Once again Alix is plunged into turmoil and pain as Nick tries to win her love, something she resists with all her strength.

Her divorce is almost final, her business is booming, and she's content if not happy-until the day she looks up and sees Nick standing across the counter. But finally, she's starting to get her life back together. For the next fifteen years she wrestles with the pain of Nick's abandonment, a bad marriage, her family and friends. Suddenly, Nick is gone-leaving Alix alone, confused and pregnant. The future looks rosy until the fateful night when Frank Anderson, Nick's abusive father, is shot to death in his filthy trailer. Through childhood disasters and teenage woes they cling together as friendship turns to love. Armed with only a tin of bee balm and steely determination, Alix treats the raw evidence of a recent beating that mars his back, an act that changes both of their lives forever. But nothing was ordinary about the day she met ten-year-old Nick Anderson, a boy from the wrong side of town. Sweet tea, corn bread, and soup beans-everyday fare for eight-year-old Alix French, the precocious darling of a respected southern family. And now, to save Thor’s people, Kiera will need a power she’s never before possessed-something hidden in the unexplored recesses of her heart. As a special agent for the Bureau of Alien Affairs, it is Kiera’s job to protect these beautiful, exotic aliens…and to discover what there is on Orpheus 2 that Dynatec feels is worth killing for.īut the magnetic allure of the breathtaking Buri leader is proving a dangerous distraction. On Orpheus 2, the indigenous Buri race faces extinction, a prospect the powerful Dynatec corporation welcomes and, in fact, may be actively hastening. A reluctant “superhero,” Kiera wishes she were normal, but it is not to be.

But she turned out stronger, faster, smarter, and more impervious to harm than anyone anticipated. The Bureau of Alien Affairs needed a special GEP agent with empathic abilities to handle their most extraordinary assignments-and a rogue geneticist saw to it that Kiera fit their specifications. Kiera Smith is not like ordinary Genetically Engineered Persons…

The sweet gum tree by katherine allred