He looked into her eyes for a moment, and then he walked back out of the room, closing the door behind him once more.
“Good morning, Lieutenant Harrington,” she said softly, holding out her hand—and her heart—to him. “Thank you for my life.”
He took her hand in his as if it were the most precious thing in the entire universe and settled into the chair beside the bed. His eyes were dark, examining her face with an almost frightening intensity, as if he had to confirm that she was actually there. That she truly had survived. She shivered as she felt the searing power behind that regard, the need. It was the most powerful emotion she'd ever felt . . . and it was someone else's. Under other circumstances, in another time or another place, or from another person, that . . . hunger for her would have terrified her with the iron tang of its compulsiveness. Its obsessiveness.
But this wasn't another time or another place, and it certainly wasn't another person, and what would have terrified her under those other circumstances had no power to frighten under these, for she felt the same need within herself. She shivered not because it frightened her, but because it had become so central to who and what she was and it had taken her all unaware. It was so warm, so caring, so gentle and yet so ferociously strong. It made her want to laugh, to cry, to fling her arms around him and bury his face in kisses. It sang through her like the note of some enormous crystalline bell fit to set the universe singing, and it was simultaneously the most comforting and the most erotic thing she had ever experienced in her life.
She didn't know how long the two of them simply gazed at each other. It seemed to last forever, and yet it ended far too soon as he drew a deep breath and settled farther back in the chair, still holding her hand.
“Allison Carmena Elena Inéz Regina Benton-Ramirez y Chou,” he said in that deep voice that sent little shivers of delight through her bones. “Excuse me, but I sort of thought your name was Allison Chou. It would've simplified things a lot if I'd known you were a Benton-Ramirez y Chou when this whole thing started. I could've called in the whole world to get someone from your family out of trouble! At least I'd've known to call your brother, anyway.”
“Yes, that's my entire name, Karl,” she said in a slightly dangerous tone. “It's also something I've spent most of my life running away from,” she added in a softer voice, admitting something she would have admitted to very few.
“Why?” he asked simply.
“For the same reason they hung all those names on me in the first place. Because I want to be me, not just another Benton-Ramirez y Chou buried under all those tons of family history and tradition. Nobody on Beowulf would dream of forcing me to do anything I didn't want to do . . . and that won't stop them for an instant from doing it anyway. I don't want to be preprogrammed. I want to know—to know, Alfred—that the decisions I make are my decisions. And I don't want to be some kind of . . . of medical royalty. I want to be just Allison.
“I'm not like Jacques. It's never occurred to him for a moment to live up to the expectations people have of our family. Trust me, there are scores of people who were disappointed in him, who looked down their noses at him when he refused to go into medicine and settled for being an obscure, fairly junior military officer—and one who doesn't seem to take his duties all that seriously, for that matter. But that's because they don't really know him. They don't know what he's truly done with his life, what he still plans on doing with it, and having so many people underestimate him and take him lightly is part of what let's him do that so very well. But I don't want that. I want what I'm pretty sure the first Benton, and the first Ramirez, and the first Chou who took up medicine wanted. I just want to be a doctor, Alfred. That's all. Just to be a doctor doing what a doctor does, one patient at a time, because it fills her with joy