Ronan caught her hand as she began to withdraw it. The contact spiked through his body like the enervating bite of a venomous serpent, plunging into the center of his brain and driving his sexual awareness to an intolerable pitch.
Cynara D’Accorso dropped his hand, and he crumpled to the deck.
* * *
Chapter 2
« ^ »
The display on Cynara’s wristcom glowed the steady amber of alert as she took her seat at the head of the briefing room’s table. Her officers had already gathered, those whose skills were not immediately required at this time of crisis, and all of them looked to her with serious and troubled faces.
They had reason to be concerned. Though the Pegasus had made it through the wormhole, Chief Antiniou had reported that the slingshot drive had faltered again. They were stalled out in an unpopulated region of human space far from any assistance, and the ship would remain dead in the water until Charis and her team could jury-rig temporary repairs.
Cynara was confident that the shaauri striker hadn’t taken a good scan of the Pegasus; the ship’s shielding was built to resist even the most advanced scrutiny. Under normal circumstances the shaauri would remain on their side of the border… unless their prey was too valuable to let escape.
And that brought her to the most troubling subject of all. Ronan VelKalevi, who had collapsed on the bridge at the precise moment her mind had touched his.
Cynara’s head still rang with that brief, blazing contact. She seldom found herself compelled to act as a telepath, and she certainly did not seek such experiences. On those rare occasions when she was forced to use Tyr’s gift, she had done so only with extreme reluctance.
She hadn’t opened her mind to receive, and yet she had tasted Ronan’s emotions as if he were capable of projecting them. He’d claimed that any telepathic ability he might have possessed had been stripped from him in childhood, and nothing she sensed in him contradicted his story. He’d been as shocked as she was—shocked all the way into unconsciousness.
Ronan VelKalevi. Everything he did and said disturbed her, though certainly not in the way he ruffled Janek. Unless she had grossly misinterpreted Ronan’s actions, he had confronted the Persephonean as if he defended her from an actual threat.
Ronan did not know her, owed her no allegiance, and yet he had behaved exactly as Kord might, a warrior sworn to his Watergiver for life.
And there was the way he’d moved… almost too fast for the eye to follow, swift and deadly, by every measure Kord’s equal. She’d watched with a kind of bizarre fascination and far too much personal interest. That made no more sense than her peculiar willingness to accept him at face value.
Was this her personal weakness? Would Tyr have acted so in her place?
Something scraped the surface of the table, and she came back to the present and the urgent business at hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I doubt there is any need for preliminaries. The Pegasus is temporarily disabled while Chief Antoniou effects repairs sufficient to take us to the next wormhole. We remain a little too close to shaauri space for comfort.”
There were several nods and a few uneasy glances. “No evidence of shaauri pursuit,” Kord reported. “That doesn’t mean they won’t come through if they want their prey badly enough.”
The suspicion in his voice told Cynara all that he didn’t say. She hadn’t had the chance to ask his impression of Ronan since their brief confrontation; she suspected that he was revising his initial judgment. But his unspoken question was the same as that of every man and woman present: Was Ronan VelKalevi what he claimed to be?
“I am well aware,” she said, “of the implications of my decision to take VelKalevi aboard. Under no circumstances am I prepared to leave a fellow human to the mercies of shaauri warriors.”
No one offered disagreement. Janek scowled, doubtless convinced that he was hiding his true feelings. “The question,” he said, “is whether or not we were intended to rescue him.”
Cynara smiled in a way she knew was sure to annoy him. “Of course. And we will expose any deception with all due efficiency—once we’re safely home.”