Copyright © 2022 by Arizona Tape, Calista Jayne, Christy Anderson, Danika Bloom, Demelza Carlton, Erin Bedford, Gwyn McNamee, Jade Waltz, Jessalyn Jameson, K. R. Max, Lacey Carter Andersen, Laura Greenwood, Lexie Miers, Linzi Basset, Margo Bond Collins, Mia Harlan, Rachel Everly, Skye MacKinnon, TB Mann, Zoey Indiana

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  All rights reserved.

  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.

  Cover by Peryton Covers.

  Published by Peryton Press.

  perytonpress.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  My Big Sweet Waffle Monster

  Skye MacKinnon

  The Macaron Witch

  Laura Greenwood

  Her Sexy Chef

  Lexie Miers

  Her Eggplant Lover

  Gwyn McNamee & Christy Anderson

  Her Winy Goddess - Harvest Of Dionysus

  Arizona Tape

  His Fishy Model

  Jessalyn Jameson

  His Forbidden Therapist

  Demelza Carlton

  Her Donut Daddies

  Calista Jayne

  Her Popping Mates

  Zoey Indiana

  Her Seasoned Delivery

  Danika Bloom

  Her Steamy Alphas

  Lacey Carter Andersen

  Her Peppery Dom

  Rachel Everly

  Her Plant Man

  Jade Waltz

  Her Greedy Boss

  Erin Bedford

  Her Juicy Dom

  Linzi Basset

  Her Pastry Shifters

  Mia Harlan

  Their Bendy Bond Girl

  TB Mann

  His Curvy Cyborg

  Margo Bond Collins

  Golden Baked

  K. R. Max

  Afterword

  The Charities

  Foreword

  Dear readers,

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  Welcome to the second edition of Eat Your Heart Out 2, a romance anthology bursting with flavour!

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  A year ago, we published the first volume of this collection and made over $2,200 for charity. We all had so much fun writing food-themed love stories while also doing something good, that we couldn’t resist doing it again this year.

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  All net proceeds of this book will go to charity: Unicef’s Ukraine appeal and the Hunger Project.

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  We’ve rated our stories by heat level on a scale from 1 (chaste kiss) to 5 (all out explicit action). There’s a bit of everything to cater for every taste, ranging from dominant chefs to pastry shifters to aliens.

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  Join the conversation on social media using #eatyourheartout and tell us if you enjoy the book!

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  Now ready your knife and fork, grab some snacks and enjoy this delicious anthology!

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  The Eat Your Heart Out 2 Authors

  PS Many of last year’s stories have since been published as individual books. You can find a list of them here: https://books2read.com/rl/eatyourheartout

  My Big Sweet Waffle Monster

  A Starlight Monsters Story

  Skye MacKinnon

  Heat level: 2

  After her alien abduction from Earth, Penny has resigned herself to never returning home.

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  For two years, she's been forced to work on an illegal space station and has lost hope of better things to come. Until she stumbles across a caged alien who smells like home.

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  Almost naked, with golden scales, and the most delicious scent, she finds it hard to resist when he insists she's his mate.

  Will Penny risk everything to free her alien?

  My Big Sweet Waffle Monster is a prequel to the Starlight Monsters series and includes a standalone m/f alien monster romance.

  Chapter One

  Penny

  I sneaked along the corridor, a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t be doing this racing through my head. If anyone caught me, I’d be dead. Or worse. Much worse than a quick, easy death.

  It was suspiciously quiet. I’d waited until most of the guards went for their midday meal, but it felt like the entire level had been deserted. The only sounds were my footsteps and my pulse drumming in my ears.

  Turn back, the clever part of my subconscious said, but I didn’t listen. The attraction of the scent was too strong. Sweet, like honey and maple syrup combined into a glorious harmony. It drew me along the corridor, ever further into forbidden territory.

  I’d first smelled it when I’d woken up. It had been faint, barely perceptible, but on the way to work, it had suddenly hit me and overpowered my senses. I’d leaned against the wall, memories crashing over me. My nan making waffles on her iron skillet before drizzling them with amounts of maple syrup that my mum called ‘diabetes in the making’. Nan had simply laughed and added even more syrup before pushing a plate stacked with too many waffles to eat in front of me. I’d taken the challenge, but I’d had to concede before I could finish the final solitary waffle. That night, I’d needed a hot water bottle for my aching stomach, but I hadn’t regretted the overeating. Waffles were life.

  And now I was smelling them again, as sweet as in my memory, even though I was half a galaxy away. I didn’t even know where exactly I was in relation to Earth, but I’d long since concluded that I wasn’t going to return home ever again. Coming to that conclusion had been a lifesaver. It had helped me focus on the positive sides of living on a space station surrounded by aliens, rather than crying myself to sleep every night, wishing I was home.

