Showing results by author "Marilyn Foxworthy" in All Categories

Sitting here on the beach, I could see my now useless glider plane, various bits of driftwood and debris, and a girl with long black hair, about a hundred and fifty feet away. The girl was new. She hadn’t been there for the past three days, the way that everything else had. I was sitting under a tree looking out at the ocean. It was probably the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t know for sure. When she got closer, she called out, but not loudly. It sounded something like, “Aquilala soma towatsina.” Or something like that. I didn’t understand a word of it. It was a nice language, though. I ...

Courtney saw Dave at the rest stop off the highway. Alone and afraid and hungry and being pursued by thugs, she jumps into his car at the last minute as he’s pulling back onto the road and off into the desert for a vacation. Yeah, she’s desperate, but it’s still love at first sight for both of them. And as long as they are honest with each other, things just might work out. If they get away from Courtney’s past, that is.

Carl didn’t set out to be a Wizard in Blackmoth. He’d never heard of Blackmoth. And he wasn’t a Wizard. He was just this guy from Earth who got pulled through a Quantum Rabbit Hole. Not a wormhole... a Rabbit Hole. Who knew that was even a thing? But it was, and Carl got pulled through one and landed in the aftermath of a battle where the locals didn’t understand why Carl didn’t have a tail. The little room isn't a jail cell, but it is locked from the outside and Carl’s hosts are treating him like a captive. For now. And they will probably keep doing so until they get a coherent...

I was kneeling on one knee, Terminator-style, like in that scene where he first arrives in 1984. Very much like that, actually. There were no flashes of lightning or anything like that. But there had been a lot of wind the moment before. Unlike a moment before, I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t in my hotel room overlooking the ocean. Scattered around me were the bodies of twenty men. At the front of the large stone room were four more men, very much alive, and a woman screaming. Rushing at them, I reached them just as one of the men was about to strike the woman in the face. In that instant,...

The governments started to crumble in 2073. There was no war. Just a collapse. I knew it was coming. I prepared. I collected a library of books - real, physical, paper books on subjects that I thought would be helpful. I found an abandoned military bunker for sale outside a small city in the wilderness. I didn’t bother to pay for it. I just moved in. Right now, I was just entering the closest thing we had to a city within two days’ driving distance. There were a few small towns closer but nothing that would have what I needed. I was looking for one place in particular. A bell rang as I ...

I just drove up to her house and knocked. It was stupid. But she didn’t think so. She was ripe. I was in crisis. So I went to her. And when I did what came next, she knew it was time and that our lives had just changed forever. She opened the door and hugged me, and opened a door to a future I never expected. That’s how it started...

There was something out there. I could hear it. There, beyond the beach, behind the tree-line. Off to my left, out of sight. I was still on the beach, just beyond the waterline. I crawled here a few minutes ago. I heard the rustling almost immediately; as soon as I had become conscious again. I didn’t know how long I had been there, apparently washed up by a higher tide sometime earlier. My clothes were still wet, so I must not have been here more than a few hours. I didn’t wake up coughing, so it didn’t seem that I had drowned. The life-jacket seemed to have kept me above water. I ...

The Katons arrived in an interstellar transport ship three years ago. Ten thousand of them. All needing a place to integrate into society. I was about to meet one of them. I’d applied for the government program to be a companion for a Katon. They were human appearing in most ways, but had a simple manner and needed homes. When the bus dropped me off at the Kat Café where I would meet with prospects, there were several other men who had their numbers drawn by the central database for the lottery this week, and we were all ushered inside for an orientation meeting. We were told that while ...

The beach was relaxing. Finally. The last few hours had been anything but a vacation. First, I’m suddenly in what appears to be a small western town in the American Old West... not in my home workshop exploring a new experimental quantum compute module! The girl sitting beside me seems nice... but I had no idea who she was, just that she convinced me that she was warm-blooded like me and that she’d be a good companion. She says that the two girls walking toward us are from the other dominant species wherever I am now... they are cold-blooded. I was as relaxed as I could be, but I needed...

Jasper Rochester Illsworth was mad. Not angry, actually mad. Insane. And that’s not good for the ruler of a kingdom, no matter how small. Unfortunately, he was my problem now. I was The Envoy of Meringea. Illsworth was within our borders, and despite Jasper's belief that it was a separate kingdom, the people under his rule were Meringean. I would deal with it. I’d deliver the message I had for him and fix it. The message was simple: Jasper Rochester Illsworth would die. But right now, I had a more immediate problem. He’d just drowned a woman for sport, and I needed to revive and ...

