KINSMAN’S OATH By Susan Krinard

“You may not be the most accurate judge of human beauty.”

“You are strong,” he said. He began to run his hands over her, illustrating with intimate touches as he spoke. “Your face is symmetrical in its lines, and firm in the jaw. Your teeth are white and even. Your nose is not too small. Your eyes are large and bright.” He kissed her closed eyelids. “Your neck is long and graceful, like that of a la’salo. Your hair—”

He combed his fingers through it, fanning the strands about her shoulders. “Your hair is soft and smells of your night flowers.”

“Red,” she said. “Like shaauri—”

“Like Cynara.” His hands sifted her hair and let it fall again. “I am glad that your mouth is not like a shaauri female’s.”

The kiss was so gentle that she barely felt it. When she reached to take him into her arms, he stopped her with that same firm gentleness.

“I have not finished,” he said. He began to massage her tight shoulders with consummate skill. “Your arms are well shaped. Your hands are graceful.” He lifted one of her hands and flattened it to his, palm to palm. “So small against mine.”

“They’re not—” She caught her breath as he drew one of her fingers into his mouth.

“Graceful fingers,” he said when he had sampled each one. He stroked his hands up her arms. “Your breasts…”

He cradled her beneath, and her breasts felt tight and aching and heavy.

“These, too, are beautiful.” His voice grew husky as he ran his thumbs across her nipples. “They give nourishment, but I do not remember what it is like to taste it.”

Poseidon. Cynara shivered. “They… don’t give nourishment unless—”

Words died. Ronan’s mouth closed around one of her nipples, and he began to suckle with all the hunger that instinct built into humankind. He used his lips and tongue in amazing ways no amount of experience could have taught him.

He worshipped her, but not as a servant. He celebrated all that was female in her, neither captain nor inferior, but herself whole and complete. He pressed his face between her breasts and she buried her fingers in his hair, swallowing a cry of triumph.

Still he wasn’t finished. He kissed a trail from breastbone to belly, rubbing his cheek against the gentle swell. “The shaauri are wrong,” he murmured. “There is great delight in this smoothness.”

No fur, he meant. Cynara opened her eyes. “Did you… you and the shaauri females… is it possible—”

His laughter rumbled into her skin, half hiss in the shaauri way. “Never.” He looked up, hands grasping her hips. “Is this what you feared?”

“No. No.” She closed her eyes again, appalled at the direction of her thoughts. “How do shaauri judge beauty?”

“It is not physical perfection that draws one mate to another. Among va’laik’i it may be status, or desire for alliance and strong children. Sometimes it is simply for pleasure.”

“Oh, yes. Affection doesn’t enter into it.”

He cupped her buttocks. “Between lifemates, emotion is all. There can be no bond without it.”

“But we… are not lifemates.”

What was she saying? She tried to distract herself from the heat of Ronan’s breath at the tops of her thighs. “I mean—”

“We are human,” he said. “I care for you, Cynara.”

It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. There was nothing of the courtier in it, the seducer seeking just the right words to open a woman’s thighs.

No. Ronan meant what he said. She did not know what he meant by it. Friendship? Affection? Surely not love…

“Ronan,” she said. Her throat was blocked, and she found it difficult to speak. “I—”

Ronan had a way with more than words. He rose to his • feet and sealed her lips with his fingers.

“How do you wish to mate, Cynara?” he whispered. “Tell me what pleases you.”

The images that leapt instantly into her mind were quite astonishing. Certainly those memories she had taken from Ronan—his encounters with Kinswomen on the shaauri world—were not nearly so inventive. He and his partners had been more intent on the result than the process.

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