The Challenge is an interesting take on interspecies relationships. Tessa Caman is a kick ass Agent in the Presidents Protection Detail, when she takes a bullet to save the life of the President, she wakes up 250 years in the future in the arms of an undeniable hunk.

By the time Kahn convinces her she really is 250 years in the future and that both Earth and his home planet of Rystan need her help, he is well on his way to discovering that all females are not shy retiring types, and Tessa is the antithesis of shy or retiring.

It's Kahn's job to prepare Tessa for the Challenge, a test faced by sentient races wishing to be granted entrance into the Galactic Federation, a millennia old governing body of inhabited planets. He has his work cut out for him as women from his planet are meek and subservient not warriors like Tessa and the suggested training routine of enhancing sexual frustration designed to bring out her latent psi talents, just isn't working as its supposed to.

The sexual frustration method of awaking Tessa's psi powers backfires and awakens her sexual awareness and their mutual growing attraction and admiration for each other. After an unsuccessful escape attempt and subsequent marriage to keep Tessa out of jail, Kahn needs to rethink his training procedure. The sexually charged situations are having a reciprocal effect on Kahn and when a frustrated Tessa teases him into hand to hand combat and wins, he relents and begins to train her as he would a male with gratifying success.

Her forthrightness, creative thinking and lack of guile endear her to several of the new sentient species she meets and her loyalty to Kahn's family continues to endear her to him and soon he comes to realize he doesn't want to live without her, nor she him. In Tessa he has found an unconventional, independent, soft hearted woman who stirs his soul and can fight by his side with the skill of any man.

But its Tessa's uninhibited passion and ability to think outside the box combined with Kahn's innate sense of honour and adaptability that will allow them to love each other, win the Challenge and bring prosperity and hope to their dying people.

Susan Kearney's imaginative "suit" and its titillating playfulness makes for some very hot sexy scenes and the characters ability to tease each other into is quite playful and amusing.

Moments after saving the President's life, Secret Service agent Tessa Camen awakens in the arms of a warrior to find she is now three centuries in the future. Charged with saving life on Earth by winning a contest referred to as the Challenge with the help of the warrior, Kahn, Tessa is expected to learn to use psi abilities that she does not believe she possesses.

To awaken these powers, she is placed in the rather embarrassing position of wearing a transparent suit, which she can only make opaque using said abilities, and which provides stimulation to various zones of her body. This is ironic since the reason Tessa was chosen was she was the only virginal warrior type that could be found within the space time continuum of the planet.

Although if one ignores certain aspects, there is a certain measure of originality to the concept, and the computer on her space ship is a hoot, several dozen pages describing the heroine's sexual frustration gets annoyingly banal faster than the plot develops.