My Affair With the Alien Next Door: A Small-Town Alien Romantic Comedy
Jack Mercer has enough problems. His ex-wife walked out years ago. His pool service business barely keeps the bills paid. And in Cedar Creek, Florida, everybody knows everybody else’s business before he does.
Then a beautiful woman moves into the rental house next door, and the whole town loses its mind at once. Including Jack.
Her name is Xylara. She does not know what a biscuit is. She asks far too many questions, some of them about things nobody should ever need explained, and she studies ordinary life on Cedar Creek Road like she has never seen a human being up close. Which, as Jack eventually works out, is because she hasn’t.
Xylara is not from Miami. She is not from New York. She is an alien princess who stole a spaceship and ran away across the galaxy to get out from under her family, and the small Florida town she picked to hide in is about the worst place on Earth to keep a secret.
Because her family has noticed she is gone. An entire interstellar empire wants her back. And standing between that empire and the girl next door are a pool guy who has never been further than his own street, a town full of amateur investigators with far too much free time, and Mrs. Betty Jenkins.
Mrs. Jenkins has been the self-appointed head of neighborhood security on Cedar Creek Road for forty-three years. She has decided the alien is under her protection. She is not open to discussion about it.
This is the gentlest book in our catalog, and it still is not polite. It is a small-town romantic comedy that happens to have spaceships in it, a fish-out-of-water story about somebody who takes everything literally, and underneath all the chaos a genuinely sweet love story between two people who were both a little lost before they met. The town adopts her before anybody explains anything. The biscuits and gravy do a surprising amount of the diplomatic work.
It is a complete standalone with no cliffhanger, and a quick read at around twenty-one thousand words. The heat is warm, not explicit, which makes it the right one to start with if you want to find out whether you like how we write before you go anywhere stranger. It also sits in the warm section of our alien romance guide, labelled honestly, next to the books that are not warm at all.
If you have ever wondered what would happen if an alien princess turned up in rural Florida and fell for the pool guy, this is that book.
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