Maxim

by K. D. Jones

  EXCERPT: Rage

  (Warning for mature readers only)

  The recorded fight they had just watched was one with which Rachel was familiar. She had actually watched the match with her friends and co-workers at the local Galactic Pub. Rage had been her uncle’s favorite.

  “I am not sure I understand what the mission is. Did you want me to investigate the fighter?” Rachel asked, not taking her eyes off Rage. Even covered in alien blood, he was hot. He stood over seven feet tall and was reported to weigh two hundred fifty pounds. His body was all muscle.

  “We want you to start your investigation with the GCFA circuit. It may lead to individual fighters.” Marks handed Rachel a personal electronic display, a PED, with a beautiful woman’s image on it. She had long, sable brown hair and chocolate brown eyes. She had mixture of a Hispanic descent, and she was human, at least in appearance.

  “Her name is Lucinda Stamos. Her uncle is Senator Jon Stamos of the Eastern Quarter of the Omega Region. She went missing a little over two months ago,” Marks informed her.

  “What does her disappearance have to do with the GCFA?” Rachel asked as she studied the image of the young woman.

  “She was celebrating her college graduation with friends. They went to one of the GCFA matches and according to her friends, she started an affair with one of the fighters. She followed him on their circuit tour, but somewhere along the way, she just disappeared. Her friends and family haven’t heard anything from her and the GCFA released a statement saying she left the spaceport hotel on her own.”

  Rachel looked again at the image of Rage. Was he involved somehow? Could he be the boyfriend? A part of her hoped that he wasn’t as she asked the question, “Who was the fighter she was involved with?”

  “Talon, according to the friends’ reports, but this is bigger than just her. She’s the eighth human woman to go missing in the last six months. They were women of different ethnicities, from all over the eight regions. The one common thread linking them is that they were all last seen at a GCFA match before they were reported missing. I’ve downloaded a report on each woman for you,” Marks stated.

  She quickly scrolled through the summaries of each case. Each woman had last been seen in one of the regions on the GCFA circuit. The circuit covered eight regions—Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Omega, Delta, Kappa, Theta, and Zeta. Each region was also separated in four quarters—Eastern, Western, Northern, and Southern, with each quarter containing a million galaxies. That was a lot of ground to cover, and it was only a small piece of the enormous universe.

  The young women had gone missing from almost every region on the GCFA circuit. The first girl, Lauren Crabtree, was reported missing from the Alpha Region. Then two girls, Sandra Tate and Melissa Dearling, went missing from the Delta Region. Barbie Vent went missing from the Beta Region. Two more, Robin Teros and Vanna Jones, were from the Theta Region. Candy Simmons had gone missing from the Gamma Region. The final girl, Lindy Stamos, went missing from the Zeta Region.

  As Marks was explaining the disappearances of the other women, Rachel looked at their images on her PED, one right after another. They were all young and beautiful. “Did you question the fighter, Talon?”

  “We tried, but the GCFA lawyers have been giving us grief about harassing their fighters. It’s been hard to get answers from him or anyone associated with the GCFA. The statement their publicity team released stated that each of the women in question left of their own accord.”

  “So you want me to question them?” asked Rachel as she continued to stare at the girls pictures on the PED.

  “Not directly. We want you to go undercover as a new female fighter for the GCFA,” Marks continued to explain. “They’ve been off the circuit for two months. They’re about to re-start their GCFA tour again in about six weeks. We want you to pose as a new fighter and go with them on their circuit to investigate from the inside. We believe they may talk to you as a fellow fighter. I have to warn you―if you accept this assignment, you’ll be going in solo.”

  “Okay, I’m in,” she said without hesitation.

  “Good. Once your training is complete, we’ll set you up with an identity,” Marks told her.

  “Training? I’m already trained to fight in multiple disciplines,” Rachel responded.

  The other man in the fancy suit had been silent until now. “Not for this type of fighting.”

  “And you are?” Rachel asked as she raised her eyebrow up at him.

  “I am called Lesak. I have trained many fighters for the GCFA. I am well known within the fighting circuit. I will be your in, but I must make sure you can fight well enough to be accepted at the tryouts. The fights won’t be fixed. They will be real.”

  “I’m one of the best fighters in the agency. The best female fighter for sure,” she said with confidence.

  “It won’t be good enough. You are pure human. You have only fought other pure humans. The GCFA fighters are mixed species, halfsies as they are called. They have to be, in order to sometimes fight full-blooded aliens as their opponents. A halfsies alien DNA ensures that they will have superior strength and speed.”

  “I think I just got insulted.” Rachel looked ready to knock this guy on his ass.

  EXCERPT: Desolation

  (Warning for mature readers only)

  “Mmm . . . oh God, yes.” Her head tilted back and she felt the ice cream and chocolate slide down her throat.

  “I like the sounds you make,” Liam said. He was fighting every instinct he had to take her in his arms and claim her. The sounds she was making reminded him too much of the noises he imagined she would make during sex. Every moan seemed to stroke his shaft. He moved closer, taking the spoon so that he could feed her the cake and ice cream. “Do you like that, Maggie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want more? You have to ask me.”

