No Other Love Read Online Free PDF

conversation, he added, “Why don’t you ever
take off that headdress?”
    “I cannot. It is forbidden.”
    Her voice was so calm and quiet that Herne
persisted. “Not on any world except Oressia. And this is a new
world, freer than any other place I’ve ever been. Take off that
stupid contraption and let your hair blow free. I assume that
Oressians do have hair.”
    She stared at him in such disgust and horror
that Herne imagined she was afraid the would try to rip off her
coif. When he rose from the ledge and stepped toward her she backed
away, terror in her eyes, and he felt a stab of remorse, tempered
by something darker.
    Having just opened his heart to her, he had
expected in return some revelation of her own private feelings. He
was disappointed by her continuing reticence, and angered by it,
too. He knew he ought not to expect intimacy from her. Oressians
were reputed to be incapable of emotional closeness, though they
were so secretive that no one could be certain of what they might
feel. Herne forced himself to swallow the frustrated anger that was
so much a part of his own cruel upbringing. He tried to understand
her reaction to what he had just suggested so he could soothe her
obvious fear of him.
    “Here, now,” he said, catching her shoulders
with hands that shook a little from his effort to be gentle with
her. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a complete beast. I won’t
hurt you, Merin, I promise.”
    Merin stood trembling, knowing she ought to
pull away from him, especially when he bent his head, put his lips
against hers, and pressed. She had seen other men and women do
this, and had been shocked by such an intimate gesture. Thankfully,
it had never been done to her before now. It was an obscenity. She
should not permit it. And yet….
    “Merin?” He drew back a little, looking
puzzled. His hand caressed her chin, then her wounded cheek, and
the sensation was sweeter than it had been the first time he
touched her face. She lifted her head, following the motion of his
hand, keeping the contact as long as possible. He steadied her face
with his fingertips and put his mouth on hers again. There was a
sweetness in his lips, and a warmth toward him building inside
her…. When she whimpered in fear of her own emotions, he let her
go.
    “I never really noticed you before we came to
Tathan,” he said. “Not as a woman.”
    “Do not notice me now.” She made her voice
cool and crisp. “Never touch me again. I am not like other women
you know; I cannot respond to what you want.”
    “You just did.”
    “You are mistaken.” She turned from his
bewildered look, trying to think of something that would prevent
him from ever kissing her again. Picking up the recorder from the
ledge where she had left it, she paused, fingers ready for work.
“Is this where your encounter with Ananka took place? On this
ledge? Please recite a detailed account for the colony
archives.”
    “Damnation!”
    “I would hardly call that a precise
explanation,” she said, “though there may be some grain of truth in
it.”
    “What in the name of all the stars are you,
that you can ask a question like that after we just kissed?” he
demanded.
    “I see no connection whatsoever between the
two events,” she told him. “As for what you did to me, it was
wasted effort on your part. I felt nothing.”
    “You’re lying.” He sounded angry as well as
bewildered.
    “Oressians never lie. It is against our
law.”
    “But you aren’t an Oressian anymore, are you?
That’s one thing I do know about your people. Once you have left
the planet, you cannot return. You are no longer an Oressian
citizen.”
    She favored him with a look from those
wondrous purple-flecked eyes, a look that would have stopped an
attacking Jugarian crab dead in its own slime.
    “If you have completed your survey of this
chamber,” she said, turning off the recorder and tucking it into
her belt, “we had best return to the surface. We are