Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [20]
He was flattered, Jax realized. Flattered that Dejah had become so attached to him that she had not returned to her homeworld as she had planned. He chided himself for the emotion. He’d gotten past the need to draw on the Force to counteract Dejah’s heady combination of pheromones and telempathic subtlety, but occasionally he caught himself having silly, almost adolescent thoughts about her. The fact that she had begged him not to leave the conapt just now, expressing fear for his life with the Inquisitors at large, had likely contributed to those thoughts.
He replayed their recent parting at the door of their apartment: her gazing up at him, worry on her lovely face, her deep red lips parted, her eyes glittering with fear, her hands fluttering between them like startled birds. He had felt her willing him to embrace her and had deflected the impulse, though perhaps not as successfully as he’d thought. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to lean his head down and kiss her. It was a moment out of a romantic holovid.
He chuckled and shook his head. Gotta watch that.
He knew his Jedi discipline and the detached state it supported frustrated the empathic Zeltron, and he suspected she’d be pleased to know how attractive he found her. He was not numb to her pull—he felt it as a tingle on the skin, a flutter of his heart, a quickening of his pulse—but he was a Jedi, after all, and it took just a touch of the Force to deflect her attempts to influence him.
He looked up to find himself at a crossroads: left, right, up, down. Which way to go? He struck out at random, stepping into the down tube. As he slowly descended he found himself thinking, unaccountably, of Laranth Tarak.
The Twi’lek Jedi had been absent from his team for several months now, and while this wasn’t the first time he’d thought of her, it was the first time she’d come to his thoughts with such strength. He hadn’t seen her since the day she’d quit the team to work full-time with the Whiplash and its leader, Thi Xon Yimmon, a charismatic Cerean who—to hear his associates tell it—possessed the fighting prowess of a trained soldier and the wisdom of a Jedi Master.
Strange, Jax thought. It hadn’t occurred to him before to wonder why Laranth had abandoned their group. He recalled she’d been impatient with him about something—he’d never discovered what, exactly—and there had been a moment when he’d visited her in the medcenter after her encounter with the bounty hunter Aurra Sing, when he’d wondered if their relationship was sliding toward …
He drew himself up short, recalling the day: Laranth lying on the medcouch, patched and tubed and pale, and him at her bedside, a roil of emotions turning him inside out.
Had there been a moment when she had read him and feared he had grown too attached to her? Or had she already felt the pull of Yimmon’s personality? Or both? Or neither?
He looked around and realized that his steps had taken him down into Whiplash territory. In fact, he was only a block or so from the charity in whose headquarters the group occasionally held clandestine meetings. It was one place of contact between the insurgent organization and those who needed its help.
It struck him, in that moment, that what he wanted most right now was Laranth’s take on this whole business … and her opinion of the trustworthiness of Tuden Sal himself. After all, they had only Sal’s word that he was really a new Whiplash member and