Toren — Leora Gonzales

She's ready to give up...Jessie is a romanceaholic—errr, scratch that—she was a romanceaholic. Fast forward almost two months and the hearts that were shining bright in her eyes when she first landed on Djaromir, have long since dimmed. Rejection is never easy but when it's multiplied by a few hundred, it's downright awful. She's more than ready pack up her dinged and dented self-confidence, catch a ship back home, and try to rebuild the life she'd naively walked away from. All she must do, is meet one last batch of miners while trying not to get her hopes up. A quick sniff to see if one of the hot miners trigger a whiff of the telltale mating pheromones and she'll have an answer on whether or not she's headed back to Missouri.What could possibly go wrong?He doesn't understand the fuss...Toren is content with his life in Gunninng. He treks under his Warlord's command, leads hunts with his brethren to gather food, and labors long cycles in solitude on their mining planet with nothing but his pickaxe for company.The way he sees it, there is no place in his life for a female much less a soft, weak, human one. It's one of the reasons why he spends as much time as possible working the mines instead of inside the tunnel city. As far as he's concerned, it's the perfect way to avoid the complications a human mate—until his Warlord calls him back to Gunninng and he gets a glimpse of what could only be described as pure temptation. Too bad she's not for him, right?