  “Please, give me more Liam.” Her eyes seemed to glaze over.

  “Take it from me, Maggie.” Liam put a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth and leaned over to kiss her.

  The flavor combination of Maggie and sweet ice cream was his undoing, and hers.

  “Liam, I want more.”

  EXCERPT: Strange Lake Falls Werewolf

  (Warning for mature readers only)

  Mary woke slowly, aching in all the right places, and she smiled as Ric ran his hands all over her body. “Mmm…that feels good.”

  His breath was right at her ear. “You feel good.” He nibbled gently.

  Mary giggled. He had reduced her to a giggling teenager. She had never acted this way with anyone before. She looked down as he moved to nuzzle her breasts.

  “What time is it?” She asked.

  “It’s seven thirty in the morning.”

  She laughed as she stretched a little. “I can’t seem to move my body.”

  He chuckled, “Well I did tire you out last night.”

  She smiled at him. “I’m not complaining.”

  He nuzzled her neck again. “Let me cook you dinner tonight.”

  “Can you cook?” She just couldn’t picture the macho Alpha wearing an apron and baking cakes.

  He looked at her with a playfully hurt expression. “Of course I can cook.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you.” She tried to squirm free, but he refused to let her up.

  “I’m not easily offended, beautiful, but if you want to make it up to me, you’ll agree to come to dinner tonight.”

  “Okay, I’ll come. What time should I be there?”

  “Eight.”

  She nodded her head in agreement. “Should I bring anything?”

  “Just your gorgeous self.”

  “How about I bring dessert?”

  Ric looked her body up and down. “Darlin’, you are the dessert.”

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  You can contact the author KD Jones at:

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  Do you like hot cowboys?

  Then check out this great western romance by the amazing Lori King.

  Forget Me Knot

  Crawley Creek Ranch

  By: Lori King

  Chapter 1

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Romeo.” Drannon stared down at the half-naked form of his brother sprawled out on the front porch. It was lucky Roman had made so much noise stumbling around drunk, or he might have frozen to death before morning. As it was, he’d woken Drannon from a sound sleep, and as usual, Drannon had gone to his brother’s rescue. Dragging Roman’s limp body up over his shoulder, and carrying him out of the February night air, he grumbled under his breath, “Going to end up poisoning your blood with alcohol, or get some sort of damn STD. Why the hell do you think you have to bang every woman this side of the Mississippi anyway? Stupid. Just plain ol’stupid is what that is.”

  There was no response from the unconscious man, but Drannon felt better as he spewed out his feelings on the recurrent situation. For months he and the other guys had been bailing Roman out and cleaning him up after his binge partying sessions. Maybe it was time to give the kid an ultimatum. Dry out and straighten up, or…

  It was the “or” that was the problem. Drannon would never be able to kick his brother off the ranch, no matter how stupid he behaved. Crawley Creek was all Roman had, all any of them had, and it belonged to the whole lot of them.

  With one final curse, he dumped Roman onto the sofa and headed for the kitchen in search of a midnight snack. The bright light of the fridge made him squint as he reached for the milk to go with the cookies he knew Marilyn had just put in the cookie jar.

  “I thought I heard something.” Vin’s voice startled him, and he choked on his cookie spewing crumbs all over the counter top. Laughing, Vin slapped him on the back, “Sorry D, didn’t mean to scare you. Didn’t you bring your teddy-bear downstairs with you?”

  "Asshole,” Drannon grumbled, reaching for a napkin to wipe his face. “The teddy bear is passed out on the sofa, probably drooling all over Marilyn’s fancy pillows, and mumbling to himself, as usual.”

  Vin’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “Not again.”

  “Yep. Found him on the porch minus his coat, shirt and boots.”

  “Fuck. That kid is trying to kill himself.” Vin took a seat at the breakfast bar, and swiped a cookie from the jar. “Who’d he go out with tonight?”

  “No clue, but he smells like cheap perfume and cigarettes. I was half tempted to dunk him in the horse tank before I brought him in, but that isn’t fair to the horses.” Drannon snorted at his own joke. Roman Freemont, aka Romeo, was only ten years younger than he and Vin, but he acted like a teenager. Partying, and womanizing like it was going out of style. “We’re going to have to do something about it.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have a clue what.” Vin scraped his nails over his shaved head in a gesture that was as routine as breathing for him. “He’s been tore up ever since…”

  His words drifted off, but Drannon nodded his understanding. Less than a year ago, Abraham Crawley had died of a sudden heart attack while fixing a fence in the west pasture. Roman was supposed to have gone with him that day to help him make the repairs, but he’d spent the night at a lady friend’s house, and hadn’t gotten home in time, so Abe had left on his own. Roman held on to the crazy idea that if he’d been there with Abe he could have saved him, even though the doctors insisted Abe had died almost instantly.

  “Guilt’s still eating him alive inside.” Drannon said, sighing heavily as the sweets he’d consumed turned into a heavy lump in his belly. “He needs help.”

  “Yep, but he’s too stubborn to admit it.”

