Twenty-something girls just want to have fun. How can Nadiah explore her sensual side when her overprotective father is a powerful telepath who reads and controls the mind of any potential mate? An impulsive joy ride to Jagron’s sex palaces is her first opportunity to take a lover, but instead, she wakes up to find herself trapped in a space cell with a huge, mute alien. By the time they escape their kidnappers, she’ll have more than a solo trip dirtside to explain to Daddy.
Available Now at most online Booksellers.
Nadiah breathed deeply, tamping down the growing excitement that she’d done it. She’d escaped on her secret mission, undetected. As her ship-to-surface stinger neared Jagron, she could see on the scanners the famed dense jungles below, obscuring even the tallest buildings. Only the sky-high landing ports were visible above the trees, flat structures poking up through the foliage like platinum pinheads on stick pins stuck in a quilted patchwork of evergreens, turquoises, and jades. If she painted the verdant scene, she’d need to mix blue and green into a million variations to capture all the hues and tones.
She checked the stinger’s landing coordinates to ensure she was approaching the correct port for her arrival—a different port than her parents’ scheduled flight plan. She didn’t want them to discover she’d taken a solo jaunt dirtside without their permission until after she returned to the ship. Especially with her father, it was much easier to seek forgiveness than obtain permission, a philosophy she and her siblings had learned from their earthborn mother.
This personal journey was long overdue, though. She was 20, old enough to make her own decisions and act independently of her parents, especially her father. Plus, she’d decided that it was the only way she was ever going to have sex. Her native urge to mate had roused itself into a subtle sense of constant agitation. But every guy she’d met recently treated her like she was still a child or had some kind of vile skin disease, thanks to her father’s interfering telepathic powers. The fact that no guy was ever going to meet Galen of the KhaRya’s standards was further complicated by the way he blithely read and controlled even the most determined prospective mates’ minds.
It was hard growing up traveling much of the year in the family spaceship in the constant presence of her parents. It was even harder growing up the oldest child with a telepathic father and uncle. Meeting new people, especially guys: easy. They visited a lot of planets, encountered lots of other humanoid species across the galaxy. Getting to spend time alone with a guy: not so easy.
If a guy even had a random thought about her, her dad immediately intervened. If a guy, not knowing her dad or her Uncle Kugen was around, had a sexual thought? He’d better be a fast runner. She couldn’t even start up a relationship remotely because whenever she used the coms, their ship’s AI recorded everything. And unless she met up with a species that couldn’t be controlled mentally by her father, like her Earth-born mother, she feared that she’d never have a relationship free of her father’s interference.
She planned a short joy ride down to the planet Jagron, notorious for its pleasure palaces, while her father and mother sold a number of her recent still-life paintings to fund another rescue expedition. Tired of being under her parents’ thumb all the time, and knowing they were planning an overnight stay on the famous sex planet, she thought she’d be relatively safe sneaking in a secret trip. Her mother had already been on her own, navigating an alien world for two years by the time she was twenty.
Checking the controls once more, which were efficiently managed by the stinger’s AI, she clamped a dream sleeping mask over her eyes and ears and reclined the seat just as the stinger was entering the planet’s atmosphere. Like her human mother, she tended to get motion sickness on these zoom landings so, to avoid developing nausea, she left the stinger to guide itself into port safely, while she distracted herself with the music and beautiful images supplied by the mask. The AI was a better pilot than she anyway, and had completed such landings successfully a thousand times. She let her mind drift to a fantasy about what it would be like to take a lover for the first time.
Clank. Bang. What the heck? The stinger jerked sideways just as warning lights flashed and alarms blared. Nadiah ripped her face mask off and leapt out of her seat. But it was too late. The cabin filled with the telltale orange gas she recognized as the knockout drug used by slave traders across the Alliance.