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pronounced cheekbones in sharp lines, low slightly arched brows in that sandy color that matched his hair. She loved his hair, all that thick, coarse mass, sun-burnished as if it had been painted with gold. His jawline met in a firm chin. But the pad of his chin was raised, round, and soft. She rubbed it now. His lips weren’t full but compressed and strong. His eyes mesmerized her, a thousand different shards of gray and green, gold and light brown that somehow blended to create a smooth hazel look.
    She reached behind his neck and removed the pick from his cadroen. She tossed it higher up on the bed and pulled his long warrior hair forward. “I love your hair. It almost has a wave and it’s so thick.”
    “You’re not answering my question.”
    “I’m thinking.” She wondered what she should tell him that could explain her heart, or in some way help him to understand her drive to be free. “Do you know why I cut my hair?”
    “I thought you wanted something new. I love it, by the way.”
    She was surprised. “I thought you’d hate it.”
    “Well”—he smiled—“when it was long, it did have one advantage.”
    Her neck tingled at the reference. He had taken her from behind a lot, wrapping her long, long hair around his forearm, holding her back toward him, constraining her.
    Of course those images weren’t helping and she really did need to talk this out with him. “I cut my hair because the fanatical sect that my parents were part of forced all the girls to wear their hair long.”
    “You know I was born a Twoling in the good old Midwest, Second Earth, right?”
    “Yes, that much I do know.”
    “Well, my folks were abusive, I just wasn’t aware of it at the time. I thought what they did in the name of religion was normal. But getting lashed in a barn till the blood ran, all in the name of the Creator’s purpose and discipline, did not endear either my parents or their beliefs to me.”
    She felt him stiffen and she was pretty sure she could hear him grinding his molars.
    She sighed and twisted a strand of his hair around her finger. “As young girls and teenagers, we were required to keep our hair long and braided down the back, no exceptions.
    “But that braid was a torment for years when I was young. In my sect, there was a group of bullies, girls, who would catch me and one of them would take me by the braid and drag me around until I was screaming and crying. Oh, they’d get punished, but the day I started fighting back, hitting and scratching, you wouldn’t believe what the church regulators did to me.
    “One of the regulators used a group of three switches bound together that she called, ‘righteousness, purity, and love.’ My father approved although he preferred his whip to anything else. Both my father and the regulators would make me strip to the waist. At least the regulators didn’t bind my wrists and string me up. Beyond that, there wasn’t much of a difference. It was all done in the name of religion.”
    She paused, unwrapped the strand of hair. She watched his chin tremble. She knew he was mad, but these were her burdens, not his. Thorne had enough on his plate as a warrior without being stuck with her problems. And she was only telling him now because she needed him to understand why she craved her freedom.
    “Anyway, the Convent under Sister Quena’s rule wasn’t much different from the sect I grew up in. I think sister-bitch really enjoyed delivering the canings and whippings. The devotiates were rarely touched, women like your sister, Grace. But then, they abided by all the rules because of their religious fervor, which does make sense.
    “But there were at least a dozen of us who had been consigned there by relatives for ‘religious instruction,’ a polite euphemism for ‘beating the sin out of us.’
    “I admit I was the worst. I had no room left in my heart for what Sister Quena and her regulators were selling. In my opinion, there was no love in what any of