by Enid Titan
Gavriel
Sci-Fi Alien Romance Novel
Enid Titan
www.enidtitan.com
Description
Jaen joins a band of misfit pirates on one last salvage mission.
She’s here to make a quick buck and get out. Fast.
Falling in love is the last thing on her mind.
She comes from a world and time where romance always comes with a steep price.
Jaen can’t lose more than she already has in the war that devastated her colony.
Then she meets him…
The brooding, horned alien male, Gavriel, is exactly like every other space pirate.
Cold.
Dark.
Seductive.
He’s got a chiseled body from fighting his way across the galaxy and a warrior’s heart to match.
But he’s the last alien in the universe Jaen should ever end up with…
Pirates are too dangerous and she’s been burned too many times to count. What makes Gavriel so different from the rest?
ISBN: 9798581424797
Copyright © 2020 by Enid Titan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover designed by Enid Titan Designs
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Created with Vellum
Also by Enid Titan
In chronological order:
Short Stories
Virgin Earthling
The Alien Prince’s Birthday Gift
The Alpha Quadrant Series
Devor
Tau
Aries
First Contact Captives: An Alpha Quadrant Series
First Contact Captives: Vidar
First Contact Captives: Kronos
First Contact Captives: Soren
Vortha Gifted Academy
Wicked Telepaths
Bonded Telepaths
Blue Alien Savage King Chronicles
Pregnant For The Blue Alien Savage King
Baby For The Blue Alien Savage King
Mated To The Blue Alien Savage King
Alpha Quadrant Time Travelers
Symbiont
Parasite
Bundles
Deluxe Steamy Alien Romance Collection (10 Books)
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Contents
1. Who’s The New Girl?
2. A Little Human Thing
3. Launch The Ship
4. The New Girl Has Suitors
5. Night Shift With Nabokov
6. The Convoy Raid
7. How Odilians Mate
8. Tougher Than She Looks
9. We Have A Saboteur
10. Jaen’s Idea
11. Reassignment
12. And Then There’s Blackness
13. Insurrection
14. All Fingers Point To Her
15. Suspicions of Mutiny
16. My Little Spy
17. Should We Attack?
18. Brace For Impact
19. Something Suspicious
20. Questioning The Suspect
21. All Thorns
22. Cave Creature
23. Bonbon
24. Friend Zoned
25. A Knife On The Belly
26. Cylon-7
27. Shift Shenanigans
28. A New Suspect
29. Saroyan
30. Let Her Die
31. If I Sleep With Her
32. Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle of Rum
33. Fire Between Them
34. Let’s Talk Strategy Boys
35. Kendall & 931
36. Nobody Wants An Orgy
37. Is That All Anyone Thinks About?
38. Jaen’s Date
39. Demoted
40. Et Tu, Horus?
41. See You Tonight
42. Tortured
43. Don’t Be Such A Baby
44. I Promise
45. Terrifying
46. Her Sweet Scent
47. If You Crash This Ship!
48. Headfirst Into Danger
49. So Alone
50. Hunting Trip
51. Fated Return
52. The New Arrangement
53. 15 Minutes In A Supply Closet
54. Xanth’s Secret
55. Connie Suspects
56. Shapeshifters
57. Finally
58. Thrice
59. High On Hormones
60. Emergency
61. Good News
62. The Wicked Girl I Fell For
63. I’m Not Done Falling
64. Very Angry
65. Never Come Back
66. I Need This To Make Sense
67. Salvage Site
68. Mushroom Soup
69. Weaker Than Ever
70. Sexy, But Stupid
71. Instinctive Knowledge of Death
72. Death Comes For Me
73. Treasure
74. The Journey Home
75. L.O.S.T.
76. Family
Pregnant For The Blue Alien Savage King
I. Book I
1. I’m Getting Married
2. I’m Going To Kill My Husband
3. My Husband Is Going To Kill Me
4. My Husband Requires My Obedience
5. My Mother-In-Law Wants Grandkids
6. I Might Be In Serious Danger
7. I Need Sex… Now
8. I Am Leaving Tucker
9. I Am Returning To Tucker
10. I Am Chosen
FREE SHORT STORY
An Invitation
About the Author
Chapter 1
Who’s The New Girl?
I nurse a pint of warm pumpkin beer.
“I need another pint, Mo.”
Mo slides another. Drink. Drink myself stupid. That way I can move past what I’ve done. Garth’s a bastard, but a compelling one. He knows about the five and how much they eat and how much it costs. I flick a coin over my knuckles. Fucking Garth. He knows I can’t resist the hunt. He knows I can’t resist doing more for them.
