by Lynne Silver
Until Now.
Bienvenidos a Miami. Welcome to the hottest party scene in the US. Behind all the glitter, hard bodies and sexy drinks, the lives of the hard-partying residents of the 305 aren’t all they seem.
Cat Ross struggles to make ends meet. If she doesn’t scrounge up enough cash for rent and to pay off her brother’s drug dealers, she’ll be sleeping at a shelter, and her beloved brother, Danny, will be in worse trouble.
As Miami’s hottest party promoter, it looks as if Ian Lawrence’s life is fun and games, but partying this hard takes work, and Ian takes business seriously. He wasn’t counting on his former best friend’s little sister, Cat Ross, to come crashing back into his life. She was the one girl who mattered until he messed things up by sleeping with her on her eighteenth birthday, and then running.
As Cat and Ian’s relationship reignites, he wants to protect her by keeping her brother away. But it’s not easy for Cat to choose between her last living family member and the man she’s always loved.
To purchase and read this and other books by Lynne Silver, please visit Lynne’s website:
www.lynnesilver.com/bookshelf
Don’t miss
THE ROSWELL AFFAIR by Anne Bordeaux
Available now!
The Dirty Bits from Carina Press give you what you want, when you want it. Designed to be read in an hour or two, these sex-filled micro-romances are guaranteed to pack a punch and deliver a happily-ever-after.
Roswell, New Mexico
1947
Seven feet tall. Dark skin. Blue luminescent tattoos. Do they cover his entire body?
Katharine Leigh Parker’s orders are the last things on her mind when she sees him. She went from fetching coffee to communicating with an honest-to-god alien in barely a day. But this was no little green man.
First contact happens right there with him—Breccon Tallel—still chained to the table, their fated bond overshadowing her analytical mind. Her duty.
Breccon promises Katharine pleasures unlike any she’s experienced if she frees him. The scientist in her weighs the risks. The human fears the unknown. But the desire—the need—in her knows she’ll give in to whatever Breccon asks.
For those times when size does matter. The Dirty Bits from Carina Press: Quick and dirty, just the way we like it.
The Roswell Affair
by Anne Bordeaux
Chapter One
Black Site 51, Somewhere in the Middle of the Nevadan Desert 1947
Lieutenant Katharine Parker, a nurse formerly of the 801st Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, was about to make first contact with an extraterrestrial.
“Do you have everything you need?”
The Black Site known as Area 51 stretched around Katharine as far as her eyes could see, a complex pattern of metallic buildings reaching over the curve of the horizon. Upon her arrival on-site, she was introduced to Lieutenant Miller, a young, stern-faced operative in an unfamiliar black uniform whose eyes kept drifting to her tits.
She considered his question. Need was such a relative concept. There was no protocol, no guidebook, and certainly no scientific method for dealing with this level of unknown. During the six-hour ride to the Black Site—during which the Military Police escorting General McGowan’s Jeep tied a black bag over Katharine’s head to keep her from seeing where, exactly, the black site was—the young woman asked hundreds of questions. They refused to speak to her, refused to give her any indication or help in her pursuit of understanding. Without any information about the creature, how would she be sure that she had what she needed until it was too late to get it? All she knew was that at approximately 2100 hours the night before, she watched a ship crash outside of Fort Walker, where she was stationed, reported it to her commanding officer, and had gotten herself thrown on the first covert convoy here. Beyond what she saw with her own eyes, the only thing she knew about her assignment was those two little words that rang in her ears from the first moment she’d heard it in the briefing. Extraterrestrial.
She tightened her grip on her bag, the same tattered blue rucksack she carried with her every time she flew during the war. The familiar feeling of its patchwork strap comforted her as she took account of the bag’s contents. Pencil. Paper. Water canteen. Tape measure. Gas mask. Solar system map. Camera. Pistol. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
“I’m ready,” was her only response. She feared if she opened her mouth any further, she might end up vomiting. As the water from her decontamination shower sunk into her skin, she tried to wrap her mind around the enormity of the task before her. An alien waited for her on the other side of that door. Vertigo rocked her world.
“Good.” He nodded at her, a sign that she took to be of confidence rather than of farewell, before walking away and shouting to the soldiers manning the door’s massive external locking mechanism, “Open ’er up!”
Katharine refused to flinch at the deafening grind of metal against metal; with single-minded focus and an emotionless blanch to her skin, she stared into the frozen darkness of the former airplane shed.
Once inside the hangar with the mechanized doors bolted closed behind them, rows of ceiling lights illuminated the once grand B-17 storage facility. Light flooded her world. Katharine blinked rapidly to return her sight, taking in every detail of the room around her. Room was not generous enough a description. Roughly the size of two football fields stretched end-to-end, Hangar 8 once held the same bombing and ferrying planes that carried Katharine around the world. Had someone dropped her here without any context, she still could have told him exactly what it was. Even two years after the war, the smell of tobacco and fuselage paint burned the hairs on the inside of her nose.
