"...erotic romance in which love still triumphs..."

When good samaritan Kelly Scott stopped to help a man at the hands of a gang her act of bravery was to change her life forever. For the dark of the night concealed the fact that her act of human kindness wasn't directed at a human after all. Tau didn't want or need the human's help. She wasn't one of the women he and his team had been sent to retrieve and now he was stuck with her. When his team had discovered her interferance he'd had to choose between killing her, or claiming her himself. He couldn't allow her to be killed, but he didn't want a human mate either...

I enjoyed this book but I did find it a difficult one to review because it wasn't what I expected. This book has been classified as Carnal by the publisher and the rating is well deserved. I feel readers who are looking for purely a futuristic romance are going to be disappointed. There are aspects of the story -- apart from the type of dialogue used - which are fairly explicit. The heroine is forced to chose between survival and letting her emotions rule and it was this which bothered me most when I read it the first time. I believe that many readers will be turned off in particular by the non-consensual sex which takes place at the beginning of the story between the hero and heroine.

The two main characters are brought together under impossible circumstances and Kaitlyn O'Connor accurately portrays the development of their relationship against overwhelming odds. I expected a 'love conquers all' futuristic romance but when I adjusted to the tone of the book I was able to appreciate it as a very well written erotic romance in which love still triumphs.

Reviewed by Barbara Small
Posted November 6, 2003

Summary

When Kelly Scott rescues a man under attack by a roaming gang, she has no idea that it will change the course of her life, but she begins to form an inkling when she discovers he is not of Earth. It isn't until she finds herself aboard the haden ship, bound for New Ducran, however, that she realizes how tenuous her position is. The mission she has stumbled upon is to secure wives for the New Ducranian colonists—but Kelly wasn't chosen, and she has no way of knowing if she can convince Tau that she's worth keeping— although it doesn't seem to be difficult to convince him to impregnate her.