Olga asked Andrea K. Höst:

I loved so very much the Touchstone series. Have you played around with the idea of writing a novella from Ruuel's point of view at any point? It would definitely be interesting to see how he coped with Cassandra's crush and how his feelings developed especially with all his Sight talents.

Andrea K. Höst It's not something I intend to do (though I've been asked about it before). Cass' crush would have been painfully clear to him, especially at any point where he physically touched her. The time he carried her about Kalasa was a mistake on his part (trying to be equable on the cartage) because it would have been like carrying a little bonfire of emotional reaction. He wouldn't get all the nuances of her feelings, but more than enough to erase any tiny doubt he may have been harbouring about just what she wanted to do with him.

He was being very logical and mission-focused in deciding that her enhancement made sleeping together (or too much contact at all) a very bad idea. All Sight/Place Sight talents would have to deal with knowing too much about their partner's current opinion of them, and enhancement makes it all blindingly clear. When he came to visit her to fetch Ghost, he knew very well that she'd had a strong change of feeling for him at some point during or after him rescuing her from near-Earth, and that she was now exceedingly physically conscious of him. [He wouldn't have known it before that encounter because although he'd watched her mission logs, none of them included her current reaction to _him_.]

And then they began a long dance of him quietly discouraging Cass and being perfectly aware of her competing attraction and discouragement, and her being fully aware that he would have to know her feelings, him being aware that she would guess he knows, until they both wound themselves into great states of sleeplessness and met in an elevator. :)

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