“I can do this,” I told myself as I fiddled with an electroniscopic scanner. I propped my forehead on one palm and sighed. “No, I can’t.”
That was when the movers diplomatically decided to take a break. After a moment I followed their lead, left word with MedAdmin, and took a long walk.
I ended up at the Trading Center. Lisette was currently serving what she called an “English Tea.” I decided to try some of the baked items along with a server of fragrant golden Oolong tea.
I was sitting by myself, falling in love with something called cherry scones, when the statuesque beauty pulled up a chair next to me. I eyed her warily. “Lisette.”
“I heard of the excitement with Dr. Rogan,” she said, tossing back her curly mane as she sat down. “He is better?”
“His condition has improved.”
“Can you make him sick again?”
There was a tempting idea. “Sure. Any particular reason?”
She treated me to a lofty sneer. “He owes me more credits than half the colony.”
It figured. “File a Charter violation.”
“I would, but he claims my cuisine was substandard.”
“He’s a dead man,” I said, and she smiled. “Okay, perhaps a bit extreme. I know, I could inject him with an enzyme to make his mustache fall out.”
“Oh, no, not the mustache.” Lisette pretended to be horrified. “It is the only part of his face I can bear to look at.”
I laughed. “Lisette, remind me never to fall behind on my tab.”
“Unlike Dr. Rogan, you would never do so.” With all the regal dignity she possessed, she leaned closer and placed one long, elegant hand on my arm. “I did not like you at first,” she said. “Now I know you, I respect you, Doctor.”
“Thank you,” I said and decided to return the compliment, just for insurance purposes. I really liked these cherry things. “And I have never tasted more heavenly cuisine in my life than what you create.”
“Humph.” She gave me a baleful frown. “You do not eat enough to keep a Rilken alive.” Her gaze softened as she noted the shadows I knew were still under my eyes. “Have you seen Reever lately?”
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t, not since the Binder incident. I still had no idea if he and Lisette were involved, although her interest indicated some kind of relationship existed. There was also that moment when I’d first met both of them, the way he had touched her cheek so tenderly. I shook my head, and waited.
“Duncan and I were on Terra together, many years ago,” Lisette said. “I was troubled. My family was gone. Duncan was - Duncan.”
“You were... childhood friends?” was my guess.
Lisette smoothed a wrinkle from the sleeve of her scarlet tunic. “More than that. At school he was my protector. When I was sad, he knew. He gave me comfort.”
“You’re talking about Duncan Reever?”
She frowned at me. “He is a very private man. Very wary of others. Beneath that, he is everything generous.” Just as I began to wonder what form of comfort Reever had provided, she shook her head.
“No, no, not like that. He was like a big brother. The others at the school, they were cruel. I was too tall, too thin, too emotional. Duncan wasn’t like anyone.”
No, he wasn’t. I pictured Reever, then tried to imagine him as a generous, protective young man. Nope, couldn’t do it. I’d have to see photoscans.
“You don’t see how he looks at you.”
“Lisette, Reever looks at me the same way he would a rather dull botanical specimen,” I said. “What possible reason would he have...” I faltered as I recalled the incident in the grove. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Precisely because you don’t see him, know him as I do, Doctor,” Lisette said. “Duncan has feelings for you.”
“Feelings for-“ I shook my head, chuckling. “No, I don’t think so, Lisette.”
The tall woman stood. “Pay attention to his eyes, cherie,” she said. “They are the gateway of the soul.”
She sauntered away to wait on a new group of customers.
Whatever Lisette had meant to do by our little “chat,” the result kept me preoccupied until I returned to the lab. I finished with the maintenance crew, and was left to begin calibrating the analysis equipment.
I completed the last in time to receive a signal hours later via incoming transport. It was a direct relay from Kao Torin’s starshuttle.
“Kao!” I grinned as the screen projected his features beneath a flight helmet. “Where are you?”
“I am on the return route from Gra’capa Minor.” The Jorenian had been escorting some League dignitaries around the quadrant. After he’d described some of the amusing details of his mission, he surveyed me gravely. “You have been working too many hours, Cherijo.”
“I didn’t have a reason to leave the facility, except to sleep or eat.” I wasn’t going to describe the harrowing events of the last two days. “You were gone.”
