Riv's Sanctuary: A Sci-fi Alien Romance Read online

  Riv’s Sanctuary

  A.G. Wilde

  Riv’s Sanctuary

  Riv’s Sanctuary © A. G. Wilde 2020

  All rights 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 or reviews.

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

  Contents

  Untitled

  Disclaimer

  Riv’s Sanctuary

  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 17.5

  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 29.5

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 30.5

  Epilogue

  A note from A.G

  Next in the Series

  Other books by A.G.

  Acknowledgments

  Keep In Touch

  If you enjoyed this book…

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to …

  I have no fucking clue.

  You know what?

  If you’re reading this, this book is dedicated to you.

  Keep kicking ass and chewing bubble gum.

  Disclaimer

  This work of fiction is intended for mature audiences only.

  All sexually active characters portrayed in this book are eighteen years of age or older.

  Riv’s Sanctuary

  Abducted from Earth over a year ago, Lauren spent most of that time getting accustomed to her new life as one of the “animals” in an alien zoo.

  When she’s sold by the zookeeper, her life takes a turn she wasn’t expecting. She has no idea where she’ll end up till she’s brought to a sanctuary owned by a tall blue hunk of an alien called Riv.

  Riv’s life is quiet and peaceful in a place as far away from civilization as he can manage. So when an annoying chatterbox of a human ends up on his doorstep, he’s less than pleased. The human disrupts his life and his solitude, and he can’t wait to get rid of her.

  He’s not interested in helping her, and he’s definitely not interested in love.

  Except…she’s managed to wheedle her way in and suddenly those barriers around his heart don’t seem so strong anymore.

  He has two options: Let her go.

  Or let her in.

  Riv’s Sanctuary is a full-length standalone sci-fi romance featuring a lovable heroine and a hot, grumpy, and possessive hero who would do anything to protect the one who shows him how to love.

  If you like sexy aliens, adventure, and steamy romance, check out Riv’s Sanctuary.

  This standalone book contains:

  - Steamy scenes

  - HEA

  - No cheating

  - No cliffhangers

  1

  What’s worse than taking a wee with humans watching?

  Taking a wee with aliens watching.

  Lauren cast a bored glance toward the transparent shield that served as her outer wall.

  Sure enough, there was an alien there watching her.

  This one was quite round, she noted. A bit like she’d imagine a cow would look walking upright on two legs—minus the sensitive areas underneath. The alien had long, pointed rabbit-like ears, no tail, and a soft brown fuzz covered its entire body.

  Such a sight should alarm her, seeing something so absolutely strange standing there. A strange being sucking on a thick green pouch as it watched her relieve herself…

  See, she might have been alarmed, say, several months ago, but today? Today was just another day.

  Removing the pee pipe from over her genitals, Lauren cast the alien another glance.

  It was still watching her.

  Perv.

  With a sigh and a roll of her shoulders, she set the pee pipe into its slot in the wall.

  A soft hiss told her the trowel-like receptacle at the top of the pipe was cleaning itself of her urine.

  There was the sound of a tap on the transparent shield and Lauren stiffened, her eyes closing for a second.

  When the tap came again, she cast her eyes toward the shield, her eyes cold.

  Apparently, the alien on the other side didn’t understand a death glare because it only continued sucking on its green juice.

  Lauren shrugged.

  Death glares never seemed to work anyway.

  She’d yet to see her glares have any effect on the beings that stopped by her terrarium.

  Death glares did nothing to deter curious aliens who saw her as nothing but an animal—and she’d had a lot of time to test that theory…a whole year’s worth of time.

  She’d stopped glaring at them after the first month.

  At least, she thought that was how long it’d been. Keeping track of time without a proper calendar was tricky.

  She’d been using the far right wall as a record of how many days since she’d been abducted from Earth, and after she’d passed three hundred days, she’d stopped recording.

  It had been starting to depress her.

  So the tap on the transparent shield, she was used to. The curious eyes as she used her alien tube toilet, she was used to.

  Try pushing out a dookie with several alien eyes on your tush.

  Yeah. Don’t worry. You get used to doing it with an audience after the first hundred times or so.

  The tap came again and she turned and faced the plump alien fully. The alien paused suddenly before it let its hand—hoof?—fall and it began sucking on its juice again.

  It wanted her attention. Needy much?

  Why was it here so early in the morning?

