Science Friction: 15 Book MEGA Sci-Fi Romance Bundle (Excite Spice Boxed Sets) Read online

  Table of Contents

  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  SCIENCE FRICTION

  Unbreakable Bonds by Selena Kitt

  Purity by Evangeline Anderson

  The Alien King: Barbarian by Maya Kane

  Second Chance Among the Stars by Angelique Voisen

  His Only Hope by Erica Conroy

  Kilted Tentacle Monster by Aurelia Skye

  Alien Commander’s Bride by Scarlett Grove & Juno Wells

  Alien Hitchhikers by Greta Bowles

  Alien Warriors Fated: Aizak by Shea Malloy and Juno Wells

  The Alien, The Doctor and the Virgin by Lili Zander

  Bound by Tentacles by Minella Mason

  Aboard the Mother Ship by Sophie Stern

  Probed by the Alien by Taylor Neptune

  Mated to the Alien by Orion Blaze

  The Robot Women of New Hetényegyháza by Sergio Palumbo

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  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  Are you ready for some science friction? This 15 BOOK Excite Spice MEGA Bundle will take you on a journey to the outer reaches of the galaxy in search of the sexiest aliens you’ll ever meet, in this or any other universe! These celestial hotties are looking for love all over the galaxy, ready to bond with human mates and seed new planets, going where no man has gone before.

  Sixteen of the genre’s hottest authors go interstellar in this collection of sexy sci-fi, giving you nearly 300,000 words of hot hijinks in hyperspace. Inside this bundle, you will find worlds that will both astound and titillate you, and intergalactic creatures that will blow your mind.

  Are you ready to travel outside the Milky Way?

  SCIENCE FRICTION

  15 Book Bundle

  AUTHORS

  Selena Kitt

  Evangeline Anderson

  Maya Kane

  Angelique Voisen

  Erica Conroy

  Aurelia Skye

  Scarlett Grove

  Greta Bowles

  Shea Malloy

  Lili Zander

  Minella Mason

  Sophie Stern

  Taylor Neptune

  Orion Blaze

  Sergio Palumbo

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  From some of the best and hottest erotica authors around!

  All brought to you by Selena Kitt—so you KNOW it’s gonna be good!

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  Bound to Love | Experience Preferred | Fall Harvest | Immortal Pleasures | Longings | Love Stories | Manhandled | Mixing It Up | Out of this World | Scary Love | Some Day My Prince Will Come | Spring Fever | Summer Heat | Three Union | Unearthly Appetites | Winter Wonderland

  Unbreakable Bonds by Selena Kitt

  Ruby didn’t know what she wanted.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true.

  She wanted him.

  She’d never met a man like Bastian. But that was probably because Bastian wasn’t a man at all. He was something altogether new and different, something exotic and, frankly, incredibly appealing.

  Maybe if it had turned out that aliens looked as they did in all the old movies like the ridiculously nostalgic Independence Day or re-runs of the X-Files that ran onscreen at two in the morning, or maybe if they weren’t able to take human shape and form, things would have been different between them. But Bastian seemed to think that theirs was not only a fated but an unbreakable bond.

  Ruby didn’t know if that was true, but it certainly felt true.

  And it scared the hell out of her.

  That was why, when she saw him with the tall, leggy blonde, his arm around her waist as he steered the woman into his apartment, she hadn’t confronted him.

  Instead, she ran.

  She ran blindly, her throat tight, hot, closing in, forcing her to struggle to breathe as she rounded the corner. She stopped there momentarily, leaning against the side of the building, the memory of Bastian’s arm around another woman clouding her vision, making her eyes burn with tears.

  Her head buzzed and she shook it vehemently, grabbing the glasses she was wearing and folding them closed, shoving them into her bag. She didn’t care who was calling—whether it was Bastian, or her boss, or even Tiff, who was the only one Ruby had told when she’d left work early to surprise Bastian at his apartment—she didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  Somehow, she found her way to the carriall, down into the tunnel, eschewing the moving stairs, and finally onto the transport. She felt her bag vibrating like it was full of honeybees—which she’d only seen or heard onscreen, because the automated models they had now were little drones that hardly made any noise at all—but she ignored it, leaning her forehead against the clear divider between her and the man in front of her.

  The carriall stopped to let people off and allow more people on, but Ruby ignored that, too, listening to the hammering beat of her own heart, closing her eyes against the advertisements that appeared on both sides of the small cubicle, momentarily obscuring her view of the people to her front and back. She could have used her fingerprint or swiped the code tattooed on the inside of her wrist and paid to stop the noise—or just put her glasses back on and told the Algo to charge her account—but she didn’t want to risk communicating with Bastian. Not now.

  Maybe not ever again.

