[Hearts of ICARUS 04] • Salene's Secrets

What’s a girl to do when your destined soul mates turn their backs on you, leaving you with no idea what to do with your life and afraid that they were driven away by a part of your inner self that you kept hidden from them? That’s easy. Step one, power bond with a golden dragon who has chosen you, personally, to wipe out the galaxy’s greatest force for evil. Step two, get your favorite ex-bounty hunter aunt to teach you how to kick Doftle butt. Step three, take the family space yacht for a cruise among the stars with a tiny 9 inch humanoid (who happens to have the ability to shape-shift into an enormous feline creature with poison-tipped fur) riding your shoulder for company.

What’s a girl to do when the yacht collides with an invisible Doftle space station? That’s easy. Step one, grab your personal, matched set of the deadliest edged weapons in the Thousand Worlds and hop into the nearest life pod. Step two, crash land on a snow covered mountain on an unknown and hidden world that the Doftles are using for their sinister purposes. Step three, save the lives of a giant sentient wolf and two orphan children who join you on a quest to break the Doftles’ evil hold on the planet and its people.

What’s a girl to do when the men she thought never to see again suddenly show up out of nowhere, tell you they love you, throw a few dozen wrenches into your plans, and bring to a head the issue of your greatest secret--a secret that could be either the glue that binds you and your soul mates in an unbreakable bond . . . or the wedge that drives you apart forever? Not a clue in the cosmos. Sometimes, a girl just has to wing it.

This is the story of Selene’s Secrets, the latest offering from Laura Jo Phillips in her “Hearts of Icarus” series. It is a full-length 146,000 word novel, full of the joy and heartache, love and loss, tenderness and anguish, tension and sensuality that are the hallmarks of this highly prolific author’s work. As with her other novels, Laura Jo’s readers can expect to be swept away in a world of romance and adventure in which towering love, an epic quest, and incandescent sexual passion are set on a stage as large as the galaxy itself. Read the first few pages and you, too, will yearn to learn Selene’s Secrets.