Free The Bronze of Eddarta by Randall Garrett

conversation and eavesdropping, I felt my thoughts circling profitlessly around the problem of Tarani.
    I weighed responsibility against desire. I tried to decide whether her need was for me, or for anyone—for intimacy, or for assurance that there was more of value in Tarani than her beauty and admitted sexual experience.
    In the end, only one thought came to me clearly, as I finished off what would be my final mug of faen:
    I’m in love with Tarani. God help us both. I don’t want to hurt her.
    It was nearly midnight when I returned to Yoman’s shop. The door creaked, the stairs groaned. I paused beside Rassa’s bedroom door and listened, hoping with one last desperate, pass-the-buck impulse that I hadn’t wakened Tarani.
    And hoping that I had.
    “I’m awake,” her voice seemed to answer my thought.
    I opened the door and stepped into the room. In the dim light, two things stood out. First, she was sitting up, with her back against the wall and the blanket tucked up under her bare arms. Second, her clothes were folded neatly on the ledge beneath the windowsill.
    I wasn’t aware of any conscious decision. But in less than a second I was across the room, kneeling beside her, taking her in my arms.
    Nothing had ever felt so good, not in two lifetimes. She rose to meet me, and the blanket fell aside unheeded. I scrambled out of my tunic, barely aware of her hands helping me. I pulled her close again, holding her carefully, like the treasure she was, and I felt the steady muscles of her dancer’s body tremble with eagerness. The touch of her skin on mine made me dizzy with need. Her tongue caressed my tusks as we kissed, sending tendrils of pleasure down my spine.
    I felt such joy that I couldn’t contain it, couldn’t express it. I was transported by the wonder of her body, consenting to be separated from it only for the sake of learning it, by sight and by touch. When I was free of the rest of my clothing, I lay beside her and held her again, wanting to pull her inside my skin, to be entirely and completely one with her.
    It was a time of peace, a pause, a lingering. A time of stretched sensitivity, of slow ecstasy. We kissed gently, silent acknowledgment that what we felt for one another was more than bodily need. But the kiss caught fire, and left us breathless and urgent. Tarani lay back, and I rose above her. Her eyes closed in anticipation …
    “Oh, Ricardo,”
she whispered.
    It was a word Tarani had never heard, couldn’t know, would be unable to guess.
    The world seemed to freeze around me.
    She opened her eyes when she felt the tension thrum through my body. Her hands, caressing my back, grew still.
    “What—what did you say, just then?” I panted.
    “Say? I only said your name.”
    “Say it again,” I urged.
    Doubt flickered in her eyes, and the warm space of air between our bodies seemed to cool. She did what I asked, and said: “Rikardon.”
    And we both knew it was over.
    I drew away from her, and she slid backward to sit up again. She pulled the blanket across her body with a self-consciousness that hurt me like a slap in the face. “It’s Molik, isn’t it?” she said. Her voice was deadly calm. “You can’t bear to be with me because of what I—”
    “No!” I nearly shouted the word, appalled that she could put such an interpretation on what had happened. “No, Tarani.” More gently.
    I took her hand; it lay unresisting, unresponsive, across my fingers.
    “Thymas, then?” she said, bitterness creeping in, stinging me.
    “Tarani, you have to believe what I’m about to say.” She was silent, looking somewhere off to my left. “My … failure is in no way your fault. Thymas and Molik have no place in what you and I share. I feel—and you
must
know it, too—that what we wanted tonight
will
happen someday. But not tonight. I’m not sure I understand why, myself. I only know—”
    I stopped, lost in misery.
    She looked at me then, and I almost wished she would turn away