ATH: Michele Hart

First up today we have Michele Hart with a great Sci Fi Romance. I love this subgenre. She is giving away a digital copy of her book Mind-Blown. She has a question after the book hightlights!
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VIGILANT

One surviving hijacker is charged with the murders of a hundred citizens.

One cop sees her innocence.

Alliance I-Marshal Weber hauls Yadira to her home planet and infiltrates the human-trafficking ring controlling her. But he finds himself unbearably attracted to his witness. A gift for detecting deception reveals she’s the next victim of a criminal industry.

Descending into shadowy worlds of slavery, Yadira endures a dark angel stalking her dreams and watches the quiet I-Marshal become dangerous in her defense. Everything about him moves her…except the memory of seeing him execute the most important man in her life. Shouldn’t she take vengeance? Delusions of a heavenly guardian affect her mind.

Slavers and demons plan to snatch her from Weber’s custody while he is uncovering connections, and Weber won’t hesitate to execute the guilty surrounding Yadira. Who but a son of fire can save her from fiends harboring hardcore fantasies of harming her?

Excerpt:

            The steam engulfed her, and water jets pounded her. The shower spray beat her body into bliss, reinvigorating her. Weber stood for the abuse, standing spread eagle and enjoying the rough massage. It felt very good, and he looked very good doing it. She wanted to put her hands all over him, but she’d never done such a thing before. She tried to make it feel normal and ordinary that she showered with a naked man. A big, handsome, strong, protective, brave man. It was a naughty thrill for her just to stand in the same room with him and look at him, clothed. The man moved her.

            “Weber, what do you know of angels?”

            “It’s angels again… I thought you didn’t believe in them. Have a few dreams changed your mind?”

            She hadn’t told him of the second dream. They hadn’t had time between the daredevil escape from the Alliance’s clutches, the visit to the doctor’s lab, and the awesome view outside their hotel window. He revealed himself in incremental hints to see if she caught on.

            “Maybe it wasn’t a dream,” she proposed, her eye on his default expression of stoicism. The water droplets raced down his hard body like shooting stars. “Maybe they were visitations. I thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. Did I tell you the angel confessed to me he was a part of you?”

            “No, you didn’t tell me that part. What color was your hair when he spoke to you?”

            Her hand went to her hair beneath the pour of a showerhead massaging her scalp. She looked down to see her saturated black tresses covering her breasts and thin black drizzles of the hair color draining down her body with the water. “I didn’t notice. Why would that matter?”

            He took the small distance separating them, and he put her into his arms, the sprays all around them. Naked and pressed against him shut her mind down to all but what he did to her.

            “It seems to me if they were simple visitations, your hair would be black, as it is in this reality. If your hair were blond, as you truly are, how the Maker made you, then you may have been taken to a spiritual realm where corporeal bodies don’t exist and the barriers dividing souls is thinner. A place where only truth exists. Your black hair is a lie and couldn’t appear there.”

            She smiled in surprise of his answer, had expected a denial. “You hold revelation of the spiritual world, Marshal. Does that mean you have the soul of an angel?”

            Parting the pour of water from his face, his hair drenched and slicked-back, he smiled in reply, as if he’d bested her. “No, it means I can use the terminology to make you think I do know much on the subject.”

            She frowned at him and wished she could tell when he lied.

            After all the stress of the hard day had been beaten from them, Weber adjusted the pressure of the jets as she soaped up a bath scrubber in her hands. When she attempted to bathe herself, he snatched the scrubber away.

            “You can’t have that,” he told her, like an order given her by his badge. “You can’t bathe yourself. You must wait for me.”

            With the heavenly subject of conversation past them, her shyness rushed back to disable her. She pulled all her dark hair around her to hide behind. She saw the moment he picked up on it, and she shouldn’t have thought he wouldn’t notice. It was his job to read clues. And she was too inexperienced to fake having been in this position before.

            He took her hand and guided her to the wall away from the main assault of the water, and he gently put her back to the tiles. Taking the soap into his hands, he stood very close to her, and he teased her into a kiss. His naked closeness stirred her, his alpha-male nearness subliminally dominated, and she was surprised how every step he took toward her sizzled her into a surrender that shot tension and thrill through her.

            His sensuous mouth. She recalled noticing the bow of the angel Dokiel’s lips before he kissed her. They were very similar to Weber’s own.

            When she was mesmerized by his lips, he put the soap in her hand, then took it to his chest. Then he trapped her small hand under his, and they slowly soaped his big arms and shoulders, his sinewy chest and river-rapids abs. She watched his hand, the only other part of Dokiel she’d seen, scribbled with tattoos of angelic script. Weber’s hands were very similar. The angel’s and the cop’s hands were big-palmed, long-fingered, hot to the touch. The contact drew the air from the room for her, and she felt a mixture of want, excitement, and uncontrolled arousal she’d never felt before. But she’d never touched a man like this.

            He gave her his sinewy back while he shampooed his hair, and she sudsed him down, driving away the shyness. Her hands all over his body, his broad, hard back, his narrow waist, his round ass. He was an extra-fine specimen of man. Her thighs were on fire just from touching him.

            There was no way her chastity would last the night. She wanted to pack it in a shiny wrapped box with a big bow and hand it to him. It would soon be his.

            Her soapy hands reached his hips, and he guided her hand around to his manhood. She took a big, anxious breath for the experience. Together they sudsed his thick, stiff shaft, gently bathing him. He was so hard and bigger than she expected. She knew for sure he would hurt her. Touching him just made her hungrier.

            He groaned. “If you keep doing that, we’ll never leave this shower.”

***



What would you like to see more of in Sci-Fi Romance? Action, technology, love scenes, suspense? Do you like a paranormal world loaded with many monsters (demons, vampires, shape-shifters, faeries, angels) or do you prefer a story that focuses on just one or two monsters at a time?