“I know,” he whispered in a low, choked voice. “I know.” But still he trembled and his skin, pressed against her bare stomach, felt feverish with heat.
“I don’t understand how you did it though,” she said, stroking the damp black hair away from his forehead. “You told me you couldn’t swim.”
“I choose not to swim. But I can when I have to.” He looked up at her at last and Lauren saw that his eyes had gone a solid red-on-black. “My father taught me,” he whispered and there were depths of unspoken pain in his words that wrung her heart.
The sight of those eyes in a face that had gone suddenly pale and those softly whispered words filled Lauren with concern. “Hey,” she murmured, looking down at him anxiously. “This is about more than me falling overboard, isn’t it?”
Xairn shook his head and looked away. “It’s nothing. I was fearful for your safety, that’s all.”
“No, that’s not all,” Lauren said firmly. “That’s not the whole story by a long shot. And you’re going to tell me all of it. But first we need to get out of these wet clothes. Come on.”
She helped him to his feet and at first it seemed like he could barely move. Lauren’s concern grew as she watched how stiffly he walked, how unsteady he was on his feet. It was almost like he was the one who had nearly drowned. What was going on with him?
She stripped him out of his wet jeans and t-shirt while Little One barked urgently on the couch. “Quiet, Little One,” she ordered, shaking a finger at the puppy. “Settle down now.” For a wonder, the puppy did as she was told, curling up in a corner of the couch and watching the proceedings with wide, worried eyes. “It’s all right,” Lauren told her, though by now she was beginning to be really worried about Xairn herself. “He’s going to be fine. He’s just…just upset.” But upset about what?
Finally she had him completely nude and began rubbing him down with towels. At any other time she would have been admiring his hard, muscular body or maybe even trying to sneak a peek at his equipment—she was still very curious about the whole ‘primary and secondary shaft’ thing he had going on. But at the moment, she was too concerned with his mental state to think about anything physical. She wrapped a towel around her own shoulders as she worked, shivering slightly in the air conditioned condo as her damp bikini stuck to her skin.
At last she had his large body mostly dry. “There.” She sat him down, still naked, in one of the kitchen chairs and pulled up a chair to sit opposite him. “Now tell me, what’s going on. Why are you so upset? And don’t say it was because of me, either—it’s more than that, I can tell.”
Xairn’s eyes were still a burning red-on-black. He closed them briefly, an expression of pain flitting over his face. “I told you that I chose not to swim but I didn’t tell you why,” he began in a low, grating voice. “I…I never told you about the drowning tanks.”
“The what?” Lauren looked at him in horror. “You had tanks on your ship just for drowning people in?”
“Not people—animals. Urlich.” He took a deep breath and went on. “It was my father’s policy to test them in the tanks as part of their final training. The tanks were filled with black slime—it must have been water at one time. But the dead animals were left to rot in it, until it was a stinking, putrid sludge, so foul it made one nauseous just to smell it.”
“Ugh.” Lauren shivered. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes.” Xairn nodded briefly. “They—the mature urlich—had to show their stamina and courage by swimming. Swimming for hours and hours on end in the slime. Some of them…” He swallowed hard. “A lot of them drowned.”
“Oh my God!” Lauren put a hand to her mouth. “Please don’t tell me he threw your pet dog in there and let it…let it die.”
“No.” Xairn looked down at his hands, which still trembled slightly in his lap. “He…he threw me in.” He looked up at her. “Over and over again. It was…how I learned to swim.”
“Oh no! Oh, Xairn!” Lauren was on her feet and cradling his head against her breasts before she could stop herself. “No wonder,” she murmured, stroking his still-damp hair. “No wonder you hate to swim. But you jumped in to save me anyway.”
Slowly his arms crept around her waist and held her tight. Xairn looked up at her, his eyes still burning. “I had no choice,” he said hoarsely. “You are my life, Lauren. If you die there is nothing left for me. Nothing.”