  Lauren sucked in air through her teeth and folded her lips. It was always the pervs.

  She felt like a cam girl. Only she wasn’t paid in money.

  Her only payment was the fact the zookeeper fed her…which she guessed she should be thankful for. She’d seen the alien in the terrarium across from her starve to death.

  That had been hard to watch.

  He’d just stopped moving one day and it had taken another week before they’d realized he was even dead.

  Some of the other aliens she could see from her terrarium were only fed when the zookeeper remembered. That’s why she’d started rationing and saving the hard bricks they were given for food. She had several days’ worth hidden under her mattress now.

  Leaning back against the slab behind her, she rested her arms on top of the straw roll that served as her mattress.

  On the other side of the barrier, a shadow fell over the alien that had been tapping the shield and another alien stepped behind it. This one was a much larger version of the one that had been there first, and Lauren realized immediately that the “perv” was a kid.

  Raising her eyebrows, she watched as the parent linked hooves with its child and pulled it away to view another poor soul in one of the other terrariums.

  The ch
ild sucked on its juice pouch, its eyes on her as it walked away.

  “Byeee!” She waved, pasting a fake grin on her face.

  The child’s weirdly large, dark eyes widened and the faint sound of its squeal came through the shield as it pulled against its parent, trying to return to her terrarium.

  Lauren’s eyes widened slightly.

  “No, no, keep going. Go with your mama, or papa…” Shit, she had trouble entertaining strange human kids, much less strange alien ones. She didn’t need the attention.

  “Go away, little alien. GO AWAY. Nothing to see here.” She was whispering, speaking underneath her breath through gritted teeth, while mentally berating herself.

  First rule of the terrarium: Never engage with the visitors.

  They tended to not want to leave her shield and go somewhere else whenever she even so much as made eye contact with them.

  She guessed that made this a shit zoo if that was all it took to get the visitors’ attention.

  She guessed? She knew it was.

  As far as she could see, she had gotten the luck of the draw with her terrarium and at least they fed her every day.

  Maybe they thought she was frail and would die if they didn’t at least make an effort with her.

  Lauren sighed, her shoulders sagging with relief as the parent pulled the little alien away.

  At least the child had only been looking at her with interest.

  There were some aliens who came by to look, species that she couldn’t have even imagined existed, and she could see the danger in their eyes.

  Outside of the transparent shield wasn’t a safe place to be.

  After she’d been taken, she’d woken up on a large alien ship. There had been slugs hovering on levitated rings and tall guards that looked like gators walking upright.

  They’d planted a translator at the side of her head, behind her ear, performed a gender test on her to confirm she was female, then locked her in a cell.

  Next thing she knew, the ship had gotten attacked and she’d hit her head against the cell. She must have lost consciousness because when she woke up she was being pulled into a market, thrown into a cage, and then bought by the zookeeper.

  It’d been horrific in that market.

  The stench had been unreal. But worse than that, the aliens walking by had been terrifying.

  Imagine living in a world where you didn’t know aliens really existed, only to wake up one day and find that your life was ripped away from you and you’d been thrown into an actual alien world.

  Not only that, but most of the aliens had been looking at her with one of two things in their eyes. They were either looking at her as if they wanted to have sex with her or like they wanted to see what she tasted like.

  She’d been lucky with the zookeeper. She only realized this later and, for that reason, she hadn’t fought to escape.

  Well, she’d stopped fighting to escape.

  After the first few attempts and the excruciating pain she’d endured when she’d been caught, she’d learned to stay within her terrarium. When the door in her wall opened during feeding times, she no longer tried to rush through it to freedom.

  Where would she go anyway? She was alone.

  Deep down, she knew returning to Earth was never going to happen. She was lost to the world, literally. She wondered if they were even looking for her back on Earth.

  Did her family think she’d met upon some serious accident somewhere? Did they imagine her body rotting in a ditch on some lonely road? Did her friends miss her?

  Another alien paused by the transparent shield. He was all white and he was dressed in a white robe. He blinked at her, studying her.

  She found herself staring at him.

  It was hard not to.

  He was an alien, after all, and though she’d accepted the fact that aliens were real and there were many different species of them, it was still a bit jarring when she saw a new one.

  But, after a year away from Earth, every day that passed it got easier and easier.

  Easier knowing she would never see Earth again.

  Easier accepting that this was her new life.

  Easier adjusting to this new life.

