Then he claimed me like one.Xander didn't just win me in the arena. The alien brute claimed me there too, with my punished bottom still burning and my screams of climax almost drowned out by the roar of the crowd.Almost...Victory earned him freedom and the right to take me as his mate, but making me truly his will mean more than just spanking me into shameful surrender and then rutting me like a wild beast. Before he carries me off as his prize, the dark truth that brought me here must be exposed at last.

    Sure, restoring the ship won’t be easy, especially when the Feds figure out she’s running an illegal salvage operation, but she’s never shied away from hard work. Or challenges. Good thing, too. Because she’s on a collision course with her competition. If you like sailing the black with rogues and rascals, then you’ll love Arch Allies. A must read for fans of Firefly and Star Wars. Pick up your copy today!

    

    Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "Semley's Necklace" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

    The next minute, I’d been mysteriously transported to that world, complete with every exotic danger I could imagine.I knew enough about dinosaurs to scrape by with my own life – but suddenly I had to protect four beautiful women from the jungle’s mysterious and terrifying threats.They trust me to protect them, and I intend to fulfill them.But it turns out that they’re expecting me to give them much more than I bargained for…

    Widow of a Leonor warrior, she is out of reach, even for the high king. Goddess help him, this woman strips his soul to the savage core, and enduring it is eating through his control. Little sister-in-law normally avoids him at all costs. Seeing her in line for an audience is a surprise. Not as humanoid as she looks, Sahara is out of time in a very intimate way. Getting her beneath him now is a risk. Sahara summons the dominant lion within, but losing this woman a second time is not an option. The surrender he requires is the one thing she needs to give, and Tor realizes he had no idea what sexual hunger was before. Now he understands the violence of that distant age when her kind walked his world. What he will not allow is for her sacrifice to be the blood price of peace. The future will be theirs, even if it's his blood purchasing it. "These Lions are big and dominant. They fight to kill and love 'til death. Nothing is taboo when it comes to their females and the pleasure these males take so much pride in providing."

    Dive leader, Megan Gerhart and her team discover what appears to be an underwater graveyard, heaped with bones…human bones! When they call in paleontologist Rourke Wolf to investigate their chilling findings, the team is thrown into a spine-tingling adventure that could cost them their lives, both in and out of the water. Faced with death-defying odds, they must confront dinosaurs believed to be extinct for 8 million years … Does the team have the grit to escape this terrifying encounter alive, when the odds are not in their favor?

    It should be a time for celebration, but not for fighter pilot Captain Alisa Marchenko. After barely surviving a crash in the final battle for freedom, she's stranded on a dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her young daughter. She has no money or resources, and there are no transports heading to Perun, her former home and the last imperial stronghold.But she has a plan.Steal a dilapidated and malfunctioning freighter from a junkyard full of lawless savages. Slightly suicidal, but she believes she can do it. Her plan, however, does not account for the elite cyborg soldier squatting in the freighter, intending to use it for his own purposes. As an imperial soldier, he has no love for Alliance pilots. In fact, he's quite fond of killing them.Alisa has more problems than she can count, but she can't let cyborgs, savages, or ancient malfunctioning ships stand in her way. If she does, she’ll never see her daughter again.

    Her unique ability to jump back 40 seconds in time to correct a mistake leaves her vulnerable when her partner, who is responsible for replacing her memory of the event, gives her a false one. But Peri lives and dies on her intuition, and she begins to piece her twisted reality together as she flees her one-time secure situation at Opti and tries to find the truth with a sullen but talented psychologist named Silas who works for the very agency trying to bring the Opti corruption to light.With Howard, tech and med specialist, and Taf, gun-toting daughter of the opposing grass-roots agency, Silas and Peri try to rebuild her memory of the night she killed her partner, knowing it will put her mental stability in danger. Peri remembers, and thoughts of revenge keep her alive and moving forward as she tries to put an end to Opti, working with the very faction that wants to see her dead.

    Sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl living in 2027—she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice.But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies—and wakes up a hundred years later, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened.The future isn't all she had hoped it would be, and when appalling secrets come to light, Tegan must make a choice: Does she keep her head down and survive, or fight for a better world?

    But when a serving girl frees a captive noblewoman, the old order is about to change.... Ariane, Princess of the House of Rule, was known to be fiercely cold-blooded. But severing an angel’s wings on the battlefield—even after she had surrendered—proved her completely without honor. Captive, the angel Perceval waits for Ariane not only to finish her off—but to devour her very memories and mind. Surely her gruesome death will cause war between the houses—exactly as Ariane desires. But Ariane’s plan may yet be opposed, for Perceval at once recognizes the young servant charged with her care. Rien is the lost child: her sister. Soon they will escape, hoping to stop the impending war and save both their houses. But it is a perilous journey through the crumbling hulk of a dying ship, and they do not pass unnoticed. Because at the hub of their turning world waits Jacob Dust, all that remains of God, following the vapor wisp of the angel. And he knows they will meet very soon.

    

     She joined the Commonwealth Space Fleet to please her mother, a high-ranking military officer; he joined as an escape from the crushing poverty and crime of the Trans-Angeles Public Housing Blocks, and the unlikely friends envisioned boring, peacetime careers as shuttle pilots. The Tahni Imperium had other ideas… Caught in the desperate fury of the Battle for Mars, the two young pilots wind up the last defense against an alien armada, but their war is just beginning. Recruited to fly the Fleet’s newest weapon in this new war, they take the fight deep into the heart of the Imperium and battle not just against the enemy but against incompetent leadership and ineffectual tactics. Can the unconventional strategies of a pair of hotshot young pilots change the course of the war? And when the time comes that a choice has to be made between duty to command and loyalty to a friend, which of the two will be willing to make one last flight alone…

    Though she is both aroused and intimidated by the dominant wolf’s stern demeanor and formidable presence, Sacha does her best to be as difficult as possible.Alexei has no qualms about stripping a troublesome female bare and punishing her thoroughly, and Sacha’s prideful defiance earns her one painful, embarrassing spanking after another. Determined to tame her, Alexei sets out to make Sacha his pet, and soon she is blushing crimson as she is taught to obey his every instruction, eat from his hand, and kneel at his feet wearing nothing but her collar.Though submission does not come easily for Sacha, being made to bend to Alexei’s will excites her in a way nothing ever has before, and his masterful lovemaking sets her blood on fire. But when Sacha’s presence leads to turmoil within the pack, will Alexei cast her out or claim her irrevocably as his mate?Publisher’s Note: The Alpha’s Pet is a stand-alone sequel to The Alpha’s Captive. It is an erotic romance novel that includes spankings, sexual scenes, pet play, elements of BDSM, and more. If such material offends you, please don’t buy this book.

    Three exciting, adventure-filled Xanth novels--Night Mare, Centaur Aisle, and Ogre, Ogre--appear in one fun-filled volume packed with all of the dazzling action of contemporary science fiction and fantasy.