Page 22 of Touch the Stars (Ghara Empire #1)

Let the good times roll!

That’s Ava Martin’s retirement plan at least, until gray aliens abduct her from the middle of the Nevada desert.

In her hair rollers no less! Talk about a rude awaking for this UFO skeptic.

And her sexy, winged rescuer is no help either; he’s more concerned about obeying orders.

Seems like there’s only one way for her to get home—hijack his ship.

All in the line of duty.

The grays have been a burr in Captain Sovah Raptorclaw’s wing throughout his law-enforcement career, and now they have absconded with half his crew.

If only the crazy stopped there. The stunning female he has rescued is from a planet he has never heard of, and she has him breaking every rule to keep her in his life.

Together, Ava and Sovah must make a daring rescue, return a cow (and other Earthlings) home, and end the grays’ reign of terror. But, can they do it all without losing each other in the process?

Present day Earth.

(Ten years before joining the Galactic Alliance of Planets.)

“For Chrissake, Regina, what kind of aliens abduct a sixty-year-old woman?” The helpless frustration at her predicament boiled up again in Ava Marie Martin’s gut as she stalked a perimeter wall of the gleaming white cell. “ In her hair rollers , no less.”

The hair rollers in question bounced against her thighs inside the overstuffed pockets of her silk bathrobe.

She turned to retrace her steps. “I’ll tell you who. Blind aliens , that’s who.”

And I made it so easy for them, didn’t I?

Walked right into their trap, then poof, one flash of green light later, here she was, like an extra from Close Encounters . Damn putty-skinned aliens with their inverted triangular heads and freaky pewter-color eyes. A bunch of stereotypical Area 51 regulars, the lot of them.

Guess I’m a believer now.

Couldn’t really be a skeptic since she’d become one of those people. The ones at whom she used to shake her head and roll her eyes. God almighty.

The less than satisfying pat-pat-pat of her bedroom slippers against the black porous floor wasn’t helping ease her current pique of temper, either. What she’d give for a pair of spikey, angry-shoes and a solid metal floor right now.

“Cha, honey,” Regina Gardenia said from his spot on the floor, somehow still looking fantastic in his vinyl, school-bus yellow mini-skirt and thigh-high boots, even after a week in captivity. “You’re as stuck as the rest of us.”

Her cellmate had that right. “I know, and it still pisses me off.”

There hadn’t been a single clue that “Motel Stardust” was actually a spaceship in disguise—parked neatly at the edge of a cracked asphalt parking lot.

Who asked questions like that when driving a dark Nevada highway, a hundred miles from Vegas in the middle of the night, anyway? Not her, that was for sure.

“Why? Wait, don’t answer that.” Regina—aka, Reg “Don’t Call Me Reginald” Gardener—waved one manicured hand in the air like the drag queen he was in his Vegas revue. “It’s because you have no control over the situation. Am I right?”

She came to a stop directly across the ten-foot cell from Reg, the edges of her silk robe fluttering like bird’s wings around her matching cornflower-blue P.J.s.

Control was at the crux of it all, as it had been for most of her life.

She’d worn it like a shield, even when she was quaking in her boots.

It’d been her constant companion, facing situations from ridicule and abandonment by certain family members for daring to stand up for herself, to building her multi-million-dollar cosmetics company.

“Okay. You might be right.”

“You know I am.” Reg nodded as if satisfied with this level of recognition. “We’ve gone over this before. Being pissed isn’t going to do you any good. It’s been at least a week, darling. Time to let it go.”

“Let her be, Regina.” The gentle voice came from the young woman in the second, larger cell across a wide walkway. “There’s no set timeframe for going through the stages of grief.”

Huh. She frowned and drew her eyebrows together. Leave it to Nora the Wicked-smart Librarian to figure out she’d been following the parameters of grieving, almost exactly. The young woman had a sense of awareness that would’ve made her an outstanding personal assistant.

Not that I need one of those anymore.

No, she’d sold her business, waved good-bye to her staff, and driven off into the proverbial sunset to retire and enjoy her “golden years.” Yeah, that plan was working out just swell.

