“Yes, Captain.”
“Captain-fila,” Toussaint protested. “A man should accompany you.”
“Your advice is noted, Toussaint. Lizbet, come with me. Taye, have Zheng meet us in the shuttle bay.” She sprinted for the door. Someone stepped into her path.
“I will accompany you,” Ronan said.
For a few vital moments she had actually forgotten him. She stood toe to toe with Ronan and felt again the leashed energy of his carriage, the arousal he provoked with his simple presence. Her voice went mute.
“I am trained in the warrior’s way,” he said, holding her gaze. “I can protect you.”
“Out of the question,” Janek snapped. “Captain, you should remain on the Pegasus. There are others you can send.”
She could have embraced Janek for his fortuitous interruption. “Are you volunteering?” she asked. “If not—” She shrugged him off and glanced at Ronan. “Your assistance has been appreciated, but you will be confined to quarters until this situation is resolved.”
“Your ve’laik’in’s situation exists because of my presence on your ship.”
She shook her head. “I am sorry, Ronan. Toussaint, escort Ser Ronan to his cabin and set a guard.” She shouldered past him, Lizbet at her heels.
“What is he like, Captain?” Lizbet asked when they were safely in the lift. The young Dharman’s eyes held a familiar gleam of hero-worship, but for once it was not aimed at Cynara. “He seems dangerous.”
“He is.” She folded her hands behind her back as if the topic were only of the most casual interest. “We don’t know enough about him, and until we do, he must be treated as a potential enemy.”
“Yet he aided us against the shaauri,” Lizbet said softly, daring contradiction. “There is a kind of… stillness about him. I wish that I—” She flushed and stared at the deck. “I understand, Captain.”
Curse Dharma for the harsh lessons it taught girls like Lizbet from the time they were old enough to walk. “Your insights are valuable,” Cynara said gently. “Never doubt it. And now I need your skills to get Kord home.”
Lizbet flushed again, this time with excitement. All she needed were a few chances to prove herself, to learn that she was the equal of any man. God grant she found her calling in an easier way than Cynara had done.
God grant that Lizbet wouldn’t live in loneliness, futilely seeking a man disposed to call her his equal.
Ronan’s face came to Cynara in all its stubborn tenacity. He had paid his debt to the Pegasus. He owed her nothing. Yet she felt that something bound him to her as she was bound to Tyr and to Kord, each in a different way, each loyal unto death.
God grant she was mistaken.
The surface at Ronan’s back was wrong, and that wrongness brought him awake in an instant.
He was not in his cabin, where Toussaint had left him sealed and guarded. He stood in the doorway of a cockpit just large enough for two seats and a bank of lighted consoles, screens, and monitors tucked beneath a transparent canopy looking out on a field of stars.
A ship. A ship in space. For an instant he thought he was still on the darter, and that everything else had been a dream.
But Cynara was at the center of his imperfect memory. He had been on the Pegasus. He had come to the bridge with no recollection of how he had done so, breaking his word to the captain. He had made some reparation by helping the Pegasus escape the shaauri, but it had not been enough.
Because of him, Cynara had lost one of her crewmen. She had been prepared to depart for an uninhabited world to save the warrior Kord. Ronan had seen her driven by an inner fire that almost blinded him, and in her body he had read her fear for her ve’laik’in.
But it was Ronan’s own fear that had bound him to speak. The fact that Cynara had rebuffed him in his cabin made no difference. He had long since stepped over the rightful boundaries of his position here, as he had done among shaauri every day of his life.