Waterworld (Hot Dating Agency Book 2) Read online

  Water World

  Hot Dating Agency

  Book 2

  by

  J. S. Wilder

  © 2017 J. S. Wilder

  Edited by Teresa Banschbach

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author's imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

  About Waterworld Book 2…

  This is the second book in the Hot Dating Agency series.

  Catherina was abducted from Earth. She’s living with the aliens and starting to feel that she's at one with them. Her guard, Tokalas asks for a small favor. He wants to be part of the agency, but not the administration side of things; he wants a mate.

  Catherina time with the agency has been reduced. She's living with the leader in a palace. She doesn't need to work anymore.

  Tokalas wants her to take a personal interest in his situation. Catherina struggles at first with the one alien that she considers a friend. Eventually, she finds that she has a personal battle to deal with which is far greater than the dating agency. One that makes her consider going back to the one planet that she’d left behind. That planet is Earth. The place that she used to call home.

  Author's Note:

  WaterWorld is a stand-alone novella and the second book in the Hot Dating Agency series. I hope you enjoy the action-packed adventure with plenty of steam in this alien love triangle romance.

  About J. S. Wilder

  J.S. Wilder has spent many years working in the IT industry. She has left the computers behind and taken up her passion for writing. She loves to write romance and still believes in fairy-tales.

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  Prologue

  Catherina Hume, late of Earth and now the bonded mate of perhaps the most powerful man in the universe, looked over the crowd of people assembled to hear her speak. She was smiling and nodding as the assembled throng pounded their fists into an open palm, waiting for their applause to stop. She’d been giving speeches once or twice a week for the past six months, and while she was still nervous standing in front of such a large crowd, at least her legs had stopped shaking before she had to take the stage. Today she was on Thatherious, one of the more than three thousand planets that formed the Peoples of the universe.

  “Thank you,” she said as she paced back and forth on the platform that had been erected for her so she was out of the large pool the rest of the Thath were lounging in.

  Moving helped her burn off her nervous energy, and as she paced, smiling and waving at the crowd, she wondered if the Earth legends of mermaids and mermen came from the Thath. Thatherious was a water world, and though the Thath were capable of walking on land, they much preferred to spend their time in the water. They didn’t have fish tails, but they had evolved long and deeply webbed fingers and toes and beautifully elongated arms and legs. Tall and slim, they could put the fastest Olympic swimmers on Earth to shame. She was visiting their largest land mass, an island not much larger than the combined size of her native UK and Ireland, giving her normal speech about celebrating and embracing the differences in the People.

  “Thank you for inviting me here,” she continued in her normal conversational voice, trying to quieten the crowd. There was no need to speak loudly. She couldn’t speak Thath anyway, but the nanites in her body provided seamless translation from English into Thath and transmitted it to the assembled crowd. “It’s a privilege to be invited to speak to you.”

  She had never performed public speaking before bonding with Stevan Gerrett, the nearest approximation to his real name she could pronounce, but with months of practice, she was getting better. It helped that she was seen a savior of the universe and the People seemed to adore her. As the crowd quieted, she launched into her speech.

  The Thath were easy to talk to with no taboos she had to be careful to avoid. She was a demonstrative speaker, talking with her hands, and on Xzarettery, she had struggled to keep her hands still because waving hands in the air was considered rude, like giving someone the finger back on Earth. Having to worry about keeping her hands still had thrown her off her game, and that speech hadn’t been one of her better efforts. People were being patient and understanding with her as she learned all the customs, but she tried not to deliberately insult anyone.

  Her speech was typically short, only fifteen minutes or so. Everyone knew what she was saying was the truth, that the Peoples of the universe had to interbreed to ensure the continued survival of the Peoples, so her job was simply to put a positive spin on it to make it sound fun and exciting. It must be working because after hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, the Peoples were beginning to mate outside their own cultures.

  “We have a saying on Earth,” Catherina continued, wrapping up her speech. “’When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ which means embrace other cultures and ways of looking at life and the universe around us. We, the Peoples of the universe, are all children of the Ancient Ones. We’re all the same, and yet we’re each unique and special. Each of us, individually and together, are beautiful in our own way.”

  She always tried to incorporate a prop from the planet she was on to drive the point home, so she pulled a small shell from a hidden fold in her garment.

  “We’re like the bouh shell,” she said, holding the shell up so her audience could see what she was holding. “No two exactly alike, and yet, each exquisitely beautiful all the same. As we see the beauty in each Bouh shell; we should see the beauty in our differences.” She paused and smiled at the crowd. “Find your own Bouh shell, no matter where it might lie.” She paused again, letting the thought sink in. “Thank you… and good luck in your search.”