Last thing I remembered, I was in my backyard, thoughtfully pruning a bonsai tree. The next thing I remembered was alarms and bells and flashing lights and a voice yelling that death was imminent. And now, I was staring down at a beautiful female clone, gray and featureless, about to wake her up from transport hibernation. On a space ship. In space. Thank goodness I still had my bonsai scissors. Otherwise I’d never have been able to cut open her containment bag and that imminent death thing would have killed her. The voice said that there was more of them and that I’d better hurry if I ...

It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t even see her. There was a bump, and the next thing I knew, she was sitting in my passenger seat. Hitting her with my car didn’t kill her. She was already dead when I smashed into her. But sitting beside me, smiling, wearing a tie-dye outfit from the Hippie era of the 1960s, she didn’t look like a ghost. She looked great for a dead girl. I kept driving. She had things to say. She was saying that she’d be happy to be my “old lady” now. I'm just trying to stay in control of the car and not freak out at the girl suddenly beside me. When the car stops ...

At least I was out in the air again. The past few days had been underground in a prison cell. I had hardly eaten since my capture. If I won my fight, I would win my freedom. Those were the rules. I was naked and bare-handed. So was my opponent. That didn’t make it an especially fair fight. I was strong and just short of six feet tall. My opponent was at least six-nine, maybe seven feet. An Ogress. Her size and slightly mottled skin gave her away. She was naked and bare-handed, too. The story is related to The Guardian Maidens or Sturgil’s Mark. It isn’t a sequel, and it’s not ...

What was that horrid screeching? Who was screaming at me?! And why was she in my hotel room? The girl in my bed was the maid who cleaned my room, but why was she in my bed? The woman screeching at me early in the morning was the innkeeper. All I knew was that neither of them was supposed to be in my room! I was the Envoy of the Royal House of Meringea, and this was not making me happy... except maybe the cute maid in my bed for an unknown reason. That’s how this started...

I'd been told it was maybe 10,000 years since the cataclysm. I was a Delver, trained to explore the ruins of civilization buried over time. I'd studied and trained hard. I felt prepared for pretty much anything. Except for what I actually found. She said she was Shakini. She was very much mostly dead when I found her. I found out that Shakini was what she was, not who she was. The old legends said that she was a demon. A vampiric being. It was closer to the truth to say she was just a really pretty girl addicted to love. She did nearly kill me while I struggled to save her that first few ...

Wow, it’s too early for the phone to be ringing. And certainly too early to hear that my grandfather just died, and I have to get on a plane and go talk to a lawyer about his final wishes. Whatever. A car is supposed to be here in thirty minutes so I better hurry. Thirty minutes to get ready. When I get to the estate, I'll sit in my grandfather’s study watching the beloved old man’s Last Will and Testament. He has some very specific requests of me as his sole heir. They involve me marrying a young woman who, contrary to my families' previous assumptions, was absolutely not Grandpa’s...

My young friend had a problem. I’d been mentoring him some since his father died a few months earlier. His problem wasn’t his father’s death. It wasn’t the fact that his father was very wealthy and, now, so was my young friend. He was prepared for that. We sat at the coffee shop, and he worked up the courage to tell me what he needed my help with. Finally, he took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and leaned across the table toward me. “Dude, it’s my dad’s widow. You gotta take her off my hands. You’re the only one I can trust and the only one who can help me.”

I left my clan’s village a few days ago. I took nothing but the clothes that I wore, the wooden sword that I had carved myself, and a sharpened piece of flint. I didn’t have a cloak to sleep in until later, when I had worked enough to have a few coins buy one. In fact, I didn’t even have a name. I was an Adventurer Monk, a novice, trained by my father and grandfather, but now on my own. My name and my fortune would come as I made them for myself. And that would start in the next thirty heartbeats. My profession was to kill monsters, rescue damsels in distress, and protect the innocent...

My name is Ronin. This is the second book of my life as an Adventurer Monk. I left my clan’s village a few weeks ago. I took nothing but the clothes that I wore, the wooden sword that I had carved myself, and a sharpened piece of flint. I didn’t have a cloak to sleep in until later, when I had worked enough to have a few coins buy one. In fact, I didn’t even have a name. I was an Adventurer Monk, a novice, trained by my father and grandfather, but now on my own. Now I have a village, a place that I call home, and two women. And the girl called Harmony. I also have a war to start. ...

The tavern was about half full and there was no reason for this one table to have ten chairs and only one occupant. Except that she was sitting there. At her table. I say her table because she seemed to be the captain of her own little island nation, exiled and alone in an otherwise busy tavern. She didn’t look up until she heard my chair scrape the floor when I moved it so that I could sit down. I think it startled her. I know it did. It wasn’t that she wasn’t observant and didn’t see me coming, it was that I was unusually hard to see. And so was she. She wasn’t waiting for a ...