  I’d buried my memories of Earth. Until that scent had woken them all over again.

  Turn back.

  No way. I was getting closer. It smelled as if I was in the centre of a busy bakery rather than an empty corridor. At a junction, I stopped, checking my map. Two of the corridors were on it, but the one on the right was crossed out. As a maintenance rat, I was allowed into more parts of the station than most, but the right corridor was clearly out of bounds. And I bet that was where I had to go.

  With my heart threatening to jump out of my chest, I walked a few steps into the passage on the left and sniffed. The scent was weaker here. It was the same for the central corridor. But when I stepped into the one on the right, images of steaming waffles and dripping honey flashed before my eyes. This was where I had to go. And I had to be close. The scent couldn’t get any more intense.

  I continued slowly, my senses on full alert, although the smell was distracting me. The corridor bent sharply to the right, ending in a set of closed metal doors labelled 32-Ω. Fuck. I didn’t have authorisation to be here. If I used the scanner on the left of the doors, it would trigger an alarm.

  Another wave of waffle scent assaulted my senses. How was it so strong even though the door was closed? Whatever was causing the scent had to be right on the other side.

  A slightly uneven patch of wall to my left caught my eye, and I grinned. Finally, being a maintenance rat would pay off. Most other inhabitants of the station wouldn’t give the stain a second look, but I knew what it promised.

  I kneeled in front of it and searched for the tiny notch that would open the hatch. It wasn’t always in the same place, so I used my hands to feel for it. Ah, there it was. I pressed it as hard as I could and with a low hiss, the hatch slid aside, revealing a dark tunnel.

  When they’d discovered me in the ship of the bastard alien who’d abducted me from Earth, they’d given me a choice. Become a maintenance rat – r’hat as they pronounced it, but I didn’t know what that even meant, so I’d shortened it into rat which seemed to fit – or die. To be fair, it hadn’t really been a choice. In the months of travel, I’d sworn to myself that I would survive no matter what. It was my one and only goal. So if I had to wade through pipes filled with shit to live, so be it.

  Luckily, this wasn’t a waste pipe, just an air vent. Much better. With one last look behind me to check for guards, I crawled into the tunnel. The scent in here was stronger than ever. I didn’t activate my head torch, preferring to feel my way along the vent. It was about as small and narrow as they got, so I bumped my elbows repeatedly on the cold walls. It’s why they hadn’t killed me. Most aliens on the station were big, and I mean huge, while I was short even for human standards. At just under five foot, I was small enough to fit into almost all the vents and pipes. Robots and drones did most of the cleaning anyway, but sometimes they needed a sentient being to check on things. Plus, they loved laughing at the sight of me crawling out of a pipe covered in shit. My life here was dirty and smelly, which was why the scent of waffles was something I couldn’t resist.

  The vent led me past the doors before slowly curving to the right. A dim glow came from further up ahead and I increased my pace until I got to a grate set into the floor of the shaft. The spaces between the metal were just enough to let me peer down into a barely lit room. It wasn’t
much bigger than my own sleeping quarters, except that I shared mine with five others. This alien had his own room.

  And what an alien it was. He was massive, a mountain of muscle, sitting cross-legged in the centre of the cell. He was covered in strangely-shaped golden scales that shimmered despite the lack of light. The scales looked hard, like plate armour, and seemed to cover every inch of him, except for a line along the back of his head, where wild hair sprouted like a punk’s mohawk. It was the same shiny gold as his scales. He was a tetrapod with two arms and two legs – which was fairly unusual on the station; most species here had more limbs than that – but he was sitting, so it was possible that he was hiding other alien features. A surprising number of aliens had tails, but it was too dark to see if he had one as well. A strip of cloth covered his waist. Not that I should have been looking at that area in the first place.

  The rest of the room was empty except for a square column in one corner, the most basic version of an alien toilet. The hollow at its top was filled with a gel that absorbed organic matter, turning it into an easy-to-clean jelly. No other furniture, not even a bed or a cupboard. This wasn’t a bedroom. It was a cell.

  I stared down at the alien, wondering what to do next. The scent of waffles and syrup wafted around me, so intense that I kind of expected to see a plate full of them appear in front of me.

  That’s when he looked up, right into my eyes.

  Chapter Two

  Qong

  She was here. I’d been able to sense her ever since they’d woken me from my cryosleep. My mate was close, but her scent was off. It was clearly her, but it wasn’t quite right. Maybe my instincts were off after sleeping for too long. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been in that cryopod. Awakening had been rude and painful.

  I dimly remembered rough hands pushing me along a corridor, into this cell, before the door had closed behind me. It hadn’t opened for several days. Food was pushed through a small hatch, but no matter how much I shouted at the being on the other side, they would never answer.

