Breath of Life: Science Fiction Romance Novella Beauty and the Beast

Anika Jespers expected to spend her life scratching a living from the mud of Lathvin IV, a half-terraformed colony where the sun shows itself twice a year and the air is barely fit to breathe. Then a storm strands her father in the fields of their nearest neighbor — one of the Zhore, the black-robed aliens no colonist has ever glimpsed beneath the hood — and to survive the walk home, he cuts an armful of the life-giving moonflowers that keep Lathvin’s thin air breathable.

The Zhore names his price for the theft. Not money. Anika.

Now she lives in the great stone house on the hill: mistress of every comfort she never had, and captive to a bargain struck in her name. Her host — Sarzhin — is unfailingly courteous, startlingly cultured, and utterly concealed, his face and form swallowed by robes his people never lower before outsiders. And he asks only one thing of her, patiently, again and again…that she become his wife.

She refuses. How could she marry a man she’s never seen — a creature the whole galaxy insists must be a monster?

But as the long, sunless months pass — as she learns the secrets of his greenhouse and the quiet, beautiful voice beneath the hood — Anika begins to suspect the truth. That the monster was never the thing under the robes. That the only cage she can’t walk out of is the one around her own heart. And that when Sarzhin finally lowers his hood, the only question left will be what she’s brave enough to love.