by Opal Carew
What a day.
What a night.
I don’t want to leave. Things don’t feel…finished and I guess there’s a part of me that’s afraid I’ll never be invited back. I’m pretty sure this was all an experiment for Rhys and I hope I’ve proved to him that he’s not the monster he fears he is. Although, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than one day and night of sex to convince him of that fact. Before climbing into my car, I cast a lingering gaze back at the house. Feeling…sad. Wistful.
There’s a distinctive ping from the depths of my bag.
My heart skips a beat as I fish around in my bag for the phone. I find it and type my password.
>When I text, IT’S ON, you’d better come.<
I throw my head back and laugh. Shielding my eyes with my phone, I wave up at the dark windows of the villa before climbing into the car and driving away.
What fantasy will Rhys choose next time?
Oh God. I can’t wait to find out.
Enjoyed this short story?
Read on for an excerpt from
The Window - A Wicked One Night Stand….
Excerpt - The Window - A Wicked One Night Stand
I find myself standing in front of 1414.
I stare. This is where he lives. K. McKale. This is the man I’ve been watching. The one in the window. The one on the street. The one I stripped for.
Holy shit! What was I thinking?
It’s one thing to do something like that for a complete stranger when glass and air and distance separate you. It’s more like a heightened fantasy than reality. This? Standing outside his door in person? This is…
The door opens.
Fuck!
K. McKale is standing there, dressed for a run in shorts, sneakers and a snug cotton t-shirt, showing off every single muscle that spans the man’s chest. I stare, open-mouthed, my fingers itching to touch. The muscles of his pecs twitch in response as if crying out to be touched in return.
Or more likely they are twitching in preparation for action because he moves so fast I don’t see it coming. He grabs my wrist, yanks me inside and pushes me up against the closed door. “Who the fuck are you?”
“My name’s Tessa Savage and—”
He grabs my other arm and raises my shackled wrists above my head to lean in close. So fucking close. Good lord! Not only is the man tall, he’s fucking strong.
“What are you doing here?”
My breath comes in quick sharp gasps leaving my mouth too dry to answer.
His eyes narrow as he takes a deep breath. “Jesus, you smell good.” The movement of his hips is subtle and I wouldn’t have noticed except that one second I feel his muscled chest pressing against me and the next I feel another muscle, just as hard, wedged against my pubic bone. “So…Tessa Savage, why are you here?”
Oh, very good question. Things seemed so clear the other night when I was putting on a show. Now? Hmmm…not so clear. In the coffee shop he seemed surprised but intrigued by the sight of me. Now he seems…surprised and something else.
Whatever that something else is, now is not time to show fear and I do my best to swallow my uncertainty. “I’ve watched you,” I say softly.
“I know.”
His grip tightens.
“I feel drawn to you.” I touch the corner of my dry lips with my tongue.
He moves his head to the other side, his gaze flicking down to my mouth and back up. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
He waits for me to continue. When I don’t he says, “You took your clothes off in front of the window. Was that for me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to.” I lift my chin while my tummy does weird little flippy things.
His gaze is fierce and curious and aroused and…there’s still that something else. It sends a blaze of heat down my throat burning all the way to the pit of my topsy turvy stomach. He bites down on his lower lip and my imagination swiftly takes me to a scenario where he is biting down on my lip instead of his own. There is something between us that definitely says arousal—good God, the sheer size of his arousal is breathtaking—but it’s the other thing in his expression that confuses me, as if his arousal is unwanted and it’s making him angry. His nostrils flare like he’s taking in my scent, a wolf sniffing the air for the aroma of fear that always gives away the prey.
“It was a mistake,” I say slowly.
“Yes. It was.”
“Sorry. Sometimes I do crazy…” I stop talking. The intensity of his gaze, the barely tethered tension in his body surrounds me from all sides, stealing my breath and my words.
“But you’re here now.” His gaze drops to my mouth. He watches my tongue dart out, then back in again. He meets my gaze. Darkness staring me in the face. “And now that you are, what do you think I should do with you?”