However, where Katharine used to enter buildings like this and see their floors lined with spare parts and oil cans, nudie magazines and discarded copies of Stars and Stripes, men with oil black cheeks and cramped hands contorted around wrenches, now there was nothing but a table raised on a stone platform in the center of the vast, empty space. From her vantage point, she could see a form atop of it, but she couldn’t get a good look at the subject, only the table upon which it lay prone.
In her briefing, when they said the subject would be restrained, she’d assumed they meant handcuffs, something that would at least give the creature some movement. The chains wrapping their way around the metal table, stretching from the four corners of the long rectangle, did nothing to inspire confidence in this situation. How would this creature react to being bound? Could she communicate with something so defeated? Would it lash out at her for being a part of the capturing force or welcome her help if it meant that she would release it from its bonds? Uncertainty sent shivers down Katharine’s spine even in the stuffy heat.
Following the marching crowd, she took her first step to approach the subject. She had no time to measure her own response because at that very moment, the air rattled with the shaking of heaving chains and a low, animalistic groan.
“It’s awake! Settle him down, boys.”
The men broke the formation of their perfect circle around the scientist, leaving her behind to point their weapons at the source of the noise. Gathering herself, Katharine pursued them.
“Ready at arms!”
Everything happened so fast, the details blurred in a high-speed haze. A creature roared. A tranquilizer dart ricocheted off of a metal table. The men laughed and shouted, calling out curses and crude jokes to each other as their prisoner yawped and cried, struggled and tore against his chains. The sport made her sick.
“Stop! Stop it! Stop this now!” She screamed.
But there was no stopping them. Katharine reached for the nearest man, yanking on the sleeve of his black uniform, only to get roughly shoved in the dirt so he could return to taking lazy, cheap shots at the captive. She knew there was no way these men would shoot at the scientist; the only way to save him wou
ld be to shield him herself. Picking herself up, she tore across the hail, her thick legs pushing until she leapt upon the creature, shielding his body with hers.
A ceasefire ensued. An eerie quiet hummed through the hangar. The creature beneath her, the alien that she had not yet gotten a good look at, whimpered, his body shaking beneath hers. The vibrations massaged her skin; his warmth seeped in through her clothes. In spite of everything going on around her, Katharine couldn’t help a twinge of—was it lust?—when she realized he was almost completely naked beneath her. His bare chest pressed against her clothed one. They breathed in time with one another. Lieutenant Miller stepped forward, stretching a cautious hand out to the woman before him.
“Ma’am... Get back.”
“No!” She bellowed with an authority she did not possess. “Is this how you ‘contain’ it? No wonder we haven’t made any progress. Get out. All of you, I order you to get out.”
She had no rank to make such a decision, but there would be no stopping her.
“That isn’t your call,” Miller said.
Beneath her, she felt the creature’s breath hitch. Did he understand English? Moving slowly so as not to disturb the subject, she rose to her feet, standing at her full height. The extra two feet allowed by the raised platform let her to look down her nose at the soldier. She was a medical scientist with a Harvard degree, an Air Evacuation nurse with four letters of commendation and a Bronze Star with three years of wartime experience under her belt, and a nurse at Walker Air Force Base since the end of the war. She understood the importance of keeping a patient safe, and she would do it now. Even if her knees were weak from their contact and the man standing below her looked as if he had half a mind to slug her.
“You want him to send a message to his space pals about leveling this place? You don’t know what kind of technology they could have, what they could inflict on us. If you want answers, I’m the only one who can get them, and I say that makes me outrank you.”
There was no evidence that she was the only one who could get the answers. There was no evidence that she would be able to make any more progress with this creature than anyone else that came before her. But she figured if she said it loud enough and kept her shoulders perfectly square, she might be able to pull the lie off.
For an unbearably long moment, Miller considered her and the options before him. Then, he took a step back, waving to those under his command.
“Stand down.” He ignored the look of disbelief from the men around him. “Fall out.”
A minute later, the small army disappeared and the mechanized door locked behind him. Katharine was alone. Alone with an extraterrestrial. She gulped. Dropping her pack to the floor, she collected and stitched together every piece of her courage. Breathe in. Breathe out, she encouraged, rubbing her hands on her skirt to stop them shaking. You’re a scientist, dammit. You can handle anything. When she finally ordered her muscles to turn and face the subject, nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.
Rummaging in her pack without ever breaking her gaze from his still form, she reached for her notebook and pencil, scribbling every thought that popped into her head. Seven foot, four or five inches. Humanoid with pronounced jawbone, ridges on nose. Dark skin. Blue, luminescent tattoos (Are they birthmarks?) crossing most of his visible body. Do they cover his...entire body? More muscular than any human male. Scarification around the body looks incidental. A soldier? Impact from bullets and tranquilizers have left no obvious bodily impact except for some minor flesh wounds—superior healing? Do the tranquilizers affect him whatsoever?
But it was more than that. More than the...scientific. Try as she might, there was no escaping the animal that purred inside her at the sight of him. There was no halting her eyes as they shifted from the cold, cataloging gaze of a nurse to the searching eyes of a woman. She knew it was wrong. He was a captive. A subject. Yet, she couldn’t help but see him as more than that. He was coiled sex. His muscular form, bound to the metal table, was open and ready to receive anything. Katharine shivered, the muscles deep in her stomach twitching as she thought of all the dirty things she could do to that body. His hips demanded to be straddled. His chest called out for her to lick... And his manhood was covered only with the thin leather of a baltea, leaving him exposed to her touch. If she wanted, she could just reach out...
