home. It had been a sad and terrifying thought in a way that he would never have been able to put into words. It wasn’t something that anyone would be able to understand or to empathize with unless they themselves had experienced it.

  As he thought about Rain and the long days that they had spent together building the vehicle that they hoped would someday be their salvation, he couldn’t help but realize that it was through that work and the dedication that they had given in the years that they were on Uoria, when they went from being stranded to re-envisioning the planet as their home, that they had created the salvation for many. He couldn’t abandon that now. Too many lives had been lost or sacrificed, and none of them knew what might be coming next. He had to keep going. No matter how much he might be struggling or how frustrated he was getting, he had to keep pushing himself to understand what had brought them all there. So far there had been so many links that they uncovered. They already knew that Nyx 23 and the hybrid army were connected, but there had to be more. It couldn’t be so simple as how Ryan explained it, even if the disturbed scientist believed that it was. If it was, there would be no reason for the examination room to still be as it was, or for Jonah’s file to be inside. He couldn’t help but believe that there was so much more to the link between the Nyx 23 mission and the hybrid experiments than they had even imagined.

  He suddenly remembered the power cells from the vehicle that he and Rain created. When they uncovered the vehicle after so many years of it sitting abandoned in their hidden workshop, it wouldn’t work. The power cells had been depleted and he wasn’t able to get the vehicle started. Once the cells had some time in the sun, however, they were rejuvenated. They remembered how to work and were able to keep going with even more vibrancy than before. Gripping the depleted lightstick tightly in his hand, Jonah ran back down into the basement to get his bag and another lightstick to guide his way. All he had needed was a reminder to restore his strength and motivation.