Stealing Her Heart
A Kindred Tales Novel
Evangeline Anderson
www.evangelineanderson.com
Stealing Her Heart, 1st Edition,
A Kindred Tales Novel
Copyright © 2020 by Evangeline Anderson
All rights reserved.
Cover Art Design © 2020 by Reese Dante
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Cover content is for illustrative purposes only.
Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Contents
Stealing Her Heart
Author’s Note
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
The End?
Fang and Claw
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Guarding the Goddess
Deleted Chapter
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About the Author
Stealing Her Heart
A Kindred thief who longs for a female to love...
An abandoned woman, trying to start again...
When the two of them are thrown together, sparks fly.
But what happens when Vicky has to pretend she's a professor
Who teaches sexual techniques to younger men?
You'll have to read Stealing Her Heart to find out.
Vicky Erickson is having a lousy Valentine’s Day. First the man she met on the dating app stood her up, then she ripped the expensive dress she was going to return. What else could go wrong?
How about having hot Kindred thief run into the bar and beg her to pretend she’s his date?
At first it seems like fun and Vicky is willing to play along. But things get dangerous when the lizard-like aliens he stole from come searching for him…and find her instead.
Chain is an M-Switch Kindred and a thief. His ability to “snatch” another male’s body for a limited time helps him pull off jobs no one else can handle—but it also makes him a pariah to the rest of Kindred society. No female would ever want to bond with an M-Switch or “Snatcher” as the other Kindred call them, so he has given up on finding love and concentrates on his craft. What he doesn't guess is that his craft will lead him to love...in a round-about way.
After landing Vicky in a heap of trouble with the lizard-like Varians he stole from, he takes her with him on his next "job" to keep her safe. But the job happens to be located on a planet where women teach men exactly how they like to be pleased and Vicky has to pose as a sex professor. Can she rise to the occasion and come up with a curriculum of her own? And more importantly, can Chain keep his head while he's...Stealing Her Heart?
Bonus Content: A deleted chapter from GUARDING THE GODDESS you'll want to read if you're a chewchie fan!
Author’s Note
This New Years I took to Facebook to ask what you, my readers, would like me to write about. I invited you all to send me your ideas and promised I would dedicate a book to you if I used your idea. Well, I got so many good responses, I was overwhelmed! Some of you need to be writing your own books—that's for sure. : ) I kept the idea that my muse liked best in a file and several of them made their way into this book. So without further ado—the dedication!
This book is dedicated to Terri Webb for her idea of a girl in bar wearing an expensive dress that got torn which she was going to return, stood up on Valentine's Day. Honorable mention to Melisa Tharrington Davis for her idea of Kindred overpopulation causing the Kindred to decide to build another Mother Ship (I just touched on this) and to Marie Whelen who asked for a Mature heroine whose kids are already away at college. Thank you all for your wonderful, creative ideas and for continuing to love the world of the Kindred as much as I do!
Love,
Evangeline
One
Victoria Erickson sat at the Last Call Bar nursing her third strawberry daiquiri and looking down at the rip in the skirt of her expensive Teri Jon dress. She had no idea how she had gotten it, but there it was, staring at her like a bad omen.
The Teri Jon was a sexy red wrap dress and Vicky had gotten it at Saks especially for tonight—for her Valentine’s date. It hadn’t been on sale, either. In fact, it had cost an ungodly amount—almost five hundred dollars—which she could ill afford on her high school teacher’s salary. But it had looked so good and made her feel so sexy, she’d decided to do something she normally wouldn’t—get the dress, wear it once, and then return it the next day.
No returning it now, whispered a little voice in the back of her head as she examined the rip. Nope, no way—absolutely not. You just blew your savings on something you couldn’t afford in the first place. Now what are you going to do the next time the Civic breaks down or the AC goes out?
Vicky didn’t have answers for those questions—all she knew was that she’d paid an awful lot to look nice and the effort had been completely wasted. Her date hadn’t even showed.
“Stupid app,” she muttered, staring resentfully down at her phone. “Should have known trying to start dating again at my age wouldn’t work.” Not after over twenty years of being with the same man, anyway.