  The Thath began pounding their fists into their hands with gusto. She walked back and forth across the stage, waving to the crowd and thanking them. When she returned to center stage she began to peel out of her outerwear. Tradition on Firaspatciti, Fire as she called it to save her from the tongue twister of the Firaspatciti language, said her dominate side—the right in her case—shoulder and arm should remain uncovered so she could effectively wield a sword, but today she’d made an exception. Underneath her Fire clothing was a skintight material the Thath favored. The slightly iridescent material clung to her like a second skin and left nothing to the imagination, but it was comfortable and didn’t bind or drag when in the water.

  Two years ago she would have been uncomfortable undressing in front of hundreds of strangers, even with a swimsuit on underneath, but no longer. Living on Fire had reduced her modesty by a factor of ten. Stripping naked in front of a close friend on Fire didn’t even warrant a second glance or a moment’s thought. The fact the nanites that allowed her to move freely between the planets had also rehabilitated her body didn’t hurt her confidence either.

  When she’d been on earth she’d been twenty to twenty-five pounds overweight, she didn’t work out, and she didn’t eat as healthy as she should. In short,
she was a typical thirty-two-year-old woman. Now she looked like a model. The nanites had transformed her, making her look and feel twenty again, but twenty as she might have been if back on Earth she’d had a personal trainer, a personal chef, the best possible medical care, and the time to whip herself into perfect shape.

  Leaving her Fire clothing on the stage, she jumped into the pool three feet below. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, even by Earth standards, and nothing compared to the fish-like Thath, but she could stand on the bottom and paddle around to interact with her hosts, all under the watchful eyes of Tokalas and Peval, her two personal bodyguards, who remained on the stage.

  She spent the next two hours talking with the Thath as they clustered around her, everyone wanting to have a word with the exotic woman from the faraway Earth. They spoke with her, asking questions and listening to her responses with rapt attention, almost as if she were an oracle divulging hidden knowledge of great value.

  She found it amusing that the Thath were fascinated by how her skin puckered from being in the water. Humans were part of the Ancient Ones stock, just like the rest of the Peoples of the universe, but as a culture, humans were barely more than children compared to the rest of the universe. She still exhibited many involuntary traits that seemed to have disappeared in other Peoples, such as the puckering of skin when soaked in water or the changing colors of her skin if she became embarrassed, aroused or frightened.

  This was her first visit to Thatherious, but the People welcomed this stranger, the only human among the trillions of Peoples in the universe. She found the Thath friendly, adventuresome and outgoing, and she liked them. This was the best part of her job, getting to meet all the new Peoples that made up the known universe.

  She smiled to herself as she held a Thatherious child, a girl of about four Earth years, and one of the youngest on the planet. She told the girl what little she knew about the whales on Earth, a creature the Thath could easily relate too. When Catherina left Earth, astronomers were making headlines when they discovered a planet that could possibly harbor life. If they only knew…

  One

  Catherina

  I thudded to the mat, using my legs to break my fall so that I didn’t have the air knocked out of me. Of all the skills Peval was trying to teach me, that was the one I’d truly mastered, mainly because I got so much practice from her bouncing me off the mat time and time again.

  “Dammit,” I muttered as I roll over onto my hip and sat up.

  I was panting and sweating, and Peval wasn’t even breathing hard. She extended a hand and pulled me to my feet and handed my grawufather—something or other—back to me.

  I’d long stopped trying to pronounce anything in the native Fire language. Now I used the equivalent English word, or if there wasn’t one, found a sound in the word I could remember and pronounce and used that for the name. The nanites, through technology that might as well be magic for all I could understand it, did a good job translating words between languages, but every now and again it broke down and I heard the actual Firaspatciti word. Icelandic and Croatian had nothing on Firaspatciti for hard to pronounce languages, and my struggling attempts at Fire provided no end of amusement for the natives of my new home.

  Peval grinned at me. “At least you fall well now,” she teased.

  I grinned back at her as I took my practice blade. The blade was dull enough to not cut, and it collapsed when you were stabbed with it, but it still hurt when the blade got through. Peval called the sting of a failed block ‘inspiration to improve.’

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Peval’s grin spread as she took a step back and brought her blade to attack position and waited for me to get set to receive her attack.

  Even though I had a minimum of two guards with me at all times when I was away from the safety of the palace, I’d decided I wanted to learn a few basic self-defense moves. Not because I didn’t feel safe, but because I needed something to help me burn off energy. I also wanted to please Stevan. He worried about me being away from the palace and I hoped that if I learned a few basic defense skills, it would put his mind at ease. Basic defense skills for the Fires would be enough to incapacitate just about anyone else in the universe.

  The Fires respected strength and fighting skill, and I wanted to earn Stevan’s respect for more than my seeming innate ability to mix and match the cultures to produce mates. One day, when talking to Peval of my desire to learn, she’d offered to teach me.

