Last week I showed you the cover and blurb for my upcoming science fiction romance, Constellation XXI. Today you get the opening of the book.

She didn’t do it.

Couldn’t have. There was simply no way. Everything about it was impossible.

Nonetheless, guilt slammed Captain Sienna Dukelsky as hard as if she’d rammed her beloved ship nose-first into an asteroid — because at the instant the ship’s systems all died, she was indulging in an erotic daydream of the glorious affair she’d had with Crispin Hunt while at Keening AstroSpace Academy.

Through him, she’d learned how happiness could transcend all boundaries. Learned her life up to then had been sepia compared to the astonishing crimsons, shimmering golds, psychedelic greens, and black velvet nights love had revealed. He was her first lover, so she’d naively assumed passion would eventually deliver another such life-changing fulfillment. But there were no second chances for undeserving women, and after Crispin, sex wasn’t even sepia, but monochrome.

Now he was here, on this very ship, trailing rainbow memories that seduced her senses and shrouded her brain as thoroughly as the shielding on the ship’s reactors. It was no surprise, then, that her first coherent thought, post-ship-death, was that he’d turned off the lights on the bridge to sneak up and throw his arms around her like old times and then —

No. The past was ashes. Love was just a cruel ghost. She had murdered it.

I have a question for you. Is the color imagery too much or too fancy for genre fiction?

And be sure to check out the hooks by other great writers in the Book Hooks blog hop.

Last week you saw the book’s back cover blurb. Here’s the short blurb:

Constellation XXI

Rediscovering Love at the Worst Possible Time

When her tugship inexplicably loses power while aimed straight at her space station home, Sienna Dukelsky tries frantically to get her ship working in time. But can she cooperate with Crispin Hunt, a former lover she’d once betrayed, to create a way to regain control before the ship kills thousands – and in her spare moments, help an alien give birth?

I have some ARCs available if anyone is interested in reviewing Constellation XXI when it comes out on Valentine’s Day. Just shoot me a line.