"Nina Osier - Matushka" - читать интересную книгу автора (Osier Nina M)

together on Earth, and had chosen him as her co-leader.
That had been their real beginning together. It occurred to Romanova now, as she sipped the hot
chocolate that was her one dietary vice, that if one went by standard dating and ignored all other calendars
it had been precisely forty years from that day to this one.
The garden was fragrant at this early hour. She had made a point of filling it with plants that had
discernible perfumes, and the heavy dew from last night's autumn coolness was bringing those perfumes
out in a way that she seldom experienced them because she was usually out here at the day's end instead
of at its beginning.
A single-family house with a private garden, created for pleasure's sake alone. On Narsai that was
almost the definition of material success, but that was not why Catherine Romanova had insisted on
having space for a garden when she had been shopping for this house as a place of refuge from her rocky
first marriage. She had simply wanted to put her hands into soil that she could call her own, and Linc had
laughingly told her that her ancestors' genes were asserting themselves at last.
Which might have been true; she had certainly been coming home sore and bruised and in need of
healing at that time in her own life, and acquiring this haven had been part of the process by which she'd
sought to mend herself.
He was stirring now, in the bedroom that was separated by a few meters of distance and by several
bulkheads (no, Katy, they're walls!) from the terrace where she was sitting. She could feel him starting to
think in his usual controlled fashion, realizing she was not beside him physically and wondering where


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she had gone and why....
And then, of course, his mind touched hers and he relaxed again. She felt morning desire rising in
him, stronger in the Morthan male than in the human male; and she smiled as she finished her chocolate,
and drew her robe tighter around her in a shiver that was partly from the morning's autumn chill and
partly anticipation of what would happen to her when she returned to the bedroom and took that robe off
and lay down to be held in her husband's arms.
It was a mutual gratification that would have to be delayed, because the front door opened while she
was padding through the living room to dispose of her empty cup in the kitchen. Two people entered.
One was a red-haired but swiftly balding man, large and broad-shouldered and human. The other was
a tall woman, her body shrouded in a cloak and her face obscured by a scarf that was beaded with Narsai's
morning mist.
"Dan!" Romanova said, and let her thoughts touch her mate's mind with a mixture of apology that
their intimacy couldn't happen as usual this morning - and of pleasure that someone they both loved was
here, unexpected but always welcome.
"Hello, Matushka," the man said, and gave his informally adopted foster mother a tired grin. "Are
you and Linc ready for some trouble? Because I'm afraid I'm bringing you plenty of it."



"This is Rachel Kane," Daniel Archer said, as he sat beside the woman who when she removed her
cloak proved to be wearing a Star Service uniform that was tight in the front to a ludicrous degree. That
had to be uncomfortable. Yet the woman's face was expressionless, which matched the way she moved -
mechanically, and as if every use of muscle required a conscious effort. "You remember me talking about
her, don't you, Matushka?"
The kitchen was warm, and it was fragrant now with coffee and chocolate and sweet hot cereals. Yet
the tall woman with the fair hair and the green eyes was shivering, and she continued doing so even after