Bastard.
“Another bloody pint!” I snap at Mo. He slides another. Kazim enters the bar, shirtless, as bloody usual. He has to show off. Lucky for us both, there aren’t any women in here. Except Connie. But Connie doesn’t count.
Kazim takes my second pint and polishes it off. Idiot. The worst part will be telling them I’m leaving again. Gav, why are you leaving? When are you going? When are you coming back? The older ones know I may never come back. The younger ones still cling to hope. They believe me when I promise six months. It could be longer than a year.
“Ready for the hunt?” Kazim booms, his husky desert accent sounds like sand tickling the back of my neck. My bunk mate doesn’t have a clue about personal space. I ignore him and focus on my pint. The last job ought to have been my last job. Now we’re going after another Confederation site on another doomed hunt.
“Quartermaster,” Kazim slurs, he must have walked in here drunk, “Ready for another suicide mission?”
“We need money, don’t we? Don’t all of us.”
“Connie’s looking forward to it.”
Kazim throws his arms over Connie and a half smile crinkles her pale face. She has a pencil twisted in her long purple hair and even hunching over a bar she has impossibly perfect posture. Part of her breeding. Rumors claim she was a princess on her home planet. There are no pr
incesses anymore.
I can’t tell if we’re better off without princesses. Most of them are somewhere with our gods: dead.
Kazim ruffles the hair between my horns, something he knows I hate.
“Gavriel, oh sweet Gavriel, my must you brood so sullenly before Garth plunges us to our doom.”
Connie scoffs and shoots me a glare. She wants me to shut him up. I think Kazim will keep talking, even in the afterlife.
“Mo, another!”
“I’m not dragging him out of here again,” Connie snarls.
Kazim throws his arm over my shoulder, leaning on me and burying me in the atrocious smell of his armpits.
“Don’t worry, Connie, I’ll look after him.”
She snorts and storms off. Garth will get here soon for our mission details until then, we’re on our own. I use credits to pay for two more pints — one for myself and one for Kazim. I lose Kazim’s attention when four women stride through the door. They’re tall and blue with waist length hair, silver like the streak running through mine. What has Kazim’s attention is their three breasts, each prominently displayed with a metal bar running through each nipple. He runs off.
I’m not interested in working girls, even if they have nine breasts between the three of them. Kazim buys them a round of syrup fried crickets and asks them crude questions about their breasts while they fawn over him. Any other man would have had his pockets picked clean by now, but Kazim could work a ring from a woman’s nipple without her noticing. Well, she might notice, but he’d be long disappeared.
“Gavriel,” a hoarse voice calls my name as Horus bends his broad shoulders and enters the room, his tail swinging behind him.
“Horus. Good man.”
He doesn’t drink. Well, nothing except blood. He sits at the bar and Mo visibly shakes. You don’t see many Arietans in these parts. You don’t see many Arietans working with others. Horus is a pacifist compared to his lot. So we have him on weapons.
“Did you get the M-96?”
“No. Better.”
Horus bares his fangs and runs through the weapons stash he sent over to the ship. Nova flits through the door as he explains. She’s smaller than all of us, 4 feet 11 inches tall, with shiny green wings that carry her a few inches off the ground. She’s smiling until she sees Kazim with his tongue lewdly flicking the breast of another woman in the corner of the bar.
“Does he have to be such a pig?” She scoffs.
I think she loves him, despite her complaining.
“Where’s Poke?”
You can’t get Nova without Poke. Poke stomps into the bar. She’s the first mate, and one of two people who outranks me on the ship despite my youth. She’s as angry as her skin’s red and her yellow eyes glow. Horus shrinks back as she enters. Even if she’s half his size, Poke has a way of... well... poking at your insecurities.
“I’m right here. What are you losers doing? We have a mission. You ought not to get so stinking drunk.”
Nova giggles and flies over to her, hugging Poke tightly, so Poke’s white blonde hair comes undone from its elaborate braid.
Jisoo strolls in, dressed in black. She doesn’t say a word, but she leans on Poke, tapping away at her little device. Xanth, our ship’s doctor, must already be on the ship. Χanth hates bars as much as he loves women. He prefers getting them on his examination table where they’re vulnerable. Where he has all the power.
Garth bursts through the door, nearly ripping the damned thing off its hinges. His short tusks protrude over his upper lip and his long black hair hangs in dreadlocks, making him look the perfect savage. He doesn’t enter the bar alone.
