Forgotten Read online

  “I don’t…don’t want to go in there.” He could barely keep from gagging.

  “You won’t,” his Master’s voice said in his ear. “I will. Now.”

  Suddenly Y had a horrible sensation—the feeling of being pushed aside—shoved into a small, dark, cramped closet with no light and hardly any air. It was happening inside his head and yet the effect was the same as if it had happened to his physical body.

  Not my body anymore, he realized, feeling sick. The Master’s body. He’s taking over completely and he’ll never let me go. I’m doomed…trapped.

  His vision began to dim and he lost all feeling in his hands and feet.

  “Master,” he begged, his tongue feeling clumsy in his mouth—a borrowed instrument he had once owned. “Master, please—don’t do this to me!”

  Shrill laugher echoed in his skull.

  “My dear Y, it’s already done,” Master Two said.

  And then…there was only darkness and silence.

  The End? Hardly! There is always more Kindred to come. Read on for an Excerpt of Brides of the Kindred 17, Switched. And be sure to look for the preorder link to The Institute: Daddy Issues, the first book in my new series coming out on Valentine's Day of 2016.

  Also, if you have enjoyed Forgotten, please take a moment to leave a review HERE. Good reviews are like golf for an author--they help readers decide to take a chance on a new book. And more good reviews means more sales which means I can continue to write for a living and bring you more Kindred! Thank you so much to all my awesome readers who review. I love you guys!

  Hugs and Happy Reading!

  Evangeline, November 2015

  Switched Blurb:

  A warrior with a talent that could get him killed

  A girl transported to a new existence with no warning

  When the two of the trade lives, it places them in mortal peril.

  Not to mention really screwing up their love lives!

  Will they ever be able to get back in their rightful bodies?

  Or have they been forever…Switched?

  Francesca Rodriguez—Frankie to her friends—has a perfectly normal life. She's happily divorced and going to grad school and all she wants is to get her degree and get out of retail hell. Little does she know her life is about to change forever.

  Kerov Volx is a Battalion Commander in the Tarkien Army. He loves his job and if his love life isn't anything more than satisfactory, well… he can deal with it. His only problem is that he has Switch Kindred DNA—that is, his people used to be able to trade bodies with their bonded mates. But in Tarkinian society, Switching or Trading is now an offense punishable by death. So imagine Kerov's panic when an invader suddenly takes over his body…

  Frankie has no idea what's going on. She only knows she went to sleep in her own bed and woke up in the body of a huge, virile, alien warrior. Now she's expected to live his life—or risk getting both of them killed. Even worse, Kerov is now in control of her body too, and the condition appears to be permanent.

  Can Frankie and Kerov Trade back into their own bodies before it's too late for both of them? Or have they been forever…Switched?

  Brides of the Kindred 17: Switched

  Chapter One

  On Thursday morning, Frankie woke up in her own body.

  Not that waking up in her own body was unusual—not at that point, anyway. And Frankie had no idea of knowing how unusual it would soon become. All she knew was that she’d hit snooze one too many times and now she was running late.

  “Crap,” she muttered as she glanced at the clock on her phone and bolted out of bed. She barely had time for a shower—a super fast one—if she hurried. There was going to be no time to wash her hair though, which meant she was going to be fighting frizz all day, especially if the humidity was high. And since she lived in Tampa, Florida, the humidity was always high.

  As the hot water poured over her body, she tried to wake up. Why had she kept hitting the snooze button anyway? Oh right—it was the dream she’d been having. It was almost like a story and she’d wanted to see how it ended.

  As she washed, she tried to remember the details. Recalling the dream was surprisingly easy. Most dreams started to fade the moment you woke up but this one was staying with her.

  It was about a guy—a really tall guy, she thought, splashing the hot water in her face and reaching for her favorite pink grapefruit shower gel.

  Normally the only man she dreamed about was her ex, Carlos, and those were mostly nightmares. Nightmares that she was still stuck in her dead-end marriage with no job, no prospects, and nothing but a life of endless childbearing and housework ahead of her. Not to mention a husband who didn’t appreciate her or think she was capable of anything else. But the man in her dreams had looked nothing like Carlos.

  He had short blond hair—or at least, it was really light brown. And those eyes— she shivered. His eyes had been a pale shade of gray Frankie had never seen before. So pale they were almost white but with a solid black ring around the irises that made him look scarily intense. In fact, everything about him was intense. In her dream, he’d been barking orders at a bunch of other guys. All were tall and lean, dressed in some kind of uniform and they shouted back in unison when he asked them questions.

  Weird, Frankie thought. Like some kind of Army recruitment film or something. Except the uniform her dream guy was wearing wasn’t like anything from any branch of the Armed Forces that Frankie had ever seen. It was scarlet with accents of gold and the trousers that went with it were black with a scarlet stripe running up the sides. Tall black boots completed the outfit.

  He’d been barking orders and marching up and down the line of warriors or soldiers or whatever they were and then the tall, blond man with the scary gray eyes had turned his head and…

  “And he looked right at me,” Frankie whispered to herself. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the image. “Don’t be crazy, Frankie—it was only a dream,” she muttered to herself, getting out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself and wiped steam off the mirror. A woman with black hair and big brown eyes looked back at her as she reached for her toothbrush.

  Frankie—who had been christened Francesca Benita Hermosa Rodriguez— came from a big, traditional Latin family. She was the fourth of seven children, three girls and four boys. Her two sisters, Alma and Carita, were married and had six kids between them. Her two older brothers, Julio and Dominic were also married and of the two younger ones, Tomas was engaged and Aurelio was dating a girl seriously—the family expected him to propose to at any time.

  It was enough to make you sick.

  Not that Frankie had anything against marriage and family and commitment—she had tried it herself, after all. Her whole family had expected her to marry her high school sweetheart and so that was what she had done. And then she’d spent a miserable five years cooking and cleaning up after him, putting up with him the nights he came home drunk and abusive, and trying to be happy because this was the way life was supposed to be, right?

  “Wrong,” Frankie said aloud to herself. “That wasn’t me—wasn’t the life I wanted.”

  She often thought that if it wasn’t for her best friend, Lacy, she never would have made it. Lacy was the only one who saw how miserable she was—and she’d been the one to encourage Frankie to take some college classes and provided her with a steady supply of birth control for which Frankie was eternally grateful. Not that she didn’t want kids eventually, but it had only taken her a couple of months with Carlos to know she didn’t want his kids and having children would have compounded an already bad situation.

  Despite being miserable, Frankie had stuck out the marriage for five long years because she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. Finally, though, she couldn’t take it anymore. When she told her family that she was filing for divorce, her extremely Catholic grandmother had fainted dramatically and her father had disowned her.

  That had been hard—maybe the hardest thing