Relationships…the day after tomorrow

The Dozen Worlds Romances

Blade’s Edge

Sometimes getting in bed with the enemy gives you the edge you need…

For Zonan Silvergard Commander Taryn Penthes, an assignment to escort a group of Bariani diplomats seems routine—until the party is ambushed. And when she realizes the attacker she just killed is the Zonan Crown Prince’s lover, political winds shift. Now she’s in a race to get the surviving diplomat to safety—while using whatever means necessary to find out what he knows.

Blade Von Stassos isn’t all that surprised at the assassination attempt a mere fifteen minutes after he arrives in the Zonan capital. What does surprise him is the ferocious, deadly skill with which Taryn protects him. With no choice but to follow her lead, he tries to ignore the instincts telling him he’s finally found a worthy consort in her. Which comes as a surprise, since he’s not long on trust when it comes to women or Zonans.

Forced into an uneasy alliance, Blade and Taryn first seduce each other for information, unleashing sizzling attraction that can’t be denied, even if they’re each other’s worst enemy. As the balance of power shifts around them, the only way to stay alive is to find out who wants them dead. And why…

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The Unique Solution

With no home, no family, and her grand plot an utter failure, Talyn Penthes emigrates to Garnford Major and goes back to her roots, remaking all those Zonan craft projects she was always pulled away from.

Sharif Tanaka Six-Alpha is worried. One of five clones of the chief exec of the Hauptmann cartel, which essentially runs the Garnford system, the highest-tech of the Dozen Worlds, he knows there’s a problem in the R&D department, as there doesn’t seem to be any innovation happening anymore.

Once back home, he learns that the cloned DNA is failing, and Tanaka generation five is fading fast so he’s running out of time to fix things. And on top of that, a series of suspicious accidents might mean one of Six-Alpha’s cloned brothers is trying to kill him—he’s not sure of it, but Talyn is (and she has experience).

It will take both working together to break the Garnford system out of its self-imposed deep freeze – if Talyn can keep Six-Alpha alive until the board meeting so she can put her Unique Solution into effect and save both Hauptmann and the man she loves.

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The Human Diaspora Romances

The Valmont Contingency

Tasha Ocasek is having a bad day. First, her father forces her to meet the son of the ben Khalid ship-building cartel to secure a marriage contract. Then she gets stood up by ben Khalid, and sold off like a common whore to a psychopathic pharmaceutical magnate. Threatened with a life of drugged servitude, Tasha stows away on the first available ship.

Garrick ben Khalid has returned from chasing smugglers and information on the corbies, derelict ships with zombielike crews. Without question, the corbies trump dinner plans with some socialite geisha. But when Rick discovers the same geisha on his ship posing as medic Marie Valmont, he knows the sexy stowaway is nothing but trouble.

After she saves his life—and shares his quarters—Rick learns there’s far more to Marie Valmont than Tasha Ocasek. He needs her help, but will she agree once she learns his true identity?

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The Nobinata Gambit

Shakiro Nobinata wakes from life-saving surgery to discover he is paralyzed from mid-chest and re-growing several organs as well as his spinal cord. Lilo, who it turns out is really named Yuki Karaguchi, has been tasked with “assisting with recovery” by Shakiro’s father, Clan Lord Feng Nobinata.

Shakiro’s parents ask him to come home to the Empire of Nippon and Allied Cultures for his convalescence. He takes Yuki and her terminally ill mother (the original Agent Karaguchi) with him, only to discover his father’s true motivation is a mysterious disappearance of a distant relative of the emperor; Nobinata is the clan in charge of Imperial Security, so any missing member of the royal family is a big problem. And the Emperor himself is coming to the planet in a few weeks.

So Shakiro has to learn how to walk again, convince the intriguing woman who has seen him at his worst to stay with him, find a traitor to the empire, and plan a Buddhist funeral, all in the few weeks before the Emperor arrives for his Golden Jubilee celebration…and possible assassination.

