Her Chosen Mate: A Quarantine Romance (Venus Quarantine Initiative Book 1) Read online

  Her Chosen Mate

  A Quarantine Romance

  LJ Anderson

  Her Chosen Mate

  Copyright © 2021 by Lark Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Lark Letter Press

  131 Daniel Webster Hwy #166

  Nashua, NH 03060

  www.larkandersonbooks.net

  [email protected]

  Edited by; Natasha Davis

  * * *

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Books by LJ Anderson

  Books By Lark Anderson

  Author’s Welcome

  Chapter 1

  Eva

  Eva

  Chapter 2

  Eva

  Chapter 3

  Eva

  Eva

  Chapter 4

  Eva

  Colton

  Chapter 5

  Eva

  Chapter 6

  Colton

  Chapter 7

  Eva

  Chapter 8

  Colton

  Chapter 9

  Eva

  Colton

  Chapter 10

  Eva

  Chapter 11

  Colton

  Reviews & ARCs

  About the Author - LJ aka Lark

  Books by LJ Anderson

  Her Chosen Mate

  His Innocent Mate(Summer 2021)

  Her Dangerous Mate(Fall 2021)

  Books By Lark Anderson

  The Beguiling a Billionaire Series

  The Billionaire’s Board

  The Billionaire’s Fixer Upper

  The Billionaire’s Funding

  The Bad Girl

  The Dis-Graced

  The Trainwreck

  Hacking His Code

  * * *

  Reckless in Love

  Love you…not!

  Trust you…not!

  Tempt you…not!

  * * *

  Savage in Love

  Savage in the Sheets

  Savage in the Sweets(coming soon!)

  * * *

  The Glow Girlz Series

  Stacey's Seduction

  Tempting Teysa

  Desiree's Delight

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  Click HERE for a free ebook!!!

  If you'd like to become an ARC reviewer for Lark, please email her at: [email protected]. If you would like to subscribe to Lark's newsletter, please sign up here.

  Author’s Welcome

  Hello, Reader! I’m so excited to invite you to my new world.

  Many of you know me as Lark Anderson, writer of sexy contemporary romance novels. What you might not be aware of is that before I wrote those, I wrote several fantasy and dystopian novels. Some romantic, others grim and dark.

  I started Her Chosen Mate shortly after reading The Hunger Games. They aren’t at all similar, except that both take place in broken worlds with broken people.

  If you loved my past works, you might hate this series! It still has a happily ever after, but the tone is far different from my other published works. I chose to publish under the name LJ Anderson because I didn’t want my readers getting confused and buying a book they’re not going to like, but I still want everyone to know that I am both LJ and Lark, and I write many different types of books.

  What to expect from my series: Venus Quarantine Initiative.

  To clarify, this is not mirroring today’s time. I merely use quarantine as a way to indicate that my main characters are forced together. I loosely use it to mean a place of isolation.

  There is a lot of love and a lot of heart. My main characters in this series have been dealt shitty hands, and they’re determined to make the best of it.

  It takes about two hours to read, and there is no cliffhanger. I’ve had early readers say that they were so haunted by the world that it left them thinking about it for days.

  I absolutely love this series, and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

  * * *

  Yours in Adventure,

  * * *

  LJ Anderson

  Chapter One

  Eva

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  You can do this.

  Crawling out of bed, it all still feels so surreal. The fact that I’m even here is a miracle. That I was chosen above so many others.

  Guilt needles me again. The kind that survivors feel, because that’s what I am. Someone chosen to live a better life, when others live in peril.

  The cabin isn’t at all what I had expected it to be like. Up until three days ago, I thought it was a lie or some rundown, dilapidated shack.

  Instead, it’s picture-perfect with well-crafted furnishings and a charming ambiance that makes me feel like I’m living in the book Little House on the Prairie by that Laura Ingalls Wilder girl.

  But I guess that’s the point.

  Care for the animals. Tend to the garden. Tidy up. Eat. Wash up.

  For months, I’ve been preparing for this, and yet, I’m still nowhere close to being ready. It feels as though I’m being ungrateful, but the reality is, I’m scared. What if something goes wrong? What if I mess up?

  What if he doesn’t like me?

  It’s preposterous because even if he thinks I’m ugly as sin, which I’m not, he will do anything to stay here.

  Well, that is if he were smart.

  When the planet went to shit, we were told there’d be no going back. The air was toxic. The water foul. The soil full of heavy metals that industries and corporations had been seeping into our precious earth. Not that the Environmental Protection Agency cared.

