They Don't Make Guys Like Him Anymore!Tanna Aldrick is the captain of a deep space salvage ship in the twenty-ninth century. When she and her all-female crew stumble upon an ancient ship floating in the middle of nowhere, they figure they might be able to find a few valuable tidbits left on the decrepit spacecraft. But what they discover is more valuable than anything they could have ever imagined finding – a gorgeous hunk of a man from the twenty-second century, perfectly preserved in cryogenic suspension. Mankind has changed a lot in seven-hundred years, and six-foot-four, blond-haired, blue-eyed guys like him aren’t just rare; they’re nonexistent.
From the moment they revive him, Tanna finds herself falling for their handsome passenger. As logical as her reasons for not getting romantically involved with him are, however, she still finds herself inviting him into her bed.
Garrick Carlisle wakes up after seven-hundred years in hypersleep to find that everything and everyone he knew is gone. Lost and disconnected, the only thing that keeps him from completely losing it is the beautiful and sexy, dark-haired ship’s captain who rescued him.
Tanna isn’t the only person interested in Garrick, though. A man like him would bring a high price on the slave blocks on any number of planets and there are a lot of unscrupulous people in the galaxy willing to do anything to get their hands on him.
How far will Tanna go to protect her valuable cargo and what will Garrick do to stay with the woman he has come to love?
Excerpt:
To her surprise, the derelict ship hadn’t been stripped at all. There were two old looking satellites in the hold, as well as dozens of containers. They were all marked with a series of numbers and letters that didn’t mean anything to her, so there was no way to tell what was in them.
Taking out her radiac, Tanna scanned the hold for radiation. If there had been anything really dangerous, the sensors on her ship would have picked it up, but she wanted to be sure. There was a little bit of reading around the satellites, but nothing significant. The containers were completely safe.
“This looks like old test equipment of some type,” Vi said from behind her.
Tanna turned to see that Vi had opened one of the containers and was looking at a collection of metal instruments. Tanna didn’t have a clue what any of it was, but it was ancient, which meant it was going to be worth some money.
Curious, Tanna made her way over to the box Vi had opened while the other girl and Leala went off to explore the control room. She had barely started investigating when Leala’s voice came through the speaker in her headset.
“Um, Captain, I think you should see this.”
Her brow furrowing at the odd tone in her engineer’s voice, Tanna immediately set down the piece of equipment she’d been holding and headed for the control room. Seeing Vi standing just inside a doorway on the opposite side of the room, she quickly made her way over to the woman.
Letting the light from her torch play about the inner room, Tanna saw that it was a joint galley and med-bay.
“What did you find?” she asked as she stepped into the room. “Something valuable?”
Leala was standing in front of a glass-enclosed container of some sort. From her vantage point, Tanna couldn’t see what was inside it, but there was a series of brightly colored blinking lights at the bottom of the unit.
The engineer turned to her with a smile. “Oh, yeah.”
Frowning at the woman’s cryptic answer, Tanna walked over to where her engineer stood, only to stare at the pod in stunned silence. Leala had wiped off the light coating of frost from the upper portion of the pod, and through the glass, Tanna saw that there was a man inside. A completely gorgeous – and from the parts she could see – very well-built man who, shockingly, appeared to be in perfect health. The pod container must be some type of hypersleep chamber, she thought. She had heard of those, but no one had used them in over five-hundred years, not since the invention of the faster-than-light Tachyon drive. That meant the ship was even older than they had thought, back from the days of sub-light space travel.
The fact that the man was still alive after so long wasn’t the only thing that made him unusual. Not only was he all beautifully sculpted muscle, but he was also unusually tall as well. The hypersleep chamber was at least seven feet long and the guy did a pretty good job of filling it up. That meant he was at least six-four or six-five. At five-ten, Tanna was as tall as any man she’d ever met, and taller than some, but this guy would clearly tower over her. She let her gaze run over his broad shoulders and muscular chest appreciatively. Damn, the guy was built. The hypersleep chamber must be equipped with some type of electro-stimulation to keep him in such great shape for so long, she thought.
