12/12/23

I’m really excited to be a part of this awesome anthology benefiting the National Women’s Coalition Against Violence and Exploitation.

Available now for preorder. Releasing this summer 7/26/22!
https://books2read.com/u/mB211y

Tumbling Through Stardust by R.L. Olvitt

Taketa of the Noal lives in a world that is half dream, half nightmare. He no longer knows which parts of him are still man, or exactly how much of him has become the machine that traps him, just as surely as his duty to his people has caged him. Looking down on his former world from the solitude of his watch station, he guards the planet whose leaders chose to keep him alive long past his time.

When he pries open the rescue pod that holds the human Lily Brevask, he realizes just how badly his makers failed in their task, because when he sees her face with its strange, hairless skin, and he breathes in her maddeningly appealing scent, he knows he is still man enough to hunger. Lily’s arrival on Taketa’s watch station has him questioning everything he once thought was immutable.

Lily is alternately intrigued and frustrated by her dark furred savior. She embraced the chance to take a trip of a lifetime and the world as she knew it crumbled away into jagged, burnt wreckage. His is the first voice she hears after she awakens in her life pod, but Taketa is a mystery from the start. He’s a man from an unknown alien race, a planet outside of Galactic Federation space, and although she’s undeniably drawn to him, she’s not sure just how far she can trust him.

Taketa may have rescued her, but she’ll soon wonder whether he can offer her any real salvation, because nothing about him seems to add up. He refuses to contact her people or to take her among his own. Taketa has secrets, and if he doesn’t share them, he and Lily may face far worse than the destruction of a simple cruise ship—it may ignite a war between their worlds.