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

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.
    What I didn’t really want to admit to myself was that Sarzhin, if you left aside the niggling little detail about him being an alien, was pretty close to ideal, except for the aforementioned sand-snake-fighting talents.  
    I made myself look at him then. The dark hood was facing toward me, but what he saw, I couldn’t say. For all I knew, his eyes were cast upward, to the high windows with the rain continually cascading down them.  
    “Isn’t it enough?” I asked him. “For me to be here with you…helping in the greenhouse, and talking with you over dinner? I really haven’t been here all that long, you know. Can’t I have more time to…I don’t know…think about it?”
    He didn’t respond at first, but only tilted his head, as if gazing past me to the living artwork of vines and waterfalls that covered the wall behind my chair. A few seconds later he pushed his chair back and rose, then came to stand by my chair. I forced myself to stay where I was, although at all our other dinners he had never made such a movement toward me.
    Just the faintest brush of those gloved fingers against a lock of hair as it lay against my shoulder, and he said, “Take all the time you need.”
    And then he was gone, the black robes flowing around him as he left me sitting there. Another of those odd tremors went through me, and I lifted my own hand to touch that one piece of hair. His fingers hadn’t moved it, but mine did. Something like a sharp, stinging twinge seemed to move from that hair to my fingertip, and I jumped. Perhaps it was just an echo of the pain he had felt.
    With an abrupt gesture, I pushed all my hair back out of the way and rose out of my seat. I needed to stop acting like an idiot. Sarzhin had granted me some grace. Now I only needed to understand what to do with it.
    The next night, when we had finished dinner and the mech had cleared away the plates, the time came for Sarzhin to ask the eventual question…except he didn’t. He only hesitated, and watched me from under the hood, and said in questioning tones, “Anika?”
    I could only shake my head mutely.
    “Ah.”
    And that was it. He let me escape to my room, where I had all the time I needed to get back to my schoolwork. Not that I could concentrate much at that point. Was it really so simple?