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Chapter 1
Amber
When I caught my ex-husband cheating on me with two women at once, I thought I’d seen it all.
I was about to learn how wrong I’d been.
I lost almost everything in the divorce. My car, my five-bedroom house in the suburbs, my last name, my Goddamn dignity. I went from Amber Evans, single woman-on-the-go, to Amber Last-Name-Redacted, bitter forty-something divorcee. I even lost my dog.
The one thing I didn’t lose was our summer cabin on the lake.Thathe let me keep.
The rat bastard probably thought he’d gotten one over on me in that deal. After all, it’s the place where I caught him, where I saw him fucking my best friend and her sister at the same time. Joke’s on him, though; I scrubbed the entire place with bleach and moved my newly single self in without a moment’s hesitation.
I had to admit, the alimony was decent. I could get by without having to supplement too much. I found a nice work from home job, something part time where I could set my own hours. It was a little boring, just some basic IT support that any idiot can do, but it paid the bills that were left each month after I’d spent my alimony. I was even able to afford to save up extra to add a few amenities to the cabin. Bookshelves for every available wall, and a hot tub for those achy muscles.
I had enough to get the best Battery-Operated Boyfriend money could buy. Between BOB and my whole-house library of primo smut, I had plenty to keep me occupied. Paperbacks became my vice, and I stocked my shelves with every trope I could find, from friends to lovers to forced proximity to the weird and wild. I had tentacles sitting side-by-side on the same shelf as small-town sweetness, and the erotic chaos that resulted pleased my crow brain. All the pretties, all for me.
Life in the cabin was blissfully normal, if a little boring and lonely. Yeah, BOB got me through the long winter nights up there in northwestern New York, but he wasn’t a real man, and even with the clit licker attachment I wasn’t as satisfied as I’d like to be. Maybe that’s why Ryan got bored with me and hooked up with Sarah and Melanie. He always said it was too much work to get me off, that it shouldn’t take hours to get a woman to orgasm. He blamed me for our marital problems, especially the lack of satisfactory sex life. Typical male: If he can’t do the job, then the job can’t be done. In his little pea brain, it was as simple as that.
Fuck Ryan. BOB and I didn’t need him, anyway.
The day everything changed, BOB died.
BOB and I coexisted beautifully for over a year before I wore out his motor. I gave him a proper sea burial in Lake Ontario in my Louis Vuitton shoebox, but that left me alone until his replacement got shipped.
Tying back my long, dark hair, I set about deep cleaning the cabin to distract myself from my frustrations while I was BOB-less. Next-day shipping wasn’t fast enough for me, and I needed something to take my mind off things until BOB’s successor arrived. I pulled up a 90s alternative playlist for a little nostalgia while I worked and blasted it through the whole-house speaker system. I started around noon and kept myself busy until the sun had gone down. After a few hours dancing to Nirvana and Soundgarden, the cabin sparkled.
Suddenly, a bright light flashed outside the large bay window on the lakefront side of the house, followed a half second later by a thundering crash and loud splashing. I moved to shield my eyes with a hand, but just as quickly as it came, the phenomenon disappeared. I blinked a few times to clear the afterimage from my vision. Outside the window, steam rose from the lake. I couldn’t quite see anything much else, and after a few minutes of waiting, my curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed an oversized cardigan and slid my arms inside the sleeves to ward off the early winter chill as I stepped outside.
It turned out I didn’t really need the cardigan. Heat radiated off the water, and the lake sizzled. I caught what looked like bubbles disturbing the surface a few hundred feet out, well past my private deck.
I walked to the edge of the deck and peered over the railing at the lake. I couldn’t see anything that would cause the steam and, well, the boiling lake. Maybe it had just been lightning after all …
Water surged out of the lake, splashing over the rail and soaking me. I coughed and sputtered as lake water got in my mouth. When I raised my eyes, I was met with the strangest sight I’d ever seen. Standing on the other side of the rail, tall and dark andfreaking purple, was a man.
Well … kind of a man. Men don’t have scales. They don’t have yellow eyes.
They don’t generally go swimming half naked in the winter.
A scream ripped from my throat, and I scuttled back, slipping on the wet deck and landing square on my tailbone. The weird purple man climbed over the railing and hopped down onto the deck, landing in a crouch. He blinked at me, and his head cocked to the side. He looked like a curious puppy.
A scaly purple puppy. With tight, wet pants. Form-fitting pants.
“K’ah mlye han?”
Were those words? His mouth opened and closed, sounds came out, but I had no idea what he might have been trying to say. I was too distracted by the strangeness of the whole thing, not to mention the bare, glistening pecs and abs he sported. This purple man wasbuilt, and for a moment I forgot that I missed BOB.
“K’nah noye Q’on. K’ah mlye han?”He tapped a muscular pec, then pointed at me.
What did he want? I trembled, though whether from fear or from getting drenched when he jumped out of the lake at me, I couldn’t tell. All I knew was I had come out here without any kind of protection, and now I was at the mercy of a huge man-fish with what looked to be a rather wide assortment of guns, knives, and other weapons strapped to his belt and legs—a whole damn arsenal, right there in front of me.
Just as I thought that, his hand reached for one of those weapons, and I realized I had to stop gaping and startrunning. I scrambled to my feet and rushed towards the cabin as he drew a nasty-looking device and aimed it at me.
My wet hands slipped on the handles of the French doors, and I felt a stinging pinch on the back of my neck as a loudzapechoed through the night.
Crap! I reached back with one hand to feel how bad the wound was, but my hair was so wet and the lighting to terrible on the deck that I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding. I jerked the door open and ran inside, hoping the purple man didn’t decide to chase me.
No such luck. I turned back for a split second, just long enough to see him chasing after me. He’d dropped the weapon, but he still had more hanging off of him. Not wanting to stick around to find out what each device did, I shot around the kitchen island, through the living room, and out the front door. If I could just get to my car, I might have a chance to get away.
