When Serna, the Alliance Prime, returns to her homeworld for her estranged mate's funeral, she expects duty, ritual, and the weight of a thousand years of protocol. What she doesn't expect is Cullen—the human soldier who's worked beside her for months, earning her respect with his tactical brilliance and unwavering loyalty. But respect is safe. What she feels when his gaze finds hers is anything but safe.
For a century, Serna has been the Alliance's unshakeable leader, sacrificing her own desires on the altar of duty. She's buried her heart so deep beneath armor and authority that she'd forgotten it could still beat for anyone. Until Cullen. Until the way he looks at her—not with the reverence others show the Prime, but with a hunger that sees the woman she's hidden away. A woman who wants. A woman who aches.
Their forbidden attraction detonates just as an enemy Serna believed dead for decades resurfaces with a vengeance. Ambushed and stranded on an uncharted jungle planet, hunted through alien wilderness by a threat that knows her every weakness, Serna faces a choice that will shatter everything she's built: maintain the iron control that's defined her reign, or surrender to the one man who makes her feel alive.
Admiral Cullen Blackwood has always been the strategist—the man who calculates every angle, weighs every risk. But there's no strategy for what Serna does to him. No calculation that accounts for the way his entire world narrows to her when danger closes in. He came to the Alliance to escape his grief, to lose himself in duty. Instead, he found the one woman who makes him want to live again.
In the heart of an alien jungle, with death hunting them and desire burning between them, they'll discover that the most dangerous risk isn't the enemy at their backs—it's the love that could save them or destroy everything they've ever fought for.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
For a century, Serna has been the Alliance's unshakeable leader, sacrificing her own desires on the altar of duty. She's buried her heart so deep beneath armor and authority that she'd forgotten it could still beat for anyone. Until Cullen. Until the way he looks at her—not with the reverence others show the Prime, but with a hunger that sees the woman she's hidden away. A woman who wants. A woman who aches.
Their forbidden attraction detonates just as an enemy Serna believed dead for decades resurfaces with a vengeance. Ambushed and stranded on an uncharted jungle planet, hunted through alien wilderness by a threat that knows her every weakness, Serna faces a choice that will shatter everything she's built: maintain the iron control that's defined her reign, or surrender to the one man who makes her feel alive.
Admiral Cullen Blackwood has always been the strategist—the man who calculates every angle, weighs every risk. But there's no strategy for what Serna does to him. No calculation that accounts for the way his entire world narrows to her when danger closes in. He came to the Alliance to escape his grief, to lose himself in duty. Instead, he found the one woman who makes him want to live again.
In the heart of an alien jungle, with death hunting them and desire burning between them, they'll discover that the most dangerous risk isn't the enemy at their backs—it's the love that could save them or destroy everything they've ever fought for.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Used availability for Annie Lucas's Serna