  She was alive. Every day, that one fact kept her going. Despite what was thrown at her, she was going to survive.

  The white alien got bored and walked away, leaving her alone again.

  Sliding to the floor, she touched the watch fastened around her wrist.

  It no longer worked. The battery went out several months back, but she kept wearing it anyway.

  It’d been her mother’s watch and the only thing she had from Earth apart from the clothes on her back—her now very-worn jeans and black tank top.

  She was lucky to have them.

  The watch was like a relic of her past life.

  As she spun the watch around her wrist absentmindedly, she looked toward the transparent barrier, a frown slowly creasing her brow.

  It was strange there weren’t any aliens at her terrarium barrier today. Usually, they’d be filing into the zoo by now, flocking in to see the exotic animals they wouldn’t normally see in the wild.

  But today was different.

  Just then, the door on the inside wall of her cell moved.

  Lauren stiffened.

  It wasn’t feeding time yet. There was no reason for them to enter her terrarium.

  As the zookeeper stepped into the terrarium, his fat black and red belly jiggling, Lauren moved a little farther toward the far wall.

  The alien looked down at her, his small ears folding over behind his horns. He looked like the version of the devil they didn’t want you to imagine: old, intoxicated, and rocking that divorced dad-bod. All he needed was a pair of boxers and messy hair.

  Who would really be scared of a being like that sending them to eternal damnation?

  The zookeeper’s huge nose moved as he opened his mouth and spoke.

  “Time to leave, human,” he said.

  “Leave? Leave to go where?”

  “The exchange. Your time here has expired.”

  When her eyes widened, the alien continued. “You’re up for sale.”

  Memories of the stench of the market, the leers she’d received, and the promise of bad things happening came right back to her.

  Staring up at the zookeeper in shock, Lauren blinked several times.

  He was selling her?

  “Selling me? Why?”

  The zookeeper’s eyes moved over her. There was no care there. “You’re too dangerous to keep.”

  This time, her eyes widened by the mere absurdity of what he just said.

  She? Dangerous?

  Clearly, he was in the wrong terrarium.

  2

  Behind the devil that God forgot existed came in three thinner beings that looked like Sphynx cats on two legs.

  They immediately began spraying the terrarium and wiping down surfaces as if they were trying to remove every trace of her from the room.

  Wide-eyed, Lauren watched them, her mouth slightly open before her brain kicked into gear.

  “Wait.” She turned to the zookeeper. “Wait. I can’t go back to that market. I can’t be bought by…” She shuddered to think what being might buy her next. She didn’t want to even consider it.

  The nightmares were enough.

  The zookeeper ignored her, instructing the aliens to lift her mattress and incinerate it.

  As the aliens lifted the mattress and took it from the room, Lauren’s heartbeat picked up.

  “Wait!” she called out to the aliens but, of course, they weren’t paying her any attention. To them, she was just another being that was the zookeeper’s property.

  And she was property. She’d learned to accept that a long time ago. Stating otherwise only caused bad things to happen like the toilet tube suddenly not working, the meal bars coming in tasting like dirt, or excruciating pain that put every cell in her body on fire.

  The last form of punish
ment was a mystery to her. She still didn’t know how he managed it but the zookeeper had some sort of remote where all he had to do was point it her way and press a button and she was in pain.

  Didn’t matter how far she ran either. Distance wasn’t a factor. The signal was never interrupted.

  She’d found that out the hard way when she’d been left writhing on the ground on one of her escape attempts.

  Lauren’s breathing began to go slightly faster as she stared at the zookeeper. Why would he want to sell her now?

  From the mumblings she’d heard from his workers at mealtimes, she had been making the zookeeper rich.

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you sending me back there? I haven’t done anything even vaguely offensive.”

  She couldn’t believe she was arguing to stay in the zoo.

  The zookeeper glanced at her and clicked his tongue. “You are a liability. I must rid myself of all traces of you before I am caught with you here.”

  She had no idea what that even meant.

  “You could always set me free.” She tried her luck. “You do know that’s an option, right?”

  She had no idea where she’d go or how she’d survive, but she truly thought anything was better than going back to that market.

  She’d been lucky to escape the weirdos at the market once and had ended up at the zoo. She doubted she’d be so lucky a second time.

  “Free?” The zookeeper’s laugh sounded like water going down a partially clogged drain. “Freedom comes with a price. If you can pay me for your freedom, you are welcome to go free.”