  That thought brought fresh tears and Ruby blinked them back, even though she knew no one was watching her. They were all in their own little worlds, in standing cubes, or seated ones with a little more room, if they had the sum to afford it. She thought about contacting Tiff to tell her that her plan to surprise Bastian had turned back and bitten her—hard. She wondered if the vibration in her bag was Tiff, and thought about answering, but knew it could be Bastian.

  Part of her wanted to see him, talk to him, let him soothe her and explain away the beautiful blonde he’d been so familiar with as he guided the woman into his apartment in the middle of the afternoon.

  “She’s just a friend,” he’d say.

  Or, “She’s a new colleague. We had some work to discuss.”

  Or, “I was just letting her use my facilities.”

  Or my telecom.

  Or my dick.

  Right, Ruby thought with a sniff, dropping her bag to the floor, where more ads were displayed under her feet. But she could still feel her bag shaking, someone trying to communicate with her.

  There were so many excuses he could offer, so many ways he could try to smooth out this little wrinkle.

  And part of her wanted him to.

  The part of her that wanted him—that craved him, needed him.

  The part that scared her.

  Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. It went on and on at her feet.

  By the time her cube opened, timed with her stop—it was all automatically entered when she used her tattoo to pa
y as she slipped into the carriall cube—she had changed her mind a million times.

  Answer. Don’t answer. Talk to him. Don’t talk to him.

  Ruby kept running. All the way to her own apartment. She even considered taking the stairs to the fifty-eighth floor—she could ignore the buzzing in her bag even more vehemently that way, and she’d be much less tempted after the climb to answer—but she was already out of breath from all the running.

  Unfortunately, the ride up took just minutes, and her telecom greeted her the minute she looked into the retina peephole that opened the door.

  “You’re home early, Ruby.” The telecom’s voice was a woman’s—before she’d met Bastian, Ruby had it programmed as a sexy-sounding man with a fine Australian accent whom she’d called Ace, but she’d changed it to the soothing, almost motherly woman’s voice a few weeks ago. Now she called her telecom Clorah. “I would have started your evening meal if you’d informed me. How was your day?”

  “My day?” Ruby choked, throwing her bag onto the floor as the door closed and locked automatically behind her. “Don’t ask.”

  “Okay,” Clorah agreed amiably. “You have one video message from Tiffinier McMallon and…” Clorah paused. “Fifteen from Sebastian Tquarnton.”

  “Fifteen?” Ruby repeated, blinking at the screen that glowed to life on the opposite wall. A video fireplace burned there—Clorah turned it on every day when Ruby came home. It was a nice, homey touch.

  “Would you like me to play them?” Clorah asked, and Ruby saw Tiff’s face appear on the screen instead of the fireplace.

  “No!” Ruby objected, kicking her bag so it slid under the hallway table as she headed toward the kitchen. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  “There’s no need to be hostile, Ruby,” Clorah chastened as Ruby pulled open the coldbox. The telecoms were programmed to be smart. They were forms of A.I., and while their intelligence might be artificial, they seemed to learn human patterns like sarcasm quite well.

  “Yes, Mom,” Ruby snapped, digging to the back of the coldbox to find the small package she’d hidden there. It was her own coldbox—there was no real reason to hide anything in it—but she did it anyway, just like she had when she was a little girl.

  “Ruby, Sebastian Tquarnton is cal—”

  “Hold all calls!” Ruby yelled at the ceiling—Clorah wasn’t really there, or anywhere, of course—before continuing to bite off sweetness. For a minute, there was a blissful silence. Ruby chewed and swallowed, savoring the chocolatey goodness on her tongue. Reesnicks were her childhood favorites, full of caramel and nougat and peanuts, with a velvety peanut butter center.

  “Would you like me to start a bath?” Clorah asked and Ruby sighed. She could order Clorah quiet, if she wanted to—but it was strange how attached she had gotten to the AI’s presence. Whenever she silenced Clorah, she actually felt bad about it, like she’d hung up on a friend.

  “No.” Ruby closed the coldbox and took her chocolate with her into the other room. The video fireplace crackled and popped invitingly. Ruby had never seen a real fireplace in her life. “Clorah, pick a movie.”

  She plopped down in front of the screen, hearing a faint buzzing coming from her bag. In the upper left-hand side of the video screen, it showed the calls coming in, just the name of the caller, inconspicuous but visible. Bastian’s name kept scrolling by.

  “Make calls invisible, Clorah,” she instructed, putting her feet up on the table. Bastian’s name disappeared from the screen.

  “What are we in the mood for, Ruby?” Clorah asked as the screen changed, showing rows of pictures. “Romance? Drama? How about the new X-Men Origins?”

