by Tammy Walsh
I worked in an office writing articles for a financial magazine. What did I know about finance? Nothing. It turned out, no one in the office did either. We copied details from the brochures and advertisements, cutting out as much of the sales hype as possible, and that was pretty much it.
Every time I met someone new, I glanced at their wrists. I couldn’t help it. But I never saw what I was looking for, which was a relief.
Every day at twelve, I had lunch with my coworkers. I was always quiet, distracted, staring out the window at the curved edge of the moon. It was so much more beautiful when you were zipping past it at unimaginable speeds. It was like a living thing rather than a rock trapped about its host planet.
When I had a few spare minutes, I typed some ideas of a new story. Of a hot alien guy who abducted a girl with no answers in life. They were perfect for each other.
Most of all, I thought about him. I wondered where he was, what he was doing, if he’d been sent to the most horrific alien prison located in a black hole where time lasted forever… Such thoughts were common when you had an overactive imagination.
After three months, I began to lose hope.
I got to work on an article about mortgages when someone stood in front of my desk.
“You look like you’re in need of a good abduction.”
My fingers froze, perched above the keyboard. My eyes drifted above my monitor at the godlike creature I’d lost my heart to.
How often had I imagined this moment? How many variations had I envisioned? And the one it turned out to be… Me bent over a boring brochure typing up numbers and percentages I didn’t understand into an article very few people would read, was not top of the list.
He looked so out of place in that office, like Indiana Jones at a PTA meeting. The other female office workers glanced in his direction, dispelling the idea that he was just a figment of my imagination.
“Hey, Alice,” Jessica, the office slut, said while chewing on a carrot stick. “Want to introduce me to your friend?”
“Not really,” I said, leaping to my feet.
I swung around my desk and threw my arms around him.
“I never thought I would see you again,” I said. “I thought… I thought…”
He pressed a finger to my nose. “You thought wrong. And I always keep my promises.”
“Are you back now? For good?” I said. “This isn’t a furlough scheme, is it?”
He chuckled. It was music to my ears. “No. I’m all yours. We never have to be parted again.”
“Did you go to prison?” I said.
“Yes. But not for long. They reduced my sentence in exchange for returning the reward payout. I didn’t have enough to bring it down to zero. They warned me that if they caught me smuggling ever again, I’d never see the light of day.”
“Does that mean you’re out of the smuggling game for good?”
“You’d better believe it,” he said. “Oh. I have something for you.”
He opened his hand. Hanging from his fingers was a delicate chain with a heart-shaped locket.
“It took a little longer to track down than I expected,” Nighteko said.
My hands went to my mouth. I immediately put it back on my wrist. I pried it open and saw my parents’ faces beaming back at me.
“Thank you,” I said, tears brimming my eyes.
I took his hand and he led me toward the exit.
“You don’t have any of the reward left?” I said.
“None,” he said. “But I still have the money I saved and buried on a distant planet. I would have lost it if they knew about it.”
“Does this mean you can’t buy a farm on Arcturon Prime?”
He shrugged. “I figured the prices were too high anyway. You want to buy in an up-and-coming market. A backwater planet with creatures that hadn’t even colonized their own moon yet. That would be the smart investment.”
A shiver ran through me. All my dreams were coming true.
Mr. Morse, the office manager, stepped from his office. “And where do you think you’re going?”
I looked at Nighteko. “Where do you fancy?”
“Anywhere with wide-open spaces,” Nighteko said.
“I know just the place,” I said.
The manager watched, slack-jawed and staring as we left the office and a life I knew I would never return to again.
We were off to live our next adventure.
The rest of our lives.
I hope you enjoyed Owned by the Alien.
It was a real labor of love crafting my very first Sci-Fi Romance.
I loved the places we got to visit during the adventure so much that I wrote five more books in this galaxy!
So if you’re wondering what happened to Alice’s fellow abductees, you can find out!
In the second book of the series, Maddy wakes up in a room with four walls and no door.
She’s scared, alone, and there’s no chance of escape.
Then Chax appears.
He’s an alien Adonis with an ass to match.
In a moment of weakness, they kiss.
The next morning, a door appears, and they realize their troubles have only just begun.
CAGED BY THE ALIEN is in Kindle Unlimited and available to buy now.
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Caged By The Alien Sneak Peek
Prologue - Maddy
We flopped back on the bed, gasping for oxygen after our vigorous workout. I giggled and ran a hand over his perfectly toned body. Nobody but a professional model who spent all his time in the gym had a body like this.