“May I suggest a reason?” I nodded. “Docking Station Sixteen,” he said. “I will be landing in two hours.”
“I’ll be there.”
I had just enough time before Kao’s arrival to make a stop at my quarters and get cleaned up, if I left the lab immediately. As I drove my glidecar toward housing, I wondered why I felt so muddled.
The unidentifiable pathogen nagged at me, of course. My new responsibilities could theoretically determine the fate of seventy-four thousand lives. What if I failed, and this thing got out of control? I thought back to my orientation with Ana Hansen, when I had warned her of just that sort of scenario.
We’d be helpless, and then we’d all be dead.
On the other hand, this could be just the newest version of the K-2 common cold, and I was simply being paranoid.
I arrived at my quarters, and greeted the cats. While I was in my cleansing unit, I forced aside thoughts of my professional dilemma and considered the more personal ones.
Lisette’s revelations about Duncan Reever replayed in my head. That little talk had also left me feeling very uncomfortable. You don’t see how he looks at you, she’d said. Just how was the chief linguist looking at me, anyway? Duncan has feelings for you. Well, if he did, I had never encouraged him. I’d argued with him, yelled at him, and even decked him once, but I’d never encouraged him. No, I decided, Lisette was simply imagining the whole business.
I fed Jenner and chatted briefly with Alunthri before leaving for Transport to meet Kao. I should have been happy about seeing him again, I chided myself on the way to the shuttle docks. Yet even the Jorenian man in my life had me worried.
I’d virtually agreed to become his Chosen, but had yet to tell Kao exactly who he was getting himself engaged to. It was bad enough that I was Terran. How would Kao feel when he found out his bondmate-to-be was a genetically engineered clone? Would it destroy the feelings he had for me?
Disgust him? How would I find the words - not to mention the courage - to tell him the truth?
By the way, Kao, my mother was really an embryonic chamber?
Would it bother you to know that my father is actually my twin brother, too?
How does your HouseClan feel about complex deoxyribonucleic acid mutations diluting the family bloodlines?
What frightened me more than telling him was the thought of losing him. I’d never planned to fall in love, but here I was. Unable to imagine a future without Kao Torin in it.
When his starshuttle landed, I was pacing back and forth at ramp sixteen. Kao cleared the last of the biodecon scans and walked down the shuttle ramp behind his passengers. His gaze swept over the crowd until our eyes met.
I expected him to smile, to call a greeting as usual, but instead he went still. An expression of something like pain etched his features as he gazed at me.
No, not pain. Longing. Hunger. Loneliness. How did I know? I felt the same things.
Suddenly I was pushing through the crowd to get to him. One moment I was reaching out my hands to take his, the next I was being lifted into the air. Kao’s powerful arms swept me completely off my feet.
“Cherijo,” he said. My hands touched his face. For once I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He strode down the ramp and carried me off in front of everyone. I hid my face against his flight suit, embarrassed by the very public exhibition we were making.
Okay, it was sort of romantic, too.
His glidecar was waiting outside Transport, and he placed me in the passenger’s seat with great care. He took his position behind the controls, and then my hand with his. I was still at a loss for conversation. We drove away, sharing the silence, our fingers entwined. At his housing unit, he helped me from the vehicle and lifted me once more into his arms.
I liked romance, but this was getting a little ridiculous. “I can walk,” I said with a nervous laugh.
His smile was reassuring. “Let me hold you.”
I had been in Kao’s quarters once before, so I didn’t feel uneasy when he finally set me on my feet.
What kept me speechless was the way he was staring down at me.
There was no need for a discussion. I wanted to be with him. I knew he wanted the same. I could feel the tension between us growing, flaring when he touched my cheek with his hand.
“I must tell you-“ he said, but I pressed my fingers to his lips. Men. They never knew when to shut up.
“Shhhh.” I put my hand over his, and rubbed my face against the broad palm. My eyes never left his.
“I’ve missed you.”
“You are decided?”
Of course I was decided. I knew what to expect as a Terran, and had researched the database for the specifics involved with his species. There weren’t many details, but I had learned that Jorenians and Terrans were completely sexually compatible. I’d even taken the precaution of getting a contraceptive booster.