It had been her older daughter Jodi’s idea to get her an account on Second Time Around, the premier dating app for divorced people in their forties and fifties.
“Dad’s moving on, Mom—you should too,” she’d said when Vicky had admitted to being lonely.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. It had been almost a year since her youngest daughter, Melinda, had gone off to college and Vicky’s husb
and of twenty-six years had announced that he was leaving.
In fact, both events had happened on the very same day. Vicky had still had tears in her eyes from seeing her baby off to USF when Kevin had announced that he’d “had enough of this shit” and he was leaving immediately.
“He already had his bags packed,” Vicky murmured to herself, taking another sip of her daiquiri. “Couldn’t wait to get away.”
As it turned out, her ex had only been waiting until both kids were gone so he couldn’t be forced to pay any kind of child support. And it further turned out that he’d been having an affair with his secretary for the past three years. And to cap off the sad, stereotypical story of her husband’s infidelity, his secretary—who was now his new wife—was pregnant.
So Kevin was starting all over again while Vicky was just left there in the dust, middle aged and alone with no one to love her and no one left to love—at least, no one at home, since all her chicks had flown the nest.
Oh, stop being so maudlin, Vicky scolded herself mentally. You’re not usually like this—it must be the alcohol talking.
Well, that and the fact that she’d been stood up on Valentine’s Day. Which sucked—honestly, there was no way around it.
The worst thing was, Vicky was fairly certain she’d spotted Ted—the man she was supposed to meet—earlier in the crowded front of the bar. She’d seen a man who seemed to match his picture—well, sort of, since he was a lot shorter than the 6’2 he’d listed and had a beer belly and was balding. But all the same, he’d looked like the photo on the app.
Vicky had seen him looking—scanning the bar for the woman in the red dress. She’d felt so sexy earlier, messaging him with that little bit of information. “I’ll be the one with a silver streak in her hair and a low-cut red dress,” she’d typed and had felt a tingling between her thighs she hadn’t felt in years.
She and Kevin had been in a sexless marriage for the last five years together and tonight she’d imagined she might finally have a little fun for the first time in ages. So she had waved at Ted—or the man she thought was Ted—trying to catch his eye behind the thick glasses he wore.
Ted—if it had been Ted—had sized her up with a quick up and down glance, then turned and headed right back out of the bar. He hadn’t waved back, or come up to give any kind of explanation, or anything. He just left—as though what he saw when he looked at Vicky wasn’t enough to tempt him—wasn’t even enough to warrant any common courtesy.
Vicky had tried to tell herself it was the wrong guy, that it hadn’t been her date at all that she’d seen looking at her and leaving. But the minutes had ticked by and Ted never showed. He never even messaged her on the app to let her know he wasn’t coming or answered the short message she’d sent, asking if she was at the right place. (She knew she was—she’d double checked twice.)
So that was her Valentine’s Day in a nutshell. The torn dress, the empty barstool beside her, and the two empty daiquiri glasses—soon to be three—said it all.
Why didn’t he stay? What did he see that made him just leave like that, with no explanation? Vicky wondered morosely. Yes, she was over forty—she was forty-six and a half to be exact—but she hadn’t hidden her age. And yes, she was on the curvy side, but she hadn’t hidden that either. She had marked the “more to love” box on her profile, indicating she was plus-sized.
Maybe Ted hadn’t liked the streak of pure silver that ran through her dark hair, highlighting her face. But that was in her profile picture too and Vicky refused to dye it. Likewise, she wasn’t going to get Botox or spend her meager teacher’s salary on expensive skin treatments to get rid of the faint crow’s feet around her eyes. She had earned every one of her wrinkles and she was proud of the fact that she had a lot more lines from laughing than from frowning.
Basically, she wasn’t going to pretend she was twenty because she wasn’t twenty, damn it! She had some life experience under her belt. She’d raised two daughters to be lovely human beings and she’d taught more kids than she could count at Woodrow Wilson High School to speak passable Spanish and French, as well as coaching the Drama Club.
Why didn’t anyone appreciate age and wisdom in a woman? Was the fact that she wasn’t a skinny young virgin really going to keep her single and alone for the rest of her life?