  The whole world became a ghetto, and cancer rates skyrocketed, killing without discrimination, all while natural disaster incidents increased. Winters were colder than usual, followed by droughts.

  The powers that be realized our peril, but when the governments united and declared a state of emergency twelve years ago, instead of working together, everything fell apart.

  I was only ten at the time, so young that I didn’t know that things had ever been different. Growing up, I remembered watching the news and hearing about whole cities falling ill due to poisoned waters, but it all seemed far away. Like it was happening on a different planet.

  I lived in a small industrial town with my mom, and we struggled, but I can’t say my very early years were that terrible. And maybe that’s what made what was to come that much harder.

  At around nine, my mother fell ill. I didn’t know how serious it was. She continued to work because she wanted to give me the best life that she could. I remember her saying once that she just had to make it until I was strong enough to survive on my own. Sickness had claimed my father before I could even walk, so she was all I had.

  At twelve, all pretense of things one day going back to normal was gone when they canceled school. Our federal government was gone, replaced with bands of opportunistic people trying to claim power, and then eventually, terrified ones.

  Our teachers tried to carry on with lessons, some going so far as to go house to house in search of children to educate, but hope had already extinguished for so many, and to some, their presence was a painful reminder of reality.

  By that time, my mother had aged considerably, and work was leaving her exhausted. It was finally clicking in my l
ittle, childish brain that this was it, and to both her consternation and relief, I knew I had to start working.

  At first, I did laundry for others, tending to our garden in my spare time. Then I went off to work in a factory at fourteen, but that closed two years later. I’ve been doing odd jobs since.

  I shake the memories from my head and focus on what I had been taught to do.

  Collect eggs for breakfast. Milk the cow. Make sure the sheep, goats, and pigs all have food.

  Instead, I look in the mirror.

  What is he going to see when he looks at me? The innocent woman they want him to? Or the girl who went half-crazy after her mom died.

  It doesn’t matter what he sees in me. What matters is what he thinks of the cabin, the garden, the livestock, the bed.

  It’s time that I get my ass outside like I’m supposed to.

  Eva

  A year ago, I had imagined that my life was as hard as it could possibly get, which is why when I was approached about this position, I believed it would be easy.

  I was wrong. Homesteading is a different kind of difficult. The rewards aren’t instant, and there’s no end to the work. It’s filthy, but not in the way that my life was before all this. That was a type of unclean I shudder to think about.

  Animals don’t care about getting muddy, and they care even less about getting you dirty. Gardening is hard work, even with the modern amenities like the greenhouse set up for me.

  For us. Because there will be an us.

  I swallow hard as I put a forkful of egg in my mouth.

  Tomorrow, I’ll be making breakfast for two. And eventually…

  I force the thoughts from my head and tell myself again how lucky I am.

  When the world went to shit, many expected great men to rise up and lead us. But that wasn’t what happened.

  Things went local—real local. You relied on your neighbors, you bartered, you helped each other.

  And when things got real bad, you sometimes killed one another.

  No government, big or small, was able to fix the problems we faced.

  But men in white lab coats claimed that they could.

  They called themselves the Venus Initiative and came with food and supplies, offering their goods to anyone that would provide samples of their blood.

  Of course, we all stood in line, eager to get our hands on something to fill our bellies.

  They claimed to be growing all kinds of food, food that could survive the droughts and abnormal temperature patterns. All they needed was a few years of mass production, and we could stabilize.

  They stayed for three days, approaching me before leaving with an offer I was in no position to refuse.

  Come with them and help restart the world.

  That was six months ago.

  And ever since then, I’ve been staying in their lab, learning what they called a ‘simpler life.’ Tried and true sustainable ways to exist, while keeping a few of our modern conveniences.

  That is until three days ago.

  Words appear on the plasma screen, one of the only displays of modern technology in the small cottage, reminding me that there’s work to be done.

  I gather my plate and silverware, wash them in the sink, dry them, then put them away.

  Men like stews, which is why I’m supposed to make one for dinner tonight. If I want any chance of forming some type of decent life for myself, I have to make him like me. It’s what they told me, and it makes good sense.

  And if he doesn’t like me…well, does it even matter? I’d prefer to like him, but I’m in no position to be choosy.

  I get on with my chores, losing myself in the farm labor.

