Written in the Stars: Science Fiction Romance Anthology Read online

  Contents

  Table of Contents

  Mia and the Alien Prince

  The Broadcast

  Another Earth

  Claimed

  Alien to Love

  Alien Mercenary’s Desire

  Copyright Page

  Written in the Stars

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Mia and the Alien Prince by Megan Alban

  Crown Prince Khiron of the Delinan Empire is looking for the fiancée he hardly knows, who’s doing aid work on a far-flung planet. The lovely local female he meets on a stopover on Mars shouldn’t be more than a brief distraction.

  Mia Langland has her life planned out. She’ll work another couple of years, waitressing on Mars, then she’ll go home to Earth to help children orphaned in the devastating global floods. She doesn’t want some alien prince messing with her heart—especially when he’s engaged to somebody else.

  Will Prince Khiron help Mia follow her dream, or will her own deepest desires pull her into an affair that could ruin both of their lives—and bring down the galactic empire?

  The Broadcast by Billie Hart

  For years, alien technologist Alyse Pepperfield has dreamed of advancing human discoveries. That’s why she’s on planet SH-17. To find the source of the strange, alien broadcast. So four years in, when a critical mission to the mine fields falls on Alyse’s shoulders, she takes it, despite the approaching meteorite storm.

  But when danger strikes on the field, Alyse’s nerves steer her thoughts to one man. Her boss, the spunky, young space marine Captain Darner, has always been there for her. And the more she discovers in the mines, the more she realizes her true feelings for him.

  Another Earth by Demi Knight

  The room temperature grew hotter as their passion to be together took on a more urgent momentum. Their hands started to explore and roam across the surface of their clothing. She pressed against him, transmitting her need, before leaping up on him, wrapping her legs around his waist. Grounding her heat into his middle.

  She’d moved quickly without pulling her lips away from his. He couldn’t control his hands, which developed a life of their own as they wandered all over her, from her cheeks down to her ass. He took off her blouse and let her hair down, to fall over her bare shoulders. Then he undid her bra, letting his hands fondle her breasts, as they fell into his palms. She looked to him like a pure goddess.

  His heart pounded, making it difficult to breathe…

  Claimed by Emma Gale

  In the remote mountains of a frontier planet, tinkerer and part-time inventor Paige Roth has her hands full protecting her claim against the goons of MagnorCo. With the help of her robots, she's doing pretty well, but the last thing she expects to fall into one of her traps is a handsome stranger trying to hike through the mountains for reasons of his own.

  He's handsome enough to make her forget where she put her toolkit, but can she trust him?

  Alien to Love by Wendy C. Giffen

  Her family has gone crazy, her man’s a mystery! Will love and attitude be enough?

  Feisty but vulnerable Celeste needs to reunite her family so she is free to marry her mystery man, but their problems and her attitudes keep getting in the way.

  In this second stand-alone novelette in the American Alien series of contemporary SF romance, an intelligent and curvy BW needs a little outside help to solve her families problems, but she wants to do it on her own!

  Alien Mercenary's Desire by Lia Cole

  Kordiss has spent his life on the fringe, not succumbing to his rages. But when he rescues feisty human Sharla from intergalactic sex traders, his defenses are breached by her trusting smile. And when she's stolen from his arms, nothing will stand in the way of getting her back. This is a sexy, steamy stand-alone alien abduction romance with a happy ending.

  Mia and the Alien Prince

  MEGAN ALBAN

  Chapter 1

  Khiron

  Crown Prince Khiron, heir to the imperial throne of Delina, strode from his ship toward the lush and sparsely-populated VIP lounge at the Mars waystation. He acted as his own captain on most trips, and he’d spent the first thirty minutes since they docked checking over the ship’s equipment, to prepare for the last leg of his journey. All was set for tomorrow, and it was time for some R and R.

  A purple-liveried doorman bowed as he opened the lounge door for the royal party to enter, but Khiron stopped outside it, looking away down the hall.

  “Bickli, are those Terrans?”

  The interpreter twitched at the sound of his name. He turned anxious eyes on a cluster of people in blue uniforms, arguing over possession of a broom.

  “I believe so, Your Highness.”

  “Call them over. We’ll start the questioning here.”

  “You want me to ask them if they know where the future Princess Linza is?”

  “Why not? I know Terra is grossly overpopulated, and they’re not likely to have seen her in person, but there must be rumors. A lady of the Delinan nobility doesn’t go unnoticed. Besides, I’m curious to know what drew her to this dark corner of the galaxy. There must be something special about these people.”

  Khiron barely remembered his fiancée from the engagement ceremony. She was his third cousin twice removed, and her parents were governors of a solar system on a distant spur of the galaxy. He and Linza had been promised to each other as children, and hadn’t met since.

  He had no particular feeling for her, but he wanted a family, and peace in the empire depended on keeping his parents’ contract with her father. He was prepared to do his best to make her secure and happy—assuming he found her, and could persuade her to come home.

