Alien's Host E-Book

Alexandra Norton

• Herausgeber: Alexandra Norton
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

My alien client craves complete control…

When I have to cancel my vacation last minute to meet with a mysterious new alien client, I don’t know whether to be annoyed, worried, or curious—I've never met an alien in the flesh before. The way Kuthil Ash Kharn towers over me leaves me frozen in his shadow. I fight to keep control under the golden giant's penetrating gaze, but he sees right through me, and I just want to get through this job and go home.

But a freak blizzard hits, leaving me trapped and injured at his ranch. With no way out, I have no choice but to allow Kuthil Ash Kharn to help me. Except his strange alien powers don’t just heal me—they come with unintended dark consequences.

Now a part of him is inside of me, and it’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by him. I feel him moving underneath my skin and I’m doing my best to fight the way he manipulates my body and mind, but there’s no escape. Not even in my dreams.

And the worst thing of all is... I’m afraid I’m starting to enjoy it.

Alien’s Host is a steamy science fiction romance suitable for readers who like a strong heroine and are intrigued by a well-intentioned but possessive alien. It is the first book of a duet. This story was originally published in the Unwrapping the Alien anthology. It contains a revised ending with three additional chapters.

Leseprobe

ALIEN’S HOST

A SCI-FI POSSESSION ROMANCE

SHARDS OF INFINITY

BOOK ONE

ALEXANDRA NORTON

Copyright © 2023 by Alexandra Norton

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover designed by MiblArt.

Edited by LY Publishing Services.

CONTENTS

Preface

December 20

Chapter 1

December 21

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

December 22

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 7

December 23

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

December 24

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 15

The Shard of Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

The Shard of Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

The Shard of Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 21

December 25

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

The Shard of Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

The Shard of Kuthil Ash Kharn

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

January 2

Chapter 30

January 18

Chapter 31

January 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

PREFACE

If you’ve read my other books you might know I sometimes lean toward the darker side of romance. You should know that while this book isn’t dark dark, it isn’t exactly an alien rom-com romp either. Alien’s Host contains forced proximity, injury, reluctance, and alien possession. On the plus side—there’s tentacles!

If you think this is all sounding like a bit too much, this story may not be for you. But this is your jam, come on in and enjoy Alien’s Host.

Alexandra

DECEMBER 20

1

Christmas with the family is great and all, but when your boss calls you in on your last day before vacation and says you’re urgently needed as a financial advisor to an alien, you cancel plans and say you’ll fucking do it. That was exactly what I did.

“Why does an alien need a financial advisor, anyway?” I said, perched at the edge of my seat in front of Bob Rosey’s office table.

Bob opened his hands palms-up in a gesture that effectively said, I have no fucking clue. He slid a manila folder toward me.

“Here’s all the info,” he said.

I opened the folder, seeing only a single sheet of paper with an address and a short paragraph printed on it.

“Alabama? What’s he doing all the way out there?”

“Living there, apparently.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, Layla, I didn’t ask him.” Bob’s deep sigh told me to ease up on the interrogation. I smoothed my hands along my wool skirt and took a beat to gather myself.

“And he needs this meeting on a weekend… Christmas weekend.”

The boss nodded. “Something about a pressing investment opportunity.”

I flipped the sheet with the address over, revealing an Amtrak ticket to Alabama. Birmingham. This was accompanied by a black and white printout of a hotel reservation at Sweetwater Hotel in Mobile.

“You can expense the return ticket. I have no idea how long it will take. It’s a unique situation. Hotel’s booked for a week, just in case.”

“Wait, you aren’t going?”

“Not this time, kiddo. It’s all on you,” he winked and gave me that fucking finger-gun thing. “Time to shine.”

Time to shine?

I was the only female advisor at the pretty darn sizable company. I hadn’t been given a client of my own even once. I’d like to say it was sexism. Well, it sure as hell was that too. But honestly, I just wasn’t very good yet. I was better coming in with the assist, reeling them in with a dose of feminine charm.

And now he was getting me to go take on an alien? Unsupervised?

“Why aren’t you going?”

Bob shrugged. “I have the kids this Christmas and the others are off already.”

There was no “off” at Rosey Financial, so that was bullshit. But my mind had already moved on to the other thing he said.

“Wait, you think what’s normally a two-hour meeting on the basics of personal finance is going to take a week?”

What am I missing here?

“Like I said, Layla, I don’t know. All I know is, this is a unique opportunity for the firm. Imagine: first ever alien financial advisors.” He looked up and far away, like he’d seen the light.

“And that doesn’t warrant a plane ticket?” I eyed the nearly twenty-four-hour train journey listed on the Amtrak stub.

Bob held his palms out as though to say “It’s Christmas. Flights were completely full. What am I supposed to do?”

If this guy—I glanced at the page again, Kuthil Ash Kharn—had shopped around for a financial advisor, he wouldn’t be the first alien to do so. Our firm was well known in New York City, but plenty of the aliens had settled in other parts of the world. There were bigger fish than Rosey Financial in those seas, and surely those aliens had investment opportunities too.

I flipped over the paper with the address. The back contained a few brief paragraphs with some information about the client.

“We couldn’t find much, and he didn’t fill out our client information form,” Bob offered.

Great.

“Great!” I smiled wide. “I’ll send a full report once I’m back in the city.”

“I know this must be hard, canceling Christmas plans.”

