Sabine Vaughn blames a battered library copy of a 1970s sci-fi paperback — wrong cover, right monster — for the entire course of her life. She was twelve, she was supposed to be doing pre-algebra, and she has been writing devoted aliens ever since.

Before romance, Sabine spent nine years as a molecular-biology lab technician outside Austin, Texas, pipetting by day and drafting starships by night, until the drafts started paying better than the pipettes. The lab left its fingerprints all over her fiction: her heroines tend to be scientists, her aliens are biologically coherent rather than just handsome, and she cannot write a fated-mate bond without quietly working out how the chemistry would actually function. (Readers tell her the science makes the fantasy hotter. She agrees.)

Her Vardan Warlords series is for readers who want the alien fully alien and the woman fully in charge of her own yes: steamy sci-fi romance about warlords one generation from extinction, the human women who turn out to be compatible, and an inviolable law that forces the most dangerous males in the galaxy to court instead of conquer. The heat is open-door, the heroines keep their names and their careers, and the happily-ever-after comes with a treaty.

Sabine lives outside Austin with her husband, Marcus, a very tolerant network engineer who fields her questions about orbital mechanics at midnight, a 3D printer that only makes dragons, and two cats named Pipette and Warlord. She still owns the battered paperback.