“Well, if I ever turn into a raging Mama Bear like Ava is now, just bitch-slapped me back to reality, okay?”

Nora snorted. “Reality equals boredom in here. Nothing to do, and no books to read.”

Poor kid did look thoroughly bored laying on her back, head propped on the thigh of her buff stud-muffin cellmate.

“Mooo.”

The human one, not the bovine. Call that rumor confirmed. Not only did aliens exist, they also really did abduct cows.

“Sorry, May Belle,” Nora said to the large, straw-color beast nosing at her sandy blonde hair. “You’re not boring, sweetie.”

The young man gazed down at Nora and cleared his throat in a pointed manner.

“Neither are you, Axill.” She patted the muscular forearm resting across her belly.

“Takk,” Axill replied in his native Norwegian, then grinned.

Was there a more unlikely pair than those two? The hot, blond actor who played some Norse god from the Cosmos Warriors movies, and the librarian who looked an awful lot like Velma from Scooby-Doo, only with sandy blonde hair.

“Thor is definitely not boring,” Regina teased.

“I do not play Thor,” Axill grumbled.

Nora turned her head to peer at Regina through both sets of light bars holding them inside their respective cells. “He plays Tyr, a god originally from Germanic mythology and likely the source of the word Tuesday.”

You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the girl.

“Cha, darling boy. I know.” Regina flashed a teasing grin, his teeth as white against his brown skin as his cotton-blonde wig. “But it’s all about perspective. And I for one couldn’t care less about which god you portray on screen, I’d still pay to watch you , Axill Lund.”

Nora’s giggle floated from across the cell, and the corners of Axill’s mouth twitched upward. Okay, so maybe all of them had bonded to some degree. There was some sort of psychology about that, wasn’t there?

She stepped toward the glowing yellow bars of light—not too close, because their shock packed a brain-numbing punch—to study the couple in the other cell. “So, Nora was grabbed leaving her library job at two in the morning, and I got suckered into a fake motel. What about you, Axill?”

The muscular hunk shrugged his wide shoulders. “Between movies, I like to spend time at my cabin outside of Eidfjord. It is remote, no neighbors for a long way. One night, I hear a loud noise, so I go check. It was them .”

“That sounds like a more classic abduction scenario. Still, I’m sorry you’re here.” Sorry that any of them were.

“Me too.” Reg stretched his long legs straight out, then tugged the tops of his boots into place. “Not that I regret meeting any of you, but getting abducted was a sucky way to end an otherwise fabulous evening for me.”

She eyed her cellmate. “Ready to tell us what happened to you, yet?”

“Sure, why not? I’m over most of the humiliation at this point.

Especially after hearing all of y’all’s stories.

” Reg folded his hands in his lap. “So, I was on my way back from a cast party and thought I’d found a new pop-up convenience store outside of town.

One moment I had my head in the freezer hunting for a pint of Banana Hammock flavor ice-cream, the next, I’m in this cell thinking da faq ? Actually, I may have screamed that.”

“You did.” Rather loudly, in fact.

It had been Regina’s voice that’d pulled her out of her own vacuum of shock brought on by this nightmare.

“Mooo.” May Belle ambled away to the farthest wall from her two people, then proceeded to relieve herself.

“Huh,” Nora said. “I didn’t think it’d work, but she’s getting pretty good at that.”

“So, Nora Weber,” Reg said in a deeper than normal voice.

“You were abducted by a U.F.O., thrown into an alien jail, and traveled to untoward parts of the galaxy that no Earthling has visited. What was your biggest accomplishment while you were in space?” He schooled his face into a parody of Nora’s shy smile. “I potty trained a cow.”

A little snicker bubbled out of Ava before she could catch it, but it was lost in the raucous laughter coming from Nora and Axill.

“Thanks, Regina.” Nora was sitting up now, her legs crisscrossed, and waved her hand in the direction of May Belle’s contribution to the floor. “All I can say is that these last couple of weeks would have been a lot worse if not for the waste-absorbent floor in here.”