I shrugged, shuffling the papers and tickets back into the folder. “It’s alright. Who knows, I might still make Christmas Day.”

Like I’d ever admit anything different to my boss.

“Good luck, Layla.” Bob leaned back in his leather chair and ran a hand through slicked-back ash brown hair.

On my way out the door, I hesitated, coming back to my earlier question.

“Why didn’t you take this one, Bob? I mean, really? You take all the high-end new clients. And this is… it’s an alien.”

Bob drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. Nervous?

Finally, he sighed, shoulders slumping in resignation.

“He asked for a female consultant. Said his kind ‘communicates better’ with the opposite sex.”

“Oh!” I squeaked. What was I supposed to do with that bombshell? Turn around and refuse? “Okay!”

I smiled again and left Bob’s office.

DECEMBER 21

2

“Kuthil Ash Kharn arrived on Earth six months ago with the rest of the alien settlers. He has kept largely to himself throughout his stay on Earth. No record of location until he contacted Rosey Financial. No media attention. No criminal reports. No children. No payment remarks. Not married.”

I rolled my eyes at the report in the folder Bob had given me. The rest of it was more generic crap like this, put together by our in-house client research guy, who clearly had no idea what to do with an alien. Half of this “information” wasn’t even relevant to an alien. Payment remarks? Marriage? Children? I made a mental note to give him shit about this later.

I’d Googled the alien’s name the night before. Aside from a mention in an arrival database, no further information was forthcoming. But him insisting on a female consultant made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Why didn’t I push back when I found out? Bob was a bastard for not telling me this until I pried the information from him myself, but I was not surprised. This was a major fucking warning sign, and I was being sent there alone. Nobody would blame me for just refusing the job. Bob couldn’t fire me over this: I could go to the media, tell them about how my boss wanted to send me cross-country for an alien who demanded a “female.”

“On Christmas,” I mumbled, sitting at the tiny desk in my city flat at nine in the morning, leg over knee. My Adidas rubber house slipper slapped against my heel as I jerked my foot up and down. Nerves.

I was well within my right to ‘nope’ right out of all of this.

But I still got into the cab outside my flat an hour later.

“Moynihan Hall,” I said, lost in my own doubts as the car made its way to the station.

This could be huge for me. Bob would have to give me my own clients and train me up properly after this, or I’d go to any other New York advisory firm, tell them I had an alien client, and get hired on the spot.

Not that aliens were big spenders. It’s just… aliens, man. The uniqueness. The prestige. It was enough to get my foot into any door.

Sure, I wasn’t the best financial advisor. Yet. That’s what happens when you join a firm that gets you to tag along to sit pretty instead of properly training you first thing out of college.

I was a little bitter.

* * *

When the Secretary-General of the UN announced in a press conference one day that the governments of the world had been communicating with aliens for the better part of three years and were now introducing free travel between our planets, people thought it was some sort of sick joke. It wasn’t even April.

Many people didn’t believe it until the first shuttle landed and the statuesque creatures emerged, beaming. Not smiling, beaming. Their marble-patterned olive skins exuded an inner light. Their eyes shone unnaturally white, intensified by a blue-tinted glow underneath. Same with their disgustingly perfect teeth. They’d all had braces as children, I was sure of it.

They looked vaguely human, but better. Models on steroids. The males stood between six and eight feet; females were only a little shorter. Their hair changed color in the light, as if they were still deciding what to look like.

“Free travel” meant them coming here, apparently. They welcomed us to their planet, but said their ships would kill us. We could not withstand the physical force incurred by their faster-than-light travel technology.

Hence the space boom. Every space company in the world was now scrambling to get us to their planet on the outer edge of the Milky Way.

I thought of those first days of the alien arrival as I got onto the silver train. The Viewliner II was old, but renovated. At least Bob got me a bedroom cabin. I slid the door shut with a click, closed the curtains, and put my overnight bag in the seat across from me.

Kuthil Ash Kharn wouldn’t kill me, I’d decided as the train moved. He couldn’t. It would draw too much negative attention. Some people were already none too happy about aliens beaming down from the sky. Plus, surely the aliens had been vetted for murderous tendencies, right?

I realized I forgot to tell anyone where I was going, or that I would not be showing up on Christmas Eve in three days.

“Hi, Mom,” I said when she picked up the phone. “I’ve got some bad news.”

She didn’t take it well. I couldn’t tell her about the alien—client information was strictly confidential. I wasn’t sure if species fell under that category, but better safe than sorry. But I sure as hell told her what hotel I’d be staying at and the client’s address, despite the rules on the latter. No way was I going to be another body-in-the-woods news story.

“I'll check in twice a day. Morning and night, Mom. If you don’t hear from me, call Bob. Or wait. Call the police. Or Bob. I’ll leave you the number, anyway.”

“You have a client all the way down South, honey?” Mom was confused. “Don’t you have enough of them in New York? And why are you so worried?”

“Mom, I’m a woman traveling alone cross-country. That’s why. I’m sure it’ll be fine, but better just to be safe. You taught me that, remember? And yes, we have enough clients in New York. This is a special client who plans to move to New York,” I lied through my teeth and had no trouble doing it. What did that say about me?

After fielding Mom’s questions as best I could, I unwrapped the sad cheese sandwich I’d purchased from the station and dug in.

It would be a long ride.