  I had no idea where I was. I didn’t even know what year it was. All I remembered was getting into my cryopod to prepare for the long journey to Kev-4, the planet most of my people had already fled to. War, famine and pollution had decimated our own planet and Kev-4 held the hope of new beginnings, a better life. The journey was supposed to take just under two intergalactic years, hence the cryopods. It was the fastest I could afford. If I’d had the money, I could have made the trip in a single IG month, but my savings didn’t stretch that far.

  I was sure this wasn’t Kev-4. It was too cold for that. I shivered, wishing I had a blanket. I still only wore the loincloth I’d put on in preparation for cryosleep. Whoever the beings were who’d taken me prisoner, they didn’t care much for my wellbeing.

  The first moment of happiness was when I’d smelled her scent. My mate. It was likely that she’d been on the same ship as me. Maybe we’d been attacked by pirates. The route to Kev-4 was long and went through some barely chartered parts of the galaxy, so it wasn’t unheard of for ships bound to get captured by pirates. Usually, they stuck to asking for a ransom or simply ransacking the vessel, stealing all valuables before letting their captives go. But not in my case.

  At least my mate was with me. Her scent had become stronger over the course of the past few IG hours, and now she was close. I almost expected the door to open to reveal my beautiful female, but instead, a sound above made me look up. A small square vent was my only source of fresh air, but I’d already discarded it as a possible escape route. It was too tiny for me. It should have been too small for any Gofren, but there she was, my mate. I couldn’t see her in the dark, but I sensed her presence.

  “Mate,” I said hoarsely.

  I’d waited for this moment all my life. I’d imagined hundreds of different scenarios about how our first encounter would go. This hadn’t been one of them. In some of my dreams, I’d rescued my mate from scores of enemies, thereby instantly earning me her gratitude and love. I’d not expected to be the one who needed rescuing.

  “What?” she asked from above in an unknown language, instantly translated by my implant. Why wasn’t she speaking Gofren Standard? Was she from one of the more remote parts of my planet where they still stuck to some of the old indigenous dialects? It didn’t matter. My implant would do the work until we could learn each other’s languages.

  “Mate,” I repeated. “Can you understand me?”

  “Yes,” she said after a moment’s silence. “I can understand you. I have a translator slug.”

  A shudder ran down my back. Brain slugs were efficient but disgusting. Nowadays, most people preferred implants, with only traditionalists, vegans and those too poor to afford one opting for slugs. I hoped my mate was the latter. Being poor was something that could be cured.

  “Can you come down?” I asked. “Why are you up there?”

  “Let me see if I can remove this grate. I didn’t come equipped for this, but if we’re lucky, my screwdriver will fit.”

  After some banging, cursing and clattering, the soft whirring of an electric screwdriver echoed through my cell. I waited patiently while imagining what my mate would look like. Would her scales be golden like mine? If she was from one of the remoter areas, they might be a deep red or a rusty brown. Either would be beautiful. I was sure she would be stunning to behold. I’d never heard of a male not finding his female attractive.

  We were made for each other, destined by the stars to be together from the moment we met until the day we died. Our hearts would stop beating as one, meaning we could enter the Great Halls of Purys together. Until that day, we’d be a mated couple. A family. My hearts beat faster at the thought of offspring. I’d almost resigned myself to staying alone for the rest of my life. All of my friends had found their mates years ago. I was the last one left. But now she was here, my mate, my sweet female.

  Another bang made me jerk, then the grate was pushed aside with a screech. I hoped nobody was close enough to hear the noise. I doubted it; I hadn’t sensed anyone besides the being who brought me my food twice a day - or what I thought was twice a day. It was hard to keep a sense of time without a window or a clock.

  “Got it,” my mate whispered, relief colouring her melodic voice. “Now, let’s see if I can fit through the hole.”

  I highly doubted it, but I also had thought it impossible for any Gofren to crawl through the vent in the first place. Maybe she’d been stunted in growth. If she came from one of the remote areas of Aggo, it made sense. She wouldn’t have had the best nutrition during childhood. Not that it mattered. I’d love her no matter how tiny she was.

  Her feet, covered in dirty black boots, were the first I saw of her. Adorable, miniature feet followed by spindly legs. She wore shapeless blue trousers that hid her scales. Most Gofren females preferred to walk around naked, presenting their bodies with pride and confidence, but I understood why she’d put on clothes while crawling through dusty vents. I bet she couldn’t wait to take them off as soon as she was in my arms.

  I jumped up and reached for her. I got a firm grip around her hip, which felt strangely soft and squishy, as if her scales were still hardening. Another effect of malnutrition or had someone harmed her? At the thought, anger rose in me, and I expelled some hot air through my spine vents. It rose to the ceiling in the shape of thin smoke tendrils.