Atlantis Redeemed Page 16

  He’d never been jealous of drops of water before.

  He wanted to lick each one of them off her body, one at a time.

  His body was shaking with need, and his cock strained against his pants so hard it hurt him. He was aroused beyond anything he’d ever known, just from the sight of the curve of her back and hip, down to her firm, round ass. He caught a glimpse of the silken shadow between her legs as she turned, and he was suddenly urgently, fiercely sure that he’d never wanted anything in his life as much as he wanted to go to her, stripping his own clothes off as he went, and plunge his cock into her so deeply that she’d cry out his name.

  Instead, he turned around. Turned away.

  All heroic sacrifices did not involve weapons and battle and death. Some were about a beautiful human woman standing in a shower.

  Several minutes later, during which he’d taken only two quick glances when he felt the curse snaking around the edges of his mind, she finally called his name.

  “Brennan? I’m done and wrapped up in these wonderful towels. I don’t know how to turn off the shower, or if you wanted to—”

  “Oh, by the gods, how I want to,” he growled, then he turned and pounced on her, yanked her off her feet, and kissed her, fast, furious, almost bruising. “But I won’t.” He released her and, tearing at his clothes, stepped into the shower, throwing shirt and pants and boots against the far wall with, at least in the case of the boots, satisfying thunks.

  She sighed loudly, and he heard it even over the roar of the shower and the pounding of so much blood in his skull. “I’m too tired right now, or we’d have a little chat. Do you have spare clothes?”

  He pointed to the cabinet under his sink, then squeezed his eyes shut, so he wasn’t tempted to see her bend over. The towel was long, but, still . . .

  “I have several sets of sparring clothes under there. They’ll be too big, but they’re soft enough to sleep in.”

  “Thank you.”

  When he was forced to open his eyes to see her, for fear of the results of the curse, she was dressed in a soft gray sparring outfit, and the sight of her wearing his clothes sent a spear of fierce possession thundering through him.

  She was his, and he would keep her safe, even if it had to be in spite of herself.

  He had no choice.

  “I’ll just lean here, okay?” she called out, leaning back against the wall and closing her eyes. Every line of her body drooped with exhaustion and he hurried his bathing so he could put her to bed.

  His bed.

  She would be in his bed, and he would have to somehow, by all the gods, refrain from touching her.

  He caught the groan before it escaped, and with a quick glance at her, still resting against the wall, he turned so that his back was to her, in case she should look up. With a fierce, practiced stroke, he pumped his cock once, then twice, in a painfully necessary attempt to take some of the edge off his need before he had to share a bed with her.

  Even as seed spurted from his body and was instantly washed away by the force of the shower stream, he knew it was futile. No mere physical release would ever keep him from wanting her.

  He was hers, and he was cursed, and any future they might have together was doomed. He made a sound of pure despair, deep in his throat, and shut down the shower.

  Maybe sleep would make it better. He didn’t see how it could make it any worse.

  Chapter 18

  Tiernan stared at Brennan, who was lying on the other side of the bed from her, as relaxed and at ease as, oh, a slab of marble—if marble could radiate misery. She was feeling a little tense herself, after the glimpses she’d snuck of his naked body in that shower. The man was pure, muscled, hard-bodied, delicious goodness, which was entirely unfair.

  “Worse,” he muttered, his eyes clenched shut. “Oh, gods, of course it will be worse. I can’t see you when I sleep.”

  “You can’t see me now.”

  He opened one eye and glared at her.

  “Your fierce glare does not scare me, oh, black-eyed one,” she said, grinning in spite of her exhaustion. “You’re pretty used to barking orders and people falling in line, aren’t you?”

  His other eye popped open. Now both of them glared at her, in all their long-lashed, color-changing gorgeousness. “I am not. I am accustomed to working with bullheaded warriors with more guts than brains. I wonder why I am surprised by anything about you, now that you mention it,” he said, his voice nearly a growl. “You could be related to Christophe. Or Ven, for that matter.”

  She laughed out loud as the purity of his truth rang through her veins like champagne filtered through her blood. “Wow. That was purely true, not even a shade of deception about it. Do your friends know you think so highly of them? Bullheaded with more guts than brains, I believe you said?”

  “Believe me, I have said this to them in far more colorful language,” he said dryly, and she started laughing again, an edge of wildness in it.

  He narrowed his eyes at the sound and then he sighed, his face relaxing, and held out his hand. “You are tired beyond the endurance levels of your body and mind. Please rest.”

  Slowly, cautiously, she reached over and twined her fingers in his. At the touch of his warm, strong hand, realization dawned. “Oh, Brennan, I didn’t think,” she whispered. “When we’re asleep, of course you won’t be able to see me. Do you think—I mean, will the curse—”

  His expression grew even more grim. “I have no way to know the answer to that, but my expectation is that, yes, closing my eyes in sleep will activate the curse and I will forget you.”

  Pain sliced through her at his words, emphasizing the truth she’d been trying to hide, even from herself. “I don’t want you to forget me,” she whispered. “I know this isn’t about me, and this is so hard for you, and our mission is far more important than my stupid feelings, but, oh, Brennan.”

