Closer Than Earth

By LD Marr

An alien rescue from Earth's apocalypse leads to a different kind of love.
I'd always had problems with relationships. It was no different with my latest boyfriend Joey. I knew he was cheating on me, even though he denied it. Then things got even worse--Earth's apocalypse happened.
With the help of some aliens, I got away just in time. I fell for Vohn right away, but I didn't want to get burned again. Especially when I understood so little about the strange people who'd rescued me.

More books by LD Marr

Have Teeth, Will Bite (a cozy vampire mystery):

In the 1890s, attracting the wrong types can be undeadly.

When Roz is reported to a witch hunter for talking to her cat, the prim and proper Salem librarian leaves town in a hurry. She doesn't have many options, so she takes a job as a dance hall girl in the wild west.

One of the girls is murdered, and Jonah the reserved but hunky deputy suspects the local vampire. But Roz knows it wasn't him. She was with him at the time being turned into a vampire against her will.

Roz wants to get closer to Jonah. But to find the real killer, she'll have to cozy up to the saloon's rough and rowdy customers instead. Being a vampire might be some protection from the murderer if the method of death wasn't a stake through the heart.

Tenderloin (gruesome horror - not for sensitive readers)

Under another pen name, Trisha McNary, LD Marr also wrote the science fiction series Xeno Relations: Alien Pets, hypnoSnatch, and Bonded in Space

• Language: English
• Publisher: LD Marr
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393247159

Book preview

Closer Than Earth

A short apocalyptic romance

By LD Marr

Copyright © 2019 Trisha McNary

Published by Trisha McNary

All Rights Reserved

This version also contains the prologue to

Have Teeth, Will Bite, a cozy vampire mystery

By LD Marr

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Have Teeth, Will Bite

Prologue

Chapter 1

In the near future...

Why am I driving down this awful road again? I asked myself.

My tiny Smart car wound through the corkscrew curves of the Ortega Highway, also known as Blood Alley. On my way to waste more time with my boyfriend Joey. Or friend as he preferred to call our relationship. Friends with benefits.

The drive was long, and it gave me lots of time to mull things over for the thousandth time.

It’s not just about sex for me. I care about him. I might even love him, I told myself, even though I hated that he slept with other women and lied about it. And we fought about it constantly.

I know you’re sleeping around, and I can’t be involved with someone who does that, I’d said so many times.

How do you know? he always answered. Do you have any proof?

And I’d say, I don’t have proof, but I just know. It’s a feeling. I just know this kind of thing. You can tell when you’re sleeping with someone, and they’re not loyal, right?

No, Claire. You can’t tell that. No one can. You’re just crazy. You have jealousy issues. But that’s OK. I’m not having sex with anyone else, and we don’t have to break up, he’d say.

Then he’d hug me and start kissing me. And we wouldn’t break up—yet. I’d sleep with him again, but the feeling of wrongness never left me. I knew he was sleeping around. I just knew it! But for some reason, I didn’t do what I knew was best for me. Maybe the real problem was that I didn’t respect myself enough, I thought now.

As time went on, and I kept seeing Joey, I’d started to get headaches. Bad migraines. I got medicine for them, but they got worse, and I had to take more and more of the pills to dull the pain. Something had to break sooner or later, I knew. I just hoped it wouldn’t be me.

I drove past a mountain curve, and an area of burnt-out forest came into view. Black dead tree stumps dotted blackened hills. It matched my mood and stretched for miles.

After years of being in this awful relationship, that’s exactly how I feel inside, I realized. Why have I done this to myself?

But I thought I knew why. Joey was the kind of guy women couldn’t resist, and he knew it. I pictured his tanned face in my mind. Big brown eyes and full lips that were always smiling. A hunky body from almost daily workouts. Glasses that made him look more intelligent than he was.

Not that he wasn’t smart. But he wasn’t the super-genius I’d thought he was when we first met. Appearances could be deceiving. Joey was my ideal man on the outside, but something was missing on the inside. The ability to be faithful to one person.

I sighed.

But everyone’s like that these days, my thoughts continued. It’s either put up with that or be alone, right?

Another choice would be to sleep around with some other guys myself, but I didn’t have any desire to do that.

One guy is enough for me, I’d often told Joey.

But one woman wasn’t enough for him.

And now, here I was making this unsafe drive just because he’d asked me to. It wasn’t just the dangerous road conditions. Unrest was stirring up in the unstable political climate of our time. People were out in the streets actually shooting each other. Not that drive-by shootings had never happened