Chapter One
Earth Year 2017, Galactic Federation Year 32,050
“Rosamund, this is Talia. You are going to go to work today. You are going to do a fantastic job. You are not going to let anyone push you around. I have faith in you, and I’m never wrong, because I’m brilliant. And so are you. Oof. Sorry. Babies tap-dancing on my bladder – I’ve got to go pee again, damn it. I can’t even get up by myself; I’m a beached whale. Lukan! Come help me! Rosamund, call me later and tell me how it went. I want all the deets. Unless I’m giving birth, then I won’t answer.”
Rosamund heaved a deep sigh and looked around.
She was standing on the plaza in front of Starcrossed Tower, desperately trying to come up with a reason not to report to work.
The city of Agora, on the planet of Agora, was awake and ready for business. Silver skimmers did their intricate sky-dance, gracefully dodging each other as they delivered citizens and visitors to their destinations throughout the vast marketplace. The triple moons were still visible in the pale pink sky, as was the giant white orb of the sun.
It was breathtakingly beautiful. It was exotic and otherworldly.
And Rosamund Linberg, who’d only found out that life existed on other planets a mere three weeks before, wanted nothing more than to take a sick day.
Her boss, Darfan, owner of Starcrossed Dating Agency’s newly opened branch on Agora, wouldn’t like it. Fine. She didn’t likehim– he was a crabby jerk.
With a sigh, she pressed the button on her wrist-comm. The wrist-comm looked like a golden bracelet with half a dozen jewels which were really buttons that did various things, like make calls and translate alien languages into English.
“Replay message,” she said. She needed moral support.
After listening to Talia’s message for the fifth time that morning, Rosamund couldn’t help but smile. Talia was massively pregnant, and she and her pair-bond Lukan were at the birthing center on the planet Ilyria, waiting for the birth of their two little miracles…but she had cared enough to call Rosamund and give her a pep talk.
So Rosamund couldn’t let her down. She had to go to work this morning.
And she had to…fire a client.
Too bad it was a sexy, terrifying, deadly client named Kodran Sky-Reign, who could literallyfireher right back because he was a member of a species called the Draell. The Draell were dragon shifters.
Rosamund hadn’t actually exchanged a single word with Kodran yet, but her encounters with him were turning out to be hazardous to her self-esteem. She wanted to avoid him at all costs.
She’d first spotted him across the room during a singles’ mixer a few days ago. There had been easily a hundred people there – Earth women mingling with humanoid aliens who were looking for a human mate.
Kodran had stood out among them all. Seven feet tall. Blue-black hair and a strong jaw. Glowing green eyes. He had red scales on his forehead, along the hairline, even when he was in human form. The sharp angles of his cheekbones and the intensity of his eyes were softened just a little by a short scruff of beard that made him look heartstoppingly manly but a little less perfect; a little more human. Except, of course, hewasn’thuman. Rosamund had found her thoughts drifting to what it would be like to feel the scratch of that coarse hair against her skin as he kissed her, or scraping over her nipple as he explored the contours of her body, or abrading the tender flesh on the insides of her thighs… He’d been wearing the traditional garb of the Draell – a silky black shirt and black trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots. He had the shoulders of a linebacker, but somehow, despite his height and bulk, he moved with the sinuous grace of a panther.
All eyes had been on him, but he hadn’t seemed to be particularly interested in any of the women who kept “accidentally” brushing up against him, trying to get his attention. He’d been looking around the room, bored, when Rosamund had accidentally locked eyes with him.
She’d suddenly forgotten how feet worked, and she’d tripped and fallen on her well-padded rear.
Several girls had rushed over to help her get up, and when she’d looked around, he’d been gone. Vanished. Without even a goodbye. Not that there had been any reason for him to say goodbye to her, because they’d never even met, but it had still somehow annoyed her.
Then she’d spotted him again yesterday. She’d been touring the market area in downtown Agora, scouting out places to take newly arrived Earth visitors to lunch.
This time he’d been standing on a street corner, yelling at a male lion shifter. She’d been able to tell the guy was a lion shifter because he had rounded, tufted ears, a thick, matted yellow mane instead of hair, and a long, swishing tail emerging from a vent in the back of his pants.
There had been a dozen men with Kodran, big and muscular and scaled like him, all clad in similar garb. They’d stood behind Kodran as he shouted abuse at the lion shifter.What a jerk.
The lion shifter had cringed away from Kodran, tucked his tail between his legs, and run.
Then, as if he’d somehow sensed her presence, Kodran had looked around, locked eyes with Rosamund and…smiled. Andwinked. And it had distracted her so badly that it had made her spill her hot cup ofMarKaffadown the front of her dress.
She’d fled in shame and hidden in a store full of alien fruit that hissed and snapped at her until she was sure that Kodran was long gone.
And now, even though last time she saw him she’d wanted to walk over and shove him in his stupid chest for being such a bully – his stupid, sexy, muscled, mouthwatering chest – she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Several times that day when she should have been concentrating on work, she’d found herself gawping at nothing, daydreaming about Kodran’s intense green eyes and the leashed power in his big body. Thinking of him made her panties embarrassingly damp and, worse, made a funny little yearning ache start up in her chest. The whole thing made her feel…well, incredibly turned on. But more than that, it annoyed her. She was being stupid. Twice now this unwanted attraction to him had caused her to make a complete idiot of herself.
And now she was going to have to sit across a table from him and tell him that Starcrossed would no longer be working with him, without babbling, lapsing into tongue-tied silence, or scrambling over the table, hauling him towards her by his lapels and kissing the breath out of him.
Rosamund wasn’t entirely clear on why the agency was firing him. Darfan had at first claimed that Kodran was abusive and rude to his dates. When she’d checked with the girls, they’d described him as just being indifferent. He’d taken them out to expensive dinners in the luxury district of Agora, barely spoken to them, and then dropped them off back at the Starcrossed suites without so much as trying to kiss them goodnight.