Was he a model? I never asked.
“That was amazing,” he said.
It really was.
I approached sex the way an athlete attacked their sport. With concentration, purpose, and unceasing passion.
If you couldn’t keep up? Then get gone.
Chax could keep up and then some. I feared he might be the one guy who could even overtake me one day.
It was going to be fun finding out.
“I hope this doesn’t ruin our friendship,” he said.
I looked up at him. He looked back at me. We burst into laughter.
I never did anything like this.
I never slept with a dude I’d only known for a few days. But with him… it just felt right.
Plus, what else was there to do trapped in this dull room? We tried to escape. We tried to get out. But we failed.
Abysmally.
Chax was tall and handsome and had the body of a Greek god.
What’s a girl to do?
And now I knew he was a demon in the sack. I’d heard about guys who could jackhammer all night long but I’d never had the fortune to find one.
Until now.
Even better, I was trapped in a room with him. With no means of escape.
Just the two of us.
Maybe that sounded romantic.
It wasn’t.
Not when so
meone had failed to install a door for you to exit from.
“You’re a bad girl,” he said, kissing me on the top of the head.
“And you’re a bad boy,” I said.
I reached under the blankets and tickled his balls. His cock hardened.
So predictable.
He sighed.
“You’re the girl of my dreams,” he said.
“Then shut your eyes and keep on dreaming,” I said. “You might get lucky and enjoy round three later.”
He grinned and flashed those adorable dimples at me.
“I’d like that,” he said.
“I bet you would.”
The lights flickered off and came back on. Only now, they were a dull red and flashed in concentric circles from our position on the bed to the wall on the other side of the room.
I sat up, pressing the blanket to my chest.
This was new.
And in a place like this, anything new was a cause for concern.
“What is it?” I said.
His eyes shifted away from me and toward the wall opposite. He stared at something I couldn’t quite make out.
The blood drained from his face.
“What?” I said, peering at the darkness illuminated only by the flashing red lights. “What is it?”
And then I saw it with my own eyes.
The blood drained from my face too.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The wall had been perfectly smooth before. I should know, I checked every inch of this place looking for a way out.
Nothing was there.
Nothing had been there.
Now there was.
Gaping like an open pit was a door.
And it was open.
Maddy
I opened my eyes and was surprised to find I wasn’t dead.
I should have been. A fall from a cliff like that would have killed anyone.
I bolted upright and sucked a deep lungful of oxygen into my starving lungs. I clutched a hand to my chest and panted.
Every day back home, I began with the same morning routine. It helped calm me, easing me into the day ahead. I shut my eyes and breathed in another deep breath. My chest expanded and shuddered as I let it out. I repeated the breath and this time it came out a little smoother and easier than the last.
Intense images of a minivan sailing over a cliff attempted to invade my thoughts but I wouldn’t let them. I saw another image. This one was a blinding white light. I floated out of my seat and…
I blocked it out.
I needed to calm down. Relax.
Another half a dozen breaths and I could breathe normally.
I kept my eyes shut and finally let those images come to me one by one.
Me and my friends were in a minivan, heading home after our crazy weekend of partying. We’d been celebrating Hazel’s final few days of freedom. In the morning, she would marry the dependable and reliable—but entirely uninteresting—Tom.
Alice was in the driving seat and accidentally took the minivan over the edge of a mountain and down into the ravine below.
We should have crashed. We should have died.
But then there was that bright white light…
My breath hitched in my throat again. I took a moment to take more calm, steadying breaths.
That light pinned the minivan in place. It seemed so unreal, like it couldn’t have happened and I’d imagined the whole thing.
But it had happened. I was sure of it.
Sitting on the backseat, my blanket had floated up and wrapped around my face. I might have been on the set of a cool Hollywood movie. And then…
Then the light tugged me viciously out of the minivan. I scrambled to grip hold of something but had no control over the movement of my arms and legs. I was a doll in someone else’s hands.
I recalled the terror of not wanting to leave the safe confines of the minivan or the reliable presence of my friends.
But what I wanted was no longer important. Only what the light wanted.
I zipped up into the sky. I couldn’t even scream. I rose faster and faster. I felt the wind—no, not the wind, it was some kind of external pressure from the light—press against me as I flew impossibly high until…
Nothing.
Had I been abducted by aliens?
Then I woke up here.
