Selena is third in line for a throne she will never need to sit on. She is Plan C, the backup sister for the backup sister, but the Ursa Systems are as safe as any place gets. Frankly, her family doesn’t need her. They definitely don’t need her social anxiety, her political gaffes, or her uncanny ability to take ordinary situations and transform them into 'incidents.'
What they do need is an asset. Sure, Selena breaks everything she touches, but in the royal guards’ training arena, breaking things is the whole point. She’s good at it, too. Selena has a knack for combat and keen interest in military tactics. If she can prove that this is where she belongs, then perhaps she can work with the royal guard or join the military council as an advisor.
All she needs is some real-world experience.
He is a terrible boogeyman.
Koa’s masters built him from the galaxy’s most formidable predators. He is a living, tailor made weapon, designed to deliver indiscriminate death and terror. Friend, foe, handler, creator, it shouldn’t matter. If it breathes, it dies. Koa is the monster from soldiers’ trauma dreams, the nightmare in the bloodsoaked dark. He’s supposed to be mindless.
But Koa is a genetic mishap. He just wants to read his wizard book and go back to salvage work where everything makes sense. Space junk doesn’t gawk at his armor and ask if he’s a mech. It doesn’t run screaming from him when he takes off the helmet. Space junk doesn’t smell like all the things he longs for, but can never have.
And then he meets Selena, who offers him one of those things. Anonymously.
It should have been simple.
It was only supposed to be three days, just a casual fling with a transient stranger, but when a diplomatic event goes lethally sideways, Selena must evacuate the palace and lie low with the Koa and his crew. The problem? She has no idea that she's half-smitten with the galaxy's boogeyman.
The Bear and The Boogeyman is a high-heat science fiction romance novel set in the Space Junk universe.