By
Award Winning Author
Ann Mayburn

Warning: This book features a galaxy where love in any and all forms is embraced including M/M, M/M/F, M/F, M/F+M/M/M, etc in scenes hot enough to melt your Kindle.

Lorn Adar has searched more than a lifetime to find his bondmate–the one woman he was born to love and the only woman who can save him from the approaching madness that threatens all unbonded males of his race. When a wormhole opens from his galaxy to Earth and the women who could hold their future, Lorn will do all in his power to not only find his mate, but show her a Universe she never knew existed. Casey Westfall’s normal life changed forever when she finds the sexy leather clad man on her doorstep. One innocent kiss leads to an adventure that will span worlds and Casey will have to choose between the man who is the other half of her soul and never seeing her family or her world again.

To complicate matters Kadothians live in polyamerous family units and Lorn will have to convince his Earth bride to accept not only his love, but the love of his best friend and brothers in arms or risk the chance of losing them to either the madness or the Hive–the race of sociopathic women bent on destroying and enslaving everything in their path, but Casey can’t see loving more than one man as being anything other than a sin. Lorn will have to teach his bride that she was created for both of them just as they were created only for her.

In a Universe where all is possible, the battle to protect not only his people, but his heart rests on the soul of a human woman who must face the unknown and take a leap of faith that could save or destroy them all.

With Roxy’s Warriors releasing on Tuesday I decided to go back and read this series again. Casey’s Warriors is the first book and she is Roxy’s younger sister.

I love the world created in this book. It all starts with what looks like an apocalyptic event on earth. Casey gets a call from her sister Roxy who is in the military, telling her to get home with her friends now and stop for gas and additional water once she hits town.

From the Bel’Tan Galaxy this same event could be life saving for the men of Kadothia, they need to find their bondmates. The women meant to be with them forever. If they don’t they will be consumed by the madness that is a constant threat to unbonded males. The wormhole created isn’t completely stable and won’t last long so these men need to get their brides to fall for them as quickly as possible. However the first kiss in which the male will exchange a bit of blood, must be initiated by the woman.

Casey first meets Lorn at the grocery where she works the late shift. The attraction is immediate and Lorn has the advantage of knowing she is his bondmate.

This is a favorite scene after she gets off shift.

Five hours later at a little past one in the morning, stinking like the spoiled shrimp she’d spent the last two hours clearing out of a broken down freezer in the back of the grocery store, Casey dug through the plastic bag where she’d put her purse looking for her keys. Her clothes were stained with rotten shrimp guts and she had a bunch of empty plastic grocery bags to put over the seat of her car so she didn’t ruin the upholstery.

Her back ached, her stomach kept threatening to empty itself, and she was pretty sure Jerry was going to make every moment of her life at the store as shitty as possible before she returned to school in the fall.

The lights near the back of the lot flickered weakly as she neared her elderly sedan that had seen better days but still chugged along. Despite the late hour she was keyed up over her earlier encounter with Lorn and the memory of his—well, shit—everything. Kimber had come back a couple times to show her pictures she’d snapped of Lorn and Casey talking, much to her dismay. Seeing an image of them together, with Casey staring up at him like some love struck idiot, only pointed out how very far out of her league he was.

He was perfect. Absolutely perfect. From the top of his white-blond head to the bottoms of his ass-kicking black motorcycle boots, the man was a walking advertisement for everything hot and virile. Well other than his overly long canine teeth, but it was better than him missing teeth, as some of the people of her small town did. And his breath…she wondered if he tasted as good as he smelled.

While enjoying a rather vivid daydream of licking her way along Lorn’s body and finding out if his carpet matched his drapes, her gaze wandered to the anomaly in the night sky. Deep in the far reaches of space a brilliant point of light flared in blues, greens, purples and touches of magenta. It had appeared in the sky after the aurora from The Event faded, and for a brief time, everyone had thought the world was coming to an end. For two weeks things had been a little hairy but order had soon been restored. Everyone kept waking up with the world still spinning around as it had for the last four billion years with the same bills, the same politics, the same bullshit, and humanity had pretty much gotten over it.

Oh, there were theories aplenty about what the light was, everything from God getting ready to bring the end of times, to the ancient Atlanteans returning to earth. Casey, being a sci-fi fan, liked to imagine it was some kind of communications beacon from an alien race. Her idea wasn’t any more farfetched than the most, but for right now the only thing everyone could agree upon was that it was very pretty.

The lights in the parking lot began to go dim and flicker, plunging her section into semi-darkness. She could still see enough by the streetlights to make out her car near the tree line, but apprehension skittered up her spine. Trying to tell herself these shitty ass lights were always going out, that this wasn’t like a scene out of a horror movie where the dumb co-ed got chopped to bits by the serial killer clown, she walked faster. She swore she heard the sound of heavy footsteps behind her, but when she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see anyone among the few vehicles still in the lot.

Putting some pep in her step, she hurried to her car and gripped the small canister of pepper spray on her keychain. She’d laughed at her dad when he got it for her, but as she flipped the safety off, she was grateful for the protection it offered. Another glance over her shoulder revealed a dark, vaguely man-like shape, around six parking spots away, heading toward her and she debated if she should scream for help or just make a run for her car. Then the shape began to quickly advance and she decided to say fuck it and do both.