But where was “here?”
I took a few more steadying breaths before I opened my eyes and peered around at the room.
Every surface was pure white. The walls and the bedsheets and the tables and chairs and the little square that must lead to the bathroom.
I smiled with relief.
I was in a hospital. What other room was decorated like this?
I fell back on the cool sheets and shook my head. For a moment, I thought I’d lost my mind.
We must have flown over the cliff and descended into the ravine below. We must have landed well or I wouldn’t still be alive.
And all that stuff with the bright white light?
It would turn out to be the bright lights of the hospital roof as I was wheeled along on a gurney.
And the stuff floating around?
Drugs. Sometimes they had a hallucinatory side effect.
Yes. That’s all it was.
Abducted by aliens.
Ha!
The girls would have a good laugh about that when I told them!
The girls.
I shot up. Where were they?
If I was in the hospital, there was a good chance they would be knocking around there somewhere too.
I tossed the blankets aside and threw my legs over the side of the bed. I placed my feet on the cold tiles and wiggled my toes. I still had control of my legs. That was good.
I performed the same action with my fingers. Full marks there, too.
If I was being wheeled along on a gurney, I might have had an operation…
But on what?
I ran my hands over my body but felt nothing. No pain, no raised ridges where the stitches would be. I checked my head and it wasn’t shaved.
Then I noticed my nightgown.
Except, it wasn’t a nightgown.
“What the hell is this?” I said out loud.
It was a sheer silk negligee. It had a low-cut top and rode high up the thigh. It was sexy. Not quite the kind of gown they usually made patients wear in hospitals…
So maybe they ran out of the usual ones…
Ran out of gowns and were now resorting to sexy negligee?
Yeah…
Just the idea made me laugh.
I felt at my arms.
No wires pierced my skin. No beeping machines checked my heart rate.
There were no machines full stop.
But I did have something attached to my throat. It had a hard edge like a piece of plastic. I daren’t take it off in case I damaged it or hurt myself.
“Hello?” I said, testing my voice. “Hello, hello?”
My voice sounded normal and my throat didn’t hurt. What was the purpose of this thing? I decided to leave it on. It wasn’t doing any harm and removing it could only cause trouble.
I got a better look at the room. I noticed it was a little too clean to be a hospital. The surfaces were perfectly white without scuff mark or blemish.
I pushed myself up onto my feet and felt relieved they could take my weight. So long as I was upwardly mobile, I could get some help.
I moved for the door.
And immediately hit a snag.
There was no door.
I shook my head. I must be mistaken. Every room had a door. How else were you supposed to get inside it?
How had I gotten inside it?
“What the hell?” I said.
I had to be seeing things. You couldn’t crash in a deep ravine without a little temporary damage. My senses were playing tricks on me. That’s all.
I moved for the widest stretch of wall on the opposite side of the room to my be
d and ran my hands over it, looking for the door’s edges. It’d just been well made, that’s all. A futuristic design where the door was perfectly flush with the wall. It saved on space, I told myself. Very clever.
I felt nothing with the palm of my hand. I clawed my fingers and gently ran them over the wall from one side to the other. My nails would catch on the seam and the door would be revealed.
And…
Nothing.
No edges, no handle.
Nothing.
But there was more than one blank surface where the door could be.
I moved to the other two big sections and ran my hands over them.
Again, I felt nothing.
The room had no door.
That was wrong. There had to be a door. I mean, I got inside here somehow, didn’t I? I didn’t just magically teleport inside it.
Teleport.
I was reminded of old episodes of Star Trek. They had spaceships and they could teleport people around.
So maybe the bright light wasn’t a figment of my imagination after all.
The beam of light in the minivan could move things around. It was a sort of magic too. Maybe that was how I got here?
I pushed the thought from my mind. There was no beam of light and I didn’t get there by magic. There would be a reasonable explanation for this.
I clicked my fingers.
The bathroom!
They sometimes made rooms share bathrooms in hospitals. I could enter the next room and use their door to get out. Maybe my room was for quarantine purposes or something.
The bathroom didn’t have a door, just an empty doorway.
Okay, so it was strange, but maybe that was for… I don’t know. Maybe it was easier for nurses to help patients in and out. I was struggling for plausible explanations.
I was getting worried.
The bathroom was basic. It consisted of a regular toilet, a sink, and a small shower. The shower had no curtain or door either. There were no towels, no soap, or toothbrushes, or toothpaste.
