Alien's Challenge: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Outlaw Planet Mates) Read online

  Alien’s Challenge

  Outlaw Planet Mates

  Nancey Cummings

  Contents

  About Alien’s Challenge

  The World of Outlaw Planet Mates

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Outlaw Planet Mates

  Also by Nancey Cummings

  About the Author

  About Alien’s Challenge

  Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. One minute, Alice was camping, trying to connect with nature, then there’s this blinding white light. Gravity must have quit because Alice and her sleeping bag were floating off the ground.

  Classic alien abduction.

  She wakes up on an alien planet full of, you know, aliens. Outlaws. Rules are optional and people are property. So not cool. Then there’s a train robbery and she’s getting abducted. Again.

  But this guy? He’s a giant lizardman, a solid wall of muscle, scales, and bad attitude. He’s dangerous, and he’s gone into a mating fever, which he says is her fault.

  So what is she going to do about it?

  Better question, what is tall, dark, and grumpy going to do about it?

  Two decades ago, Faris was exiled to this prison planet. Only the strong survive here.

  He’s too old for a mating fever, but his body has other ideas. The human female was not part of the plan, an ordinary smash and grab, but she’s his now.

  And he does not share.

  Alien’s Challenge is a standalone book in the Outlaw Planet Mates series. The books can be read in any order. No cliffhangers, no cheating, and an HEA.

  The World of Outlaw Planet Mates

  Reazus Prime is a hard planet. Once a prison, it was abandoned once the mines dried up and the Overlords could no longer turn a profit off the prisoners. Now it’s a haven for outlaws, pirates, and anyone holding a grudge against authority.

  It’s isolated, alone, and the only ships coming are the worst sort. One such ship carrying a cargo of abducted human women, explodes in orbit. A lucky few were ejected in pods, only to crash on the outlaw planet.

  Now the race is on to find and claim the human females.

  Prologue

  Alice

  “Hello!” A figure waved in the distance.

  Oh no. Alice’s stomach sank. Not that Miriam wasn’t a nice person, but what the hell was she doing here?

  “Miriam! How unexpected,” Alice said. She stood from her folding camp chair.

  “Am I interrupting?” Miriam’s too-perky voice verged on teasing as she looked around the campsite.

  Tent for one. One sleeping bag. One chair. Yeah, Alice was alone. She’d been alone since her last boyfriend ditched her and didn’t have the emotional strength to trifle with romance again.

  “It’s just me and the mosquitoes,” Alice said.

  “I brought pizza.” Miriam held up a flat cardboard box and gave a shy smile. “It’s low-carb with a cauliflower crust.”

  What kind of abomination was that?

  “Great,” Alice said, voice flat. “But what—”

  “I’m not commenting on your weight,” she said quickly. “You were talking about cutting back on carbs, so I thought this would be a nice olive branch.”

  Alice didn’t think the low-carb pizza had been a comment on her weight, but now she did.

  And yet, Miriam continued, “If you want, I can get you a buddy membership at my gym. I can show you some exercises that are really great at working your glutes—”

  Alice rolled her eyes. Well-meaning people kept offering unsolicited tips and advice about exercise or food. It was exhausting. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  This was a one -person camping trip. Super exclusive. Just Alice and her fat butt.

  “Oh, I wanted to apologize,” Miriam said.

  “You could apologize on Monday.”

  She bit her lower lip. “You’re mad at me. Is it the pizza? I’m not making a dig about your weight. Really. I like the cauliflower crust. I order it all the time.”

  “It’s not about my weight,” Alice snapped.

  But thanks for bringing it up twice.

  “I know I messed up. You’re my friend and I’m sorry,” Miriam said.

  Alice took a deep breath, willing the tension to leave her body. That was the point of the camping trip, right? Commune with nature. Relax. Forget the world and the damn internet for a few days.

  Until the root of her problems showed up with a cauliflower pizza.

  Miriam wasn’t her friend. They were colleagues. Yes, they were friendly at work, but they never socialized outside of work hours. That, Alice suspected, was her fault. She was prickly, and Miriam was so damn nice it was suspicious. Fresh out of school, she was so eager about everything.

  Okay, that was definitely on Alice. She had a cold, cynical heart.

  Maybe, just maybe, it had a little to do with how her ex-husband, Travis, dumped her because he “just couldn’t support her self-destructive life choices” and immediately started flirting with Miriam. Like, right in front of Alice in the library.

  First, enjoying food was not self-destructive.

  Second, having your husband hound you into going to the gym before work when you wanted to sleep did not make you a fan of working out. It made you resentful.

  Third, it was a remarkably bad idea to work at the same school as your ex. She should have transferred to another school in the district.

  Alice was better off without Travis. Miriam could have him. The ink wasn’t even dry on the divorce papers before he started putting the moves on her coworker.

