
CHAPTER 18
Cassidy waited for all of an hour, checking the different tests and setting out the samples that were ready for Tor to look at. She played with the mag-lense a little, peeking at some of the orchard samples, specifically the ones where she had added infected sap to the healthy tree.
The outcome surprised her, a very clear infection that had not only taken over the tree sample but the entire gel-like medium in the little tray. There were no signs that the tree had been able to resist the infection at all. Which was confusing because something was preventing random trees from growing ill.
She frowned at the screen, but her expression did not change the output. Nor did it give her any more information about the infectious bacteria itself. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that something was off. She had put the samples in a richer solution, but not that much richer.
A muffled call from the hallway distracted her from her thoughts. She’d purposely left the lab door open, the bathroom was nearby and that way she could hear if Tor needed anything. She shut down the mag-lense slipped out of the lab pushing the panel for the bathroom door.
...Holy mother of everything good.
Tor stood beneath the flow of water, his arms raised, some tool or other in his hands. His dark hair was plastered against his head and water droplets spiked his dark lashes. His soaked clothes clung to his form highlighting the contours of lean muscles. His shirt rose as he reached farther into the ceiling, leaving a wide strip of skin exposed.
Cassidy swallowed a wolf whistle, because that would be rude. But yikes, Tor was ripped. She wasn’t sure why this surprised her so much all of the Livarians had been warriors, and they all took that aspect of their being rather seriously. Even the men who had found mates regularly trained and kept up with an almost military-like routine. But Tor...she’d never thought about him as the same. She rarely saw him outside of the medical building and he’d never participated in the morning trials. Somehow that had translated in her mind to him being less fit and more intellectual.
But oh how wrong she was, and her mind wasn’t quite sure what to do with this new information that was, quite literally, staring her in the face. She’d pushed Tor deeply into the friend-zone of her thoughts and it was working, so far… sort of. Now...now she was never going to get this image from her head, and good God what an image. What would it be like to run her hands over that six pack?
“...Cassidy?”
Oh shit. He’d been talking to he while she was ogling his body. His incredibly sexy body.
“Uh, yeah?”
“I need you to comm Huntak and get the building blueprints,” Tor’s tone indicated this was not the first time he had repeated himself.
“Okay, how do I do that?”
“I’ll need you to get my techtini, the women call it the ‘light tool’. I’m in the last door on the right in the right hand hallway. The techtini is on the table next to the bed. Bring it here and I’ll walk you through the process.”
“Okay,” Cassidy nodded and tore herself away from the bathroom door, moving down the hallway on autopilot. Her mind still reeling a little with the force of her attraction. And yet it wasn’t quite new, it was just that now there was no denying it. She had a teeny tiny crush on the medic.
Tor’s room door opened easily. Cassidy had planned to slip inside, grab the light tool and get back to help Tor as soon as possible, but when she stepped through the threshold she halted.
The room that faced her was not an examination room.
It was bigger, for one, the combination of two exam rooms with the wall knocked out maybe. But the biggest difference was that it was lovingly, almost obsessively decorated. The plain gray walls had been covered with a finish that resembled a cross between wood cabin and old world plaster, rich deep browns and creams highlighted with almost fanciful swirls in the paler areas. The bed was a comfortable size, the supports a dark wood with blankets that matched the décor. The windows were a little small, but she knew they would be crystal clean, and in the light of day the sunlight would filter through to the variety of bookshelves lined against the walls, filled with honest to god books. The smell itself was warm spice and library. Warm bright rugs littered the floor, each strategically placed. It was like stepping into one of those home magazines.
She hadn’t thought about it before, but it was obvious now that Tor wasn’t just quarantined, he lived here, in the medical building. She brushed her fingers along the spine of several ancient looking novels and wandered toward the table next to the bed. There was the light tool that Tor had asked for next to a book that looked as if it had been thumbed through many times. The cover was hand written, a flowery script, too flowing to be considered neat and precise. She hadn’t caught on to enough of the language to get a feel for the title though.
Curious she picked it up, pulling the cover open. Lines of script filled the page, and the next. Flipping through the book Cassidy found writing continued, until, about thee quarters of the way through it simply stopped halfway down a page. Something odd caught her fingers, it was thicker that the rest of the book and resistant to bending. She turned the page carefully, her anticipation rising.
A painting, of a Livarian woman. Precise and beautiful, the lines lovingly created, every detail careful. She was gorgeous, with markings that highlighted her exotic, almond shaped eyes and light brown skin with a dusting of spots. Her hair a golden cascade down her back. She wore some sort of ceremonial robe, colorful and iridescent, her lips pursed into a half smile.
Cassidy stared at the painting for far longer than was warranted, a swirling storm of odd feelings crawling around inside of her. Who was this woman? Someone important to Tor, obviously, since he kept her image next to his bed. Family? Lover?
She didn’t like the muddy way that made her feel. Like something great had been lost, sorrow and grief, but also...yeah, that was a small stab of envy. Envy that someone...this woman...had meant something to Tor. Tor, who she had to fight so hard to reach at all, for every soft comment. She was jealous of a dead woman. God, she was a terrible person.
She carefully closed the book and placed it back where it belonged. This is what she got for snooping. If she had just minded her own business then she would never had known what Tor had lost. He would never tell her, of that she was certain.
She frowned at the morose turn her thoughts had taken. It wasn’t like she wanted to compete with the woman, whoever she was, anyway. She wasn’t looking for anything from Tor, not really.
She grabbed the light tool and slipped back through the door, closing it behind her. It would be nice though, she admitted to herself, to be his friend. Yes, she could live with this new knowledge because that’s all she ever wanted to be, his friend.
Yeah. That was it.
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