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  Claimed for the Alien Bride Lottery

  The Khanavai Warrior Bride Games Book Three

  Margo Bond Collins

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Join Margo Online

  Read More of Margo’s Books

  Claimed for the Alien Bride Lottery

  Copyright © 2021 by Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Dangerous Words Publishing

  Cover by Covers by Combs

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author or authors.

  Created with Vellum

  About Claimed for the Alien Bride Lottery

  I thought I’d escaped being given to an alien warrior. I was wrong.

  I was one hour away from washing out of the Alien Bride Games.

  None of the Khanavai warriors had chosen me, and I was scheduled on the next shuttle off the filming station.

  But then a bright red alien passed me in a hallway—and the next thing I knew, we were all over each other.

  Bad enough that my name had been drawn in the Bride Lottery.

  Now, even though they’re supposedly over, I’m back in the Games. And not the usual ones, either—a whole new set of challenges, just for me.

  Guess it’ll make for good television back home.

  I just hope I can resist him long enough to get back to Earth, to the people I love.

  And that I can keep him from learning my most desperate secret.

  The odds aren’t looking good, though…

  Readers adore this hot series featuring gorgeous, bright alien heroes and the sassy human women they choose as mates!

  Every book in the Khanavai Warrior Bride Games series is a standalone romance. Join these brides as they find a whole new world of happily ever afters.

  Chapter One

  Mia Jones

  My name—the one I have now—never should have been drawn in the Alien Bride Lottery.

  The back-alley surgeon who replaced my ID chip promised me it was clean, loaded with the information that I had already been through the Games.

  I guess that’ll teach me to trust the word of someone who made a living as a criminal, illegally replacing the chips our world government required all humans to have implanted.

  But the night I was transported up to Station 21, I wasn’t at all worried.

  I was, however, hot, sweaty, and irritated.

  “If you needed unbuttered toast, you should have noted it in the order,” I snapped at Kitty, the waitress on the other side of the passthrough to the kitchen—the one who was currently glaring at me over the plates under the heating lamps.

  “Noted it in the order?” she repeated with a sneer, one hand on her hip. “Who talks like that?”

  I rolled my eyes and snatched the toast off the plate under discussion, replacing it with unbuttered toast. “There.”

  Turning away without waiting for a response, I moved back to the grill. Kitty took the plate with a huff, and as soon as she was gone, I inhaled deeply and blinked away a tear.

  I shouldn’t be here at all. I trained at L'école de Cuisine du Chef, the single most prestigious culinary school in Paris. I should have been in a five-star restaurant in New York or London or Los Angeles, astounding patrons with my delectable, edible creations.

  Instead, I was in a crappy diner in Atlanta, slinging hash browns and frying eggs.

  But it beat the hell out of the alternative.

  Yeah—this is infinitely preferable to what I ran from.

  As I finished plating the last meal from the grill, voices rising from the dining room caught my attention. Wiping my hands across my apron, I made my way out to the front room to see what was going on.

  “It’s the new Bride Lottery,” Kitty announced excitedly, clasping her hands under her chin as she stared up at the television.

  I frowned. “Those poor girls.”

  Kitty raised one eyebrow. “What do you mean, those poor girls? They are so lucky. They never have to work again. All they have to do is sit and be beautiful for their alien husbands.” She struck a pose. “Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to do nothing but spend all day being waited on hand and foot?”

  “You don’t know what happens once the cameras are turned off,” Wanda, one of our regulars said.

  I moved over to pat her soft, wrinkled hand. “That’s right, Wanda. I don’t think we know nearly enough about the Khanavai. I bet they’re not as perfect as they pretend to be on TV.”

  “I remember the first time they showed up,” she said—not the first time we had all heard the story, but I paid polite attention, anyway.

  “The Prince sure was pretty,” she reminisced. “And for the first couple of years, him and his princess were all over the news. It was like a fairytale. Then they just up and disappeared. Hardly ever heard anything at all about their prince again.”

  “So you think we shouldn’t trust them?” Kitty asked the old woman.

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “But it’s not like all that many women end up with Khanavai husbands,” Joey, our busboy reminded us. “A whole lot of women get chosen every year in the Bride lottery, and then a whole lot get sent back down to Earth.”

  “Some of them don’t,” Kitty countered. “Some of them gets swept off their feet and taken away to live happily ever after.”

  I managed to contain my snort of derision, but only barely.