  “Just like someone else I know,” Drannon shot back with a pointed look at Vin.

  His brother’s nostrils flared, and his eyes darkened in the murky kitchen lighting. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like you don’t know? You go all Incredible Hulk on everyone at the slightest thing lately. That PTSD isn’t something to play around with, Vin. You need to get back on those meds.” Drannon hated pointing it out, especially this late at night, but the opportunity had presented itself, and he couldn’t let it go.

  “That medicine makes me numb. I’d rather feel something than nothing,” Vin grumbled. “Besides, it ain’t my fault the guys you hired last summer are morons. Shit, if we had some hands with brains around here maybe I wouldn’t lose my temper so much.”

  It was an argument Vin had made for too long, but Drannon let it drop because two a.m. was not the time to get into it with his brother.

  “I’m going back to bed. We have an empty house until Thursday, but then we get a guest.” Drannon put the milk away, and wiped the crumbs from the counter into his palm.

  Vin frowned back at him as he put the cookie jar away, “A guest? In February?”

  “I know, but they booked it a while ago, and it’s already paid for. I can’t imagine anyone taking a trip to the Dakotas in the dead of winter for fun, but whatever. Money is money, and if we’re going to start taking in fosters this summer, we need what we can get.”

  Following Drannon into the main hallway, Vin nodded, “True that. Want me to take him upstairs?” He gestured toward the living room where Roman’s snores rumbled.

  Drannon shook his head, “Don’t bother. Marilyn will lay into him when she finds him in the morning, and he deserves what he gets.”

  “That’s stone cold, man,” Vin said with a chuckle, “but I like it.”

  The two parted ways, with Drannon heading up the main staircase to the original wing of the house, and Vin heading farther down the hallway to the new wing that was added a couple of decades ago. Abraham and Seraphina Crawley had turned Crawley Creek Ranch into a home for foster children, and as their small clan of orphans and runaways grew, they kept adding on to the main house until it was obvious they needed more space. Cabins sprang up all over the back forty acres, and after the kids grew up and moved away, the buildings stood empty.

  Walking through the silence in the dimly lit hallway regularly brought back the memory of how Drannon came to be at Crawley Creek, and he let himself drift back thirty years on a memory.

  No one ever told Drannon outright that his mother was dead, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. All around him, people avoided his questioning gaze until he stopped looking altogether. The doctor gave him an uncomfortable one-armed hug, and told him that everything would be okay, but the stately man left unspoken the phrase that would shatter a child’s eight-year-old heart.

  It didn’t matter that Kelsey Russo was a drug addict who frequently sold her body to men in order to buy peanut butter and bread to keep in the cupboards of their tiny one bedroom apartment. All that mattered was that she was his mom and the only person in the world who had ever loved him. Now she was gone. A victim of her own demons.

  After several hours of lonely boredom in the tiny hospital waiting room, a tired looking woman with dark coffee-colored skin, her hair pulled back in a severe bun, arrived to collect him. By the time she’d completed the hospital’s necessary release paperwork, Drannon was near to falling over with hunger and exhaustion.

  “Hello Drannon, my name is Danica. I’m with social services, and I’m going to get you someplace more comfortable so that you can get some rest. It’s been a trying day for you hasn’t it, sugar?” Her voice was raspy but comforting after the haunted silence of the last hours alone wondering and worrying. When she cocked her head and frowned, he nodded quickly, feeling his cheeks heat. “Do you have anything with you?”

  He shook his head no, thinking briefly of the three t-shirts and two pairs of torn jeans resting in the bottom drawer of his mother’s dresser. It wasn’t mu
ch, but it was all he had. Clearing his throat he tried to tell her. “M-my c-clothes, um…they’re in m-my house...er…ap-ap-apartment.”

  Embarrassment filled him making the stuttering even worse as he struggled to get the words out. Danica nodded, but her eyes were sad. “Unfortunately, the police have the apartment roped off while they do their investigation, but I’ll do my best to collect whatever you need from there tomorrow. For tonight, we’ll just have to make do.”

  She didn’t mention the stuttering at all, and his anxiety eased. When she reached for his hand, he gratefully accepted the gesture. There was no way she could know that it was the first time in his life he could remember anyone holding his hand. Following her lead, they left the hospital that held the empty body that was his mother, and went directly from there to a fast food restaurant where Danica let him choose anything he wanted off the menu.

  After a large cheeseburger and fries washed down by an enormous cola, his eyelids began to droop heavily. He didn’t remember anything about the ride other than climbing into the car and buckling his seat belt. On that frigid February night, all that mattered was that he was full for the first time in months, and comfortably tucked in front of the heat vent in Danica’s car.

  She woke him when they parked in front of a massive white ranch house that had a wrap-around front porch. Drannon couldn’t see much more in the dark, but he got the impression of other buildings off to his left as he followed Danica to the front door. A tall man with dark hair and a mustache that looked like a huge caterpillar swung it open and gestured them inside.

  “Who have we here?” the man’s voice was deep, and it brought a shiver to Drannon’s spine as it reverberated in the foyer and on down the wide hallway.