Author: Rayne Forrest
This short erotic SFR novel is good and fun. It's the story of Kiana and Adjutant with a secret for a planet that has a lot of secrets, and Ian Logan, dashing new captain of the Rea Cheveyo spacecraft. Kiana is a humanoid (possibly human, but no one knows if the legends of seeding are true) sent to work with humans against her will and with implied threat to her family if she misbehaves by breaking any of the numerous rules about contact with offworlders.
Ian is a happy-go-lucky guy just loving his new assignment and his ship when in walks a virginal hot blonde and knocks him for a loop. He falls for her so hard that the many strings attached to her don't matter to him much.
The Romance plot is believable and the sex is definitely not skimped on but it's also not overwhelming (and I tend to go for the tame stuff, y'know.) There's only one spot where I thought, "hmm, would the captain really do that now?" But technically he WAS off-duty and his First Officer was handling the bridge, so it was okay.
The external plot is interesting and nicely convoluted. Kiana is an investigator with some psychic powers, a greedy venegeful boss, and a lot of secrets that come back to haunt her.
The good: the writing is good, the characters solid, likeable and growing. The worldbuilding is a little sparse for the first half but gets more in-depth after the relationship is built and actually made me want to read more about the "universe" due to the larger plot complications brought up near the end. I genuinely like both of the main characters and some of the background characters too.
The bad: Kiana's people use Thee and Thy and some formal speech that was really hard for me to get into at the beginning. I got more used to it as I read but it still jumped out at me. Also, the worldbuilding was a bit sparse for the first half (to my SF-adoring personality) but it picked up enough in the second half that I read a lot faster.
I had the impression in places that the author was told to shorten this and leave some things out or skim things I would have liked to read in depth. Not often enough to detract from the story.
Book #23? I haven't decided yet. But probably another short ebook.
This is a good story. Maybe not a keeper for me but I definitely want to read the other stories in the Rea Cheveyo series.
