Enemy of the Alien Bride Lottery by Margo Collins (e book reader free .TXT) 📗

last time, his gaze holding mine hostage again for a few seconds—until the hatch slid closed between us, and the ship’s engines roared.

Then the gorgeous alien and his ship were both gone, and I was free.

But my hands trembled, and a sense of foreboding settled in my stomach, periodically rising through my throat. No matter how often I tried to swallow it down, it wouldn’t go away.

So I wasn’t terribly surprised a few hours later when a police car pulled into the hotel’s semi-circular drop-off drive, lights flashing.

Two officers moved into the lobby, their faces grim.

“Deandra Casto?” the shorter of the two officers asked, his dark eyes narrowing as he scanned me up and down, his thumbs hooked in his belt.

“Yes,” I confirmed, albeit reluctantly.

“Do you have anyone here to cover for you?”

“Alejandro just got here. I should be off work in about…. Well, now,” I said as Alejandro emerged from the office behind the check-in desk.

“Then I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to come with us,” the other officer, an older, heavier bald man, said.

Fuck.

As I stepped out from behind the desk, the shorter officer spun me around and handcuffed my hands behind my back as the other one said, “Deandra Casto, you are under arrest for aiding and abetting a fugitive from the Khanavai Warrior Bride Lottery and Games.”

As he Mirandized me and they marched me out of the lobby, only one thought kept running through my mind over and over again.

I never should have told that green bastard that I helped Amelia.

Chapter Four

Wex

The first thing I did when I got back to Station 21 was look up everything I could find about Deandra Casto.

There wasn’t much to find. Her mother was deceased. Her father was on several government watch lists, of concern to Earther officials because of his anti-government leanings.

I didn’t care about that. All I wanted to know was how I could arrange to make his daughter my bride.

When I came across her marriage record, it was all I could do to stop myself from pounding my fist through the control panel in front of me.

No. She cannot be married.

Reining in my anger, I began searching for more information on this supposed husband of hers.

Samuel A. Wesson.

Through Earth’s public records, I tracked him down to a city some considerable distance away from Deandra’s home—at least when traveling by Earther methods.

It wasn’t entirely uncommon for human women who were completely opposed to ever joining the Bride Lottery to marry just before they turned 21, the age at which their names were dropped into the lottery. The practice was illegal as Zagrodnian hell, but fraud was often hard to prove.

Except, of course, in cases where the newlyweds immediately went their separate ways—as it appeared Samuel and Deandra had done.

If they were caught, they faced some stiff penalties. But, more to my purpose, the marriage would be instantly dissolved and declared void.

Best to make sure first, however.

Glancing around the Bride Games control room to make sure no one was paying any attention to what I was doing over at my station, I logged into one of Station 21’s lesser-known systems. A system that technically, only Vos Klavoii was supposed to have access to. But as the chief communications officer, it was my job to keep those secret systems running for him. They were designed to allow Vos and his staff to conduct what he called a deep dive into the Bride Lottery candidates’ backgrounds.

Because although he made a huge production of drawing the brides’ names live on vid, Vos actually drew the names much earlier, checked their backgrounds, and then, if they did not meet his standards, he discarded the names and drew again.

Access to this information was protected by the Bride Alliance between Earth and Khanavai Prime. There would be trouble if I were caught accessing the information of an individual otherwise unconnected to the Bride Lottery.

But I won’t get caught.

No. Samuel Wesson had not ever been to Deandra’s home, as far as I could tell, nor she to his. Their credit chips had not been used at any car charging stations between their homes. Nor at any restaurants, convenience stores—or anywhere else, for that matter.

They had never contacted one another via their private communication devices in the years since their sham marriage had been performed.

She wasn’t really married.

Good. Because there was no way I was going to allow her to get away from me.

Now I simply had to find a way to get Vos to draw her name and let me participate in the Bride Games.

As I was trying to figure out how to convince the Games Director that he should do just that, an alert scrolled across my screen—the one open to Deandra’s information.

She had been arrested for her role in Amelia Rivers’ escape.

I frowned at the screen. Her arrest put a crimp in my plan to make her mine immediately.

On the other hand, being convicted of aiding and abetting a runaway bride came with a punishment—time in an Earther prison, if I recalled correctly.

Prison time would ensure that she doesn’t form a true bond with someone else.

I could use this to my advantage.

Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I quickly added information to the alert, noting her fraudulent marriage.

If anyone bothered to trace the source of the information, it could lead back to me. But I doubted anyone would look beyond the fact—especially since I had attached all the evidence I found that she and Samuel did not have anything resembling a true marriage.

I wasn’t certain it would hold up in a human court. Due to some antiquated and frankly bizarre religious beliefs, humans tended to put a lot of emphasis on the idea of consummation.

Khanavai didn’t care if their mates had sexual relations with others before they met. As long as the human female wasn’t truly mated, we were happy—and that meant for us, that no Khanavai male had joined with her using his mating cock,