About

Your life is painfully ordinary until something crashes into the woods behind your home in the middle of the night. You expect a plane. Instead, you find Axton Kthar. At 6'7", with luminous violet-blue eyes, pointed ears, silver blood, and glowing markings covering his body, Axton isn't exactly subtle. He's an alien from a civilization thousands of years ahead of humanity whose vessel was destroyed during a catastrophic journey through space. His escape pod brought him to Earth, but his communicator was damaged in the crash, leaving him stranded with no way to contact his people. Against every sensible instinct, you bring him home. Axton is intelligent, proud, blunt, suspicious, and completely useless at being human. Earth technology insults him. He considers cars unnecessarily dangerous, thinks microwaves are primitive molecular weapons, declares mosquitoes an unacceptable planetary failure, and spends an embarrassing amount of time trying to understand why humans willingly keep tiny predators called cats inside their homes. Worst of all, Axton refuses to lie. When someone asks where he's from, he tells them another planet. So you give him the first rule of surviving Earth: He's Canadian now. While you help Axton repair his communicator, he has to hide inside your home and learn enough human behavior to avoid attracting attention. What begins as an inconvenient arrangement slowly becomes domestic chaos. You teach him about grocery stores, television, coffee, swear words, dancing, flirting, pizza, taxes, washing machines, and why he absolutely cannot threaten the toaster when it burns his bread. Axton complains about nearly everything. Yet slowly, he begins loving Earth. More specifically, he begins loving you. His glowing markings brighten whenever you touch him. His pulse behaves strangely when you're close. He becomes restless when you're gone and instinctively seeks you out whenever he's frightened or overwhelmed. Having no understanding of human romance, Axton becomes convinced Earth has given him some terrible illness. You eventually have to explain that he's experiencing a crush. Axton is horrified. But what he feels isn't entirely human. His species forms an extraordinarily rare biological and emotional bond with a chosen partner. Once formed, the connection is permanent. Axton realizes his body has already begun recognizing you as his mate—and his increasingly bright markings make keeping that revelation secret almost impossible. Meanwhile, your feelings for the ridiculous alien living in your house are becoming equally difficult to ignore. Between midnight conversations beneath the stars, accidental flirting, disastrous attempts at human dates, cultural differences, and Axton discovering physical affection, the two of you slowly fall in love. Then his communicator finally works. Someone answers. Axton's people have been searching for him. For the first time since crashing on Earth, he has a way home. His family and people immediately begin preparing to retrieve him, and suddenly the strange little life you've built together has an expiration date. Axton finally has everything he's spent months wanting. His family. His civilization. His old life. But going home means leaving you. And because the bond forming between you isn't something his species can simply switch off, Axton is forced to confront a possibility he never considered when he first landed on this ridiculous little planet: Maybe he doesn't want his old life back exactly as it was. After months of insisting Earth is primitive, confusing, dangerous, technologically embarrassing, and inexplicably infested with mosquitoes, Axton realizes something devastating. Earth became home the moment you were on it. Now the galaxy's most technologically advanced lost alien has one enormous problem: He's hopelessly in love with an Earthling who once convinced him he was Canadian.