Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium Series) by Pope Christine

Author:Pope, Christine [Pope, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction Romance
Publisher: Dark Valentine Press
Published: 2011-06-10T05:00:00+00:00

“Anika, will you marry me?”

I closed my eyes, the lingering sweet aftertaste of the wine I had just drunk turning bitter in my mouth. Why did he continue to force the matter? Did he think if he kept at it long enough, somehow he’d chip away at my resolve, a patient river slowly wearing away a stubborn stone?

“You know I can’t.”

“So you tell me, every evening.”

To someone who didn’t know him well, his tone might have sounded as calm and even as it always was. I had spent too much time in his company, though, had used too much energy studying the patterns of his voice, since the rise and fall of his tone was the only thing—besides the bits of body language I could glean through the heavy robes—that I really had to give me any clues to what he might be thinking or feeling. Another person wouldn’t have heard the edge of tension under those smooth, rounded syllables. His voice was beautiful; I had no idea whether the rest of him was or not.

With an uncharacteristic restlessness, he pushed his wine glass away. At once the mech appeared to remove it. Sarzhin made an odd little gesture, as if to stop the mech, then shook his head and settled back in his seat.

“Does what I look like matter so much to you?” he asked then. “A spouse’s appearance can change—there are accidents, aging. Yet people stay together despite all that.”

“But at least they knew what the other person looked like before any of that happened,” I protested. “You can’t equate the two. And you know appearances don’t mean that much to me. I mean, remember the way I looked when I showed up here.”

My remark elicited a shake of his head, followed by what sounded like a very unwilling chuckle. “You have a point, I suppose.”

That small laugh encouraged me a little, but I guessed from the slump of his shoulders he was still disappointed in me.

For some reason, I was almost disappointed in myself. Maybe someone else would have had the courage to accept him, to give the answer he’d been waiting long weeks to hear. Maybe another woman would have been content with merely knowing what a good companion he could be, how kind and intelligent and everlastingly patient.

For some women—and the disloyal thought that my sister might have been counted among their number passed across my mind—maybe his money would have been enough.

But I wasn’t any of those women. True, my tastes in reading and watching vids tended toward adventures and mysteries and the occasional horror tale, if I could manage to hide it from my parents, and not romances. Even so, I’d harbored a few very secret notions of the sort of man I thought I might want to be with one day. Foolish notions, I suppose, of someone tall and handsome, with multiple doctorates and the ability to both pilot a starship and fight off a Stacian sand-serpent single-handedly, but even my admittedly pie-in-the-sky fancies had never extended to a dark-cloaked Zhore whose face I had never seen.

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