Get this: In The Mark Of Gideon, Kirk beams to Gideon, and finds himself back on the Enterprise, but everybody is gone. Then he finds this dizzy dame dancing giddily around his ship. He asks her her name, and she's not 100% sure what her name is. Kirk tells her she must be from Gideon, but she swears she has never heard of Gideon. She's not sure where she's from, but she knows she is not from Gideon.
Kirk tells her that they seem to have been thrown together by some intelligence for some unknown purpose. She claims to be afraid.
Lie, lie, lie. She's lying through her teeth the whole time.
In any case, Kirk eventually OBVIOUSLY begins to suspect that Odona is responsible for kidnapping him, so he decides to humor her a little and try to draw her out. This is the "romantic" part, where Kirk seems, out of the blue, against all odds, to forget everyone and everything except "the lovely lady". She seems to want to be all alone with him awfully bad, so it's perfectly logical for him to assume that she is the one who is behind all of this. If she's responsible for getting him into this, it's logical for him to assume that she has the power to fix it, too... so OF COURSE he decides to humor her a little, and try to draw her out. Starfleet won't answer him on the radio, and his whole crew is missing, so she's all he's got to work with.
AND she's a big, fat, heartless liar.
Yeah, Kirk kisses her, once.
Long story short, she's the daughter of Gideon's Prime Minister Hodin. Odona, and the whole side-windin' pack of Gideonites are lying, deceiving snakes, basically. They don't believe in birth-control, and so the whole planet is covered by people... who also apparently don't believe in abstinence or "safe sex". But, oddly, they do believe it's OK to kill each other off with exotic, imported diseases which are stolen from unwilling donors.
Odona catches a disease, not from contact from Kirk, but from the blood that they stole from him. At the end she is cured by Dr. McCoy. The plan then is for them to use her blood to infect others - which makes her a literal femme fatale, as well as a deceptive bitch.
What an utterly despicable bunch the Gideons generally are.
Kirk NEVER was honestly interested in her. He was obviously playing her, the same way we've seen him play several other enemy females.
All site contents Copyright L. Goodwin 1990 - 2003