Kithra by Dani Worth

Released: November 8, 2011
Format: e-book
Publisher: Samhain

Series: Kithran Regenesis #1

Source: Personal shelf

A frustrated spaceship captain, her trusty second-in- command, and a handsome alien prove that three is definitely not a crowd.

Spaceship captain Lux Moyans is currently piloting missions for The Company. When her second-in-command, Kol Frega, informs her they’ve been ordered to Kithra, she’s furious. A year on an uninhabitable planet? She’ll only be flying supply missions! But her ship—Kol’s design—is the only one that can withstand the planet’s gases…and Lux is one of the few pilots with the skill to navigate the debris fields resulting from the explosions that killed most of the planet’s Gwinarian race.

Kol is the engineer who learned to manipulate the indestructible metal on Kithra, and he and a surviving Gwinarian will be her only company on planet. When they pick up Egan Lothbrun, Lux knows there will be trouble. She’s already attracted to Kol and she doesn’t need another man to arouse her either mentally or physically. Lux doesn’t want or need the complications that emotions bring. Yet, when she learns Kol and Egan share a painful past, she realizes getting Kithra livable won’t be her only challenge.

Keeping her heart intact might be harder.

Warning: A cranky pilot, a sexy second-in-command and an irresistible alien join…forces in more ways than one. And yes, there are close encounters of the sexy kind.

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Kithra is a little different from the usual stuff I read. It’s sci fi romance, my new favourite subgenre, but it’s also erotic romance, which is not what I usually go for. I’m all about story and not so much about reading the sexy times, but I really enjoyed Kithra. There’s a lot of sex, for sure, but the characters and world are well developed and it’s not a novella that exists purely to go from sex to sex to menage-with-an-alien scene. There’s actually a lot of cool story in Kithra, so I think this novella will appeal to people who don’t usually read erotic romance (like me!).

Lux Moyans is a spaceship pilot. She lives to fly. She’s not one for relationships but she is attracted to her crewmate, Kol Frega. She’s never acted on the attraction because she was his superior officer but that all changes when they’re given the bum assignment of going to Kithra to help get the now-uninhabitable planet back on its proverbial feet. Their only company for the year-long assignment? A Gwinarian, a native of Kithra, with a previous relationship with Kol. Gwinarians are known for their free-loving ways, often having multiple partners and not exhibiting any gender preferences, which leads the three main characters into a polyamorous relationship. I’ve never read a book with a relationship like this so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the story was emotionally driven, not all about the sex. You can understand why all three of them are attracted to each other because their personalities are quite compatible.

I was also very interested in the setting. Even in a novella-length story, Dani Worth managed to get a lot of worldbuilding in. There’s space travel, alien species, and interesting technologies. Of course, the length of Kithra does limit the amount of worldbuilding the author can put in but I felt like it was very well-developed and thorough. There are two other novellas in the series so far and I hope that they will continue to build on the platform that has been established.