  Not that Miriam was anything but professional during work hours. She seemed to recognize that Travis was a giant douchebag. A fact that had taken Alice years to see. So it was a complicated mess of feelings, most of which fell on Alice.

  Ugh. She wanted to get away from this garbage.

  Alice tilted her face to the sky, which had turned a deep violet as the sun slipped behind the trees. She needed a drink. She needed to get laid.

  She couldn’t do anything about that, but there was pizza.

  “We might as well eat before it gets cold,” Alice said. A low-carb pizza sounded like it would taste terrible. Being cold would only make it worse. “Pull up a piece of ground. I’ve only got one chair.”

  Alice had no intention of being a gracious host and giving up her seat. Miriam was ten years younger than her and probably did yoga every morning. She could sit on the ground without her knees and back complaining.

  “Awesome.” Miriam folded her legs and sat gracefully on the ground like it was nothing. “I really am sorry. I just posted a picture to my Insta, and it became a thing.”

  Alice saw the photo, a dumpster behind the school filled with old textbooks they had weeded out to make room for new books. #backtoschool #weedingthelibrary

  The internet lost its collective mind.

  Look, twenty-year-old textbooks did not help anyone. In fact, parents screamed about outdated textbooks. Old textbooks got weeded to make room for the new books, and that usually meant going to the dumpster. There wasn’t a farm upstate t
hat took elderly textbooks, and precious few places accepted donations, let alone two hundred and fifty copies of US History that didn’t include the last two presidents.

  Yeah, it was unfair, but sometimes books have to go to the big library in the sky.

  But there was Shakespeare in the dumpster!

  The internet was not having it.

  The world will not miss thirty copies of a 1997 edition of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare will survive, she wrote.

  Maybe that hadn’t been the smartest comment. Live and learn. Ever since her inane decision to engage on social media, the messages and emails hadn’t stopped. Her mother called wanting to know what Alice had done. Even Travis seemed concerned.

  So a weekend in the woods seemed a good idea. Smart, even.

  The problem was, between the earnest but insulting comments about her weight and trekking all the way out here with a pizza, Alice couldn’t tell if Miriam was sincere or not.

  That’s a lot of work just to get a fat joke in. So, probably sincere. Clueless, but sincere.

  “I’m not upset with you,” Alice said.

  A white light flooded the area, blinding her.

  Chapter 1

  Alice

  Today’s outlook: it’s gonna suck.

  In all fairness, all the days had sucked since Alice went camping and subsequently got abducted by aliens. Nothing about today was remarkable on the suckage meter. Same old, same old, sitting on an ornate cushion on the floor, wearing a collar attached to a leash.

  There were certain unexpected events that Alice had mentally prepared for. Sinking in quicksand? She had a plan. Need to send a message to her past self to save the future? She already picked out a password. Zombies? Aim for the head and destroy the brains.

  Alien abduction while camping? Not so much. It was ironic because that was how it always happened in the movies. Okay, maybe one movie, but it made an impression on her.

  That she was even camping was bullshit. Yeah. She wasn’t a fan of camping, even if that had more to do with the alien abduction than actually struggling to pitch a tent.

  Long story short, bright light, floating off the ground, little green— gray? —men, and she woke up here.

  Well, not here, here. At a warehouse was her best guess. The building had that cold, industrial look with concrete floors and harsh lighting.

  A fog lingered in her head, making her sluggish and slow to respond. She was forgetting something important, but it kept slipping from her mind, like trying to hold water in her hands.

  People—alien people? —kept talking. Alice tried to ask where she was and all the other typical questions about what the hell was going on, but her words slurred. They injected her with something. She tried to struggle but moved like she was stuck in mud.

  He was there. Tall, red scales, watching her with reptilian eyes. His name was Randevere, as far as she could tell. Someone jabbed her behind the ear, and she could understand them. When she tried to speak, they patted her on the head and called her a “cute, little, squishy thing.”

  They treated her like a child. Worse, a pet. Randevere’s cute, squishy human pet.

  Before she could protest that she was a person, not a cat, they shoved her into a crate. The days that followed were hazy. Sleep in the crate. Come out of the crate and sit on a pillow. Be quiet.

  Alice suspected that her food or water had been drugged. Exhaustion never seemed to leave her.

  Today was different. Today, they were on a train. For the last few hours—how many she couldn’t say, but it felt like five or six—the train zipped along through an urban maze into a rolling prairie, and now the tracks wound their way through a mountain pass.

  Alice watched the landscape, the fog in her head slowly lifting. She marveled at how the alien landscape all felt so similar, despite two suns in the sky. The larger sun looked like the regular old sun. The second was tucked up alongside it, diminutive in appearance, and cast a bluish light.

  This was definitely an alien planet.

