Page 33 of Roping Her Alien Ranchers

Idiot didn’t phase me. I’d been called worse over the endless star cycles I’d been alive, my differently abled tentacle making me an easy target for taunts. The biped… no, the woman’s scent had sweetened now that she’d calmed down some. The perfume of her rolled over me in delicious waves, reminding me of the saccharine waters of KerKraken Abyss back home.

“We have recently begun cataloguing your world seriously,” Cyro’s tone was sharp, “It takes at least one-hundred-star cycles to complete a planetary study. We always began with oceanic mapping.”

“Awesome, then get back in your ship and go find a pod of damn dolphins.” She cocked her head, staring at Cyro now, her expression challenging. Her pheromones plumed the air, a spicy note threading through the sugary notes.

I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply. She still stood nearest to me. Were the others as affected by her smell?

The translators usually processed more than base language, also providing cultural and biological context, drawing from its vast database of interspecies encounters. Not that it could provide much when it came to Earth’s land beings. But it didn’t matter, apparently, those translator functions were rendered completely inoperable thanks to the crash.

Yet just the knowledge that she was female triggered unexpected responses in my physiology. Beyond that, I felt the ingrained attraction my kind only felt toward their destined mate. My chromatophores pulsed with patterns I'd never displayed before. They were called from an ancient place inside my genetic coding. Intense, rare colors that spoke of attraction and desire. My silvery gaze roved away from her, finding my companions exhibiting similar reactions. Their own bodies were recognizing this human female, preparing to claim her.

On our planet, that would mean years of courtship, of dodging endless refusals, of eventually winning over three hearts at once. Were the mating rituals similar on this planet? Was that why she’d attacked Cyro? That thought made me feel an emotion I couldn’t identify at first. Was it anger that Cyro had received her advances first? Perhaps desire to switch places with him?

Envy. Jealousy. Boiling hot need.

"Her scent is impairing my thoughts," Vantor communicated, his normal discipline visibly struggling against biological imperatives. "My translator is enhancing her biochemical signatures.”

I glared at him. Why was his translator working properly and mine wasn’t? I reached a tentacle up, tapping hard against the device once more. All that did was make it glitch out for several heartbeats.

“Biochemical signature?” The woman’s mouth warped, her face scrunching. “Do you mean my scent?” She raised one upper limb, bringing a pale, delicate expanse of skin to her nose, sniffing. Now, her mouth turned downward. “God, you guys are making my body go haywire. Is that some weird ass alien thing?”

"Fascinating evolutionary adaptation," Cyro managed, though his forced detachment was contradicted by the intense colors rippling across his mantle. "An olfactory communication system that transcends species boundaries. It is—” he abruptly stopped speaking, gaze traveling down his body. My own gaze followed, snapping down to where his mating tentacle had protruded outward, into view.

The female’s gaze caught sight of Cyro’s engorged member, and her speckled face turned crimson.

Cyro turned his body slightly, hiding his arousal.

I nearly groaned as the female’s odor intensified, clouding the air, making my mind go hazy.

But then Vantor moved closer to the woman, his tentacle extending toward her left lower limb, and I snapped back to life, clarity chasing away any brain fog.

I found myself drawn forward too, a spark of possessive need not wanting him to touch her before I could. My diminutive tentacle reached for her first, as if more desperate than my other appendages in its need to touch her body.

The woman’s eyes widened, her pupils dilating dramatically. Her scent spiked with alarm and fear again, but it was now interlaced with something even more compelling. Colors flowed across my skin, undulating and shifting. The smell of her triggered ingrained protective instincts alongside the already confusing attraction response.

She wasn’t our species.

It was likely impossible to mate with her. How could her slight body handle our massive lengths? The anatomical logistics didn’t matter though, not while my biological response was steering the ship.

"Stay away from me, you intergalactic perverts!" she cried, stumbling backward and losing her balance. She fell, her body hitting the ground with a soft thud before she began scrambling backward across the dirt. “Seriously, don’t even think about abducting and probing me!”

My translator finally regained full functionality, though I wasn’t sure how long it would last. It provided immediate context for her outburst—cultural references to supposed extraterrestrial encounters that her species had mythologized, involving examination procedures she clearly feared. Her terror was genuine, but so was our inexplicable attraction to her presence. My tentacles continued reaching forward, even as my brain urged me to cease advancing. We may not know much about the land parts of this world, but many star cycles ago, our planet had intercepted a long-range Earth communication.

It had been coded “message in a star bottle.”

Filled with various images and random stories that took our best language experts many eons to understand, simply because the dialects were varied, the information was eventually entered into our historical database. Senseless anecdotes, but I’d read them as a young G.E.F. recruit. They’d made me laugh, even if they were not entirely accurate when translated into our native tongue.

That communication had also allowed our technology to input parameters into our translation technology—ones that, hopefully, would allow us to process the varied languages of Earth. At that time, many thought it was unnecessary; our kind had zero desire to explore Earth’s barbaric landscape. We were not even sure what type of sentient land creatures had sent the large transmission. We knew a bit about the oceans, with its giant creatures, some fifty tentacles in width. We also knew of the dolphins, long ago migrated to Earth’s waters (none of the languages in the “star bottle” belonged to that alien species) from a sister planet. But the communique had clearly come from the land masses, of which our knowledge was cripplingly limited.

Right now, I was grateful that we had enough knowledge of Earth to understand what this enraged biped was saying.

Cyro was edging closer now, drawn by the same inexplicable force that had taken control over my and Vantor’s bodies.

“I’m serious! One inch closer and I’ll… I’ll… I’ll turn your asses into Area-51!”

It took all my willpower to halt in place, not because of her strange threat, but because I did not want to terrify this human woman. I didn’t want her to fear me, to fear us. I stretched out two tentacles to either side of me, using them to keep both Vantor and Cyro from getting closer to her.

“We are not here to hurt you,” I finally breathed out. “In fact, we need your help.”