Alien Conquest: (The Warrior's Prize) An Alien SciFi Romance Read Online Free

and gray, like a shark’s. Alaina would have been lying, though, if she’d said it wasn’t at least somewhat comforting to know that these aliens had the same parts that she did. It made them a little less strange to her, and that was a gift.
    She blushed when she realized most of the bathers were eyeballing the line of slaves as they walked by with some combination of curiosity and hunger in their eyes. She felt like fresh meat. Yfia bowed her head to anyone who looked at them, the gesture somehow at once elegant and obedient. Alaina was pretty sure if she tried something like that it would just end up looking like she had a twitch.
    “Oh, that’s lovely,” Yfia murmured
    Alaina blinked, looking up at her. “What is?”
    Yfia smiled. “The color in your cheeks. That’s marvelous, what a gift.”
    Alaina felt her cheeks grow hotter and cleared her throat. “Um, thanks.”
    Yfia nodded in approval, and they turned a corner into a wide space with several steaming baths. Then a veritable army of attendants poured into the room and Alaina found herself swarmed by three Jiayi women, all of whom insistently and hastily removed her clothes. Though Alaina had never been disrobed in public before, she had to admit these women were experts at it. Before she’d even managed to wrap her head around what was happening, someone had lifted her by the armpits, her feet off the ground, and yanked her pants and underpants right off. She squeaked, alarmed, and then heard that tsk sound and looked over at Yfia, who held up her arms to accommodate the attendants and smiled patiently.
    “Let them do the work,” she suggested. “No one will harm you. You are too valuable.”
    Alaina didn’t feel valuable. She felt violated. But once her bare feet were on the tiled floor, she didn’t put up a fight, just let them tug her shirt off over her head, and finagle her free of her bra. Then she instinctively wrapped her arms around herself, covering up her delicate bits, and stood there turning pink from her toes to the top of her head, no matter that everyone else around her was also naked. Yfia seemed not to care at all, as if she enjoyed just standing there nude, the steam curling around her elegant ankles. Alaina figured if she had that kind of sapling-thin, long figure, she might not mind being naked either. Or maybe it was an alien thing. Blessedly, they didn't stand there long. The attendants wasted no time ushering the line of slaves into various pools, and Alaina found herself walked down a set of marble steps by one of the attendants, after Yfia, and right into warm, milky water. It smelled faintly of honey, or what Alaina imagined was honey. Space honey. And it was thicker than normal water. But the sensation of it slipping over her skin was not unpleasant. She thought maybe this was what a mud bath felt like. Sort of.
    The attendants entered the pools alongside their appointed slave, and Alaina was promptly dunked under the water and brought back up. Then they poured the water over her head, her hair, lathering her body with some kind of soap. She hoped it was soap. She was at least somewhat relieved that her hair was in her face, so nobody could see the scarlet blush in her cheeks, or the likely horrified look on her face as these strangers’ hands rubbed all over her body. Their hands were gentle enough, but the only hands that had ever lathered soap on Alaina’s skin were her own, and it was weirder than anything else. They dunked her head again and when she came up, they started combing her hair back from her face. She saw Yfia nearby, not even standing in the water but floating under her attendants’ ministrations, relaxed as anything.
    Alaina tried to focus on her plan. Let them make her look however they liked, let them dress her and sell her to someone who would be kind, and then she’d find a way to escape. It was all she could do, holding tight to this, and she knew if she let her mind wander too far from it she