Billionaire Romance: MAXIMILIAN (An Alpha Bad Boy Contemporary Mystery Romance) (Mysterious Billionaires Book 3, Anthologies & Collections) Read Online Free PDF Page B

spread, and think, A decade and a half ago, that was me. 
                  But then, a decade and a half ago Gwendolyn was not one of the youngest leaders of the field of xenoarchaeology, whose perseverance had contributed to humanity's greater understanding of the non-human species of the galaxy.  A decade and a half ago she could only dream of leading the effort to understand the other human-like species in the galaxy, something that biology had predicted man would never see.  Even if she was not what the most desirable men wanted to take to bed, there were compensations.
                  Work on Sarma proceeded uneventfully until Gwen and the crew noticed a greying of what had been a perfect blue sky, and a low sound like a million heavy breaths exhaling coming in from the distance.  They all looked up from their tools and their excavations and found something growing and looming into view on the horizon.  It was a spreading vastness of ruddy brown emerging over the hills in the distance, and it could mean only one thing.  Gwen cursed the luck.  While modern Sarmian society was as advanced as Earth in many ways, they did not have a lot of the niceties of Earth, such as weather-tracking and severe weather dissipation systems.  On Earth, massive sandstorms rising out of nowhere had ceased to be a problem long ago.  Sarma, damn it all, still had them.
                  As the airborne tsunami of sand came rushing in, Gwen ordered everyone to cover up their work, throw on scarves and goggles, and take cover themselves.  She had just gotten her tools into an electric wheelbarrow along with some pottery whose markings and symbols she wanted to study and covered her eyes and her face when everything around her disappeared into flying sand.  She pulled her electrolocator out of her pocket and turned it on, meaning to use it to find her way around by detecting masses and other moving bodies in the low visibility of the sandstorm.  The screen on the device showed the shapes of structures and devices around her and the moving forms of the rest of her party.  It also detected two other moving bodies coming up behind her, which she took to be simply two other members of her team looking for shelter.
                  And it was then—ah-ha, then! —when that damn pain in her head started.  She wondered now if she might have accidentally backed into something, but no, she remembered that the electrolocator showed nothing in the flying sand behind her but those two moving bodies.  Her next assumption was that one of them had run into her.  What sense did that make, one of them running into the back of her head?  Which led to her next hypothesis: she had been struck on the back of the head, deliberately hit.   And that was when the sandstorm and everything else disappeared into blackness in her memory.
                  Now, opening her eyes and wincing from that nagging throb in her skull, Gwen started to become aware of other things.  There was something unfamiliar under her, soft and cushiony and satiny.  And whatever she had on, it wasn't the durable fatigues that she had been wearing on the dig.  It was soft too, luxurious and flowing.  Getting her vision back into focus, Gwen saw that she was in a circular room with windows from floor to ceiling on every side.  Outside and stretching out all around was a panorama of the Sarmian countryside in which she had been digging, with whirling and billowing clouds of sandstorm whipping through it, thinning here and thickening there.  Inside the room, everything was red and gold and magenta.  It was all silky, satiny fabrics, drapes and blankets and carpets, divans and cushions and Ottomans, and a very large bed on which she was resting.  And Gwen was dressed not for an archaeological dig, but in a flowing gown that suggested activities of a totally different sort.
                  After a moment of utter