“Crew. Assemble in the back.”
He nods at Mo who points to the back room, the place we’ve met the past seven years before each mission.
“Who’s the new girl?” I whisper to Poke. She shrugs. I follow her into the room, clutching my foamy pint.
Chapter 2
A Little Human Thing
I can’t take my eyes off the new girl. And I don’t have to. New crewmen are my responsibility, and this one looks useless. She’s human, for one thing. There aren’t many humans out here. We only have three on our crew. Connie, our engineer, Jisoo the Second. And Kazim’s half-human. The rest of us come from the region, the lost outer colonies of the Alpha Quadrant, ceded to the Confederation forty years ago.
Most of us are too young to remember a time before. I’ve lost track of my age, but Xanth thinks I’ve lived almost thirty years. I don’t know my birthday.
“This is Jaen Nabokov. She’ll travel with us and join the crew,” Garth says.
The girl stares over large, round glasses and waves, but she doesn’t say a word. But she’s female, so Kazim springs into action.
“I volunteer to show her around the ship. Hello, Jaen.”
He takes her hand and kisses it while Jaen regards him with an admixture of suspicion and confusion.
“Very good, Kazim,” Garth grumbles.
Kazim couldn’t hear Garth anymore. He took both of Jaen’s shoulders and positioned his body behind hers.
“Where does she come from?”
“I don’t know. Now sit the fuck down, Kazim,” Garth snaps.
He massages Jaen’s shoulders, and she stands there, frigid but not afraid of him.
“How can I sit down when you bring such a luminous flower into our midst?”
Kazim reaches into his pocket for a candied sugar flower and places it in Jaen’s palm, closing her hand around the candy.
Nova snaps, “Sit down, Kazim. Nobody wants to watch you flirt.”
Everyone snickers, but Kazim is incapable of feeling anything close to shame. He winks at Nova and sits on the table.
“We have the map programmed into the ship. Gavriel, you’ll take the new crewman under your wing.”
“Aye.”
“Poke, Kazim, I’ll need you to run battle drills with the rest of the crew. This will be a big haul... and once we take our share from the top... it’ll be the last job any of us have to work.”
Nova’s wings flutter with irritation. She scowls at Kazim, but her glare is really pointed at Jaen, who she already clearly hates.
“It would help if you would stop bringing around more mouths to feed,” she snaps.
“Jaen has very useful skills.”
Kazim takes Jaen’s hand and presses it to his lips.
“Would she mind sharing these skills with us?”
Garth grunts.
“She doesn’t speak. But trust me... she will be very useful to us.”
She exchanges a glance with Garth that I can’t place. And I’m no stranger to reading people. Kazim lets go of her hand and I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am. Garth has brought a new concubine aboard. And if she’s his, he won’t want any of us to touch her. We have no proof. And she’s awfully plain for a concubine. Her curly dark-brown hair has seen better days, and I’ve never known a concubine to wear spectacles and have a shape that’s more plump apple than hourglass. I can’t stop staring at her. It’s the mystery of her, I think. I can’t help but want to solve it.
Connie rises.
“We’d better go, then. If I’m to reconfigure the ship to avoid Confederate sensors, I ought to get a move on.”
“Jaen can help,” Garth says.
Connie casts him a skeptical glance, but purses her lips and nods stiffly. That’s as close to approval as anyone can get from Connie. I wonder where she’s from. She’s human, the girl. And obviously... shell shocked. We’re all shell-shocked down here.
“We’ll reconvene on the ship in an hour. If you aren’t there, you know the deal. You forfeit your rights to the profits and your right to accompany future salvage missions. Understood?”
We all emit a mixture of a grumble or a groan. This is our fifth job together. The crew shifts beneath us, but the senior team remains the same. We all know each other well. I’d say we were like family, except we’re likely to stab each other in the back
if it means getting more profit at the end. During salvage missions, we’re the closest any of us will have to family outside our home worlds. We need each other to survive, and that keeps us from killing each other. Though knives get pressed to throats occasionally. Not like that’s something any of us can help.
I transport straight to the ship. It’s my job to assign the crew to different parts of the ship and organize shifts before we get on our mission. Piracy is serious work, and since the Confederacy strengthened their control over this sector, it’s the most legitimate work you can find unless you sign a labor contract. You’ll owe the Confederacy 2,000,000 hours of labor for a roof over your head and food. If you die before completing it, which most people will since working 20 hour shifts wears on the body, your next of kin gets locked into the gnarly contract.
