Beast's Beauty, page 1
Beauty’s Beast
Fractured Fairytales & Mangled Myths, Alien Scifi Abduction Romance, Book One
Laney Kaye
Christina Wilder
CrpssWorlds Publishing
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The use of artist and song titles, locations, and products throughout this book are done so for storytelling purposes and should in no way be seen as advertisement. Trademark names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.
Copyright © CrossWorlds Publishing 2019
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ASIN: B07XCF3RYP
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Contents
Books by Christina Wilder & Laney Kaye
Acknowledgments
1. Amelia
2. Jrecatoa
3. Amelia
4. Jrec
5. Amelia
6. Jrecatoa
7. Amelia
8. Jrecatoa
9. Amelia
10. Jrecatoa
11. Amelia
12. Jrecatoa
13. Amelia
14. Jrecatoa
15. Amelia
16. Jrec
17. Amelia
18. Jrec
19. Amelia
Books by Laney Kaye & Christina Wilder
Chapter One
…still not enough Alien romance?
Abducted By The Alien Hottie
Chapter One
Books by Christina Wilder & Laney Kaye
CAT SHIFTERS OF AAIDAR SERIES
Escape
Engage
Ensnare
Endings
FRACTURED FAIRYTALES & MANGLED MYTHS:
ALIEN ABDUCTION SERIES
Beast's Beauty
Minotaur's Mate
By Christina Wilder
DRAGON MATED
A Steamy, Funny Novella Series
Captured by a dragon
Hunted by a dragon
Claimed by a dragon
By Laney Kaye
FLIRTY, DIRTY, SHORTY ALIEN ROMCOM SERIES
Abducted by the Alien Hottie
Knocked up by the Alien Hottie
Adored by the Alien Hottie
THE LURE OF THE MER SERIES
Hook
Line
Amazon
The Wild Rose Press
THE SPIRIT OF OHANA CRUISE SHIP SERIES
Hawaiian Hurricane
Hawaiian Taboo
BENT, NOT BROKEN SERIES
Malicious Desire
Acknowledgments
For Taylor, who can read this in about five years. Maybe ten.
With special thanks to Alex and Elena for their input and advice, and with gratitude to all my critique partners, whether they worked on this story or others.
~ Laney
For my friends, CPs, and family.
As always, your support means the
world to me.
~Christina
A beauty stolen from earth
Gifted to an alien beast.
Can love set them both free?
Amelia: Abducted by aliens and taken to their ship, my best friend and I are desperate to escape and return to Earth. I’m tossed into a cell with a reptilian alien and told I must satisfy him or they’ll hurt my friend. I never thought giving in to his needs might satisfy my own…
Then they put me with a new beast and say we're going to compete in a deadly game called the Rampage. Alien Hunger Games anyone?
The beast is snarly and ferocious, and he could rip me apart with his tusks and claws. Yet in his eyes, I sense something vulnerable. Lonely. With hints of something I found with the other alien.
I'll do whatever I can to soothe the beast and convince him to help me win the Rampage. Because losing means death.
Jrecatoa: I was once a man, a Krakarian warrior.
That’s all gone now. Hidden beneath this abominable exterior, far more Beast than man. Not only in appearance, either—because the scent and the sight of this female do things to me. Things that surely no man would ever feel.
Of course, I’ve wanted women before. Had women before.
But I’ve never needed them like this.
She’s awoken my Hunger.
But maybe that’s just as well—without the fury of the Hunger, neither of us has any chance of surviving the Rampage.
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1
Amelia
Funny how music could turn out to be prophetic. Maybe not immediately, but eventually…
“Starfall is moonfall,” Lily and I sang out together as I drove through the night. The miles clipped beneath my vehicle in a long, black strip stretching toward the horizon, punctuated by a yellow stripe down the center. With too much of the night left to travel, we hoped to make it through the desert and then to our home in northern California by morning. Just in time to crash, sleep twenty-four hours, then get up and go to work the next day.
“Stars align. The world collides,” I shouted, my hand drumming on the steering wheel as I tapped into my inner rock star. Without the voice, because I couldn’t sing for crap.
After shoving her long blonde hair up into a hasty ponytail, Lily cricked her neck and pointed out the windshield, toward the sky. “The world’s…” Her voice trailed off with a squeak. She leaned forward in the passenger seat as far as the seatbelt would let her. “Hey, what’s that?”
Clutching the steering wheel to pull myself closer to the glass, I eased my foot off the accelerator and strained to see what she was talking about. Stars peppered the indigo night, and I easily picked out the familiar constellations of Hercules and Draco.
Plus, the brightest object I’d ever seen hovering above and to the right of us. A glowing yellow ball. Not tiny like something you’d throw for a dog to fetch but big, the size of the silver globe at Epcot. From what I could see from here, that is.
