(If you’re here for the SFR Brigade Presents snippet, go here.)

Here’s the link to the Weekend Writing Warriors central page, so you can visit all the participants sharing excerpts today…a fun way to sample new books and find new authors! (Also welcome to the Sunday Snippet visitors!)

I’m now excerpting my newly released scifi romance The Fated Stars. Story below the excerpt, as per the rules. I skipped a little ahead from last week’s snippet. Larissa is profoundly disturbed by her encounter with the seer and awakes the next morning still thinking about it. She goes back to the carnival on her own, seeking more information, and is speaking as the snippet starts. (Apologies for the weird punctuation, to meet our rules here!)

I’ll be releasing a new acifi romance book, possibly in the coming week, so this may be the last snippet from The Fated Stars.

The excerpt:

“How much for a private reading?”

“Huh?” The carny, who was the same woman who’d been on duty the night before, gaped at her, “You pay your credit and you get whatever he says.”

“Yeah, I understand – I was here last night, and I just wondered if I could have him tell me more,” Larissa lowered her voice and leaned toward the other, “I didn’t want to ask too many questions with my friends listening, you know?” She pulled out a ten credit token, “Of course I understand there’d be an extra fee for a private session.”

The credit was gone from her hand as if it’d never been. The carny headed for the entrance, “Five minutes – don’t touch anything and stand in the circle at all times. When I get back, you’re done,” She looped the flap down as she exited, giving Larissa unexpected privacy.

She planted her boots in the circle and studied the man’s face, “All right, you seemed to want to talk to me last night, so talk – or am I wasting ten perfectly good credits?”

The story:

Larissa Channer, a tough no-nonsense mercenary in the Sectors, is celebrating success on her last job and a big bonus, with no slightest thought of taking on another assignment anytime soon. Out for a night of carousing with her friends at a third rate carnival on a backwater planet, she walks into the tent of a fake fortune teller and finds herself confronting the most intriguing man she’s ever seen. But something’s wrong, ominous currents lie beneath the surface of their encounter and Larissa can’t leave well enough alone.

Samell, a powerful, high born empathic priest, has been kidnapped from his own primitive planet along with a number of his people, and sold to the shady operator of an interstellar carnival. Kept enslaved, pretending to be a fortune teller while forced by his captor to steal information from the minds of all who come before him, Samell despairs of every breaking free.

Until Larissa walks into his tent and he recognizes the warrior who might mean the difference between life and death.

The situation becomes dire when Larissa and Samell come to the attention of the Shemdylann pirates who kidnapped him in the first place and the deadly Mawreg, aliens who threaten the Sectors. Can she save herself and the empathic alien noble, and derail the Mawreg plot against the Sectors? And will the soldier end up with her prince when all’s said and done?

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