Anyone U Want Read online

  “Did better than that.” Kat put a large recycled cloth shopping bag on the round kitchen table and started pulling things out of it, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. “Eggs, butter, ham, chives…” She stopped to push a wisp of auburn hair behind her ear before continuing. “Some fresh shitake mushrooms, goat cheese—”

  “Whoa—whoa!” Liv was startled into laughing. “What the hell kind of pancakes are we making here, anyway?”

  “Not pancakes—quiche. I saw this new recipe last night on Food Network—”

  Liv and Sophia both groaned aloud at this, cutting her off. Kat was a paralegal at Linden and James downtown but she had always had grand aspirations when it came to cooking. Unfortunately, she didn’t like to follow a recipe so most of her culinary creations landed in the trash—a fact that didn’t discourage her in the least when it came to trying something new. Especially if she was working in someone else’s kitchen and didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the mess afterwards.

  “Tell me something, Kat,” Sophia demanded. “Exactly how much of that stuff in the bag does the recipe call for?”

  “And how much is your own addition?” Liv finished her twin’s thought effortlessly.

  “Come on, you guys.” Kat pouted unconvincingly. “This one is going to be good, I can tell. And just because it doesn’t actually call for sardines and black olives doesn’t mean they won’t be good in there.”

  “Black olives?” Sophia made a face.

  “And sardines? Yuck! Are you making a quiche or an everything pizza?” Liv crossed her arms over her chest.

  Kat noticed the gesture and grinned. “Ooo, nice nighty, Liv. Did we have a nocturnal visitor last night?”

  Liv opened her mouth but Sophia beat her to it. “No one besides her dream man—whoever he is.”

  “I didn’t dream about him last night,” Liv lied defensively. “And I wore this because I happen to like it—it’s comfortable.” In contrast to Sophie’s Sesame Street pjs and Kat’s sensible t-shirt and shorts, she had on her lacy black baby doll nighty. It was the one her ex fiancé, Mitch had given her and it had a short black robe and panties that matched.

  Liv wasn’t wearing the set because she missed the jerk—she’d really dodged a bullet when she gave him back his ring and told him to hit the road. It was more a case of not letting something so nice go to waste. Mitch may have been a cheating bastard but he had good taste in underwear—underwear for her, anyway. He’d worn tighty-whities himself. Liv had always struggled not to laugh when he strutted around the house in them, thinking he looked so hot.

  “She claims she stayed up late reading a book—that’s why the dark circles and eye luggage.” Sophia sounded skeptical.

  “Well you look like hell,” Kat said frankly. “It must have been some book. Was it a horror novel or what?”

  “Something like that,” Liv muttered sulkily. She was in no mood to put up with her friend’s teasing.

  “Well don’t get bent out of shape, doll.” Kat smiled at her as she continued pulling ingredients out of her shopping bag. Liv hoped the strawberries and mangos were for a fruit salad and not the sardine and black olive quiche. “I just thought with that sexy outfit maybe you’d finally decided to get back on the dating train. You and Mitch hit splitsville over six months ago now.”

  “You’re the last one to talk about dating.” Sophia was whisking something in a bowl—no doubt she’d decided to make pancake batter after all as a back up to the disastrous quiche. “You’re even worse with men than me—and I suck at the social scene,” she added, tasting the batter and reaching for a bottle of vanilla extract.

  “Exactly—because most men today don’t appreciate the pleasures of a plus sized woman.” Kat gestured at her own lush figure with a small pineapple she’d pulled out of the seemingly bottomless bag. “Which is why I have to live vicariously through you two skinny-minnies. A size eight looks good in that naughty little nighty—a size eighteen, not so much.”

  It was true Kat was a size eighteen but she had it all in the right places, Liv thought. She had often wished that her breasts were as full as Kat’s but then, Kat was full to running over all over the place, including her mouth. She was thinking of going back to school to become a lawyer instead of just a paralegal because getting paid to argue was her idea of a perfect job. Usually her quick wit and naughty sense of humor cracked Liv up but this morning she so wasn’t in the mood.

  “Change the subject. Preferably away from my hot jammies and the fact that I don’t have a man to wear them for,” she said, getting up from the table and going to the fridge for a glass of juice. Actually she’d tried dating again after she’d dumped Mitch but somehow it didn’t feel right. Mainly because none of the men she went out with were tall and dark with glowing amber eyes…Stop that! she scolded herself, pulling open the fridge door which was covered in colorful magnets and reaching for the carton of OJ. Stop thinking about him—he’s not even real!

  She tried concentrating on her favorite fridge magnet instead, the one with two California rolls in bed side by side. The caption underneath read, Wake up, little sushi!

  “Okay, sourpuss, try this subject on for size,” Kat snapped, folding the empty shopping bag and stowing it away in her barn-sized purse. “You remember Jillian Holms that took home-ec with us in high school?”

  “The head cheerleader?” Sophia made a face. “How could we forget?”

  “That’s her.” Kat nodded enthusiastically. “Well, you’re not going to believe this but she got drafted.”

  There was complete silence in the room for about two seconds and then Liv and Sophia said simultaneously, “She what?”

  “Got drafted. I know, can you even believe it?”

  There was no need to ask what Kat meant when she said their old acquaintance from Hillsborough High had gotten drafted—every woman in the room knew about the draft and every one of them lived in fear of it.

  Five years before the Earth had been suddenly attacked. The space station orbiting the moon, which had been completed in 2025, had been destroyed and the rest of the planet was threatened by a mysterious force known only as the Scourge. Attempts to contact and reason with the menacing threat had failed and even the deadliest weapons had little or no effect. It looked like the Earth was down for the count and everyone on the planet was going to wind up as alien take-out.

  Liv remembered those horrible days—it had been forty-eight hours of mass panic. Suicides, bombings, looting and unprotected sex which she thankfully had not personally participated in. With no other immediate family, she and Sophie and Kat had locked the doors to the little apartment she’d been living in at the time and eaten themselves sick on Ben and Jerry’s while they watched a never-ending marathon of vintage chick flicks.

  It might not have been the most productive way to spend their last days on Earth but eating your body weight in Chunky Monkey and watching Sixteen Candles and Pretty Woman beat chowing down on the business end of a gun or having sex with a total stranger any day of the week, in Liv’s opinion. And their wait-and-see approach had been justified—in the end everything turned out all right.

  Because of the Kindred.

  The Kindred were a race of alien warriors, humanoid in form but much more massive in scale than the average human male. They had swooped in suddenly and forced the Scourge to stop their attack and retreat to the far side of the moon. There were rumors that the war continued somewhere in space with scrimmages and battles between the two factions but if so, it was kept quiet. The alien warriors took up orbit around the planet, ensuring that the tenuous peace continued, for Earth at least. And they only wanted one thing in exchange—a genetic trade.

  Because a mutation in their genes caused their race to be ninety-five percent male, the Kindred had become a space faring race, looking for other planets to inhabit and other humanoid species to trade with. Earth was only the fourth planet in their ten thousand year odyssey to offer a via