Was it a meteor? Though, being stationary, that idea didn’t feel right.
“I gotta see.” Lily tapped my arm. “Pull over. Pull over. I want to get out. Look at the light.” She pointed again. “It’s aliens.” Her voice took on a fake, creeped-out tone. Eyes widening as she grinned at me, she hummed the music from the Twilight Zone.
“Oh!” I said, getting into the mood she’d set. “They’ve come to abduct us and take us to their spaceship where they’ll…” I shivered through my laughter.
“Please no anal probes,” Lily said, and we snickered together.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “They’ll extract our DNA before returning us to Earth completely unaware of what happened. We’ll wake in the car with a headache and bad breath, wondering why the hell we decided to sleep by the road.”
She frowned. “Why bad breath?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we’re forced to eat alien food while we’re up there and it’s garlicky?”
She chuckled as I put on my blinker to indicate I was pulling onto the rough shoulder. Not that there was anyone around to care if I didn’t signal my intentions. But I was known as the Safety Queen. I avoided danger.
No harm in stopping a moment to see what was going on. We needed to stretch our legs anyway.
As I came to a stop and shifted the vehicle into park, Lily unbuckled. “Come on,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “I want to see what it is!”
The thought of trooping through the desert at night made goosebumps pepper my skin. Most of the time, I played it safe and remained on pavement. Nothing dangerous there other than slimy dudes telling me to smile. “There could be snakes out there. Scorpions.” I wasn’t making this up. “Other creepy desert creatures.”
“Noooo,” Lily said in awe. “Snakes and scorpions in a desert?” She popped open her door and thrust her feet out, totally fearless. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nighttime. They’re probably curled up under rocks, asleep.”
Did desert creatures ever sleep?
Grumbling good-naturedly about how we were going to wind up in trouble, I opened my door and stepped outside. Cool air greeted me, the heat of the day having fled hours ago. I lifted my long hair off my neck and let the light breeze drift down the back of my shirt. Puffing, I fanned the front of my tee. Lily insisted ice ran through her veins and had turned on the car’s heat the second the sun set. I’d been roasting for ages.
As I strode around the back of my car, the pavement radiated warmth up through my sneakers, toasting the soles of my feet. “Hey. Wait for me.”
“I’m going pee while we’re here,” she said. Standing on the white line marking the edge of the road, she fumbled with her shorts’ waistband. “You need to go, too.”
“Don’t have to,” I whined.
“But we agreed that we’d always pee at the same time,” Lily said, hauling down her shorts. Tissues in one hand, she held the material to the side with the other while squatting and jutting her butt out. “Then we won’t need to stop ten thousand times.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “You want to go here? You could poke your butt with a cactus.”
“Nothing wrong with doing it as nature intended. Besides, you’ve seen my worldly charms before.”
Since we shared an apartment, I had. “Still.”
“Your snake friends won’t care,” she added.
I snorted as I passed her, trooping down the sandy gravel sloping away from the road, my shoes crunching on small sticks and rocks. Thicker vegetation brushed against the calves of my jeans but I wasn’t too worried about running into a snake or a scorpion. There must be a better place for them to hang out other than beside a road.
I’d only gone about twenty feet from the car when a sense of unease made me stop abruptly. Too dark to see, I stumbled over a root or rock or something, almost falling on the ground.
“My God,” Lily squeaked out behind me, horror and amazement rising in her voice.
“What?” I asked, peering around. Dusky hills rolled away ahead of us interspersed with random scruffy shrubs. Fortunately, no snakes I could see so far. “False alarm? Our aliens fled the scene?”
“It’s…it’s…” Head tipped back, she stared up with creases deepening on her pretty face. Her hand fluttered against her chest. “Something’s…”
I looked up, expecting to find who-knows-what. Perhaps an oddly placed streetlight? Or a cell tower with a light on top.
The enormous, glowing ball far above us pulsed and flickering red and blue lights flared in a rolling circle around the outside of the large object. A low rumble shook the ground, and the glowing thing grew larger as if it came closer.
Chills tripped down my spine and every hair on my arms stood on end.
Before I could shout run, a long beam of light shot from the ball, in our direction. It hit the ground about five feet away without making a sound, not even stirring up a puff of soil. Wide, the ray pulsated like the ball had seconds ago. Something—no, multiple somethings—slowly solidified in the beam.
Beam me up—or in this case, beam me down—was coming true before my eyes.
I gulped, my skin flashing fire. “We need to get—”
A loud boom was followed by Lily’s shriek. I whirled around, catching her yanking up her shorts. She hauled on the hem of her t-shirt, covering herself completely. Her mouth ajar, her eyes widened. “What the…?”