  She stopped and scrubbed tears from her eyes before they could slide down her cheeks to the silken pillowcase. “I don’t want you to forget me.”

  He froze, going so still that for a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her, and then his hand tightened on hers and he pulled her slowly, inexorably, across the wide expanse of bed until she was nestled against his side. His chest was bare, so her face rested on smooth, warm skin that covered rock-hard muscle, but he’d pulled on a pair of the soft sparring pants, probably for her sake.

  She wished he hadn’t.

  “I could never forget you completely,” he murmured against her hair. “No matter the curse, no matter how powerful the god who commanded it. You are the lost part of my soul, Tiernan Butler, and I only wish for years and years and years to prove it to you.”

  She stiffened a little in his arms, and he pulled her a little closer into the heat of his body, but she shook her head. “I don’t want your feelings to be the result of a god’s curse. I want to have time to get to know you, to explore these feelings between us. If you forget me every time you go to sleep, it’s going to be very tough. Maybe impossible.”

  He raised a hand and stroked her hair back from her forehead, then kissed her there. “You said feelings between us, did you not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Did a god curse you to care about me?”

  She knew where he was going, but answered him honestly. “No, of course not.”

  “And yet you admit you have feelings for me, even a little?”

  “More than a little,” she admitted. “It’s kind of crazy, but there it is.”

  “Kindly grant me the right to the same feelings, then, leaving out whatever a god may have encouraged,” he said, his voice gone deep and husky, resonating in very private places in her body.

  “I want you to kiss me, Brennan, but we don’t seem to be able to stop at kissing, and I’m so tired, and so afraid of the curse kicking in when we’re asleep, and so worried that everything I’ve worked for is falling apart around my ears.”

  “Just let me hold you. I’ll stay a
wake as long as I can, which will be no hardship with you in my arms,” he said, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face.

  “Huh. Lucky you,” she muttered darkly, wondering if she had the energy to go for a very cold shower. “Also, that was a lie.”

  He laughed and leaned over to kiss her nose. “Yes, it was a lie, my beautiful truth teller. Holding you is, in fact, very hard.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Very, very hard?”

  He caught her hand and pressed it against his erection and then released it so quickly that she was caught off guard, with her hand hovering uncertainly above his very impressive and, definitely, very hard penis.

  “It’s a constant state since I met you,” he confessed, looking pained at the admission.

  A little niggle of guilt scratched at her. After all, in the forest it had been all about her. Shouldn’t she reciprocate?

  “Talk to me,” he commanded, surprising her yet again. “Tell me about growing up with your Gift. Just for a little while, until you fall asleep.” He turned to her, his pain and worry naked on his face. “Please?”

  That please got to her in a way that commands never would have.

  “It was hard,” she began, then laughed a little at the unintentional use of the word. “No, let’s go with ‘difficult,’ okay?”

  “Difficult. I can see how that would be so. Were there never any compensations?” He twined his fingers through hers and rested their joined hands on his hard abdomen.

  “Never? No, I can’t say never,” she said, forcing herself to sift through long-buried memories. “I saved a boy from being falsely accused of stealing a teacher’s purse once. His family was really poor so everyone thought he’d taken it for the money. He was telling the truth, and I asked a few questions of a few of the other students, pretty impressed with my mad Nancy Drew skills, and found out that the principal’s son actually stole it. Acting out to get attention from Daddy, who was kind of a jerk, I think.”

  “Were you pleased? To be able to help?”

  Her smile faded as the rest of the memory surfaced. “I was. For a while. The boy who’d been falsely accused even gave me my first kiss.”

  Brennan growled, the sound and vibration of it startling beneath their joined hands. “I don’t need to hear about you kissing anyone else.”

  She laughed. “We were twelve. This is not exactly a threat to your manhood, so calm down, wild thing.”

  “I can’t imagine you twelve. Or maybe I can. Your daughter will look exactly like you, one day.”

  She turned to look up at him, startled by something in his voice, only to find that his eyes were glowing that hot green again. “My daughter?” she said faintly.

  “I felt it premature to say ‘our’ daughter.”

  She heard the smile in his voice and grinned a little. “You think? Well, anyway, the boy I’d rescued wanted to know how I knew, and I thought I could trust him with the truth about me.”

  Brennan’s muscles tightened as his body went stiff again. “Did he betray your trust?”

  “Not exactly. It was more that . . . he thought I was cool. You know? He was a twelve-year-old boy and suddenly he had a walking, talking lie detector. He wanted to experiment, and for a while, I was glad enough to play along.”

  “Just to have someone to play with. A friend,” Brennan ventured.

  She sighed. “I guess so. Close enough. But I couldn’t do it for long. I was a freak, a curiosity to him more than a friend.” A tiny pang of sadness struck, and she realized to her surprise that it still hurt.

  After all these years.

  What would it do to her if she lost Brennan?

  In a swift motion, he rolled over so that he was facing her, both of them on their sides, and he still cradled her in his arms. “I am your friend. No matter what else, I will always be so.”

  The simple truth of it took her breath away, as did the heat in his now-black eyes, with their centers of blue-green flame.