  Surrounded by aliens.

  Who put a collar on her.

  Sitting on a cushion and being treated as a pet wasn’t the worst outcome. No one tried to eat or fuck her. Randevere largely ignored her, which was fine and dandy. She had food and water, even if it was drugged. Clothing that covered a bit more would have been nice, though.

  The current snow-covered mountain view outside suggested that Alice would freeze when they got to wherever they were going. Fluffy white flakes sped past the window. Hopefully, someone would realize she needed shoes, pants, and a coat.

  Alice rubbed a hand up her arm to warm her bare skin.

  “What is it doing?”

  A tug at the leash attached to her collar forced her to turn at Randevere’s question.

  “I’m cold. I need clothing.” After chipping her, they gave her a piece of gauzy cloth and a blanket. She wrapped the gauze around herself like a sarong, even though the cloth didn’t hide anything, and huddled under the blanket.

  Randevere watched her, the vertical pupils in his eyes narrowing, and the frills at the side of his neck fluttered. “She’s trying to speak. How charming.”

  “I’m not trying, I am speaking, you giant red jackass. Give me shoes.” She pointed to her foot. “Shoes! I need shoes.”

  “You do have tiny feet, yes you do.” He patted her on the head.

  “No, I’m cold! I need shoes and a coat. Look at my goosebumps!” She shoved her arm in his face. The thin hairs stood on end.

  Her antics no longer amused Randevere. He pushed her away, forcing her back down onto her cushion. “You will be quiet, or you will be put in your cage. Do you understand?”

  “I understand you’re a dick.”

  He tilted his head, watching her.

  “I understand,” she muttered. She curled up on the cushion, tucking her feet under herself, and resumed watching the world glide by.

  She didn’t know where they were going, but she guessed it wouldn’t be her idea of fun.

  The train entered a tunnel. With the outside view nothing but blackness, Alice had nothing to distract herself from her misery and resentment.

  Randevere had staff, or maybe henchmen. Three aliens, the same reptilian variety as him, came in and out of the carriage. When he wasn’t issuing orders, Randevere busied himself with a handheld device that reminded her of a phone, not that she could get a good look at the screen. Not that she could read anything on the screen.

  Ugh, abduction problems.

  Maybe he was Googling “how to take care of your new human.” At least she knew that he knew her species name. She heard someone say human and Earth, so all he had to do was look up her basic human needs. The internet made this problem, so now it could fix it for her.

  Alice rose to her knees on her cushion. The floor of the train swayed.

  “Human,” she said, tapping her chest. “Alice.”

  “Not now,” Randevere grumbled.

  “I’m human, from Earth.”

  “I said be quiet.”

  The collar issued a mild shock, nothing more than the pop of static electricity on a cold day. Regardless, Alice’s eyes went wide and she gasped, clutching the collar.

  That fucker.

  “Be quiet like a good pet, or I’ll use the collar.”

  Alice sat back down, an ugly loathing brewing in her guts.

  I’ll smother him in his sleep the first chance I get.

  The lights flickered, and she heard shouting outside.

  Men with guns burst into the carriage.

  Faris

  Only the strong survived on Reazus Prime.

  Old hands at the saloon slapped each other on the back, congratulating themselves on another day of survival. They celebrated with lukewarm beer that tasted like piss, liquor that would taste better if it were piss, and food bland enough that you wished it tasted like piss.

  Trust was for fools. Trust got you a knife in the back. Faris had learned that lesson the hard way. r />
  Survival.

  Faris wanted to do more than merely survive. He’d stubbornly clung to life on this hellhole of a planet out of pure spite. He craved revenge.

  Today, he would take the knife his former partner left planted in his back and return the favor.

  Twenty-three years ago, nearly half his life ago, Faris killed a male and was dumped on Reazus Prime by the Overlords to serve a life sentence. He’d killed since then but found he couldn’t regret a single one. The first killing had been necessary. As the fourth son with a four-syllable name, he did the unpalatable work his family required and paid the price.

  Since then, he tried to avoid taking a life, but sometimes a slithering bastard wouldn’t take no for an answer and more drastic measures had to be taken.

  He didn’t like it, but that was the cost of survival on this planet.

  If the goal of imprisonment there was to make a person think about their life choices and repent, then mission accomplished. Faris had plenty of long, solitary nights under the stars to think and even more frigid nights huddled under a thin blanket. He questioned every damn life choice he ever made that led to this place but he was here now.

  And the Overlords weren’t. Two decades ago, the mines dried up and they left everything behind, including the prisoners.

  Only the strong survived.

  Faris shifted, his boots sinking into the snow. The cold seeped in through his gloves and coat. The hovercycle between his thighs rumbled and purred, wanting to lunge forward. The snowstorm created enough cover that he was not concerned about being spotted.