For a moment, she didn’t move and, in the silence, he allowed his eyes to finger her.

Beneath the blond tumble of hair, her blue eyes watched him, her lips toying with a bemused smile. She wore the odd toga-like dress that had recently become popular among the women on the home planet; it was a white color, trimmed in a pale blue that went well with her hair, but Lors hardly noticed it. His eyes were fixed upon the twin lift of her breasts as they fought against the material.

She swung her long, curved legs to the floor, a momentary flash of creamy flesh showing at her thighs, and stood up. She came to him on slippered feet, whispering against the floor and stopped before him, her breasts faintly brushing the material of his tunic.

“I thought I’d never get here, darling.” Her voice was soft and warm. Sex, love and desire hung in her words; the emotion dripped from her voice the way water falls from the roof of a cave, giving her tone a throaty huskiness that started the blood racing in his veins. Yet she held herself back, restrained her urge to fling herself into his arms. It was a game with her, one she had always played. “Did you miss me?” She asked.

He nodded, unable to trust his voice. It would crack, he knew it would. He would be able to say nothing beyond a mere croak. Too much was happening, too damned fast. It was almost impossible to keep up with it all.

“Well,” she mused. “I realize you’re stunned to see me, but you ought to kiss me. At least, that.”[p124]
He reached out his hands slowly, feeling the tremble begin in his fingers as he closed them over the softness of her upper arms. A drum began pounding in his temples as he touched her, a flashflood ripped through his veins, and his stomach churned like a storm. He brought his mouth down slowly against hers and felt her lithe body flatten up against him the way a candle melts against a sheet of hot metal.

Her mouth was a pliant sweetness that shoved all his thoughts of Terra into the back of his mind; her body trembled against the lean hardness of his in a shiver of passion. The very touch of her tongue against his lips beat aside all the problems that swirled about his muddled mind and awakened the desire and need that had lain dormant within him all this time.

“Darling,” she breathed, when he had pulled his mouth from hers. “Oh, Lors...”

“Shhh.”

There was no need for talking, no sense in it at all. Her body mashed up against him and he allowed his hands to smooth down over the material of her dress, along the curve of her spine to the twin globes of her buttocks. Her mouth lifted to his again, eager, demanding, while her fingers dug through his tunic and into his flesh with a sharp need that thrilled him.

Her hand reached behind him, her fingers finding the light button and suddenly the room was sheathed in the soft cloak of darkness. Only the tiny nightlight gleamed like a small, yellow eye in the center of the ceiling. She spoke to him, without removing her lips, her breath hot and demanding against his mouth.

“I don’t want to wait any longer, darling,” she [p125] panted, “not another minute.”

His arms slid around her, lifting her at the shoulders and the thighs to carry her to the bed, but she twisted away from him, whirling off into a darkened corner of the room where the yellow light could not touch. He could hear the sigh of the toga-like robe as she whipped it away from her soft flesh. Then she stood there, before him, framed in the alluring gold of the circle of light.

Lors felt his breath suck inward at the sight of her, standing there nude. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered and he felt shaken, to the very roots of his being.

The smooth curve of her shoulders glowed in the light and her face was kissed by shadows. The arching lift of her breasts and the impassioned nipples threw a wash of dark shadow downward over the flat of her stomach and the lithe curve of her thighs. With the light covering the beauty of her face, Jela lost her identity.

She was woman. Period.

Any and all, from time immemorial, or immoral, perhaps. She was somehow, standing there, a composite of every woman who had ever drawn a breath. She was the best of woman, the choicest parts of all women since the dawn of time, suddenly thrown together in a high breasted, slim waisted creation that was being offered to him, only to him.

And Lors?

It moved in him, churned through his guts like a forest fire. He was man! All men, glaring with the red eyes of passion at all women. He too, in the wash of lust that had swept over him, lost his identity and he didn’t give a damn. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that she was [p126] waiting...

His fingers ripped away his clothing and he was at her side in no time at all, his arms sliding about the pliant warmth of her flesh to clasp her to him. To take her. To love her with a fever that was equal to the challenge she presented.

She made a small sound and he hushed it with his mouth, planting his lips roughly against hers while he lowered her to the bed. He hurt her, but she didn’t try to get away.

It was the kind of hurt she had waited for, that they both had yearned for all the long months that had kept them apart. His hands closed over her. Smoothing the tender flesh and feeling of life beneath his palm.

She moaned, tearing the sound from the very depths of her as his hands smoothed the satiny texture of her thighs, his fingers working against her flesh. He felt the nails of her hands digging into his shoulders, but he paid no attention to it.

Nothing mattered now. Nothing except the warmth of their love and the expenditure of the raging passions that threatened to engulf them both.

They laid there for a long time, basking in the heat of their love, and he knew. Finally he knew that it all would not work. There could be nothing between him and the Terran woman. It was impossible. She could not live in his worlds, nor could he live in hers. Jela was his world and the past was merely an emotional thing. A moth and the flame.

Yet ... somehow, he did love Beth. Somehow her and her life was important to him. Her happiness was something that he had to assure. Had to [p127] guarantee for her.

He had to work out a plan that would solve everything and return the whole business to a state of normalcy. It would be difficult, if not impossible, and he knew that Zark would never listen to him, never allow him to carry it out.

But he had to do it.

There would be all kinds of risks and, if he failed in the thing, he might have to pay with his life. If he managed to accomplish it, he would get nothing as a reward, except perhaps the hand of the Commander’s daughter. That wasn’t such a bad reward, though.

He kissed her and the fires began to burn again.