Apleasure, to wake feeling so marvelously refreshed—or so Tedra thought until the happenings of yesterday crashed into her consciousness. She flushed with the vivid memories and felt a distinct uneasiness that would have had her squirming, except she didn’t want to wake Challen, whose arm lay heavily across her upper chest.
Where in Stars’ universe had she got the guts to do what she did to the mighty barbarian last night? Was she nuts? A glutton for punishment? And where in the farden hell had the idea come from that shelikedbeing dominated by a man so insufferably arrogant and inflexible in his ways that he was on the close side of being an absolute tyrant? And she had thought to give him a little tit for tat, when he was an expert at it?
She had his word there would be no reprisals, but in point of fact, she’d forced him to give it. She wouldn’t honor a swearing given under duress, so why should he?
She made a sound in her throat, and Challen’s arm moved, his hand coming up to turn her face toward him. “Do you not feel well,chemar?”
“I … did I wake you?”
“No,” he said simply, leaving her all kinds of things to wonder about—like had he been watching her all this time?
She stared into his dark-as-midnight eyes, hoping they would tell her something, but they were back to being inscrutable. Not for the first time, she wished she had his warrior’s calm, his ability to appear unruffled even if he was hopping-around mad on the inside.
“Have you stuck around for—for a particular reason?” she ventured.
“No.”
There was no help for it with such enlightening answers. “Are you mad at me, Challen?”
It was funny from that angle, seeing one of his golden brows arch. “Should I be?”
She felt like telling him what a great communicator he was, but pushed down the urge, wondering where this suicidal tendency kept coming from. From one of her donators, no doubt, those two unknowns who had supplied the genes for her tube. One of them must have been unbalanced—probably the male.
“If you aren’t mad, warrior, I’m not going to bring up a subject that might change that. But if you are mad, I’d like to discuss it.”
“A sound strategy,” he replied, laughing.
“Well?”
“I will leave it for you to decide, whether I should be mad or not.”
“Do I look stupid?”
“You look, as always, very desirable.”
She frowned for about two seconds, then broke into a brilliant smile. “You really aren’t mad, are you? I’m glad, since I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the—ah—uniqueness of the experience. And if you didn’t mind it all that much, maybe we can play switching places again sometime.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Oh?” She grinned as she watched him sit up on his side of the bed with a degree of stiffness. “Need I remind you that there wouldn’t be any play to it if I decided to challenge you again—and won?”
“You are welcome to try,” he came back with supreme confidence.
“Well, thank you—I think. And as long as you’re being so generous, how about throwing in a handicap? Considering your size and gender, I’d say that’s only fair.”
He turned toward her, interested if nothing else. “What is a handicap?”
“An edge. A head start, so to speak. Or to put it another way, it’d be the same as if you had one hand tied behind your back to make the odds more even.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Very well, what then is the handicap you request?”
“The element of surprise would do nicely. That would let me attack without giving you prior warning. Would you agree to that?”
“You have already given me prior warning in the asking. How then do you perceive an element of surprise?”
“I didn’t mean I was thinking of challenging you this minute, babe. And you can’t be on guard every moment of every day, now can you?”
The warrior frowned, wanting to know, “You would attack while I slept?”
