DANCE OF THE STRANGE MAIDEN

Synopsis Xander Vale has everything—wealth, looks, influence. At nineteen, he treats love like a game and people like toys. Women fall for him, he walks away. To him, attachment is weakness, and settling down is a joke. His mother disagrees. One night, she brings home a strange girl found unconscious and terrified—Arielle. Arielle isn’t just unfamiliar with Earth. She doesn’t belong to it. She comes from a distant world ruled entirely by women, a planet where men are myths and emotions are tightly controlled. Falsely accused of treason, Arielle escaped execution by stealing a sacred relic tied directly to her planet’s throne. Hunted by her own kind, she fled across the stars… and crashed into Earth. Xander is the first man she has ever seen. And she doesn’t understand why her heart reacts before her mind does. To Xander, Arielle is an inconvenience—naive, clumsy, strange, and completely out of place. She doesn’t understand doors, spoons, television, or privacy. She wanders into rooms without knocking, breaks household gadgets out of curiosity, and stares at reflections as if they’re alive. To Arielle, Earth is terrifying. And Xander is confusing, arrogant… and impossibly magnetic. As comedy turns into tension and tension into something dangerous, Xander slowly realizes Arielle isn’t just innocent—she’s important. Powerful forces are searching for her, and the relic she carries could ignite an interplanetary war. And then there’s the truth she hasn’t uncovered yet. The parents she was told were dead. The reason she was really sentenced. And the shocking possibility that Earth was never a coincidence. When hunters from the stars arrive and secrets collide, Xander must choose: protect the strange maiden he never wanted… or lose her to a war that spans worlds. Love was never part of the plan. But some dances can’t be escaped.