"I'm not sure I'd say 'we' do it, My Lady," her maid murmured, "but someone certainly does." She looked innocently at her Steadholder, and all three treecats bleeked in laughter.
"I'm keeping track," Honor told her, "and the day will come, Miranda LaFollet."
"What day would that be, My Lady?" Miranda asked demurely, eyes laughing.
"Don't worry," Honor said ominously. "You'll recognize it when it arrives." Miranda chuckled, and Honor glanced back at White Haven.
"As I was saying before the distraction, My Lord," she resumed, ignoring her maid and armsman as they joined the 'cats' laughter, "we tend to try things out here, and what we're trying out this time is Grayson’s first modern genetic clinic."
"Ah?" White Haven raised his eyebrows attentively, and Honor felt his fresh flicker of interest. Most of it was simply that, interest in the project she was describing, but there was more to it, as well. A dancing fire around the edges of his emotions. It was... admiration, she realized, and felt her cheeks heat. Darn it! Whatever White Haven, or Miranda, or Lord Prestwick, or even Benjamin Mayhew, might think, there was nothing extraordinary about her decision to bankroll the clinic. The entire initial endowment came to barely forty million, and Graysons suffered from an appalling number of genetic defects, many, if not most, of them correctable by modern medicine, after a millennium’s exposure to their planet's heavy metal concentrations. It would have been criminal for her not to get someone from the Star Kingdom out here to do something about that, so where did White Haven get off admiring her for it? What gave him the right to sit there and...
She snatched her own thoughts to a halt with a confused sense of shock. Dear God, something was wrong with her. This irrational anger, and anger, she knew, was precisely what it was, was alien to her. Worse, it was irrational. Neither Miranda nor White Haven had said or done a single thing which should have upset any rational human being. And Miranda's admiration hadn't upset her. But White Haven's had, and a dagger of sheer disbelief went through her as she realized why.
She'd been wrong. His sudden awareness of her last night hadn't been one-sided after all, and she swallowed hard, reaching for her napkin and wiping her lips in an effort to buy herself a few more seconds' respite. Perhaps the earl's moment of recognition had begun one-sidedly, but it hadn't stayed that way, and that was the reason she'd found herself picking at it so long last night. For in the moment in which he'd truly seen her, some part of her had truly seen him. And now something infinitely worse had happened, for in the moment of her awareness, something stabbed at her through Nimitz. She heard the 'cat inhale sharply, felt his twitch of shock, but she couldn't sort out his reactions. She was too busy fighting to understand her own, for in that instant, her link to the 'cat had let her not simply see White Haven but recognize him.
There was a... resonance between them, one she'd never sensed before, even with Paul. She'd loved Paul Tankersley with all her heart. She still loved him, and the two of them had shared something she knew had been rare and perfect and wonderful. She no longer allowed herself to dwell upon it, but not a day passed in which she didn't miss his gentle strength, his tenderness and passion, and the knowledge that he'd loved her just as deeply as she had loved him. Yet for all that, she had never felt this... this sense of symmetry.
That wasn't the right word either, and she knew it. But there was no "right" word, and she wondered almost wildly how much of this moment was her, how much White Haven, and how much simply some bizarre malfunction of her link with Nimitz. No one else had ever been so closely tied to a 'cat. Surely that was the explanation! It was just a quirk in the flow, some sort of weird emotional spike which had fooled her into thinking it was something more.
Yet even as she thought that, she knew it was nonsense. It was as if a door she hadn't known was there had opened in her head and she'd looked through it to see deep inside White Haven. And what she saw there was herself.
There were differences, of course. There had to be. They didn't agree on everything. They didn't share all the same opinions. In fact, there was enormous scope for disagreement, argument, even quarrels. But where it mattered, where the wellsprings of their personalities rose and gave meaning to their lives, they were the same. The same qualities drove them, molded and pushed them, and Honor Harrington felt a sudden, aching need to reach out to him. It shocked and confused her, but she could no more have denied that desire than she could have stopped breathing, for she sensed the enormous potential singing unseen but inescapable between them. It wasn't sexual. Or, rather, it was sexual, but only as a part of the whole, for it went far, far beyond any sensual attraction. It was a hunger that went so deep and subsumed so much of her that sexuality had to be a part of it. No one had ever before evoked such an intense sense of shared capability within her, and she sensed the way they complemented one another, the unbeatable team they could become.
Yet that was impossible. It could never happen, could never be allowed to happen, for what she sensed and recognized in that moment went far beyond any professional team. It was a total package, almost a fusion, with implications she dared not truly consider.
Honor had never believed in "love at first sight"... which, a tiny part of herself told her quietly, was foolish in someone who'd actually experienced just that in the moment of her adoption by Nimitz. But that had been different, another part of her wailed. Nimitz wasn't human. He was her other half, her beloved companion, her champion and protector, as she was his, but at this moment...
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Enough. This was more than simply ridiculous. Hamish Alexander was both her superior officer and a married man who loved his wife. Whatever momentary awareness he might have felt last night, he had never, ever, said a single word she could possibly construe as "romantic." Whatever was happening to her, he was in control of himself, and if he'd had even the faintest inkling of the sudden, ludicrous confusion whiplashing through her, he would have been disgusted. She knew it, and somehow she forced the fire out of her cheeks and looked up from her waffles with chocolate-dark eyes that showed no sign of her inner turmoil.
"Yes, My Lord," she heard herself say tranquilly. "The strides Grayson has made in industrial capacity and the ability to feed its people are remarkable, but I think, in the long run, that modern medicine is what's really going to have the greatest impact here. No doubt the fact that both of my own parents are physicians tends to prejudice my thinking in that regard, in fact, I've asked my mother to take a leave from her practice on Sphinx to set up our clinic here, but I don't really believe anyone who truly thinks things through could argue the point. After all, simply introducing prolong will bring about enormous changes, and when you add things like genetic repair and research, or..."
She listened to her own voice, letting it wash over her almost as if it were someone else's, and below its calm normality, she wondered despairingly what had come over her... and how to cope with it.
Chapter Four
Citizen Admiral Thomas Theisman leaned back in the sinfully comfortable chair and rubbed his eyes with both hands, as if the act could somehow scrub away the burning ache of fatigue. It couldn't, of course, and he lowered his hands once more to smile bitterly at the opulent office which surrounded him. At least the condemned man gets a comfortable cell, he told himself. Too bad they couldn't give me a few more ships of the wall to go with it.