  “You mean the reboot of the remake of the remake?” She snorted a laugh, knowing Clorah was making a joke—if A.I. could be said to have a sense of humor. Clorah had caught on pretty quickly that Ruby was no fan of movies that had been re-done ad infinitum and ad nauseum. “How about The Martian?”

  “The new one?” Clorah asked politely and Ruby rolled her eyes, unable to help smiling. Clorah really thought she was funny. “I have the original from 2015, or the remake in 2029, or the latest version from 2075…”

  “The original, with that adorable Matt Damon,” Ruby insisted, curling up and settling in to watch. She wanted to get lost in someone else’s problems, be taken back to a time and place when the idea of life on other planets was just a dream, when the invention of hypersleep and traveling at the speed of light were nothing but ideas in the minds of fiction writers.

  “You do realize that Matt Damon has been dead since—” Clorah began but Ruby hushed her and told her to start the evening meal.

  Not that she was hungry, but it gave Clorah something to concentrate on and got her out of the way. Most people had converted to Nutribars and Nutridrinks and that’s what she ate when she was at work, or when she went out, but Ruby could remember her mother making actual food, and she liked to eat it at home, even if it was more expensive.

  Working at N.A.S.A. had its perks, and the extra pay was just one of them. The program had fallen by the wayside for a long time. Most people were just peripherally aware of it. Ruby hadn’t been born yet when the program exploded to life again, but her father had been one of the first astronauts to travel outside of the Milky Way, and he and his team had returned safe and sound, and not aged hardly at all, thanks to hypersleep.

  Ruby wasn’t an astronaut, nor did she have any aspirations to be one, but she’d worked in N.A.S.A.’s control room since she’d matriculated, thanks to her father’s connections.

  Meeting Bastian had been another perk of the job—at least, she’d thought so at the time. The first time she’d seen him, she’d forgotten how to talk. She’d just sat there, looking at him, all words gone. Thoughts, too, really. When he had turned his head to look at her, somehow sensing her gaze on him, it had been like a jolt of lightning ripping through her.

  Those eyes.

  He hadn’t started wearing contacts yet to cover up those lavender eyes. They glinted almost silver when he focused on her that first time. It completely fried her brain—she couldn’t think, could barely keep focused on the autonomic stuff like breathing. She actually put her hand to her chest to double check—was her freaking heart still beating?

  That’s what meeting Bastian had been like, and that was before the man—who was a man, and yet so much more—had even opened his mouth and acknowledged her.

  “The evening meal is ready, Ruby.” Clorah interrupted her memories. Half the movie was over already, and she’d been daydreaming about Sebastian the whole time. “And I know you told me to hold all calls, but you’ve had another six of them from—”

  “Don’t say his name,” Ruby warned, holding up a finger and shaking it in mid-air like she was reprimanding a child. “Just don’t.”

  Clorah was silent as Ruby made her way to the kitchenette to fetch her dinner. Real roasted vegetables mixed with bits of chicken—there wasn’t much livestock to be had these days, so any kind of meat was a luxury—in a mouth-watering sweet and sour sauce that made Ruby want to lick the dish as she ate on the sofa in front of the television.

  She let herself get lost in the story, smiling through the rudimentary scientific explanations Matt Damon gave on the screen. These days, an astronaut getting “stranded” on Mars was a ridiculous notion. They could get to and from Mars in a blink now. At least, N.A.S.A. could. Regular passenger space travel had been up for debate for years in congress, but so far, no one but N.A.S.A.’s astronauts had been outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Her own father had been one of the first men who had discovered Bastian’s home planet, just twenty years before.

  By the time she finished dinner, the movie was over and Clorah was eerily quiet. The telecom usually kept Ruby company—she’d grown up with A.I., and didn’t have her mother’s aversion to the technology—but she’d gone so quiet it was concerning.

  “Clorah?” Ruby carried her dish to the kitchen and left it in the sink.

  �
��Yes, Ruby?” Clorah inquired, coming back online again.

  “Everything all right?”

  “I might ask you the same, Ruby.”

  Ruby sighed, heading into her bedroom. Sometimes artificial intelligence was too intelligent. The television had been turned off, and the lights in the living area dimmed, just as the lights in her bedroom came on. They were all heat sensitive and responded to her as she moved throughout the apartment.

  She sat on the edge of her bed—a bed she’d been sharing with Sebastian for months, when they weren’t holed up in his apartment—and tried not to feel the incredible hole in the center of her chest. It more than hurt. It frightened her. She felt a panic clutch her throat at the thought of being without him. How could she be so connected to a man she had known for so little time?

  “Would you like me to start a bath?” Clorah inquired.

  It sounded like heaven, getting lost in a bath, but sitting alone in the quiet would give her too much time to think. About him.

  “Did Bastian call again?” Ruby asked softly, almost afraid to ask.