Excerpt from Eloped with a Pard

Upcoming Release

Excerpt:

At this point in the romance, Zhan and Keedi are living on campus waiting for school to start. Both have summer jobs.

Keedi walked with her bots to lunch. They were planting an area that would take a couple more hours. She entered the amphitheater area, planning to cut through to the cafeteria, and found Zhan in a fight. His movements were a blur, leaving his attackers scrambling to defend themselves. But there were six of them. One was under as tree, unconscious, and two others were limping badly.

She pulled out her gardening  stick and defined the area for her bots, the area of the fight. Thankfully, she had eight bots today for a big planting project. She switched their function to prune, which involved short powerful laser bursts. The small bots rolled forward to the fighters. Keedi realized her mistake. 

“Stars!” Quickly she selected Zhan in a green beam that told the bots to leave it alone.

By then there was so much shouting and howling, other people came running. The assailants saw Keedi, and one big one headed toward her, with legs bleeding. She gulped, unable to move.

Zhan leaped past him in a burst of speed, and grabbed her around the waist. Still running, with one leg he pushed upward off a tree trunk, and grabbed a limb of a nearby tree with one hand. In a dizzying swoop, Keedi was boosted onto a thick limb of a tree, and then swung higher, onto a limb above Zhan. “Hang on tight to the tree trunk, Keedi.”

Zhan dropped down onto a huge, angry man with dark red skin.

“Get off him!” A woman yelled. Three Trengulu women pulled off their traditional headscarves, revealing a gleaming third eye. Each of them sent a laser-like beam at an assailant, who dropped with a thud. Zhan grinned, climbed up the huge man he was fighting, and jumped into Keedi’s tree. A beam hit the man, and he fell on his face. “Thank you, gentlewomen,” Zhan called.

One of the Trengulu women snorted and grinned.

“I really need to spend some time learning about other Alliance races,” Keedi muttered, holding tight onto the tree trunk.