I had read book #1 in this series, His Human Nanny, and I think that one was better because it had to set up the new world, so it felt fresh and interesting, even though it was a short and shallow story. But this book doesn't have the newness to prop it up, and the FMC, Avery, reacts exactly the same way that the FMC of book #1 does when she sets eyes on her Hyrrokin employer: she screams bloody murder.
She has less reason than the previous FMC to be taken by surprise or to be freaked out; she works undercover for the Intergalactic Business Bureau and has travelled to various sectors or planets before. She's not sheltered, and would have met all kinds of other beings, so it doesn't make sense for her to be so taken aback when she meets Hannibal.
Also, Hannibal is a really human name for an alien...
Anyway, I wasn't impressed with Avery because despite working undercover, she doesn't have any extraction plan in the event that things go wrong--it made her look like a poor planner and a lousy undercover agent. I was even less impressed by the ditsy way she responded to Hannibal when she met him; it seemed to me that she hadn't read any of the info that the employment agency had provided her with. They'd given her a tablet with information about the planet that she was going to, as well as the specific assignment, but obviously she hadn't read anything, or she'd have known what to expect when she arrived at the transporter station.
The way she didn't read the information which had been provided to her and wasn't prepared for the job with Hannibal made me feel like she didn't take it seriously. Considering that she was on the run, she should have wanted to appear as professional and prepared as possible in order to fit in and not look suspicious. In fact, Hannibal immediately knows that something is not right when she arrives without luggage, and puts a private investigator on her trail because he wants to know what she's running from. If he hadn't been immediately taken with her, or if he had been a bad guy, she'd have been toast.
I didn't feel that Hannibal's reaction to Avery was believable. Just before she arrives on the planet Tarvos, he was having a conversation with his best friend about human females and was thinking that he didn't find them attractive at all. Two of his friends are mated to humans, but he says he has never understood the attraction. Then when Avery appears in the transporter, he's all, "I can't believe how beautiful she is" and "How am I supposed to calmly work alongside this sex goddess?" I don't see how he can be attracted to her the moment he sees her. He doesn't like that humans have hair on their head but no horns, and he notes that Avery's hair is even thicker, longer, and darker than the hair of the other two human females he has met. But for some reason, "This does not bother me as much as it does on the other human females"???
Apart from the ludicrous plot (at some point Hannibal storms into her room and demands that Avery sleep with him in the same bed: "Assistants and their employers also share rooms," he claims--AND SHE GOES ALONG WITH IT!) I was also feeling 'meh' with the book because of all the telling instead of showing. Hannibal actually has deep fears of taking another mate because he doesn't want anyone to feel trapped, as his first mate did. But instead of showing us his fear, the author just has him reiterate that he has vowed never to take another mate. The result is a very shallow book that doesn't engage the reader in any meaningful way.
I'm taking the rest of this author's books off my TBR. I'll just have to reread Ice Planet Barbarians (by Ruby Dixon) again instead. ::sigh::