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The Ocasek Opportunity

Where do you hide in space?

On the courier ship ferrying The Hero of Ararat, the Dragonkiller and their daughter, Ekaterina ‘Kat’ Avondale, from the Saurian homeworld back to human space, newly promoted third-shift commander Stephan Ocasek has found a sneaky ion trail. They are being followed. No, not followed, hunted.

Not by Saurians, since they’re flying an honor escort. Not by humans, because the engine signature is all wrong. When they detect a comm signal that Kat recognizes from Saurian history, they know the Ancient Horror—the species that nearly ended Saurian history a couple of millennia ago—has returned, and it knows where they’re going.

The Saurians sent a suicide ship into a black hole to stop it last time. This time, all they have is Stephan’s reflexes together with Ekaterina’s calculations to save two of the three known sentient species in the galaxy. And even if their plan works, they might not survive long enough for him to finish teaching her how to be human.

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The Ganymede Survivors Romances

Open Mike at Club Bebop

Travertine Garcia is out of funds, out of options, and her air tax is due in the morning; you live on the moon, you pay for air. You can’t pay, you go looking for miracles, like the Bebop’s legendary open microphone, netcast by its equally legendary owner, Joseph Bannister.

Bebop owner Joe “Glitch” Bannister is sleepwalking through his second life, tweaking the gang that wants payola and hacking for the Strike Force that put him back together after blowing him apart.

Until Travertine decimates the Open Mike, flatlines on his stage, and wakes him up. She’s everything he didn’t know he needed, a deep-dive performer with an ancient-tech interface who can’t carry a tune outside the net.

When the Blue Dragon gang kidnaps her while he’s off chasing down a rumor about the Ganymede conflict that got him temporarily killed, Joe’s ready to fight for the woman and the club; but it’s going to take both of them to save the venerable stage and each other.

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Getting Lucky

Alexei “Sasha” Davidoff has a problem. He’s babysitting Club Bebop and investigating a mysterious incident that might have been the root cause of his death, well, sort-of death, on Ganymede. And someone else is in the Mars police-sealed archive he’s searching, but he/she/it runs whenever he tries to make contact.

Lucinda “Lucky” Burbank, multibillionaire Luther Burbank’s only heir, is broke and stuck on the moon, working two menial jobs to pay air tax and occasionally eat. It’s not helping that she has to pilfer net access from the offices she cleans at night to search for evidence that her stepmother set up her father’s “accident.”

When Sasha finally chases down the intruder to the Bebop office, he finds Lucky Burbank, quite possibly the last person in the Solar System he’d expect to be cleaning the nightclub. With her unique help, he gets into the Burbank Industries and MarsCorp networks and also finds evidence that there was a native culture on Mars before the planet died.

However, it’s going to take both of them together—with some help from Ganymede’s ghosts—to dig up the digital evidence, save the physical evidence, and solve the mystery of what caused the friendly fire disaster seven years ago.

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Kindness of Strangers

Kindness

Always make sure your murder victim is truly dead…striker payback is usually with interest.

Strike Force Colonel Rahmsin Singh is almost as much machine as man, and he wants to know the root cause. Unfortunately, the woman who can tell him that is in deep cryosleep…her body mostly a freeze-dried husk that’s going to require a lot of regeneration, though her consciousness was protected.

The last thing Chandra Ramasamy remembers is the burn of a bullet hitting her chest after hitting the escape pod eject button. Now she’s in a net-avatar conference room with a military officer telling her she’s been in bad cryosleep for seven and a half years.

Can she piece together what happened after her memory stopped and help him figure out what killed him and his soldiers? Well, the MarsCorp thugs didn’t quite manage to kill her seven years ago, and now she has the Strike Force on her side. He’s a little stiff, but deep down he’s a gooey-hearted mother hen. She can work with that, particularly if she can help take down MarsCorp as payback.

And then get her body un-freezedried and working again. And, if they both survive, she might want to keep the universal soldier with the heart of gold.

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