Warrior by Angela Knight

Jessica Kelley is an artist in Atlanta, but nobody wants to buy her paintings. So in between her job, she paints more for herself than anything else, and tries to do right by her sister, a crack whore whose boyfriend acts as both her pimp and her supplier.

But not tonight. Tonight, someone is coming to kill her, and a warrior from the future named Galar Arvid is there to try and save her.

For in the future, Jessica is a well-known and even famous artist, and Galar suspects that an art collector is going to have Jessica killed so that he can make a killing on the small number of paintings she did while she was alive. If the killer is from the future, Galar is trained to stop him, but if the killer is someone from Jessica's time, Galar will be powerless to stop him from killing Jessica, as his job is only to stop time crimes.

Unbeknownst to either Galar or Jessica, the killer is actually coming for her roommate, Charlotte Holt, because Charlotte is from the future herself, carrier of a nanotech DNA infusion that her people, the Xerans, consider heresy and blasphemy. But when she spills her blood on Jessica while Jessica sleeps, she apologizes to her sleeping roommate before fleeing the house.

The killer, when it arrives, is no mere time-jumper or art collector, but a Xeran battlebot, a killer more machine than organic, that is out to eliminate all traces of Charlotte Holt, including her blood and DNA on Jessica's face. But Jessica might be overwhelmed by the machine set against her, she uses what she has and douses the battlebot with turpentine and sets it afire as it and Galar and his team try to bring it down. When it teleports away, Galar and his team bring Jessica to the Future to give her a new life. Time cannot be changed, and she must remain "dead" to the world she knew.

But as Jessica struggles to acclimatize to her new world, Charlotte Holt is still being tracked by the Battlebot, and Xeran spies in the Time Police organization set out to eliminate Jessica as well as a carrier of the heretical DNA infusion that seems to be giving her psychic powers. But as Jessica and Galan fall in love with one another, will the Xeran DNA inside her drive them apart- making her seem to be an alien to the men of the future, or will Galan and the others learn to accept her for who she is... and find a way, in that Heretical DNA, to bring the Xenophobic Zerans down?

I love Angela Knight's writing, in both her Majae/Vampire series and her "Time Hunters" series. This book is part of the second series. Time Hunters protect the timeline by protecting people in the past who are being targeted from the future. Jessica's case is one such because of the immense popularity of her paintings in the future make it much more likely that someone from the future would try to kill her to increase the value of her paintings by making sure that fewer were "left for posterity". But they can only intervene if her killer is from the future. If her killer is from her own time, they can only stand by and let her be killed.

The romance between Galar and Jessica is handled well. Galar is immediately attracted to Jessica, and later on, she finds him quite stunning and attractive as well, her first impulse on seeing him is that she wants to paint him. Their attraction is well handled, and well-written, and you can definitely see why they are interested in her. The attempts on her life are also well-handled and while one set of the characters are definitely sequel-bait, I want to read that book when it comes out.

This book shows great world-building, though if you haven't read the series, you'll wonder why the Xerans hate the others so much, and what it is about the alien DNA they find so heretical. But the characters are well-drawn and solid and the love story is, too, so you'll find a lot to enjoy here. Highly recommended.