Tentatively, she dragged her pack to the elevated platform around his bed for a closer look, only to realize that the creature’s blue eyes were wide open, staring at her.
“Ah!” She jumped in fright, then giggled at her own fearful leaping, collecting herself. After all, the creature was in chains. What could he possibly do to her?
“Hello,” Katharine looked into his eyes, assessing their every property. What were they trying to tell her? She compared their color, their shape, their emotion, with everything in her fragile, human memory, and could come up with only one solution, only one reason why he fought against the chains when he heard the boots of the soldiers but sat totally still when she approached. He trusts me. She lost herself in his eyes, wondering if he could see in hers the filthy daydreams that penetrated her professional gaze. Another step, and she was as close as she could be without touching him. Oh... How she wanted to touch him.
He was... She swallowed, hard. Handsome. Breathtaking. The young scientist’s mouth dried as she tried to focus on his eyes. Even in the damp overhead lights, he shined like perfect sea-glass; his chiseled features and half-exposed body demanded attention. She cleared her throat, swallowing to try and regain some of her composure. He’s a subject. A scientific discovery waiting to happen. Not something for you to get soft-hearted over.
“Hello.” She smiled, hoping that even in chains he could see he was genuine, a non-threat, but hoping even more that a return to protocol would stop the puddle growing between her legs. “I’m Katharine.”
The creature’s brow furrowed in confusion. Of course he doesn’t know English, you numbskull, Katharine scolded herself. She scraped the rims of her mind, searching for some way to communicate. As a flight nurse, she used smiles and songs to offer friendship to the Germans and Italians who came under her charge. But now, she had to ask him questions and get answers. Singing and smiling wouldn’t be enough.
“I’m—” she pointed to herself, teaching the two words as if teaching them to a child “—Katharine.”
He opened his mouth to speak and a traitorous flicker of hope flashed in her chest. But, instead of repeating her words, he went into his own stream of an unfamiliar dialect, delivering each word with a conviction the likes of which Katharine had never seen any human speak. For a moment, she considered trying to scribble down the phonetics of his speech so she could later hand it over to a linguistics expert, but the words were coming too loud and too fast. What do I do? How do I communicate? What language do all species speak?
“Yakhaali truizi renyil nu. Waharaf bendameski zoert prinom wrexemet, faharil—”
Katharine surveyed the alien once more, trying to listen to the words his wide eyes were trying to convey. His wide eyes that looked desperate and hungry all at once. Katharine’s stomach twisted in knots as those two warring emotions battled inside her own body. Here she was, faced with an alien creature whose survival was her duty and who sent thrills straight to her sex... Katharine’s eyes went wide. Her heart faltered. It occurred to her then that there was only one language that every species spoke. Only one way to communicate peace in every language, to every people.
So, she bent down. Placed her hand on a complex pattern of tattoos over his heart. And kissed him. It was unscientific. It was dangerous. It was unthinkable. But it was the only way she knew to communicate peace.
And, oh, was it worth it. Katharine ducked to brush his lips with hers, intending to convey the message and break away. A peck to put forth an offer of non-violence and gentility. But then, his soft lips moved beneath hers and she was lost.
Electricity pulled her in, dragging her down as her kiss melted into his. A low moan of satisfaction rumbled from his chest straight to the juncture between her thighs. She wasn’t imagining the sex in his body. It was there, and it was in his kiss.
“Katharine.”
She leapt away at the sound of an accented voice in her head, speaking her name as clearly as if he were saying it out loud. She clutched her own chest for support. So many emotions—fear, lust, thrill, fascination—fought for her attention; she could give no one feeling complete reign over her body.
“Did you—” She couldn’t help but begin the question in English as a force of habit.
Her subject nodded, a slight tilt of his head, but made no move to open his mouth and reply. What is going on here, she wanted to scream and beg the universe to answer, but she knew that there was only one way to find out what was on the other side of this labyrinth. She had to go through it.
Slipping off her workday heels and dropping them with a satisfying clunk to the concrete below her, she couldn’t help but relish the undivided attention of the...subject. It felt strange to call him that after what they had shared, the passion that crackled in the air between them, in their lips when they kissed. His abrupt stare took in every inch of her form; Katharine shivered as his gaze caressed her breasts, the curve of her hips, and the lift of her ass, memorizing every detail. The stare was so real, so pointed and true, that it almost felt as if she were being caressed by him, her ass groped, her hard nipples flicked.
Picking up the folds of her skirt and hiking them up around her waist, Katharine attempted to keep her thoughts clinical as she slid onto the restriction table, climbing the length of the massive man’s body until she could straddle his waist. Desire puddled deep in the pits of her stomach as she rubbed her pussy against the lower tunic covering his manhood. His erect member rubbed the loose cotton of her panties; she nearly moaned at the feeling. She fought to keep her eyes from rolling back in her head, but couldn’t fight the soft rolling of her hips against him. It felt too damn good.