With a loud, blood curdling scream she dashed for her car, hitting the locks so she’d be able to jerk the door open and slide inside. Just as she was about to reach the handle an impossibly large hand gripped her arm and she spun, spraying her attacker full in the face with her pepper spray. His startled yell cut off her scream when the figure’s long, pale hair flew back as he bellowed and rubbed at his face. She stood dumfounded when Lorn said something in a foreign language that didn’t sound very complimentary.

The sight of tears running down his face snapped her out of her daze. “Oh shit! Lorn, I’m so sorry! Wait, stop rubbing your face!”

“Woman, what vile weapon did you assault me with? I cannot see!”

He went to rub his face again and she gripped his arm, trying to pull his hand back before he touched himself. “No, wait, I’m so sorry I maced you. I thought you were attacking me. Don’t touch your face with your hands, use your shirt but blot, don’t rub. Oh shit, I’m so sorry. I thought you were a clown, I mean, not a clown, a psycho, but you’re not and I’m so sorry!”

Crouching down on the pavement he ripped off his trench coat, then his shirt. She shamelessly ogled his half naked body and creamed her jeans at the sight of his perfect six, no eight pack. The man had an honest-to-god eight-pack that was as smooth as a baby’s butt. His broad chest was equally built, and the way his massive arms flexed as he tried to remove the pepper spray from his skin, made her want to rub herself against him in the worst way even as guilt pierced her over hurting him.

He made a pained noise and she shook her head, scolding herself for standing back and getting an eyeful when she should be helping him.

“Hold on, I have emergency water in my trunk. Let me get it and we’ll try to rinse some of it off.”

She took his grunt as approval and quickly opened her trunk, pulling out the two gallons of water her father insisted she carry everywhere with her. “Move your hands, I need to pour this over your face.”

She handed him the water and stepped back as he lifted his face and poured it over his skin. When she caught sight of his reddened cheeks and swollen eyes guilt panged through her and she started babbling again. “What were you doing? Why didn’t you say something? I thought you were some kind of psycho that wanted to hurt me.”

“Number,” he growled out as he shook his head, water flying through the air and splattering her. “Can you please pour the water on me?”

She did as he asked, trying to get as much of the pepper spray off his eyelids as possibl
“Number?”

“I wanted to attain your number. Without it we would not have dinner.”

“Oh…” she was so shocked that she kept pouring the jug over his face, half drowning him before it emptied. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

He shook his head again and she tried to resist the urge to run her fingers along his slick chest, to trace each perfectly cut muscle beneath his tanned skin. “It is my fault. I should have realized you would not see me in this light.”

“Are you okay?”

He gave her a bleary blink. “I am fine.”

Dropping the jug she went to touch his face but he grasped her hand. “Do not. You will injure yourself.”

Her guilt tripled and she had to blink back tears. “I’m so, so sorry, Lorn.”

“It is all right, Casey. I have suffered worse.”

Poor guy, his eyes were practically swollen shut and he was trying to comfort her.
Mayburn, Ann. Casey’s Warriors (Bondmates) (pp. 51-54). Honey Mountain Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Casey gets really sick with the transformation that adapts her body to not only be with Lorn but also to live on Kadothia. Her friends come over to see how she’s doing and also ogle the guys at the farm next door to her.

An earth woman Casey has a lot of preconceived notions about relationships and there are plenty of adjustments she has to make. One of the hardest is that Lorn’s blood brother, Nast is also expecting to bond with her. The other is she needs to partially bond with others in order to keep them from falling to the madness.

As Casey is adjusting we meet a Matriarch Jaz (Book 2), who is also from earth and is helping with the transitioning. We also get to see a blossoming relationship between Casey’s friend Paige and Commander Trenzent  (Book 3).

While the relationship advances rapidly and hotly, there are more than a few bumps in this road. Some family drama on both ends, and a traitor that nearly destroys the trust Casey has for her men. I totally want a zendor

Melt your kindle heat, with some tear producing backstories and if there is anything in this warning you don’t like then don’t pick it up. This is a galaxy where love in any and all forms is embraced including M/M, M/M/F, M/F, M/F+M/M/M.

5 Contented Purrs for Ann!

Ann Mayburn

With over forty published books, Ann is Queen of the Castle to her husband and three sons in the mountains of West Virginia. In her past lives she’s been an Import Broker, a Communications Specialist, a US Navy Civilian Contractor, a Bartender/Waitress, and an actor at the Michigan Renaissance Festival. She also spent a summer touring with the Grateful Dead-though she will deny to her children that it ever happened.

From a young Ann has had a love affair with books would read everything she could get her hands on. As Ann grew older, and her hormones kicked in, she discovered bodice ripping Fabio-esque romance novels. They were great at first, but she soon grew tired of the endless stories with a big wonderful emotional buildup to really short and crappy sex. Never a big fan of purple prose, throbbing spears of fleshy pleasure and wet honey pots make her giggle, she sought out books that gave the sex scenes in the story just as much detail and plot as everything else-without using cringe worthy euphemisms. This led her to the wonderful world of Erotic Romance, and she’s never looked back.

Now Ann spends her days trying to tune out cartoons playing in the background to get into her ‘sexy space’ and has accepted that her Muse has a severe case of ADD.

Ann loves to talk with her fans, as long as they realize she’s weird, and that sarcasm doesn’t translate well via text.