Her gaze went to his face. She had been so distracted by his body that she hadn’t really spent much time looking at it before, but as she took in his square jaw and chiseled features, she decided he had to be the most attractive man she’d ever seen. She stared at his dark-blond hair, fascinated by the color. She hadn’t seen that many people with blond hair in her life. And most of the people she had seen had artificially colored it. She had no doubt his was the real deal. All at once, she found herself wondering what color his eyes were. They had to be blue, she thought. That would match his hair perfectly.
Glancing at the other two women, Tanna saw they were equally entranced by him, and she watched breathlessly as Vi began to wipe more frost off the front of the glass to reveal a washboard stomach and lean hips.
“Vi, that’s enough,” Tanna ordered abruptly, pushing the other woman’s hand away when she started to move lower.
Vi frowned. “I just wanted to see if he’s built like that everywhere.”
Tanna wouldn’t have minded seeing more of him herself, especially since the only men she had seen naked in a while had been the computer-generated ones conjured up in the holo-chamber on their ship. And they definitely hadn’t looked anything like him. But ogling a man while he was in a hypersleep pod just seemed wrong.
“Try to control yourself.” She glanced at Leala. “Do you think he can be revived?”
Leala chewed on her lip as she eyed the equipment. After a moment, she shrugged. “The chamber’s really old, but everything seems to be functioning properly. Sela would probably know more, though.”
Sela Fanaday was the salvage ship’s resident bio-system engineer, but she also served as their med-tech when they needed one.
Tanna turned her gaze back to the handsome man asleep inside the pod. “Is this ship safe enough to bring on board?” she asked Leala.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t see why not, Captain. The sensors didn’t pick up any hazardous cargo and I haven’t seen anything dangerous. There’s isn’t even any fuel left.”
Still gazing at the man, Tanna flipped over to the ship’s frequency on her radio and spoke into the headset. “Malana, we’re bringing the ship aboard.”
“Did you find anything valuable?” the first officer asked.
Tanna only smiled. Oh yeah, they had definitely found something valuable.
* * * *
Dear God, he was absolutely perfect, Tanna thought as she gazed down at the sleeping man an hour later. The blanket that Sela had carefully tucked around him left his chest and shoulders exposed to her appreciative gaze, and she had to fight off the almost irresistible urge to reach out and run her hands over his smoothly sculpted muscles. How many hours a day would a guy have to work out to look like this?
After bringing his ship aboard, they had transferred his hypersleep chamber to their own med-bay so Sela could examine him, which the woman had done once she had gotten over her shock at seeing their cargo. Since no one used stasis chambers like his anymore, Sela had to do some research in the computer archives to figure out how to revive him. Following the procedure she had found on the computer, Sela had slowly brought him out of hypersleep. Tanna had expected him to come awake right away, but the other girl had told her that wasn’t how it worked. It could take hours for him to wake up. According to the med-tech, though, his vitals were strong, which was a good sign. That didn’t stop Tanna from worrying, though.
Getting her crew to focus on anything but the man laying in the med-bay had been almost impossible since then. Especially after Sela had hurried to the shuttle bay and briefed everyone in great detail about her patient and those parts of his anatomy they hadn’t seen yet. Her description had brought the rest of the crew running to the med-bay so they could take a look for themselves. Sela was just about to pull the blanket down for a little show-and-tell when Tanna finally pulled rank and tossed the other women out of the med-bay, sending them back down to the shuttle bay to take a closer look at his ship and the salvage it contained. Anything to distract them.
A few minutes ago, Malana had called on the ship’s intercom to let her know they had located the class and ident-number of his ship. According to the database, it had disappeared in the year 2104. Other than that, the computer didn’t know a lot about it. Or him. Malana had found some uniforms in a storage locker, though, with the name Carlisle on them. There was a shoulder patch of a flag with red and white stripes and stars in the corner on one sleeve. There was another patch underneath that, this one with the letters ISEA. A search of that acronym had turned up the name International Space Exploration Administration, an Earth-based government agency that had conducted space research in the early part of the twenty-second century. Tanna shook her head. Well, whoever he was, he was going to be in for one hell of a shock when he woke up. If he woke up.
Tanna was just wondering if she should call Sela so the other girl could check on him again when the man’s eyelids suddenly fluttered open and she found herself gazing into the most incredible pair of blue eyes that she had ever seen. She’d been right about the color, she realized a little breathlessly. And they did go perfectly with his blond hair.
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Paige
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