  Happily ever after doesn’t exist. It’s a trick designed to convince women to give up their entire lives for somebody else.

  At least, that was my experience.

  “Ooh. Vos Klavoii is about to draw another name!” Kitty called out.

  I decided to take a seat in the dining room. After all, no one was going to be ordering anything much until the drawing was done. I might as well take a break. I was practically dead on my feet. Working the 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. overnight shift well into the morning was good, because it meant I could get Josiah to bed at Rebecca’s and then be there when he woke up from his morning nap the next day. We might have to change that once he started school, but for now, it meant that we were home together for most of the day.

  That didn’t leave me much time for sleeping, though.

  But we were safe.

  Someone would have to be watching us pretty closely to be able to tell where we lived. And if they found that out, they’d have to be watching even closer to figure out where Josiah spent his nights.

  I stifled a yawn as Vos Klavoii, the bright green game show host who ran the Bride Lottery and Bride Games, continued his mindle
ss chatter about this year’s crop of brides.

  Crop. He might as well come out and say it—he thinks human women are grown to be brides for Khanavai males. Like we’re not worthwhile on our own.

  This time, my jawbone cracked as I gave a giant yawn.

  Sitting down probably hadn’t been a good idea. I was about to drift off to the sound of everyone enjoying the Bride Lottery drawings when the sound of my own name—the one I used now, anyway—jerked me awake.

  “Mia Jones,” Vos repeated, flicking his fingers toward the eboard behind him as he waited for the bride’s picture to be flashed on it behind him.

  No. It can’t be me. This is not a terribly uncommon name. There must be at least twenty others with the same name, I reassured myself.

  “We seem to be having some technical difficulty,” Vos said, his game-show host demeanor not breaking for even a moment. I wondered if he slept with that smile pasted on his face.

  All around me in the diner, everyone began jumping up and down and shouting.

  “It’s you, Mia, it’s you!” Kitty grabbed my hands with both of hers and pulled me up out of the chair as if we were suddenly best friends.

  I tugged my hands out of hers. “You can’t know that. It might not be me at all. Anyway, I’m not eligible for the lottery.”

  My coworker stopped her silly dance. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

  My breath stuttered to a halt in my chest. How can I answer that?

  No one here knew I had a child, and I was not about to tell them.

  For that matter, I wasn’t even Mia Jones. I was just playing a part: Mia, a little shy, a little talented in the kitchen, trying to get by as best I could.

  That’s all they needed to know.

  Wanda peered deep into my eyes as if reading everything there, then turned to the others. “That’s none of your business,” she announced. “Maybe her name was already drawn before.”

  “Nah. She’s lying,” Kitty decided. “She just doesn’t want a hottie alien husband. Because she’s insane. Clearly.”

  Vos was still on the screen, his green skin glowing almost a neon color as he chattered away about the history of the Bride Games in an attempt to fill time while they sorted out their technical difficulties.

  “Oh, here we go,” he finally said. “It looks like we are getting the feed through, finally. I hear they’re sending it over right … now.”

  My entire world narrowed down to that one moment, the eternity in the second between Vos announcing the picture was on the way and the picture actually showing up.

  When it finally came on the screen, I wished that I could have stayed in that second forever.

  It was me.

  Somehow, the Bride Lottery registration had gotten my name and new ID number and had drawn me in the Lottery.

  Cold washed through my limbs and my vision flickered in and out.

  I have to get out of here, have to run. A drumbeat started in my head. Get back to Josiah. Get us out of here. Save him.

  The transportation technology picked me up when I was halfway to the door, dashing across the room and ripping my apron off as if it held my tracker. I don’t know where I thought I would go. There was no one on Earth who could save me, no place I could hide. I was acting on pure instinct.

  The very last thing I saw as I was transported to Station 21 was the outline of Vos Klavoii’s face fading until only his smile remained.

  Like an evil, green, Cheshire cat.

  Chapter Two

  Eldron Gendovi

  “The Alveron Horde has been far too quiet lately,” I insisted. “They are planning something. I know it.”

  “No, they’re not. The Horde has been defeated.” General Clovad sighed and shook his head. “I understand your concerns, Commander Gendovi, but they’re unnecessary.”

  My jaw clenched, but I managed to simply nod. “Yes, sir.”

  “However,” the general continued, “just in case you’re right, I’m going to embed you in the Bride Lottery program this year.”

  I had already begun to excuse myself, so his words took me by surprise. “Embed me?”