“Or, if our cell was as small as Regina and Ava’s,” Axill added.

That much was true. Having to pop a squat with no privacy was bad enough, but at least the waste didn’t sit around on the floor. One of the first things she and Reg did after waking up in here was to agree on a designated corner to do their business.

A sense of mild morose settled over her.

Damn mood swings. She trudged over and claimed a spot against the wall next to Reg.

She should be in Vegas with the girls right now, gambling, going to shows, picking up guys…

celebrating her stinking retirement. But now, the trip she’d been planning for over a year with her besties had gone to hell.

The girls must have reported her missing by now.

At the very least, someone should’ve found her car sitting in the middle of the desert.

What a shame she couldn’t hand that little convertible over to Robyn like she’d planned.

All the work she’d done investigating how to legally sign it over to her niece only, and keep Robyn’s piece-of-shit husband’s name off the title, wasted. But none of that mattered anymore.

Oh, my poor sweet Robyn.

A sound somewhere between a soft chuckle and a scoff escaped her.

“What’s up, honey?”

She raised her gaze and met Regina’s. “What do you suppose gray-haired old me has in common with any of you youngsters?”

That caught Nora’s attention. The little, bespectacled librarian moved to stand by the light bars of her cell. “You mean, what do four humans and a cow have in common?”

“Yes.” The cow who was now receiving an ear scratch from Axill. “What kind of cow is May Belle, anyway?”

“Mooo.”

“Hmm.” Nora cast a critical eye at the creature. “She might be a Charolais, or maybe a Murray Grey.”

“Charolais,” Axill said as the cow tipped her head into his palm and closed her eyes halfway.

Regina frowned. “And how does a Norwegian actor happen to know anything about cow genetics, or whatever it’s called?”

Axill looked up, gave him a small smile, then returned his attention to the cow in question.

Silence fell over their little cellblock, as if everyone had retreated into their own personal thoughts. She pitched a strand of her chin-length hair and twirled it around one finger. Gray, blond, blonde, off-white—

“Hey,” Reg murmured. “Still feeling pissed?”

“Not so much, for the moment.” She lifted the curl far enough to give it a critical eye. “But I think I just answered my own question. All of us have light color hair. Including the cow.”

“Ha! Not under my wig, I don’t.”

“True, but do the aliens know that?” She raised her shoulders in a nonchalant shrug.

Nora hummed. “That’s interesting. We all have some variant of light hair.”

“Well,” Regina huffed and touched his fingers to his wig. “If that is the reason we were taken, then someone’s going to be mighty surprised by me.”

“Mooo?”

A shudder rumbled through the floor under Ava’s bottom and she snapped her gaze to Regina’s. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes.” Regina’s wide eyes reflected the surprised uncertainty, similar to feeling the first jolt of an earthquake.

Another, harder tremble shook the walls.

She scrambled to her knees and met Nora’s startled gaze through the bars. “Has that ever happened before?”

“No.”

A high-pitched whine, like over-taxed engines filled the cellblock and the room began to tilt.

I have a bad feeling about this.

“Hang on!” Axill’s bellow was barely audible over the mechanical screeching, but it was enough to jar her senses back into place.

Hang on to what? She turned her head in quick jerky movements, scanning the smooth white walls for anything to grab on to, but there was nothing. The floor was a pliable, non-slippery matte material, though.

“Reg, lie flat and try to dig in with your fingernails.” She lurched forward, landing belly first on the floor, and her cellmate mimicked her movement by her side.

Everything kept tilting up and up and up, sending her half sliding, half falling toward the dreaded shock bars.

“No, no, no, no.” She clawed at the floor, tried to get a grip with her fingers, toes, or heels as she rolled.

A cold sweat broke out over her top lip and her heart pounded against her chest, as if ready to bail on her in an effort to save itself.

Just like it did every time she was faced with heights.

She caught a flash of bright yellow vinyl and dark flailing limbs, an out-of-control Regina following her silk-covered ass toward the stun-you-stupid bars.

Crap. This is gonna hurt.