Stardust and Skin

Interracial erotic romance. She is the navigator. He is the engineer. They have been alone on the Aethelgard for six months, with two and a half years still to go, on a deep-space burn toward a colony that may not exist by the time they arrive. Elara is thirty-eight, pale-skinned, sharp-edged, the senior officer. She has run black ops, asteroid sweeps, and gravity-well burns for half her life. She is supposed to keep her head.
Jax is twelve years younger, dark-skinned, gravity-well lean, quiet, and watching her every shift. He has been waiting. So has she. The voyage is long, the corridors are narrow, and the silence between them has been getting louder for months. Then something hits the ship. It is not debris. It is not a pulse from a known weapon. It is something vast and dark hanging in the void where nothing should be - a vessel of impossible scale, lit from within by veins of violet light, watching them.
It does not fire. It does not speak. It waits. The Aethelgard is dying. Life support is failing. The hull is breached. Elara has minutes, maybe an hour, before she and Jax are dead in the cold. The alien ship offers her one option. A prompt on the screen, in a language her console should not understand. One word: INTEGRATION. She presses it. What the ship wants is not their data. It is not their bodies.
It is the heat between them - the friction, the want, the months of unspoken hunger held back by rank and protocol. The ritual that will bind them to the vessel is the most intimate act of their lives, witnessed by an ancient intelligence and powered by it. They will give themselves to each other and to the ship in the same breath. They will not die. But they will not be entirely human after. Stardust and Skin is a sci-fi erotic romance about two people, one ship, and the impossible third presence that joins them.
It is short, intense, and explicit. It is about the way desire becomes a survival skill in a place where nothing else can save you. It is about being chosen by something older than language, and choosing back. It is about a pale woman and a dark man in a small pressurized box at the edge of the known galaxy, finally giving each other what they have both been holding in. The book is novella length.
Four chapters. Single voyage. Complete. Content warning: explicit sexual content, sex in life-threatening situations, themes of injury and existential threat. For adult readers only.