  “Not officially. If you’re wrong, I don’t want to terrify anyone. But on the off-chance that you’re right, I think it would be a good idea to have you close to our best source of viable mates.”

  Of course, that would be the general’s primary concern. Rumor had it that his own Khanavai mate—one of the few females remaining of our species on the planet—was dying. And the general, who had married not from love, but from political necessity, already had his eye on replacing her with one of the young Bride Lottery humans.

  Still, I was smart enough not to bring that up.

  “If they have anything planned,” he continued, “I suspect it will be at the height of this year’s Bride Games—and we will have you there.”

  “If I may ask, sir—you’ll have me there as what, exactly?”

  The general’s eyes lit up. “As a groom, course. You might as well get a mate while you’re there.”

  Three weeks later, I was still convinced the Horde was planning something. The longer we went without hearing any news from The Darkness—the part of the galaxy the Horde had claimed—the more comfortable the upper brass got. And the more nervous I became.

  The Khanavai had gotten more lax over the years as the Alveron Horde failed to attack year after year.

  I did not believe that we were safe from the ravages of the Horde. And I definitely didn’t believe the space station where we filmed the yearly Bride Lottery and Games was safe.

  So here I was on Station 21, pretending to search for a bride.

  Only Vos Klavoii knew my real mission. He’d been clear. I had to make my bride-hunt convincing—anything else, and he would have to boot me from the show, possibly too soon to do any good if the Horde did attack.

  I glanced around the tiny room I had been assigned as my groom’s quarters.

  This was a young man’s game. I was at least a decade older than every other groom here.

  I didn’t fit in.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to. I simply had to continue participating until I was absolutely sure that the Horde didn’t have something up their alien equivalency of sleeves.

  I had no interest in actually becoming a groom.

  Besides, my research suggested that the Bride Lottery and Games had been a terrible miscalculation on the original Khanavai explorers’ part.

  Not that they weren’t immensely popular now—they absolutely were. But when we, as a species, had first arrived on planet Earth, we had been watching various entertainment programs for years. Earthers had been so naïve that they had blasted their entertainment out into space to be picked up by anyone who happened by.

  We had half expected, given the content of the entertainment, that humans would have blown themselves to bits already by the time we got there.

  As it turned out, although Earthers really were easily as violent as their television shows had suggested, they weren’t quite so likely to wipe themselves out entirely.

  No one knew that yet, though, when Prince Khan had arrived half an Earth century before. He and his team had saved Earth from the Alveron Horde attackers, then dropped in on the planet to introduce themselves and ask for payment for protection: genetically compatible female mates to replace the ones the Horde had genetically poisoned.

  When Prince Khan’s research team put together the proposal for the Bride Lottery and Games, however, they made one tactical error. They thought human reality shows were, in fact, real.

  The Khanavai assumed the entertainment they had intercepted and studied was somehow indicative of Earthers’ actual, true courting rituals.

  As it turned out, Earther females did not usually participate in games to win their spouses.

  Not even kissing games.

  Not competitively, anyway.

  Mostly.

  No one on Prince Khan’s team had realized that salient fact soon enough, so as part of the
treaty between Earth and Khanavai Prime, the Khanavai had set up a game show during which human brides competed for the honor to mate with a Khanavai warrior.

  As it turned out, human women were not uniformly thrilled with the idea of catching their mates like fish, as one early contestant had succinctly put it.

  I’d had to look up what fish were and all in all, I was rather glad we didn’t have them on Khanavai Prime. No matter how delicious human women seemed to think they were, they appeared to be slimy and scaly.

  And unflatteringly floppy.

  No. We were definitely not fish to be caught.

  Now that the Bride Lottery was fully enmeshed in their culture, of course, many Earther females had begun to look forward to it. But that early reluctance explained the Lottery portion of the agreement. The Bride Alliance Treaty specified that human women could not be mated against their will, but they could be convinced.

  Early on, it took sorting through a lot of women to find one who was both willing to leave her world and compatible with one of our warriors.

  Now it was much easier—but the Bride Lottery lived on as tradition.

  Anyway, I thought smugly as I stretched out on the single bed in my quarters, I wasn’t actually looking for a bride. I was looking for any way the Horde could break through our defenses.

  Spying on my own people wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I knew it had to be done.

  A ding from my com let me know that a message had arrived.

  It wasn’t the information I was waiting for, though. I had been hoping for more details about the station’s weaknesses, as the general had promised.