Barbarian's Taming (Ice Planet Barbarians, Band 8) - Softcover

Buch 8 von 21: Ice Planet Barbarians

Dixon, Ruby

 
9780593639481: Barbarian's Taming (Ice Planet Barbarians, Band 8)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593639480 ISBN 13: 9780593639481
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The next novel in the Ice Planet Barbarians series, an international publishing phenomenon—now in a special print edition with an exclusive bonus epilogue!

There are a million reasons why Hassen and Maddie shouldn't work, but despite it all, they find themselves unable to resist each other...

As a newcomer to the alien tribe, I've struggled to find my place. It might be because I'm a tad headstrong at times. And yes, I might have thrown a few things at people's heads. But I had a good reason to pitch a fit—my shy sister was stolen away right under my nose. Of course, now she's back and mated. Everyone's happy...except me.

I need...affection. Attention.

Okay, I'm lonely. Really lonely.

Strangely enough, the only person that I think understands what I'm going through is the same blue-skinned brute that stole my sister. It's wrong to hook up with him, even as a mindless fling.

Except...I'm not so good with the whole "rules" thing. And he's not so great with the "fling" thing. But maybe there's a chance for us.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruby Dixon is an author of all things science fiction romance. She is a Sagittarius and a Reylo shipper, and loves farming sims (but not actual housework). She lives in the South with her husband and a couple of geriatric cats, and can’t think of anything else to put in her biography. Truly, she is boring.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

What Has Gone Before

Aliens are real, and they're aware of Earth. Fifteen human women have been abducted by aliens referred to as "Little Green Men." Some are kept in stasis tubes, and some are kept in a pen inside a spaceship, all waiting for sale on an extraterrestrial black market. While the captive humans staged a breakout, the aliens had ship trouble and dumped their living cargo on the nearest inhabitable planet. It is a wintry, desolate place, dubbed Not-Hoth by the survivors.

On Not-Hoth, the human women discover that they are not the only species to be abandoned. The sa-khui, a tribe of massive, horned blue aliens, live in the icy caves. They hunt and forage and live as barbarians, descendants of a long-ago people who have learned to adapt to the harsh world. The most crucial of adaptations? That of the khui, a symbiotic life-form that lives inside the host and ensures its well-being. Every creature of Not-Hoth has a khui, and those without will die within a week, sickened by the air itself. Rescued by the sa-khui, the surviving human women take on a khui symbiont, forever leaving behind any hopes of returning to Earth.

The khui has an unusual side effect on its host: if a compatible pairing is found, the khui will begin to vibrate a song in each host's chest. This is called resonance and is greatly prized by the sa-khui. Only with resonance are the sa-khui able to propagate their species. The sa-khui, whose numbers are dwindling due to a lack of females in their tribe, are overjoyed when several males begin to resonate to human females, thus ensuring the bonding of both peoples and the life of the newly integrated tribe. A male sa-khui is fiercely devoted to his mate.

The humans have now been on the ice planet for over a year and a half, and most have adapted to tribal life. New babies are being born of human and sa-khui pairings, and the tribe stirs with life once more. The last of the human castaways resonate, and the remaining men despair of ever having a mate. Josie, who ran from her resonance to Haeden, stumbles across the wreckage of the spaceship that Kira destroyed and discovers the unthinkable: two more human women are trapped in stasis there. Josie and Haeden return to tell the rest of the tribe, and a rescue party is sent out to retrieve the new women. Sisters Lila and Maddie cause issues amongst the tribe's hunters the moment the women arrive. Hassen steals Lila in an attempt to force resonance, only for Lila to run away from him. She's rescued by Rokan, who resonates to her, and they make their way back to the tribe.

Meanwhile, Hassen is exiled and Maddie remains angry that Lila was taken in the first place.

This is where our story picks up.

Chapter One

Maddie

It's weird when you don't fit in.

I thought that once I hit adulthood, I'd be all done with feeling like an outcast. That once I got past those awful high school years when I felt like the round peg in the square hole, it'd all just be a bad memory. That someday I could look back and laugh at how much it bothered me to be the weirdo on the outskirts.