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SAVAGE TALES
How to Choose a Cowboy – A Savage Interactive
How to Break a Cowboy – A Savage Tale
How to Train a Lover – A Savage Interactive
How to Debauch a Biker – A Savage Tale
How to Tempt a Tycoon – A Savage Interactive
How to Tempt a Tycoon - A Savage Tale (Non-Interactive)
How to Free a Biker – A Savage Tale ~ coming soon
How to Marry a Cowboy – A Savage Interactive ~ coming soon
How to Tame a Beast - A Savage Tale ~ coming soon
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WICKED ONE NIGHT STANDS
The Chase
The Window
The Hunt
The Cop
* * *
SEDUCTION SERIES - Harlequin Blaze
Sweet Seduction
Big Sky Seduction - Harlequin Blaze
A Christmas Seduction
A Wild Seduction
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STAND ALONE BOOKS
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Sex, Spies and Photographs
Party of Three
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About Daire St. Denis
One word describes Daire’s stories…HOT! Check out what satisfied Amazon customers had to say about HOW TO BREAK A COWBOY - A Savage Tale
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“HOT, HOT, HOT - Do NOT read it in a public place or with friends and family around. It is definitely 5 alarm hot.”
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Daire St. Denis is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. She’s an adventure seeker, an ancient history addict, a seasonal hermit and a wine lover. She writes smoking hot, contemporary romance where the pages are steeped in sensuality and there’s always a dash of the unexpected. The best way to spice things up is to check out her new series of interactive tales, WICKED WAY INTERACTIVES, a fun new format in sexy storytelling.
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Abducted
Book 1 of The Alien Mate Index
Evangeline Anderson
The Alien Mate Index
Book 1: Abduct
ed
Evangeline Anderson Books
* * *
Copyright © 2016 by Evangeline Anderson
* * *
www.evangelineanderson.com
With love to all my Kindred readers. If you like Kindred, I think you'll love Alien Mate Index as well. I write these books with all of you in mind. I feel very blessed to have such awesome people to pretend with me.
Hugs and Happy Reading to you all!
Evangeline
Author’s Note
Throughout this book, you'll notice lots of references to different sci-fi and fantasy shows and movies because, well, I'm a geek. : ) I thought it would be fun to see how many of you are as geeky as I am.
If you want to list the references as you see them, then send me the list at [email protected], I will put your name in the pot for the drawing of a gift card.
This contest is good until book number 2 of Alien Mate Index, Protected comes out. Good luck and see how many you can find! Some are hidden and there's one I bet no one will get ; )
Evangeline
The Alien Mate Index
or
How I became an Alien Mail Order Bride
Part I
Through the Looking Glass (No, seriously, I’m not kidding. I actually went through a freaking looking glass.)
Chapter 1
Zoe
All the hottest mail order brides come from Russia.
Russia or somewhere over in the Ukraine. At least, that’s what it looks like if you’re surfing the Internet late at night and you run across one of those awful Bride sites.
All those women are tall and thin with sleek, perfect hair and sexy smiles. Oh, and they’re all willing to travel halfway around the world to get out of the crappy place they’re living and start a new life.
Of course, they might change their minds if they found out they’d have to travel halfway across the freaking universe. That might be a deal breaker. I know it would have been for me—if anyone had given me a choice.
I didn’t get a choice though. In fact, I didn’t even know I was in the AMI. That’s the Alien Mate Index—which is the site full of women that Alien males with a taste for Earth girl coochie can choose from. Hell, I didn’t even know there was an Alien Mate Index at all!
Until I got abducted.
Now, lest you go thinking that I’m some six-foot tall, hot, blonde supermodel, let me set the record straight. I’m not. I’m so not.
I’m five four in my stocking feet and I have curly auburn hair that tends to frizz on a humid day. And since I live in Florida, every day is a humid day.
In addition to not being tall with sleek blonde hair, I am also not thin. That’s okay though—I’m not afraid to admit I’m plus sized. I own my curves and I love them. I spent too many years at Weight Watchers counting points until I felt like a freaking adding machine. Finally I decided, you know what? Forget it. Me getting skinny just isn’t going to happen.
Now I live my life by the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the time I eat healthy and the other twenty percent I eat a damn donut if I want it. So what if I’m a size sixteen the rest of my life? I can deal with that as long as I don’t have to live on nothing but kale and quinoa. Krispy Kreme is more my style anyway.
I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not exactly mail order bride material. I’m just an ordinary girl with a little more junk in the trunk than usual, flyaway red hair, and too many freckles. I’m not the kind of girl a guy would point to on a website and go—“Her—oh my God, I’ve got to have her.”
At least, I didn’t think so.
Again, until I got abducted.
But let me tell you about that—and you might want to take some notes. You might want to know what or who might be coming for you. That’s because you never can tell who might be watching you, even when you’re having the most boring, awful, ordinary day of your life…
* * *
“Oh my God, he’s being an asshole again. I’m telling you, Leah, I can’t take much more,” I muttered into my phone as I sat huddled in a stall of the employee bathroom at Lauder, Lauder and Associates. I worked as a paralegal there and the lawyer I was assigned to, Dayton Lauder the third, was a real piece of work.