  If I’m being honest with myself, I know that this life is harder than the one I left. In some ways at least. It’s cleaner here, and I’ll never miss a meal, but the work is vast, and it’s never completely done.

  But it’s a good life. One that I can be proud of.

  By the time Venus had found me, I was well on my way to considering a career on my back. What other life was there for me? I’m pretty enough, and I’d taken a handful of men to bed. I knew what the job entailed, but admittedly, I found the line hard to cross.

  By some miracle, I held off long enough and didn’t completely destroy myself before Venus came.

  When they found me free of diseases, and my genes robust enough to better stave off the waste of the world, they offered me a position in Venus. They said it was the most important job, not just in the company, but in the world: repopulating the Earth with strong, genetically healthy humans.

  I thought it was a joke at first, but they took me to a lab, fed me well, and ran all kinds of tests, making sure I was as physically sound as my genetics indicated I was. They told me they had labs set up all over the world, each working to find perfect specimens of our kind to breed.

  When they told me that my genes were better than ninety-eight-percent of those tested, I damn near died laughing. But they remained dead serious.

  I wasn’t given much of a choice at that point. Continue to be cared for and fed, or find my way back into the world.

  I couldn’t go back to the life I had before, doing backbreaking labor to afford enough food only to half-starve.

  Complying came easy for me because I know how bad things could get. If they wanted me to bear the next line of healthy children, so be it.

  Except that wasn’t all they wanted.

  They insisted that what they created be sustainable. Be natural. Be something to build from.

  “You can’t build a healthy society out of a sterile lab,” they said.

  Fuck, I would have done just about anything to stay clean and well-fed in that sterile lab they had.

  Instead, they had homesteads for people like me. Places to raise a family in a sustainable way that wouldn’t kill the earth and poison the children. Knowing what was coming, they had spent over a decade readying areas like this, for people like me.

  And the man I get to meet today.

  Venus said there were three good matches for me, but they never showed me who they were. They promised me that I’d be respected by the partner they’d chosen for me, and I had no reason to be afraid.

  I know I’m lucky, but all my fairytale dreams of love and making it out of my waste of a town never included an arranged relationship with a man I’ve never met.

  This isn’t just a quick lay I can run away from afterward. This is a forever match. Someone I’ll be raising children with.

  Or at least I hope to, because if I can’t produce, there’s no room for me in Venus’s world.

  They made that clear.

  Hidden lights flash, alerting me that his arrival will soon be upon me.

  I take off the apron and bonnet I had been wearing to do my chores in, and I go to the washroom to tidy up for the man I will soon call mine.

  Chapter Two

  Eva

  I’m thankful for the bath, though I wish they had gone more modern. Cold water gushes from the faucet, heated with a brazier, like they had in medieval times.

  I’m in no position to complain, though.

  I splash in rose-scented oils, then lay down inside the large basin, taking in the pleasurable sensation of the water lapping my flesh.

  Baths were unheard of in the world I left behind. You hurried to take a quick shower every now and then, hoping the water was clean. You never laid in it.

  At Venus’s lab, I was allowed daily showers in comfortable, warm water. When I first arrived, I was in and out in a flash. The orderlies laughed, telling me that there was nothing to fear and to ‘enjoy my damn self.’

  After that, there were days I spent over an hour in the shower, relishing the warmth and the feeling of cleanliness.

  But that was nothing compared to this bath. Now that the water is warm, I feel so relaxed I could fall asleep.

  That is if it wasn’t for the twists of anxiety churning in my stomach.

  All of a sudden, I just want to be h
ere alone. Forever. All by myself with no one else to care for.

  No husband. No children. No god-forsaken cow with hugely engorged udders.

  Alone.

  There’s no stopping the tears welling in my eyes from traveling down my cheeks.

  I can only stay here if I play by the rules.

  And those rules include him.

  And eventually, children.

  Venus promised me that they’d choose a good mate for me. They couldn’t promise me love, but they could promise me security and safety, which in this world is far more valuable.

  I finish washing up and put on the dress they gave me for this occasion.

  It’s ‘prairie’ chic with a modern flair. Venus wanted us to return to more wholesome roots, but since the whole point of this endeavor is to procreate, they allowed for a lower neckline, showing off a decent amount of cleavage, and higher hemline, coming halfway up my thighs.

  Although the cornflower-blue fabric is tame, the fact that they didn’t provide me with a bra makes the dress a lot more interesting. And the lace panties I was given aren’t as innocent as the wholesome veneer that this whole experience portrays.