Krinard, Susan - Star-Crossed

Title: Star-Crossed
Author: Susan Krinard
Series:
Pub: Bantam
Pub Date: August, 1995
ISBN: 0553569171
Genre:
Time Period:
Setting:
Hero: Rook Galloway
Heroine: Ariane Burke-Marchand

Summary:

A beautiful aristocrat risks a forbidden love... with a dangerously seductive man born of an alien race.

At sixteen, Lady Ariane Burke-Marchand had loved Rook Galloway with all the passion and pain of unrequited love. It didn't matter that the handsome Kalian was separated from her by birth and caste and mansion walls. All she knew was that this exotic, mysterious creature called to her in ways she couldn't fathom or resist. But that was eight years ago, before the deadly riots that pitted Marchand against Kalian and turned the man she worshipped into an enemy she loathed. Convicted of murder and sentenced to life on the harshest prison planet in the League; Rook seemed gone from her life forever...until Ariane realized that to put the past behind her she needed to see him once more. Now, as Ariane prepares to meet the smoldering gaze of the man who has haunted her dreams, she doesn't know that she is about to become Rook's unwitting pawn, hostage to his searing passion-- and his desperate hunger for revenge....

Excerpt:
"I'd advise against it, Lady Ariane," the warden said, his hands clasped behind his back. "The workstations have minimal security. Out there we don't need it. But it's not set up for visitors. The men out there--"

Ariane smiled patiently as he shook his head, but her thoughts were far from this small, cluttered office so removed from the harshness of the Tantalan wilderness. Out there, he said. Out there where prisoners from all the worlds of the League labored to fill their sentences, and died if they were lucky.

Out there, where Rook Galloway was condemned to a life of endless misery. She'd read about the prison world before she'd come to drop off the shipments of drugs and electronic equipment from Espérance; Tantalus was a convenient place to dispose of criminals who were judged to be beyond rehabilitation.

Like the murderer of her brother.

Eight years ago. Ariane turned to look out the tinted window at the jungle. Eight years ago she'd seen the Kalian condemned to death, only to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment on Tantalus. The League had been responsible for that. Grand-père had wanted him dead. But the League did not approve of such barbaric practices, and the Patriarch had bowed to the pressure.

Ten Kalians had been sent to Tantalus. Only one was still alive, according to the records the d'Artagnan's computer had accessed.

Rook Galloway.

In eight years Ariane had come to terms with her grief. She thought the bitterness and hatred were finally behind her. It should have been possible to forget Galloway and let him rot on Tantalus.

In two Espérancian weeks she would be meeting Wynn on the League space station Agora. In two weeks she would be giving up her freedom, putting behind her the three glorious years in space piloting a swift courier ship between Espérance and her family's business interests throughout the League. And she would go home to become Wynn's bride, confined to a sedate life in Lumière, no longer a rebellious girl but a woman of the Elite, bred to bear heirs and keep her husband's honor as she'd once kept her own.

There would be no room for dreams or regrets.

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