“Is that your question?” she asked. Her voice was taut, and Halak gave her a searching look and knew she was hiding something, but he was damned if he knew what. But that just made two of them doing the same thing to one another.

“No,” said Halak, at last, reaching for her hands again. “That’s not my question. This is: the same question I asked you twice before.”

He felt her hands flinch, but she didn’t draw them away, and he felt a flare of hope. He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.

“Ani,” he said, trying to put everything he felt into that one word and wondering if she would ever, couldever know how very much he hated keeping secrets from a woman he loved as much as he did her. “Ani, will you marry me? Please?”

Chapter 4

When Ven Kaldarren didn’t respond, Garrett leaned in closer to her companel. A little crazy, sure, but maybe, if she could close the physical divide just a little bit, this might be the ticket to bridging the emotional chasm that yawned between them like a black and bottomless pit.

“Please,” Garrett said again. “Please, Ven, don’t make me beg. You knew I’d want to speak with Jase if you called. If you wanted to humiliate me, you could’ve done the same thing in a prerecorded message.”

“No,” he said, and his voice was thick. (With anger? Sadness? She couldn’t tell.) “No, I didn’t call to humiliate you. You should know me better, Rachel. I would never do that to you. That’s a coward’s way, and I’m not a coward about most things.”

This was true. She was the one who’d always been gone on deep space assignments, the one who was conveniently away, or had somewhere to go if there was a personal problem. How ironic that she could face down phaser blasts, Klingons, and ion storms, but she absolutely withered, cringedwhen it came to dealing with her own emotions, or the feelings of the people she really, truly cared about.

Maybe that’s why I’m good at captaining, and crummy at everything else. When you’re a captain, there are rules and regulations and nice, safe codes of behavior. Everything’s so civilized.

She looked into Ven Kaldarren’s ravaged eyes and read his sorrow and hurt. But there’s nothing civilized about love, nothing.

“No,” she said finally. “You aren’t, and…” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Ven. That was unfair of me. Please, I would like to speak with Jase. No excuses; I won’t ask him to forgive me because he has every right to be angry, too…”

“He’ll never hate you, Rachel,” Kaldarren said. “He loves you. He always will, no matter what happens.”

And no matter what you do.Kaldarren hadn’t said it, but he might as well have; Garrett read it in his eyes. And did she see something else there? Something about her?

She brought herself sternly. Don’t go there. That’s over and done with.

He broke the silence first. “Let me get him. He…I think he’d like to hear from his mother.”

Garrett opened her mouth to thank him, but Kaldarren’s body swiveled to one side as he turned in his chair, and then he was gone. Staring at the emptiness where her ex-husband had been, Garrett waited, her head throbbing, her heart aching. She tried not to think. Not now. Maybe she would think later, or maybe she wouldn’t think at all because there were a lot of things pressing in on her, a lot of responsibilities. For now, though, she had to focus on Jase.

There was a blur of movement on the companel, and she blinked, plastering an automatic smile on her face before she’d even registered that Jase had slid into Kaldarren’s empty seat.

“Sweetheart,” she said. Too bright, too chipper, tone it down, you sound like a chipmunk.“How are you, honey?”

“Fine.” Jason had Kaldarren’s black hair, though it was much shorter, and the same black eyes, though he had Garrett’s paler coloring and the same oval cast to his face that made him look fragile as fine china. “How are you, Mom?”

“I’m okay,” she said, lying. “I missed your birthday. I’m sorry. That was wrong.”

Jase hiked his shoulders. “S’okay.”

“It’s not. A boy doesn’t have his twelfth birthday every day.” Not so cheery; you can’t smooth this over.“I promised you I’d be there, but I wasn’t. That must’ve made you angry.”

“No,” said Jase, though his voice broke a little and Garrett couldn’t tell if it was from the lie, or that he was growing up. “It made Dadangry.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He didn’t say anything,” Jase added, as if worried Garrett might think that Kaldarren was goading the boy into taking sides. “He never says anything. He doesn’t talk about you much, not even when Nan wants to. He won’t. I know because I’ve heard him tell her to be quiet; that it’s not right to talk about you. Then sometimes they get really quiet, and they aren’t talking, but they still are, you know? The way the room gets really still and the air is hard, like ice, and I just know that they’re thinkingat each other, real loud.”

Garrett could imagine that this was exactly how an argument between two telepaths might seem to someone who couldn’t read minds, and she ought to know. Excludedwas the word that came to her mind, and that was the way she’d felt whenever they visited Ven’s mother, as if they and all telepaths were part of a club to which she was denied admittance, maybe for her own good. She’d always nurtured the sneaking suspicion that Ven’s mother, an imposing and somewhat imperious woman named Molaranna, made cutting little telepathic jibes about Garrett. To Garrett, the atmosphere always turned frosty whenever she and Ven visited, and sometimes the pauses in the conversations weren’t empty at all but felt full of things being said in the air above her head.

She gave Jase a small smile. “But you said Dad was angry. If he didn’t tell you, how do you know how he felt?”

That shoulder hike again. “I just do. It’s hard to put into words. But Dad’s feelings…they kind of come off in waves. Like heat shimmers off hot sand, the way you can see them in the air. You know?”

“Sure,” said Garrett, remembering those cold pregnant silences. “What about you?”

“What about what?”

Garrett gave him a look. “I mean, how did you feel? When I couldn’t…” She broke off, and rephrased. “When I didn’tcome for your birthday after I promised I would?”

“It made me sad,” Jase said, with the simple, unflinching directness that only children who love their parents have. “You promised, and you didn’t show up. You didn’t call.”

It was on the tip of Garrett’s tongue to tell her son about all the things that were going on with her crew, the ship. But she held back. He was a boy. She was the parent. It wasn’t Jase’s job to comfort her. No excuses.

“Yes,” she said, “and I’m sorry, and it’s not okay. It’s never okay to break a promise.”

Jase nodded. His eyes fell, and he blinked. “But there was a good reason, right?” he asked his hands. “I mean, you’re a captain and all, and so you must have had a lot to do, stuff that’s really important.”

Oh, yeah, duty rosters are really important. Letting your first officer go on R and R because you’d rather not have him around is really important.

“You’re important,” said Garrett, and that was the truth. She couldn’t bring herself to say that he was more important than her ship; he’d see through that because, after all, she hadn’t made the choice to be there for him. But she told him the truth.