All First Chapter Samples

What do you get the man who has everything for Valentine’s Day? Chocolate? No, he was allergic . Card? He thought fake romance was disturbing, and there was no way I was crafty enough to make one. Dinner out at a nice restaurant? He ended up with food poisoning last time, so he wanted to pick the restaurant this year.

Go with an experience, my mother said. Just go out and do something together, his brother said. That wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. We both had busy jobs and couldn’t take time off from work in February. I was scared of heights, so that left out those ropes courses and things. We both thought something like a spa would be painfully boring.

So I started thinking outside the box.

He really shouldn’t have left the planning up to me. He should have learned that after the vacation disaster two years ago. He’d said fun and carefree…evidently that hadn’t meant an indoor waterpark resort filled with families.

I’d thought it sounded like fun.

Tobias didn’t. He was a bit too serious sometimes. That was one of the things I liked about him, though. He wasn’t boring, but he was thoughtful and focused, and I never had to worry about him doing something stupid like spending all our rent money on lottery tickets and Girl Scout cookies because he’d gone grocery shopping while high.

But that seriousness made holiday shopping for him more…interesting.

“I really don’t think we had this much stuff.” Ryan looked around at the boxes and stacks of random things that filled the room, frowning. “There’s just no way all of this is ours.”
Scott was nodding like he wanted to believe Ryan, but he was the more practical of the two because it didn’t look like he was taking Ryan’s word for it. “Um, I think we just had a lot of stuff in the closets?”

Trying not to laugh, because they really did have a lot in the closet when we’d first met, I focused on getting them organized so Ryan didn’t have a heart attack. “Okay, I’ll start on the kitchen. I’ll work from the basic layout you had in the apartment, and you work on your bedroom.”

That had both of their cheeks pinking, but they straightened like having a plan made them feel better. Clearly, having a Dom in their lives was helpful outside of the bedroom too.

“Once you have that done, we’ll tackle the living room together.” Looking around the room, I didn’t think it was quite as bad as they thought. “A lot of this stuff is going on shelves or into the office. That room is nearly empty. It’s not going to take long.”

Contrary to what Ryan thought, I’d seen a lot worse when I’d helped my siblings move.

“I thought he’d lost a sex toy, not a person!” Carrick’s voice kept getting louder, and even though I wasn’t the target of his frustration, he still made me nervous.

“You shouldn’t make assumptions about things like that.” Lorne shrugged and didn’t seem to realize how close he was to getting zapped by his mate.

Or worse.

Caged.

To me, Carrick looked like he was plotting murder or a wicked scene, and either way, I wanted to out of the line of fire.

Mages were kind of nuts when they got this irrationally pissed off and the crazy mage didn’t love me, so I wasn’t going to take any unreasonable chances.

“Lorne, what exactly did you tell Carrick?” Daddy Monroe was being especially Daddy with his tone, but he also stepped between the two men, so he was smart too. “I’m not sure the…the lost your shit spell was meant for people.”

I was promised little green men, not octopus people with a name that had so many random letters in it the news people were having conniptions trying to pronounce it right. And the debates over the right way to use it in a sentence were even worse. Was it supposed to be said like “They were from Greece” or “They were Greek?”

The debate from the science guys on one of the morning talk shows got so vicious, they’d actually had to cut to an early commercial break when one scientist slugged the other. Daytime television had never been more insane.

But as annoying as it all was, I was just grateful that politics wasn’t the biggest issue anymore. When the aliens who’d invaded weren’t little green men but multi-tentacled things that asked for asylum and wanted to pay taxes, everything else took a back seat.

Especially when they’d settled in New York and tried to use the sewer system as a secondary subway. That had been an epic mess that had dominated the top news feeds for weeks until regulations could be put in place. It’d been nuts.

And as a plumber, I’d know.

I’d made more in the first six months of their “invasion” than I had in the previous three years combined. Every housewife in America wanted a screen or mesh installed in their shower and a lock on the toilet.

This was the weirdest munch ever.

Somehow it’d ended up being all straight people besides me and possibly one other exception…an interesting one.

“Your innocent attire and the way your body reacts to youthful educational stimuli suggests you would be classified as a little.” His voice was almost mesmerizing and it took me a second to realize I had no idea what the tall alien had said.

Huh? Innocent attire?

His sentence or question, or fuck, string of words had me looking down at what I was wearing because at that moment I had no idea what I’d put on.

Okay, I was starting to see what he meant.

“I honestly have no idea what to say. Your mind wasn’t focused on what it was supposed to be, that’s obvious. What were you thinking?” He could have gotten hurt. Not just killed the lawn mower, but himself as well.

Bryan looked down at the kitchen floor and mumbled something about being distracted and very sorry. He certainly looked remorseful, but there were other emotions mixed in.

“Do you even know what you ran over?” It had been like shrapnel going everywhere. Someone could have gotten seriously hurt.

He shrugged. “A lawn gnome, I think?” That seemed to be his best guess and it made sense. But how in the hell did he miss a lawn gnome? Maybe his mother was right, and he shouldn’t be given anything that might be in the realm of heavy machinery. That should probably include any kind of machinery really, considering he wasn’t allowed to use the toaster.

“You’ve mowed the lawn before, right?” Was this one of those things that he wasn’t allowed to do—like use the toaster?