  “I . . . thank you. I am your friend, too,” she whispered.

  “Later? When you were older? Adults spend much of each day engaged in deception. How painful is that for you?”

  His clear perception of what life had been like with her Gift offered a calm that soothed her, and she relaxed against him a little.

  “It was—it is—easier to be alone. Alone so often that sometimes I forget what it means to be anything else.” The painful admission caused her eyes to burn, but she refused to let the tears fall. Not here. Not with him.

  She’d cried enough tears in her life.

  “Shh, mi amara, shh. Please. You don’t need to tell me any of this when it brings you such pain.” He stroked her hair and her back, making shushing noises, murmuring gentle words in a musical language that must have been Atlantean. “Hush, please, my beautiful one. You don’t need to share any of this with me.”

  But she found, to her surprise, that she wanted to share it. Wanted to unburden herself of some of the years of pain. “It was hard when I was a kid, but the teenage years, wow. Talk about torture.”

  She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, remembering high school. Johnny. Kim. Prom.

  “My boyfriend in high school didn’t lie to me. At least that’s what I thought. He never gave me the slightest reason for suspicion. Nothing he told me ever pinged my truth senses. Even when he was never available to go out on Friday nights.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He was studying. Or visiting his sick grandmother. Can you believe I was so stupid?”

  Brennan propped his head up on his hand. “He was lying to you?”

  “He was lying to me. He was dating my best friend at the same time he was dating me. Except she knew about it, because he acted like my boyfriend at school. She was acting really odd, but she said she was stressed-out about college applications, and she was careful never to actually lie to me.”

  She laughed and shot a cynical glance at Brennan. “Of course, I never came out and asked her, ‘Are you sleeping with my boyfriend?’ either.”

  “This man,” Brennan began, then stopped to take a deep breath. “This boy. You were . . . intimate with him, too?”

  Alerted by something in his tone, Tiernan whipped her head around to stare into his eyes, which had gone icy green again. “No, and even if I had been, you can’t possibly be jealous of a seventeen-year-old boy.”

  “Jealousy is not it, exactly, but he hurt you, and I find myself wanting to beat some sense into him,” he growled. “He is not seventeen today.”

  “He was my first in another way. He was the first person to lie to me that I couldn’t feel it, but he wasn’t the last. They’re rare, but they’re out there. I think it’s maybe the same kind of person who could pass a lie detector. Sociopaths or narcissists; people who really don’t care about the results of their lies, so they don’t register with me.”

  “You can tell when I lie,” Brennan said, a purely masculine smile on his face. “I care very much.”

  She smiled, but her eyes drooped shut and she had to fight to keep them open. “I know you do. My parents, they didn’t last. Their marriage. Too many lies between them, too many deceptions. I don’t usually trust anybody, but somehow—” Her mouth cracked open in a giant yawn and she leaned her head on his shoulder, snuggling close to his solid, warm strength. “Somehow I know I can trust you.”

  “You have given me a gift beyond price, Tiernan Butler,” he murmured. “I would rather have your trust than all the sunken treasure in the ocean.”

  “Easy for you to say, Mr. Billionaire,” she said, laughing. “Who needs sunken treasure when you could buy and sell Boston a couple of times over?”

  He tucked the silken covers around her shoulders and lightly kissed her lips, sending a shiver of pure, sensual need through her that almost—almost—cut through her exhaustion. “Rest now, and we will discuss treasure and buying Boston in the morning.”

  She stopped fighting the waves of tiredness and sank into the
softness of his bed, the strength and warmth of his arms, and the magic of Atlantis. She was falling asleep in Atlantis, with a warrior straight out of the pages of a lovely fairy tale.

  “Rest, mi amara. I’ll stay awake and guard your dreams,” he said, and she sank down, down, into a cloud of peace and calm. Tomorrow she could return to worry. The last thing she saw was an edge of light as morning broke through the window. They’d stayed up all night, and ushered in the dawn.

  “The first of many, I hope,” she whispered, and then the darkness took her.

  Chapter 19

  Brennan awoke to the very rare and yet highly appreciated sensation of a warm armful of woman curled up against him. He waited awhile before opening his eyes, searching his memory to see if he could pinpoint just how and when the night before he’d broken his own rule about bringing women to his rooms in the palace.

  He’d learned long, long ago the consequences of slipping from a very straight and narrow path, after all.

  When nothing—nobody—came to mind, he mentally cursed the vast quantity of Atlantean ale he must have consumed and then gritted his teeth against the arduous task that faced him. He needed to get her out of his rooms with the minimum of post-coital drama. It was unfortunate Christophe was not nearby to offer advice; the man was a master at managing irate women.

  The woman stirred against him and then her soft, unexpectedly musical voice confirmed that she was awake. “Brennan?”

  She knew his name, then. Too bad he could not reciprocate that knowledge.

  He’d postponed as long as he could; honor demanded courtesy, at the very least. He opened his eyes and found himself looking directly into the most vividly beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. Not brown exactly but the darkest amber shade of ancient gems, with tiny flickers of honey-gold near the pupils.