Apparently so, whispered the morose little voice in her head. If tonight is any indication. And stop trying to be brave about your age—you know you’d like to look younger. Why else did you spend so much time on your makeup tonight? And why else would you splurge on that ridiculously expensive red dress—a dress you now have no hope of returning? Because you wanted to look nice—because you were hoping to maybe get some sex for the first time in over five years.
Well, it looked like sex was definitely out. It seemed ironic to Vicky that after reading so much about today’s “hook-up culture” she couldn’t find a man to hook-up with herself. It wasn’t like she was looking for true love. She just wanted a half-way decent looking guy to touch her and treat her like she mattered—just for a little while.
Was that really so much to ask? Was it?
And that was when a man slid onto the bar stool beside her, gripped her hand and whispered, “I need your help—pretend you’re my female.”
Two
“What?” Vicky exclaimed, staring at him in surprise. He had on a dark cloak—really, who wore a cloak?—which shaded his eyes and made a mystery of his face. “Who are you?” she demanded, trying to make out his features in the shadowy confines of the dark garment.
The strange man seemed to sense her confusion.
“Forgive me—I ask for your help and do not even show you my face. Here.”
He pulled back the cloak, revealing longish dark hair that was wild around his face, chiseled features, and midnight-blue eyes which were accented by the dark blue shirt he was wearing under the cloak. Tight leather trousers, a black leather jacket, and tall black boots completed his outfit. He looked to be somewhere in his early thirties and was so tall and muscular he had to be a Kindred Warrior.
Vicky, like the rest of the world, knew all about the Kindred. The idea of the big, handsome Alien warriors coming to seek brides from Earth made her heart pound, though she had still been married to Kevin when they came and thus ineligible for their marriage draft.
And of course now she was too old for it, though she had heard rumors that the Kindred were thinking of raising the age of the draft or simply taking the age limit off altogether. Apparently some warriors were pairing up with older Earth women and without the draft as an excuse, it could be difficult to get a woman aboard the Mother Ship.
Not that this warrior with the dark hair and piercing blue eyes looked like he was here to claim her as his bride. The idea was ridiculous since she was obviously too old for him, Vicky told herself. He did look like he was in trouble, though and appeared to be asking for her help.
“Pretend you’re my female. My…what is the word you humans use?” His dark brows knitted in concentration. “My date! I need you to pretend you’re my date.”
“But…why?” Vicky asked, frowning at him.
“There are some very bad people after me.” The warrior looked anxiously at the door of the bar, as though expecting these “bad people” to barge in at any time. “Bad Varians, to be exact. I have no idea how they got through the barriers the Mother Ship has put around the Earth but somehow they did and they’re here. But they won’t be looking for a couple.”
“Varians? What—?” Vicky began but he was already dragging her off the bar stool and over to a shadowed booth at the far end of the bar.
“Better cover here,” he explained, sliding into the booth and pulling her in beside him.
“I guess so,” Vicky said doubtfully. “But—”
Just at that moment the bar’s door opened and two identical men in their late forties came in.
Vicky stared at the newcomers in surprise. It wasn’t just their faces that were identical, a
s though they were twins. Their clothing, (black track suits,) and shoes, (white Nikes,) were identical too. Even their short brown hair was cut and parted precisely the same. They didn’t just look like identical twins—they looked like someone had copied and pasted the two of them on a computer screen.
“That’s them—the Varians!” the Kindred whose name she still didn’t know hissed in Vicky’s ear. He draped one muscular arm over her shoulders and pulled her close—so close she was practically sitting in his lap. “Quick, laugh at something I just said. Act normal—like we’re a bonded couple,” he muttered in her ear.
There was absolutely nothing normal about this situation, as Vicky wanted to point out. But after years of coaching the Drama Club, she certainly knew how to act.
Turning her head, she gave his bristly cheek a soft kiss, noting as she did, that he smelled fantastic. Was that warm spicy scent some kind of alien pheromone cologne? If it was, it was working because being close to the Kindred’s big, muscular body was making her tingle in all the right places.
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