Heart’s Prisoner by Olivia Riley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
He’s not like anything Lana has ever encountered.
Heart’s Prisoner
Asset X: Massive, deadly, a little terrifying to say the least. A devilish warrior. And a killer. Captured on a hellish world after attacking a military campsite and now imprisoned in a state of the art cell inside one of the military’s top bases–Lazris.
And Lana has been assigned to “study” him. To learn his secrets and gain his trust, if he is ever allowed to set foot out of his cell. As a top behaviorist, it is the biggest hurdle of her career.
Asset X–or Xerus as he is called–won’t give up his secrets easily. He is difficult, elusive, and–dare she say–unfathomably alluring…despite his seething demeanor and hard, frightening physique.
Something subconsciously draws her to him. Something wildly irresistible. Even if his wicked smile and needful gaze could just be a ploy to win her trust and escape his cell.
She shouldn’t think of him like that. He is an alien after all. And possibly their enemy.
For Xerus claims he is on a mission. A mission to destroy. And he cannot afford to fail. If he dares let Lana get close, dares open his cold heart to her, she could compromise everything.
Unexpectedly good alien romance thriller!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤💙❤️💜
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☺️😮🙂🥰😘
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Solo Narration
The heroine: Dr. Lana Heart – She worked on Tanis Base L3Z where she had lived for 4 years now. She works in a lab as a researcher. Lana was the one that convinced the race of Gita on the planet to allow them to test and study their race, to see how they evolved. The testing is completely volunteer and they study them by communication only not by holding them captive, cutting and dissecting or anything like that. Lana is approached by a friend to research a new race, one that is not so peaceful or willing to be studied. They are housed at the military base on Lazris. A top security and research facility.
The Hero: Asset X (Xerus) – a vicious killer, an assassin who is on a mission to destroy. He is highly intelligent and has been trained well. He has been challenging to the therapists on Lazris and caused two of them to quit already. His looks are as fierce and dangerous as he is.
The Story: Lana took two months after agreeing to the job, before she was off to Lazris. She read up on the Assets as much as she could on the way there, there were several different alien races held their. Asset X was of the highest threat level at the base (other high threats were a group of Raptors, a creature that would pretend to be asleep and then grab its prey and eat it alive-slowly). Asset X was reptilian, poisonous, 7 feet tall and a weaponized military team had to be on stand by when someone was interacting with him.
I have read quite a few stories before where the alien or paranormal being is in a situation like this, either being experimented on or studied in some way, though this story was a bit different, where they are doing my psychoanalysis than anything else. Though the military seems to have some alternate agenda and is seeing it as more of an interrogation than what Lana thinks it is.
I liked the difference though like always, there were men that think of Xerus as an it instead of a him. I don’t know why they can’t see sentient beings as anything but animals in so many books like this, but I suppose it is true to life and that would be how things really would happen.
The story got better as it got more mysterious. There were very strange things going on at the base, and nobody was talking about it in other than whispers, but if I were Lana, I would have been freaking out at some of the things she saw there. This story got better and better as it went along and I was on the edge of my seat through much of it. I was pleasantly surprised since this was an author I hadn’t heard of before.
This book was told in Solo narration which I don’t usually like, though it was the first book in a series so I decided to listen to it anyways. Maxine Mitchell did the narration and she always does a good job. She has a pleasant voice which is strong and clear, yet feminine and she has this way of portraying fear and anxiety through her voice so well.
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