Then there was Samantha.

The Sphinx Forestry Service had checked its files at Honor’s request, and the SFS report confirmed what she’d suspected. There wasn’t a single recorded instance of a mated pair of ’cats who had both adopted humans… before Nimitz and Samantha. There’d been mated pairs in which one ’cat had adopted and the other hadn’t, although even that had been vanishingly rare, but in those cases, at least only one human had been involved. There’d been no need to choose between two-legs who were not or could not be together, and so there’d been no reason for them to face the possibility of permanent separation from either mate or person. The fact that the situation was unique meant there was no precedent to guide any of them, yet in this, as in so much else, Nimitz and Samantha had set their own precedents, with no regard at all for history or tradition.

She wondered sometimes what might have happened if Harold Tschu hadn’t been killed in Silesia before Hamish’s awareness of her had shifted so radically. Would she and Harry have been drawn inexorably together? It was certainly possible, but even so, she doubted that it would have happened. He’d been a fine man, and she’d respected him, but he’d also been one of her subordinates. Theirs had been a professional relationship, and so far as Honor could tell, the bonds between each of them and their ‘cats hadn’t carried over to their attitudes toward one another in any way. Certainly the thought that he might ever have been anything more than a friend, the human partner of Nimitz’s wife and the human “uncle” of any of the ’cats’ children, had never so much as crossed her mind before his death had erased any possibility of it.

Which had absolutely no bearing on her present intolerable position. As Emily had pointed out, she and Hamish had no choice but to continue to work together, cooperating as closely and as… intimately as before the attack. And just as political considerations made it impossible for her to avoid Hamish, so did the personal consideration that Nimitz’s mate was bonded to him. There was no way she could possibly separate her beloved friend from his wife, yet the very intensity of their bond with one another only made Honor even more exquisitely sensitive to all of the points of resonance between her and Hamish.

No wonder empaths thought it was insane for anyone to attempt to deny what she truly felt!

The lecture hall’s seats were almost full, and she glanced at the time display on the wall. Another ninety seconds. Just long enough for one last self-indulgent wallow in her self-pitying misery, she told herself bitingly.

Yet self-pity or not, there was no escape from the grim reality behind it. Emily had bought her a reprieve, nothing more. Friends and allies could defend her from external attack, but they couldn’t protect her from her own inner weakness and vulnerability. No one could defend her from that. The only possible answer she could see was to find some way to separate herself from the source of her pain. She might not be able to do that permanently, but perhaps she could do it long enough to at least learn to cope with it better than she could now. And even if she couldn’t learn how to do that, she desperately needed some respite, some break in the pressure to let her pause, catch her breath, and regather her strength.