Komiko Yakamura: Stories

Wyoming, 1878. When schoolteacher Angela Parker boards a stagecoach to meet a stranger who placed a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper, she carries two things: a satchel and a hidden return ticket. She never planned to stay. He never planned to beg. But Coulter Brooks doesn't want a captive — he wants a partner. And two weeks on the Wyoming frontier, under wide skies and honest stars, has a way of changing what a woman thinks she wants. A choice freely made. And kept.

She came to him the way wild things do — slowly, carefully, leaving gifts he didn't yet understand. For weeks, Michael found tokens at the edge of his orchard: a bronze feather, smooth stones, berries arranged like offerings. He assumed it was nothing. He was wrong. Missy had been watching the man who cared for broken things. She had kits on the way and winter closing in, and she had chosen him. Now she just had to trust him enough to knock.

Combat medic Vance Riker only wanted to save the wounded Valtharian princess bleeding out in a crashed dropship. He didn't plan to trigger an irreversible genetic bonding. Or get her pregnant with quadruplets. Or accidentally start peace negotiations that would end a twelve-year war. Now he's married to alien royalty, director of an interspecies breeding program, and committed to fathering twenty hybrid children. His mother-in-law is a eight-foot warrior empress. His sister-in-law hunts human ma

304 AD. Roman princess Valeria is kidnapped as a toddler by a Chinese spy—but instead of delivering her to chaos, he raises her as his own. Trained in three cultures, three languages, and the art of playing empires against each other, Valeria builds an impossible kingdom in the Hindu Kush mountains. Negotiating with Constantine, taming a cocky Gupta prince, and transforming kidnapping into power, she carves out a piece of life entirely her own.