  Odd that she needed persuading. Most women would have been waiting at the palace door with their tongues hanging out, knowing they were scheduled to be empress of the galaxy someday. With his father so sick, that day was likely to come soon. But Linza had vanished into the wilds of Terra.

  Bickli set off down the hall. Khiron was joined by the waystation’s manager, who came out from the VIP lounge to see what had delayed his royal guests. He led them from the bare and functional hallway into an ostentatious room with thick purple carpet on the floor and a mirrored ceiling. He invited them to sink into a plush central ring of couches.

  Khiron waved away food but accepted a glass of a sweet-and-sour local drink called lemonade. He took a sip, then another. Teleporting always made him thirsty, and this was good.

  Bickli and the manager ushered the four Terran cleaning staff into the lounge. They stood with slumped shoulders, in an uneven row. Khiron stared at them with interest. He hadn’t seen Terrans in real life before.

  In shape and size they were built like Delinan people, but his own subspecies had silver-gray skin, with an inch of black hair covering their heads and running in a narrow strip down their spines. These Terrans had a range of skin colors from dark brown to a pale, pinkish beige. Their hair stopped at the base of the skull, but it grew much longer on the top, at least on some of them. One had a great patch of bare mottled skin on his skull, and a crescent of white hair around it. Another had tightly-curling dark hair all over the head, more like the Delinan people, but clipped to stubble around the ears. A third had thin tails straggling to his shoulders, and the last had straight black hair gathered at the neck like thread and hanging loosely down his back, reaching below the shoulder blades. Khiron knew of no other species whose hair grew so long.

  “What are those l
umps on the torso of the one on the right?” He gestured toward the one with the longest hair. He spoke Delinan—they wouldn’t understand. “Are they tumors, or part of his clothing?”

  “They’re a natural part of her body, Your Highness. That’s a female, and those are glands for feeding the young. They produce a white liquid that’s stored there for the babies to suck.”

  “Their young don’t drink their parents’ blood?”

  “No. They call the substance milk. Those are milk sacs. They’re a feature of most of the larger animal species on Terra.”

  Khiron’s eyes ranged over the four of them. “They are strange-looking creatures, indeed. So very like us in some ways—tall and upright, with the same body shape, and similar facial features. But the female has such long hair, and then those lumps—” The female’s sagging milk sacs were covered by her cleaner’s uniform. What would they look like underneath? He found it hard to picture them as anything but unwelcome growths.

  But all humanoid peoples had their peculiarities. The manager, an Alpha Centaurian, was furry all over. Our shining skins must have been as surprising to the Terrans when we arrived in their orbit, Khiron thought, since they’d forgotten we existed.

  He nodded to Bickli. “Address them.”

  Bickli cleared his throat. “Salve. Venimus in pace.”

  The Terrans didn’t reply. They shuffled their feet and looked at the floor.

  “They appear imbecilic,” Bickli said. “Perhaps that’s why we left their planet to its own devices for so long.”

  “From what I’ve read, they’re of average intelligence. We abandoned them because the early Terrans were aggressive and destructive. They wiped out the humanoid species closest to them, and began to dominate their ecosystem. Our forefathers feared their warlike nature might destabilize the empire, if they were allowed to expand beyond their own planet.” Khiron turned to the waystation manager. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Your Highness. It was during the third imperial millennium, when the empire was dealing with the crisis on the outer galactic arm. Your Highness’s ancestors didn’t have time to waste on minor planets, so they dismantled the Delinan cities they’d established, and left. The Terrans retained bizarre myths about gods living on mountains and your people drinking their blood. Some of them are still fearful of you.”

  Khiron frowned. “How could they believe such nonsense? We wouldn’t feed our babies other people’s blood. Say something else to them, Bickli. Tell them we won’t hurt them. Ask them if they know where Linza is.”

  The female Terran brightened.

  “She appears to recognize the name, ” Bickli said. He stepped forward. “Ubi est Princeps Linza?”

  The Terran nodded and smiled. “Linza, Linza.”

  Khiron gave an impatient sigh. “She may know the name, but I don’t think she understood anything else you said—and nor did the others. Either your accent is unfamiliar, or our appearance frightens them.” He turned to the Alpha Centaurian manager. “You can ask them. They must be used to you.”

  “I don’t speak Terran, Your Highness.”

  “You can’t talk to your own staff? So who tells them what to do?”

  The manager drew himself up to his full height. He was still shorter than anyone else in the room. “I don’t waste my time on cleaners. We have staff who are able to speak both Delinan and Terran.”

  Khiron let out an irritated breath. “Well, send for one, will you? I want to be sure we can communicate with them, before we land on their planet.”

  Mia

  Mia Langland laid the last glass in the dishwasher tray, closed the door and hit the start button. Water gushed into the machine. She straightened up and began sorting the silverware.

  What had made her think waitressing on Mars would be any different from waitressing in any small town in America? This was nothing but an overgrown fueling station—nothing glamorous about it. The clientele looked a little different, was all. The work was as tedious, the pay not much better than on Terra. The boss favored the staff who’d come with him from the old place. It was taking forever to save the money she needed.

