She's too small, too pretty, and too human. The hybrid alien captain is a bully, and he considers her a liability, one he wants to seduce.
Endura Bixby grew up on Texas One, an Earth colony in the Alpha Beta Galaxy, sheltered from the harsh reality of space exploration.
She is ambitious and has a thirst for adventure.
On her twenty-first birthday, Endura enlists in the Earth Army Corps and finds herself on a space cruiser for the first time.
She's in for a rude awakening.
The men and women serving in the Earth Army Corps of twenty-third-century Earth are hardened adventurers who have left behind the niceties of civilization. They are young, daring, and Earth's best hope for the future. She's petite and far from hard.
Thirty-six-year-old Quain Mallory, a human-alien hybrid and seasoned Captain of the Black Hawk space cruiser, draws admirable praise. He is big, handsome, dark-haired, and rough around the edges. He is also a boxing champion with the Earth Army Corps.
He's arrogant, smart, self-confident, mean-tempered, and bossy and demands perfection from those around him.
As the recruits boarded his cruiser, he noticed a lovely young woman. Her soft beauty, auburn hair, and delicate features catch his eye. Unfortunately, Quain also sees her as a liability, too small and too meek for the Corps.
She surprises him at every turn.
He sets his sights on the attractive beauty, confident he can bully her right out of the Corps, never once thinking he'd want her in his life forever.
But she surprises him Endura is in for the ride of a lifetime, discovering love and passion wrapped up into one demanding and extraordinary man.
Quain falls deeply in love and learns you can never truly judge a book by its cover.
Both learn that love does happen in the strangest of places.