Sitting here in a cave at a party for my sister, surrounded by aliens, I feel like I'm reliving my high school years all over again. It's pretty garbage, I have to admit. I wasn't popular then, being fat and opinionated. These aliens don't care if I'm fat or if I have a big mouth, and yet I'm still on the outskirts.

It's weird.

Someone dances past me, laughing. His tail smacks against my arm and then he spills a bit of his drink on the stone floor in front of me. Lovely. I absently swipe a bit of my tunic on the spilled alcohol because I don't want someone slipping on it in front of me while I sit and hold down a cushion in the corner of the room by myself.

It's not that people are unfriendly. Heck, it's not even that I'd have to sit alone if I didn't want to. It's that I'm really not sure where I stand with any of these people. I stare out at the celebrating tribe, not paying attention to the people who dance past with a skin of sah-sah, or the woman who pulls her top down to breastfeed not one but two blue babies. I ignore the exclamations over the fruit that they've managed to savor all damn night, and I sure as shit ignore when they start singing again.

Everyone's so damn happy. Everyone but me.

Me? I'm struggling.

In the space of the last month or so, my world has been upended. I went to sleep one night and woke up in the arms of blue space aliens on a frozen planet. Apparently I was kidnapped by bad aliens in my sleep. Apparently they took my sister, too. Apparently we were also stuck in sleep pods for over a year and a half and missed out on the bad guys being shot down.

It seems we slept through a lot.

Even if I thought it was all too strange to be believed at first, it didn't take long to realize this shit was legit. There are two suns, two moons, and endless frost and snow. The people here are blue, covered in a downy fuzz, and act like a blizzard is a nice spring rainstorm. Oh, and the parasites. I don't even want to think about the parasites, especially not the one living inside me now, helping me "adapt" to this alien world.

My sister is thriving, though.

It's strange. Lila's always been a shy introvert and even more of an outcast than me. She was born deaf, and though she got cochlear implants at age twelve and no longer needed me to speak up for her when lipreading was too tricky, I've always felt the need to protect her and care for her. But here? We've been separated and she's been killing it. Lila is usually the lonely, lost one and I'm the bold, outgoing one. I have to be because that's how you Get Shit Done.

Except Lila's doing fine on her own and now I'm just kind of . . . lost. I'm the single human that doesn't have a mate. I don't know the others. They're all pregnant or getting pregnant or juggling babies already and I'm sitting here, twiddling my thumbs with my vacancy sign over my vagina.

Not that I want a baby, mind you. Or a mate. But it feels weird to be the only chick who's not hooked up in this place. Even my sister's lovey-dovey with an alien and mated.

She's happy here despite all the snow and ice and man-eating creatures and lack of toilets. She wants to stay (not that we have a choice).

And me?

I'm just kind of here.

Alone.

I rub at the wet spot on the stone floor while one of the humans-Georgie? Megan? I don't know which one-whips out a boob and starts breastfeeding her child mid-conversation with an alien lady. Lila's not attending the party any longer; she ran off to her cave with her alien guy to go make babies with him. Literally. She's literally going to make babies with him. It's something I'm still struggling to wrap my brain around. It seems that if my chest-cootie wakes up and starts purring, it picks a man I should make babies with.

I'm pretty glad mine is deciding to be mute.

Lila's thrilled to be "resonating," though. Of course she is-now she's one of the baby-crazy crowd of human women who've settled in with the aliens. Now she fits in even more, though she wasn't exactly having a tough time with that. She's mated to a popular guy. She showed up with fruit. She's taken to all the daily life tasks like they're a joy for her. Got a fire that you need made? Lila can do it. Skin a kill? Lila's right there. Make dinner? Arrows? Fucking slings or snowshoes or bear traps or whatever else these Grizzly Adams wannabes can come up with? Lila can do it. She can survive just fine because she's been learning how to be like them.

And they love her for it, too. The tribespeople have been learning sign language to speak to Lila and to make her feel welcome. I'm glad they've accepted her so readily, but it also makes me jealous . . . which makes me a terrible...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593639480
ISBN 13 
9780593639481
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

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