“I’m sure.” Saying that didn’t make me feel any more confident. It was my first time, and my hands shook as I fumbled with my tunic.
Kao’s hands covered mine. “Allow me,” he murmured against my lips.
My body, a disciplined, often-abused tool I always used without thought, slowly became a stranger to me. Kao’s hands gently freed me of my garments, and guided me as I helped to remove his. I was astonished to see several scars marring the perfection of his body. Deep ridges of old injuries marked his shoulder, side, and upper thigh.
I touched the one above his heart. “What happened here?”
“Warrior training,” he said, pulling me closer.
That first touch of skin on skin was shocking. Before I could catch my breath, Kao began finding sensitive spots I never knew I had. The glide of his fingers over my shoulder left a trail of tingling warmth.
Under his stroking palm, my breast swelled and flushed. My thighs trembled as he brushed his lips over my hair.
This wasn’t so bad, after all.
He lifted my chin. “You honor me, Cherijo,” he said. There was no equivalent for the word “love” in Jorenian, “honor” being the closest to it.
“Yes. I love you, Kao.” Okay, so it didn’t translate. He understood me.
His skin was damp beneath my fingers. I curved a hand around his neck, and discovered an odd, textured tattoo hidden beneath his hair, just below his left ear.
“More warrior stuff?” It was dark, and shaped like the upswept wings of a bird. When I traced it with a fingertip, he groaned with pleasure and dropped to his knees. That put him exactly at my eye level.
“My HouseClan symbol,” he muttered against the curve of my arm. I gasped as his face turned, and his mouth opened over my tightly beaded nipple.
He ran over me like soft, warm rain, until there was no inch of skin he had not touched and stroked into awareness. This was what all the fuss was about, I thought. I could get used to it. My shivering euphoria quickly burst when I heard Kao say, “I would Choose you now, Cherijo Grey Veil.”
What? I thought blankly, and went very still. “Now?”
Kao frowned. “You said you were decided.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you were talking about that.”
What had happened to waiting for an eternity for me? “Urn... can’t we talk about this later?”
His brow touched mine. “I must. We cannot be intimate without Choice. It is forbidden.”
Pre-Choice intimacy was forbidden? Great. Why wasn’t that in the database files, under Before you have sex with a Jorenian, read this? His timing was less than perfect, too. It would have been nice to know little details like this before he’d gotten me naked and half-crazed with desire. The only comfort I had now was knowing I wasn’t the only virgin in the room.
I dimly heard him speak in his own language. “Etarra nek t’nili. M’adeunal,” he said. Then my TI kicked in when he repeated the ritual words. “Come with me to the eternity we share. Be my Chosen.”
This was it. Like it or not, Kao wanted to Choose me. There would be no going back. I closed my eyes, steadied myself against him. Whatever I decided to do now would determine the course of our future forever. There was so much he didn’t know. I had to tell him, I thought, and opened my eyes.
“I will not hurt you,” he whispered as his big hands moved over me, soothing my tense form. “But I will not let you go.”
Maybe he would. “There are things you don’t know about me,” I said. “I have to tell you about-“
Now his fingers touched my mouth. “It does not matter.”
“It will,” I said as I pushed his hand away. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“You are Cherijo Grey Veil. That is all that matters to me.”
“Kao, I’m not - I am a - I’m-“ I groped for the right way to tell him the happy news.
“Cherijo, you could be a disguised Hsktskt, and my decision would not change. I will Choose no other.”
What he meant was it was me or no one. Period. Forever. From what I knew of his people, he meant it, too. Like it or not, Jorenians mated for life.
“All right,” I said at last. On the Jorenian bondmate desirability scale, a clone had to be better than a Hsktskt. Even a disguised one. “I’ll be your Chosen.”
Kao rose to his feet. One arm encircled my hips, a muscle flexed, then suddenly I was at his eye level.
My feet dangled two feet above the floor. Instinctively I wrapped my legs around him.
In an unexpectedly fierce tone he said, “I claim my Choice.”
He certainly did that. There was the sensation of being stretched, filled, pleasure edged by momentary pain. I was so absorbed in watching Kao’s reaction that I didn’t care. A moment later I was immersed in my own body’s response.