For the first time, Kane took notice of the woman, with a swift, slightly irritated flash of the eyes. They were eyes that appraised Rouch, yet were already focused on something else.
As the doors swung shut behind her, Kane declared,
“I understand DeFore expected you to talk to me about being fused out.”
Brigid stared up at him, feeling his anger, but too busy wrestling with her own to address it. “Do you know why Rouch is here?”
His eyes narrowed in sudden surprise. “No, and I don’t really care. Why didn’t you?”
“She’s here to mate with you,” Brigid interrupted. “To improve the breed of Cerberus exiles.”
Kane’s surprise became astonishment. He turned to look at the doors Rouch had just walked through. “Really? Nobody told me.”
“Oh, she would’ve gotten around to it eventually,” snapped Brigid bitterly.
“She told you that?”
“And a lot more. First, she wanted to know if you and I were” she paused, groping for a delicate term “involved. Not that it would make any difference to her, mind you. It’s all business, though she isn’t above mixing a little pleasure in with it.”
Kane shook his head fiercely. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Will you?” she demanded hotly.
“Will I what?”
“I hate it when you’re obtuse. Answer my question.”
“Answer mine,” he countered.
“You didn’t ask me one.”
“That’s because you didn’t give me the chance. DeFore told you that I was fused out.”
“That’s not a question.”
Kane snarled, knotting his fists, turning a complete circle in angry frustration. “Goddammit, let’s stay on the subject!”
Brigid heaved herself out of the pool in a splashing rush of water. She snatched up the towel Rouch had dropped and furiously began drying her hair. “Fine. I suppose it makes perfect sense, Lakesh continuing to practice his own version of purity control. It would have been polite to have briefed us on what he had in mind, but then we’re just an ex-archivist and an ex-Mag. Exiles all.”
Kane gazed at her, finally reacting to the unmistakable edge of barely repressed fury and hurt in her voice. He said the first thing that occurred to him. “You’re jealous. For God’s sake, Baptiste, you’re jealous. You’re acting like a”
He caught himself before he uttered the final word, but Brigid guessed it and spoke it herself. “A woman. That’s what you were going to sayI’m acting like a woman.”
He shifted his feet uncomfortably. Lamely he replied, “Well, you are.”
She stood up quickly. The speed and grace of the motion gave a slight hint of the athlete’s coordination within her slender frame. Kane couldn’t help but gaze at her admiringly. He had seen her nude before, but the brief brassiere and panties she wore struck him as strangely arousing.
His thoughts whipped back to that night months before in Cobaltville when he had first met her. He had recognized her as a truly beautiful woman then, and with a slight sensation of shock, he recognized a truly beautiful woman now.
Brigid’s mane of thick, unruly hair, darker now because it was wet, tumbled artlessly over her shoulders. Her slim body was rounded and curved, long in the leg. Her full, taut breasts strained at the fabric of her brassiere, and through the wet cloth of her panties was plastered to the soft, honey-blond triangle at the juncture of her thighs.
She radiated a beauty far deeper than the physical, a force intangible yet one he had felt since the first time he laid eyes on her, an energy that triggered a melancholy longing in his soul. That strange, sad longing only deepened after a bout of jump sickness both of them suffered during the mat-trans jump to Russia. The main symptoms of jump sickness were vivid, almost-real hallucinations.
He and Brigid had shared the same hallucination, but both knew on a visceral, primal level it hadn’t been gateway triggered delirium, but a revelation that they were joined by chains of fate, their destinies linked.
They never spoke of it, though Kane often wondered if that spiritual bond was the primary reason he had sacrificed everything he had attained as a Magistrate to save her from execution. The possibility confused him, made him feel even more sad.