felt his control begin to give way completely, he tore his mouth from her body, and with shaking hands moved her off his lap to a safe distance. His body screamed at him in desperate need, but he clung to honour like a drowning man to flotsam. He focused on drawing each deep breath into his labouring lungs.
‘Rene?’ Liv’s voice was thready and high, her emotions as out of control as his own.
‘If I do not stop now, I will not be able to stop at all. Trust me, Liv, I am doing the gentlemanly thing here, no matter how much it pains me.’ He didn’t try to look at her. One glance at her glorious hair in disarray, and her gown half off her lush form, and he would have been lost. Closing his eyes, he tried to think of something else, anything else, but the need that was coursing through his sensitised body.
‘This… this passion between us seems unnaturally intense.’ Her voice was wavering and fragile, as if she were close to tears. ‘Augusta never described it thus. It feels wrong… but I do not want to stop.’
He groaned, and buried his face in his hands to block out the images her words brought to mind. He didn’t want to stop either. But he had to, for her sake. It was too soon. She still saw such sexual feelings as wrong, outside of marriage. When she calmed down, she would feel betrayed by him. A stranger in a strange world, she needed his support, his protection, not his animal need.
‘It feels more intense to me too. But there is nothing wrong with what we are feeling. It is natural – I assure you. But you are a maiden in my care, and I would not abuse that responsibility.’ His voice was as strange to his ear as hers.
‘My… my maiden state is yours, if you would have it. I will never marry another, so you take nothing from another man. But I fear what my father would say if I returned home … with child.’
Her innocent offer was as painful as broken glass underfoot. He rubbed at his spikey hair with his palms, trying to rub the sense back into his head.
‘You would not find yourself in such a condition, I promise you. I can never father children. No one here can. That is why we Retrieve people from other times. It is the only way we can continue our species.’
Liv shifted into a sitting position, and pulled her gown back up to cover her exposed skin. Then she brushed her hair back from her face. All this he saw out of the periphery of his vision.
‘Oh Rene, how heart-breaking for you all. I have never wanted to be a mother. Childbirth killed my mama and eldest sister before I was ten years old. I have watched childbearing make an old woman out of my eldest living sister. But not to have that choice… how do you all stand it?’
‘For hundreds of years we just focused on bringing our world back from the brink. There was much to be done, and so few of us left to do it. Then, only a few years ago, Cara and Jac, the blonde couple you met earlier today, began a revolutionary project. They rescue children from the past, and our people parent them, and give them loving homes. It is resurrecting us. It is giving us hope. And my work gives hope of a different kind.’
‘What is your work?’ she asked softly, leaning in against him, so he could feel the warmth of her body as it pressed against his own.
‘Our ancestors, with their overpopulation and industry, destroyed the natural balance. Millions of species on this planet…in this world … were killed. Became extinct. Here in New Atlantis everything looks perfect, but elsewhere – there is devastation. We have disrupted the weather, warmed the earth to uninhabitable levels, and melted the icecaps. The evil that we have done in ignorance, greed and neglect is boundless.
‘But now we are starting to redress the harm we have done. We have set up a program in the last year to start to Retrieve the extinct flora and fauna, so that it can have a second chance. The giant earthworm I found, with your grandfather’s help, will assist us to regenerate the barren soil. We will recreate the biodiversity we have lost. We will create Eden on earth once again.’
‘That is a God-given mission. I