Hitting the Target Read online

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  AVAILABLE APRIL 2019

  An ordinary mom from Earth thrust into the life of an evil Mistress

  A Kindred warrior desperate to save his people

  Can they work together to restore Malik's world and get Nikki back home?

  Or will the two of them be trapped forever in a reality which has become...Twisted?

  Nikki Davis is having a terrible time. Her three tween and teenage sons are in trouble in school and her husband is divorcing her while a nasty coworker steals her best commissions at work. Is it any wonder she's thinking of offing herself? But when she steps into the foaming surf of Clearwater Beach, she feels something hard under her foot. A stone that looks like a shiny purple M&M is just lying there so Nikki picks it up...

  And finds herself in a whole new life on a completely different planet.

  Malik is a Volt Kindred, the only survivor of his home planet, Uriel Five. When the Knower, the Artificial Intelligence tasked with taking care of his world, took it over and killed all the humanoid inhabitants, he was off-planet. But he has a plan—a special tool from the Goddess herself to restore his world. The only trouble is, he has to get back to Uriel Five first and the only person brave enough to deal with the Knower is the evil Mistress Hellenix of Yonnie Six. Malik allowed himself to be bought by her and has been her slave for three long years but now, for some reason she has changed completely...

  Nikki doesn't know what to think—how did she go from her miserable life in Tampa to a fantastic palace with a huge Kindred bodyslave who is calling her Mistress Hellenix? And how can she ever get back home again? She must pretend to be the woman whose life she has taken over by accident but how long can she keep up the charade? And what will Malik do when he finds out the truth—that his real Mistress is millions of light years away and her double knows absolutely nothing about life on Yonnie Six? How will he save his home world now that reality has become...Twisted?

  Chapter One

  Nicole Davis, (Nikki to her friends and family,) stood in the cold, frothy foam that rushed over the hard-packed sand and looked out at the vast gray of the ocean and the pale blue of the sky beyond. It was her thirty-seventh birthday and her life felt like it was over. In fact, she was trying to think of a single reason not to keep walking…not to let those rolling waves she saw in the distance rush over her head and drag her under forever.

  Shouldn’t even be here. What am I doing at the beach instead of at work or attending one of the endless conferences at one of the boys’ schools?

  Right this minute she ought to be at Rosy Ray’s Realty (where we find you your forever home for less!) filing paperwork and taking calls for Missy Cannon, the realtor whose assistant she still was, despite the fact that she’d passed the Florida state licensing exam and had gotten her Real Estate License herself months before. And later she had to attend yet another 504 plan meeting for her twins.

  Jacob and James had both been born with learning delays—probably because they’d had to come out really early due to complications in her pregnancy. At the time, Nikki had also been dealing with a toddler—three year old Jude—as well as the two preemies. Her husband, Gary, was at work all the time so he couldn’t really (didn’t want to) help much at all. She felt like a single mother and it had been really overwhelming.

  Nikki’s life had gotten really crazy after the twins were born and somehow even twelve years later, the craziness never quite dissipated—it just mutated into other forms of stress. People always told you, “Oh, don’t worry—it will get easier.” But it never did as far as Nikki could see. It just got worse.

  Maybe she was just feeling negative because of the awful day she’d had yesterday, she thought morosely. Maybe that was her problem…

  * * *

  It had started with her finding a bottle of her mother-in-law’s pills in her teenager’s sock drawer when she was hunting for some pairs of spare socks for her twins, who were out of clean clothes again. They had some in the washer—which were unfortunately still wet because she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep before she could put them in the dryer the night before. So she’d been rooting around, hoping her fifteen year old might have some clean socks when she’d found the half-full bottle.

  Gary had been rushing out the door to the office, so she couldn’t enlist her husband’s help. Instead, she’d confronted Jude by herself and his answer had been…a shrug.

  “Look at me, young man! What are you doing with a bottle of your grandmother’s pain pills? Do you know what these are? They’re addictive! You could get hooked and ruin your life—how did they get here?” Nikki glared at her hulking fifteen-year-old who towered over her since his last grown spurt.

  Jude had shrugged sullenly again.

  “Dunno.”

  Nikki wanted to shake him. Where had her sweet, smart little boy gone to? The one who used to help her in the kitchen when she cooked and made the A honor roll consistently? Lately it seemed that Jude had drifted further and further away from her, becoming distant and sullen, and he’d been getting into trouble at school too. His grades were dropping and he was cutting class all the time. Now she had to wonder if he had a drug problem on top of all that. What the hell was going on?

  But no matter how much she ranted and raved, he just stood there, refusing to answer, that same, angry scowl on his face as he silently glared at her from his newly superior height. It made Nikki crazy, but there was nothing she could do about it at that point. The three boys would all be late to school if she kept on and anyway, she was getting nowhere with her sullen teen.

  “We’ll have a talk about this with your father tonight,” she told Jude and then shoved the pills in her purse and grabbed the socks for her twins.

  “Did not!”

  “Did too! Give it back!”

  “No! It’s mine now—I own it!”

  Sullen silence wasn’t a problem with Jacob and James and she had to break up a fight before she could make them finish getting dressed. Before having them, Nikki had heard so much about how twins were supposed to get along and have a special bond. But her boys fought like cats and dogs—maybe because they were fraternal twins instead of identical.

  James was fair with light brown hair and light eyes like her husband Gary and like Jude. Jacob, on the other hand, had inherited Nikki’s black hair and dark eyes.

  At twelve and a half and in sixth grade, both twins were firmly in their tweens, which meant that neither of them was sweet or cuddly anymore. They no longer wanted Nikki to read them bedtime stories and though the fact that she was always the homeroom mom had used to be a source of delight to them, now having her step foot in their school was the worst embarrassment imaginable.

  “Mom, do you have to come to our class every time you have a meeting in the office?” James had asked her just the week before. “None of the other parents come around like you do.”

  “Yeah, Mom—it’s embarrassing,” Jacob had chimed in. It was the one thing the two of them seemed to agree on—that the very sight of Nikki in their school was humiliating in the extreme. It made her feel like a trailing piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of a shoe. Though she knew it was normal—having already gone through it with Jude—it still hurt to go from being the greatest mom ever to something shameful that ought to be kept in the closet, hidden away out of sight.

  I’m there for you, Nikki felt like screaming. As the school got less funding, they were constantly trying to cut the twins’ speech and language services. Sometimes it felt like every week she had to go down to the counseling office and fight to make certain her kids got the help they needed to make it through middle school. And what was her reward? Tween scorn and ingratitude that almost stung more than Jude’s sullen teenage indifference.

  She had finally gotten all three boys packed off to school and gotten to work—five minutes late—to find that Missy Cannon (the realtor with a smile!) waiting at her desk with a frown and a sheaf of paperwork.

&n