He drew closer to the bed, muscles flowing from one position into the next as if he hardly moved at all. “I am concerned only with your judgment, Cynara. I wish to be a worthy human in your eyes.”
“You’re already that, Ronan. You have nothing to prove to me.”
She spoke falsely—not as one courting or being courted, but as a companion… a “friend” who bore him some affection and nothing more.
“Do you consider me your equal?” he asked.
“You can’t seem to decide if you’re a servant or a commander. On the ship—”
“You are captain. Aho’Va.”
“You called yourself unworthy then.”
“But here it is not the same.”
“Because I’m just a woman?”
Anger. Challenge. She tried to dismiss them, but they lay there always, at the heart of her being. ” ‘Just’ is a human term,” he said. “There is no ‘just’ in you, Cynara.”
She laughed nervously. “It seems you’ve learned the human knack of giving compliments. Who taught you? Kord?”
“There is another human word, ‘seduction.’ Can you explain?”
“It’s something I’m sure you could learn very quickly if you tried.” She tugged at the ends of her sash. “I’m certainly not the one to ask.”
“You have had few… lovers.”
“Didn’t I answer these questions before?”
“You were to be married, and that ended. Your own people turned against you. Kord is not your mate. There have been others?”
She didn’t answer, but his mind grasped vague, troubling images of a much younger Cynara, hardly out of childhood, engaging in another small act of rebellion with a young Dharman male of her age. Shame accompanied the memory, but it was not the only one of its kind. She had taken sexual pleasure several times before she left her homeworld.
He could find no reference to sexual contact after she became captain of the Pegasus.
“You have avoided mating,” he said, as if he merely guessed.
“A captain doesn’t disrupt the morale of her crew with personal entanglements.” She got up from the bed and walked across the room. “Discussion of my love life isn’t likely to help you become more human. Maybe you’d better go back to sleep.”
He followed her and stopped within a hand’s touch of her back. “Why did you come to find me, Cynara?”
He heard her internal debate, weighing more deception against the truth she feared. “Sometimes I’m just not very good with words.”
“Shaauri,” he said, “do not use many words when they wish to mate. The body speaks instead.”
Her back stiffened. “And what do you think I’m saying now?”
“That you are afraid without need.” He cupped her shoulders in his hands. A violent tremor shook her body. “I could not harm you, Cynara. I demand nothing. I know you are alone among your own kind. Such loneliness may find ease, if only for an hour.”
“As you did with those Kinswomen?”
“It was for the body, which gives strength to the mind, as the mind strengthens the body.”
“Shaauri philosophy?”
He turned her about until his breath mingled with hers. “Sihvaaro taught me that all beings crave union with something—the universe, perfect knowledge, another of their own kind. I am not far along the Eightfold Way, Cynara. Since I came to the Pegasus, I have craved only you.”
“And you asked me what seduction meant.” She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. “Just when I think I’m starting to understand you—”
He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth. He opened his mind just enough so that she could see what was in his outermost heart: admiration, respect, and desire so powerful that it made him shake like a be’laik’in at his first mating.
This was his first. His first with a woman who wanted him, whose own need met his without hesitation or disdain.
“It… it makes no sense,” Cynara whispered, fitting his hand to her cheek. “When you came aboard the Pegasus—even then you weren’t a stranger. It’s as if I’d known you all my life.”
“It is Walkabout,” he said. “There is no wrong, no shame. Only discovery.”
“I don’t know which of us has more to learn. I guess we’re about to find out.”