  The People of Fire were the finest warriors in the universe. They had taken on the role of soldier and peacekeeper for the rest of the Peoples of the universe millennia ago, and it was a duty they took very seriously. The palace guard was the elite of the elite, and they were charged with keeping Stevan, and now me, safe from harm. Stevan could take care of himself, a fearsome warrior in his own right, but I was another matter.

  I’d been working with Peval for almost an Earth year, and I knew I was improving. Now it sometimes took her as much as fifteen seconds to get inside my guard and cut my heart out, or body slam me to the mat and slit my throat.

  I was learning hand to hand combat and how to use a short blade. There was no such thing as projectile weapons, things like guns or bows, anywhere in the universe except for Earth. I’d found that amazing until Peval had explained to me that with the portals, an enemy can get in close, well inside the range where a gun or something similar would be effective. You had to be able to defend yourself with your bare hands, or if you were lucky enough to have one, a sword or knife. It was the reason nearly every Fire had a ceremonial blade on their hip, myself included. Now I was learning to use it as Peval taught me to defend myself with nothing but my hands or a short blade, what we called a knife on Earth.

  The lessons I’d learned best was how to fall and how to control my anger and frustration. When I’d first started working with Peval, I would get irritated with my inability to get through her guard and my technique would get sloppy. She would then bounce me off the wall or floor, or slash me with her blade, to teach me the error of my ways. The pain of my failure would frustrate me even more and I would become even more aggressive and sloppy, only to have my ass handed to me again. That was a hard lesson to learn, but learn it I had. Now I could attack and block, staying in control and relying on the skills she taught me.

  Peval came at me again and I began to backpedal, giving ground as she pressed me, our blades flashing and singing as we thrust and parried. She gave me an opening, an opening I knew from hard-won experience was a trap. I feinted for her weak side as if I were going to take the opportunity and bury my blade deep in her side.

  She took the bait and began to turn, intending to use my mistake to bury her own blade in my back as my missed thrust threw me off balance. I turned with her, and kicked out, knocking the leg she was pivoting on from beneath her. As her balance shifted and she stumbled, I grabbed her arm and rotated my own hip, throwing her to the mat, my blade coming to a stop at her neck as I landed on her.

  I smiled down at her, panting hard. I had finally taken her down, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t let me that time! She was smiling at me as I held my blade at her throat, then tapped me on the back on my neck with her own blade as her grin widened, letting me know the wounds would have been mutually mortal.

  I didn’t care. I bounded to my feet and offered her a hand up. She bounced to her feet then held her hand up high for me to slap, a mannerism she’d picked up from me during our training.

  “Congratulations, Catherina! That was excellent! Your skills with the short blade have greatly improved in the last three months. You didn’t fall for my trap and you turned my tactic against me. Perhaps I should talk to Commander Garth about finding you a position on the palace guards.” She beamed at me. “I’m sure our Lord wouldn’t mind having you close as his personal guard. Perhaps you could… protect him… during the night?”

  I blushed. Stevan and I had bonded, the Fire term for married, almost six months ago a
nd I was still adjusting to my new position as ‘Lady’ of the palace. Most of the staff still treated me with the stiff formality they treated Stevan, but Kergah, Stevan’s closest friend and advisor, Tokalas and Peval, my two personal guards, had continued to treat me as a friend, something I greatly appreciated. I smiled back at her as I mopped the sweat from my face.

  “I hardly think our Lord needs my protection.” I smiled mischievously. “Besides, at night I’m often too distracted to protect even myself, much less our Lord.”

  Peval giggled as her eyes twinkled. “Understandable. I’ve heard rumors that he’s often the same way. Perhaps you should simply exercise together? A personal guard has to be ready to aid in whatever manner is required.”

  I laughed. I kept in touch with Quathaul, still my closest friend and confidant, but Peval was like the zany friend that was always up for an adventure. Her sense of humor ran to the bawdy side and she didn’t take herself, or me, too seriously. She and Tokalas were like breaths of fresh air when I was home in the palace and surrounded by the rest of the fawning staff.

  It was amazing the changes that have occurred in my life in the last two Earth years. I had been a nobody, a thirty-two-year-old single woman trying to make her way in Glasgow. Through a series of events that started with me hitting a mugger in the face with a pineapple, Stevan had taken notice of me. He’d tunneled into my flat with a portal one evening, kidnapped me, and returned me to his home on Fire. I’d been terrified, of course, not understanding how he’d pushed me through a hole in the middle of my bathroom and onto another world. But then he’d introduced me to Quathaul, an Aquallian, and assigned her to be my guide for a week. Quathaul was the kindest, most gentle creature I could imagine, and she’d shown me so many things and explained to me why Stevan had taken me.