Dayton always spoke in this booming voice, as though he was addressing a crowd of admirers and he wanted the ones in the back to be able to hear him. Unfortunately, most days it was just him and me and I was most definitely not an admirer. That didn’t stop him from “yell-talking”(as my friend Charlotte called it) all the time, though. I ended most work days with a pounding headache.
If poor voice modulation was the worst thing I had to put up with, I might not have minded so much. Unfortunately, Dayton had other problems that put the “yell-talking” one in the shade.
One problem was his personal hygiene—or lack thereof. When most people think of a lawyer, they imagine some sexy associate from The Good Wife with an immaculate, pressed, tailored suit, neatly clipped hair, and manicured hands.
Not Dayton Lauder the third.
As a tax lawyer, he didn’t really go to court much. He just sat in his office and did paperwork, so I guess he thought it didn’t matter how he came to work.
Well, it mattered to me. Or anybody that got too close to him.
My boss had a love affair with brown, polyester suits. I say “suits” but in fact, I was convinced he only owned one of them which he wore every single day and never cleaned. It was rumpled and wrinkled and he wore it with a stained white shirt that had dirt marks on the collar and sleeves. Every time he waved his arms—he did this a lot while he was “yell-talking”—a huge cloud of nauseating BO would waft out, nearly knocking me over if I stood too close.
He had coffee breath too—not too surprising since he had me brew him several pots a day. Of course, I’m a paralegal, not a freaking barista but the economy sucked and I needed the job. So I brewed the damn coffee and even fixed it just the way he liked it—three creams and four sugars.
Now, people can be socially awkward and not be horrible. But again, not my boss. He shouted at me a lot and just that morning he’d actually thrown a stapler at my head because I had stapled his papers in the top left hand corner instead of putting the staple right in the middle where he preferred it.
What an ass.
After the stapler incident, I had run to the bathroom where I was pouring out my heart to Leah, one of my two best friends.
“Oh, Zoe, I’m so sorry.” Leah had a soft, sweet voice—everything about her was soft and sweet actually—that I normally found soothing. But today, I was too upset to be soothed.
“He threw a stapler at my freaking head,” I emphasized.
“That’s awful,” she exclaimed. And then I heard her say, “All right, sweetheart, I’ll help you find your pony in just a minute. Right now, though, Miss Heidi is in charge. Okay?”
Leah works in a private daycare center that specializes in mildly autistic children and she’s better with kids than I could ever be. Talk about the patience of a saint.
“Kids sneaking into the break room again?” I asked.
She sighed. “Yes, I’m sorry. Heidi is supposed to be in charge but they always seem to want me. Makes it hard to take a break.”
“I shouldn’t be taking up your time then,” I said. “Let me let you go.”
“No—keep talking. You need to get it off your chest.” Leah would make an awesome therapist, I swear, which is what she really wanted to be if she could ever get back to school.
There was a clicking on the line that I recognized.
“Oh, no. Hang on,” Leah said, her soft voice suddenly filled with dread. There was a pause and I wondered if it was Gerald, her overprotective fiancée calling. Leah always claimed he had her best interest at heart but over time he had become more and more controlling until Charlotte, my other best friend, and I, were really worried about her.
A moment later, Leah came back on.
“It’s just Cha
rlotte,” she said, her voice filled with relief. “Should I put her on too?”
“Of course. She must have gotten my message—I called her before I called you.” I cleared my throat. “I, uh, thought it might be Gerald calling you again,” I said as she merged the calls.
“Nope. He’s off on a business trip this weekend.” Leah’s voice sounded light and happy—I wondered if she had any idea that she sounded that way when her fiancée was gone.
“Who’s on a business trip? Gerald?” Charlotte’s no-nonsense voice came on the line, filled with disbelief. “And he trusts you to be in the house alone all weekend?”
“Of course he trusts me.” There was a note of defensiveness in Leah’s voice that worried me. I had never liked her fiancée and lately his nasty attitude seemed to be getting worse. But now wasn’t the time to stage a “your boyfriend is a controlling asshole” intervention. Taking pity on her, I decided to turn the conversation back to my current situation.
Quickly, I outlined the situation to Charlotte. She’s a nurse practitioner working for an orthopedic surgeon—he even lets her assist in some of the surgeries he does. She has the best job by far of the three of us but I can’t be jealous of her for it—she really busted her ass to get where she is. Not that getting a paralegal degree is all rainbows and unicorns but it’s not as complicated as what Charlotte is doing.