  Weird that only fifty years ago, Homo sapiens terranus thought themselves so clever, and so important. Deep down, Mia had a little wistful nostalgia for the happy arrogance of her ancestors. They thought Terra, their Earth, was the only inhabited planet in the galaxy—maybe in the whole universe—and believed they had evolved or been created there all alone. They had no idea other humanoid subspecies existed, or that a whole empire was out there. They didn’t know their planet was a backwater, factored out of the hustle and bustle of galactic business, and they’d been left to flourish or starve as they might.

  That was until the major transportation hub in this sector, on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, was wiped out by a meteor. The Delinans decided not to rebuild in the same star system, but to put their new waystation on a planet in the next system along—on Mars, in full view of the people on Terra. The result was panic on an Earth already devastated by climate change, followed by an uneasy acceptance of their planet’s insignificance in a vast empire.

  Someone was approaching in the passage outside. Mia tensed, then relaxed as she identified the quick steps of her best friend, Cindy.

  The Andromedan pushed through the door and slid her tray onto the counter. “Heavenly powers, it’s jumping out there! What wouldn’t I give for an extra pair of hands right now!”

  She came over to put a hairless, teal-colored arm around Mia’s neck, careful not to get grease on Mia’s clothes. Andromedans spent a lot of time in water, and their skin needed protection against the dry air of Mars. “How are you doing, honey? Tough day?”

  “Yeah. It’s the anniversary.”

  “I know that. Did you think I’d forget?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t.” Mia’s eyes clouded with tears. Her friend was so kind. “Oh Cindy, it’s been five years, and I still don’t have enough to set up their trust, even though I save every penny I can.”

  Cindy clicked her tongue. “You take too much onto yourself. I’m sure your grandparents never would have expected you to spend the best years of your youth slaving for their dream.”

  “It’s my dream too.”

  The door flung open, and one of the young security guards from Alpha Centauri stood there. Mia didn’t remember his name.

  “You’re Terran?” he said breathlessly.

  Cindy hugged her closer and said to the guard, “Duh. Notice the chest?”

  “Sure, that’s why I thought—or aren’t you? Sorry, no offence meant.”

  Mia bristled. “I don’t see why I should be offended that you call me Terran. Is it an insult?”

  “No, but—oh powers, I’ll start over. The boss needs a Terran speaker to interpret for some grays, and I can’t find the housekeeper. If you speak Terran, please come with me. If not, say so and I’ll go look for somebody else.”

  Mia sighed. “All right, I’ll come.”

  Grays. Delinans, the last thing she needed. They ruled with a soft, kindly hand, and most subspecies loved them. Terrans generally didn’t. And why should we love them, Mia thought with a flash of rebellion, when they appeared in our telescopes without warning, terrifying our people and bringing us nothing but taxes in exchange?

  Chapter 2

  Khiron

  The manager returned a few minutes later with a young female Terran—a beautiful one, with long, silky, dark brown curls. Khiron’s pulse beat loudly in his ears. He hadn’t expected to find these people attractive.

  He gazed at the strange swell of her chest. She was dressed more skimpily than the scrawny cleaner, in the uniform of a waitress, and the upper surface of her milk sacs was visible. To his surprise, he found them pleasing. The two globes were firm and enticing above the line of her shirt, inviting him to caress them. His fingers twitched, but he didn’t touch—not yet.

  He looked up, and met her dark eyes. They flashed fire at him. A warlike natur
e, indeed. Had he done something to arouse that anger, or was she always so passionate?

  “Your Highness, may I introduce Mia Langland, one of our server staff?” The manager said. “Mia, this is His Highness Crown Prince Khiron, and Professor Bickli.”

  The young female Terran nodded. No bow, no respectful greeting—hadn’t the manager instructed his staff on the protocol? He surely had. She must be too nervous to remember.

  “I’ll bed you before we leave, Mia,” Khiron said, to put her at her ease.

  She stared at him, open-mouthed. Perhaps Bickli was right about their intelligence. As a people, Terrans might be smart enough, but those working here seemed slow.

  “Speak to her, Bickli,” he said. “Say what you said to the others, see if she understands it.”

  “Salve. Venimus in pace. Ubi est Princeps Linza?”

  She blinked at Bickli, and spoke for the first time. Her voice was smooth as syrup. “Is that Italian? No, if you’re a professor—it’s Latin, isn’t it?”

  Khiron frowned at Bickli. “It should be Terran.”

  Mia said, “It is a Terran language. I think it means ‘Greetings. We come in peace. Who is’ something something.”

  “Where is Princess Linza,” Bickli corrected. “Princess is a courtesy title, of course, until—”

  “Wait,” Khiron interrupted. “You mean there’s more than one language spoken on Terra?”

  “Oh yes, there are thousands,” Mia said with a proud smile, as if this were a sign of superiority in her subspecies—when surely it would only cause misunderstanding, and the wars they were famous for.

  “How do you communicate?” Khiron asked.

  “I guess you could say we have some international languages. Most people know at least a little Chinese, Spanish or English, as well as their native tongue.”