The way I didn't know I needed a space "Love Boat" (and for you young'uns, that was a very popular TV show in the '80s!), with super sexy, older protagonists. Hardy does such an amazing job of capturing the everyday and putting it in amazing settings. Sunny and Freddie are extraordinary, their chemistry is 🔥, and their stories are so riveting and emotional, I found myself at several points throughout the book, just gasping through the tears streaming down my face. I am a full-on Jess Hardy stan now; her prose just keeps getting better and better. 💖

There is a reason it took me 4 days to read Tale of the Heart Queen, the final book in the Artefacts of Ouranos quartet. I didn't want it to end. I have been so invested in Lor and Nadir's story, I had to slow it down to take everything in. And Tuli really brought it full circle. There were fist-pump moments, and tears-streaming-down-my-face moments, in equal measure. I'm not sure how she pulled it off, but it was SO satisfying. What. A. Ride. 🥳💖

It is really hard to review an anthology, especially one with 15 different stories in it. As it often happens, some stories were more to my taste than others, but they were all solid. I think the easiest way to do this is to provide several one-sentence descriptions with no context.😄 Oh, and the art is PHENOMENAL!
- Alien aquatic prince looking for a love match.
- The hive-mind concept done in a really unique way.
- The fated mate trope, but make it a dream-walking alien.
- Cyborg-courtesan and the mechanic who fixes them.
- A cerulean-skinned alien on the eternal search for a goddess finds a lonely human engineer.
- The living embodiment of an earth fae prince gets stranded on a derelict spaceship with the retired human mercenary who saved him.
- 50 Shades of a Blue Bajillionaire.
- Space vampires with wings!
- We stan a male who immediately recognizes his fated mate, and allows them to still choose.
This is simply a great (horny!) anthology, and it was super fun to get lost in for awhile. 😊

So I read the previous edition of this book earlier in 2024. It might as well have been a new book altogether because it told a clearer, more cohesive story. And while I gave the first iteration 4 stars, THIS version gets all 5 of them. 🥹 LaRynn and Deacon were deeply flawed and deeply human, and it was deeply moving to watch them struggle and grieve and love. Gah. DeWitt is truly a gifted author. And this also has one of my favorite descriptions in any book, ever. "I made a noise akin to a pirate suffering a surprise anal probe." 🤣🤣 Perfection. 💖