Harvest Moons: Love on a Space Frontier

By Melisse Aires

With the death of her no-account husband, Polly is the sole owner of a farm steading on the planet Celstar. She is determined to hold the steading and make a life for herself and two Synth children in her care. Her nearest neighbor, widower Fallon Verdad, is the big landowner in the territory and also her local Councilman. Like most of the other settlers, Fallon is a Shimmer, a horse shifter, while Polly is human—well, mostly human. Their attraction to each other is electric and hard to deny. An affair would lead to scandal in this conservative community. Scandal is the last thing Polly needs. 

Sci-fi space western romance, futuristic, colony planet, horse shifter hero, short story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pure Escapism
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524296742

Melisse Aires

Take a shy Catholic school bookworm from Montana. Hand her a stack of her much older brother’s sci-fi and fantasy novels, James Bond books and horror comics. Later, introduce Barbara Cartland and the world of romance fiction.Get her a teaching job or two in authentic, one room Montana schools, ala Laura Ingels Wilder.Marry her off to a great guy, move her to a big city in Tornado Alley, then pop three daughters out of her in twenty-two months (one set of identical twins).Then, make her a jinx. Every great genre TV show she loves gets the ax: Beauty and the Beast, Dark Angel—and Buffy and Spike NEVER have a happy ending! She gets upset about no romance in the world and fires up to write her own stories with happy endings.Throw this all together into a small house in Wyoming, along with a small bouncy dog named Baxter and too many cats, shake constantly and pour it out onto a computer keyboard.There! You have me, Melisse Aires.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Editor: Dave Ellis

Cover art: Melisse Aires

Canstockphoto.com

Blurb

With the death of her no-account husband, Polly is the sole owner of a farm steading on the planet Celstar. She is determined to hold the steading and make a life for herself and two Synth children in her care. Her nearest neighbor, widower Fallon Verdad, is the big landowner in the territory and also her local Councilman.

Like most of the other settlers, Fallon is a Shimmer, a horse shifter, while Polly is human—well, mostly human. Their attraction to each other is electric and hard to deny. An affair would lead to scandal in this conservative community. Scandal is the last thing Polly needs.

Sci-fi space western romance, futuristic, horse shifter short story.

~**~

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Chapter One

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Her husband was dead and she was glad for it. With this one last ugly chore Polly would be done with Hoggart Avila forever and someday the memories of their short, ugly marriage would fade. Owning the Steading would certainly help with forgetting the unpleasant way she got it. More stability than she’d sure ever had, and she meant to keep it. She was legal wife by law of the Terran Confederacy. Somehow, she was an upstanding, vote carrying citizen of Celstar Mid-Territory.

It was more than she’d ever hoped to have in life.

Polly paused in her labor, stopped and rubbed her aching back. Dragging the body far from the Steading was dangerous but necessary. Her laser was in her apron pocket, and high day was the rare time to see a volve or a pack of woolers. Woolers, with their deadly horns and short tempers, headed for the river banks during the heat of the day to nap and volves came out after sunset. No extra credits to spend for the precious fuel in the flitter to carry the body, since the solar array on it had busted. After harvest she’d get in fixed. Meanwhile, she