Format: ebook
Source: borrowed through Kindle Unlimited
Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Date read: February 25, 2026
Taken by the Stars
1. Heart of the Deep - Kindle
2. Starbound
3. Breach Protocol
4. The Queen's Shadow
5. The Captain's Claim
Adrian Blue
| Amazon |
Synopsis (Goodreads):
Shannon Cooper has spent three years falling in love with a world she's never seen — a planet of endless ocean, bioluminescent cities, and a king who has turned away every human diplomat who dared to meet his gaze.Thoughts on Heart of the Deep: I must say I REALLY liked this one. Shannon and Kael'thar WORKED for me.
She will be the eighth.
As a xenolinguist, Shannon knows the Thalassian negotiation protocols better than anyone. She knows the sacred pools are designed to make lies impossible. She knows that trust must be earned through touch — skin against tentacle, mind pressed open to mind. She knows exactly what she's agreeing to.
What she doesn't know is Kael'thar.
Scarred by centuries of betrayal, the king of Thalassia has learned to read humans one way: with cold efficiency, searching for the disgust or greed hiding beneath every polished smile. But when he reaches into Shannon's mind and finds neither, something long-fortified begins, for the first time, to crack.
The negotiations demand they go deeper — into the water, into vulnerability, into a closeness that has no name in either of their languages. But the greatest depths between them have nothing to do with the ocean floor.
They have everything to do with daring to be known.
Shannon is in love with the world she's trying to broker a trade with. She's carefully hoarded and studied every scrap of information she can find on it and now she's in one of the great underwater cities about to meet the Thalassian king. She's scared and excited and worried she won't be enough for this magnificent place.
On Kael'thar's end, he's wary. He doesn't trust humans because the sacred pools reveal their unguarded thoughts which tend to be of greed and disgust. He doesn't expect much of anything from Shannon other than a brief meeting and then her retreat back to her ship. That is NOT what he gets. He feels her fear of failure and her awe at his world and how she is most decidedly not disgusted by his form. And he doesn't know how to process this. She's not greedy like the ones who have come before her and she sees him as an intelligent being. One who just happens to have tentacles and can see into the heart of her.
But he's been burned by hope before and he's slow to trust. Shannon keeps chipping away at his walls with her kindness and honesty and her genuine grief when a terrible act from the past is revealed to her. And he has to accept the fact that she's not like the humans who came before. She's open-minded and kind and she understands him in a way the ones before haven't.
She also doesn't mind his tentacles or his otherness or that he can see the truth in her.
Let's just say that the eighth time is the charm and these negotiations are going much better than any of the attempts before.
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