I pivoted back to where the beam had landed. The light had disappeared but it left five creatures behind. Moonlight glinted off metal things the burly beings held in their hands. Four hands each, since they all had two arms on either side of their bodies. Tails whipped around their legs, and they had black, twisted horns like a mountain goat’s on their heads.
One grinned, revealing glistening fangs. It — he? — shoved his long, scraggly white hair off his face.
“They…They’re wearing fur,” I stuttered out. As if their clothing choices mattered. But if they possessed technology capable of transporting them through a beam of light, let alone the spacecraft hovering above us, why wouldn’t they wear something more…spacesuit-like? Something made from synthetic fibers?
“Stop gawking,” Lily yelled. “We gotta…Go, go!”
Terror bolted through me, unlocking my legs from where they’d solidified on the sandy soil.
I needed to get to the car and drive the hell away from here.
My arms flailing, I scrambled toward the road. Lily clawed at the car door handle, bursts of high-pitched fear erupting from her lips.
One of the creatures snagged the back of my t-shirt and brought me to a jarring halt. It hauled me around to face it, and I pointlessly wished I’d floored my vehicle rather than pull over to check this out.
Then we’d be miles away from here by now.
Miles away from them.
2
Jrecatoa
“Heads up!” Christophus tossed a bottle across the cabin toward me. Though I was nine sheets to the wind, I reflexively caught the benzal without moving from the industrial-nylonium covered couch. I flipped the cap and chugged the burning alcohol in one long draft.
“Hells, man, you’re drinking me under the table,” Akanite groaned.
“You know it, dude. Every time. But you’re homeless, because Samaras has already taken that space. Literally.” I gestured at our comrade, who lay partly obscured by the low table that housed the wreckage of our revelry.
Samaras reached up and waved one hand, the four joints in each finger straightening independently until they stood as rigid as sirdar posts, like their inflexibility proved his sobriety. “Still here, guys. Just letting my eyeballs rest for five.”
“Sure,” I snorted. As senior officer, I had to hope my words weren’t as badly slurred as his. Best I kept my shit-talking to a minimum, though, because chances were, after four hours of celebrating, the only sense I was making was inside my own head.
I displayed my empty bottle, waggling it from side-to-side like I wanted a refill. And hoping like hells the chest alongside Akanite’s knees was empty.
“Man, you have hollow legs,” he complained as he almost toppled from his chair, leaning down to rummage in the box. “Time’s done you no harm. You still drink like a cadet.”
He was wrong. I was definitely at least two bottles past having enough to drink. I thumped a fist on my chest, my legs stretched well across the small lounging space. Military craft weren’t big on providing material comforts, like cushy furniture or opulent recreational areas. “Like a fine benzal, I only get better with age. Spent the last fifteen years improving my toleration.” Toleration? Hells, was that even a word? Nope, most likely not. I shook my head to clear the gray fog, but immediately regretted the movement. Damn, this was going to hurt in the morning.
Seemed my friends were well past noticing my grammatical confusion, though. Akanite tossed another bottle in my direction—which I barely caught. My dexterity was taking an alcohol-soaked beating but hells, it wasn’t often the five of us got together, our ships linked in the classic five-pointed star formation by the clear, flexible docking tubes, which snaked like umbilical cords through the frozen vastness of space. I was damn glad the other four had ventured to my cruiser. I’d never had any love of the barely-controlled space-swim through the low-grav tubes.
Christophus took a long drag on a tamus rollup. He blew a cloud of green smoke up into the temperature-controlled atmosphere of the cabin, waiting for it to settle into two rings, one around each of his horns, before he held the rollie toward me.
I waved a hand in refusal. “Man, trying to give the stuff up.”
Eilban tipped back his head and released a howl of laughter. A literal howl; a Lupinkin, he retained the elongated jawline and yellow eyes of the breed, but he had, like the rest of his kin, long ago lost the ability to shift. “Yeah, you’ve been saying that ever since you damn near ended up married to a purchase-mate at that sleaze-easy, right?”
“Don’t think it went quite that far.” But I had been young and stupid enough to let the weed cloud my mind. A stupid grin cracked my face; with my new ‘toleration’, maybe I could afford to kick back a bit.
Christophus waggled the joint. “C’mon, man. It’s not every day that five of the Fleet’s finest combine forces to route the galaxy of the scourge of evil Ousndjarkd pirates.”
“You’re a poet, my friend,” Samaras slurred, reaching out for the joint after I’d taken a drag. I held the smoke in my lungs for a moment before releasing it to drift up to cloud the ceiling as Samaras struggled with his words. “But you are also entirely correct. We are the finesht…finesht…fine…hells, what are we, again?”
