Atlantis Redeemed (10 page)

“I had a certain reputation to uphold. We have set up my identity as a very eccentric billionaire who is not only arrogant but highly demanding.” Stepping closer, he lifted a strand of her hair, then let it slide through his fingers, pinning her in place with the force of his searing green gaze. “He is lucky I did nothing more than intimidate him. When you smiled at him, I wanted to make him bleed.”

She caught her breath at the unvarnished truth in his words. “Brennan, you said you would behave.”

“Yes, and I will do my best, Tiernan. That does not mean I do not experience the emotions I am now forced to suppress. Interesting irony, is it not?”

A muscle in his jaw jumped, and he pivoted and walked away from her, muttering something under his breath that was definitely not English and definitely not very nice.

“I heard that,” she called. “Will you teach me how to swear in Atlantean when this is over?”

He stopped still and then glanced back at her over his shoulder, amusement tilting up one corner of his mouth. “I will teach you anything you want in Atlantean, when this is over.”

It was her turn to flush as his intended meaning swept over her, causing certain highly provocative visuals to dance through her brain. But thinking of one extremely buff, unbelievably hot Atlantean warrior naked was not doing anything to move them toward their goal.

“So it’s their move,” she said briskly. “Now we go to the reception and see what we can find out from drunken scientists with hopefully loose lips?”

He nodded, but before he could respond, Tiernan’s phone rang again. She hesitated, then retrieved it and thumbed the screen to “on” just as it clicked over to voice mail. The screen told her she’d missed yet another call from Rick, who wasn’t going to be the slightest bit happy about it, but he knew by now that she often went hours or even days without checking in when she was hot on the trail of a story.

“Hot” was certainly the operative word. She shoved her phone in her pocket and studied Brennan as he crossed to her window and looked out into the night. The dark waves of his hair brushed the collar of his shirt, which drew her eye to that lovely expanse of broad, muscled shoulders and back, tapering down to a very nice waist and oh, holy Atlantis, the man even had a tight, perfectly shaped butt. Why were all the gorgeous ones either married or two-thousand-year-old cursed warriors?

She rolled her eyes, both at her black humor and at her easy acceptance of his story. She’d had a long time to get used to unbelievable tales, though, and it didn’t hurt that nobody could lie to her. Humanity’s reality had changed almost beyond recognition in the past ten years. The world’s shock, fear, and disbelief over the existence of shifters, vampires, and who knew what else, had gradually given way to a wary acceptance and then—now—even a dangerous complacency. The monsters counted on that, though. The bad ones. The deadly ones.

Not all of them had wanted to come out and face the light of day and the insane press of media. Many, many of the vampires and shifters had wanted to remain hidden, content to remain the stuff of legend, nightmares, and really bad horror films. But the majority, or at least the most powerful, had won that argument.

Tiernan and her colleagues had discussed the reasoning for years, over endless pitchers of beer, margaritas, cosmopolitans, and mojitos, as drink fads had come and gone. They’d each had their pet theories that had changed over time, but Tiernan had always stuck firm to her original explanation. Vamps were the ultimate game players. Showing themselves to humans and integrating, more or less successfully, had allowed them a much larger arena. Now they weren’t fighting just for control of individual territories and the “sheep,” as they called the humans who lived there, but for control of countries and kingdoms, insinuating themselves into governments and power centers in industry, finance, and the media. The U.S. had gone the furthest, the fastest: now Congress had a third house, called the Primus, that was all-vampire.

Power on an international level, and why not? It was much easier to take over the world when you could travel to its cities on your own corporate jet, with blacked-out windows and willing donors who doubled as flight attendants or simply came as guests.

Now the not-so-lost continent of Atlantis was in the mix, complete with a tyrannical god-ruler who had arbitrarily cursed one of his warriors for a tragedy that wasn’t even his fault. Corelia had been the architect of that decision, leaving Brennan no options. He hadn’t even known about the baby. To Tiernan, that was the worst punishment of all: to find out that you were a father and find out that you were not, all in the same breath.

An unpleasant thought struck her like a lightning bolt to her stomach:
had
he been? Corelia didn’t sound like she’d been the most faithful of women. What if the child hadn’t been Brennan’s at all? Unfortunately, that led to unanswerable questions: Could a god really know these things? Did Poseidon have some sort of super DNA tester abilities or had he merely been guessing? She groaned at the barrage of questions—ones she could never ask Brennan without hurting him even further.

Brennan had been telling her the truth. He believed he would not harm her; that he would die to protect her. She only had to worry about a recurrence of the strange fit he’d gone into when the curse had struck, and that was easy enough to handle. All she had to do was escape long enough for all of the terms of the curse to apply. “Out of sight, out of mind” took on a whole new meaning. If he couldn’t see her, he wouldn’t remember her, and she’d be free to get on with her mission.

Alone.

Alone was better, anyway. So there was no reason the prospect of Brennan forgetting her very existence should cause a hollow feeling in her stomach. She kicked herself out of her mental wanderings as Brennan wheeled around and strode toward her so swiftly that he’d already halted, only inches away from her, before she could think, move, or even breathe. Staring into her eyes, his own narrowed as if daring her to stop him, he put an arm around her waist and pulled her even closer, until her breasts were pressed into the hard heat of his chest. Just when she thought he’d kiss her, he simply rested his face on the top of her head and inhaled deeply, like he was breathing her in. Memorizing her scent.

Every nerve ending she had went from zero to sixty at the feel of his hot, hard body against hers, and she had to struggle against a wicked and entirely abnormal impulse to snuggle even closer. It had been months, no, more than a year, since she’d had any kind of intimate relationship, and her body was crying out that enough was enough of the enforced abstinence, already.

It was more than that, though. The heat sizzling through her limbs was about way more than lack of sex. This was personal—it was about Brennan. The way he looked at her, as if he’d like to strip her bare and take her up against the wall, not to mention the things he’d said to her . . . Well. That had been enough to set the most restrained woman’s sexual urges on fire, and she’d never been one for restraint.

He turned his head so she felt his warm breath against her ear, and her traitorous body trembled a little. Her cheeks instantly burned with embarrassment. It was one thing to have the hots for the crazy ancient cursed guy in your hotel room; it was quite another to let him know it.

“I, who have spent so very long being entirely rational, find that any semblance of calm or logic has deserted me, simply from the sight of your innocent touch on that man’s arm,” he murmured. “I have become a Neanderthal, lacking only a cave to which I might drag you and a club with which to beat off the occasional stray woolly mammoth.”

He’d surprised a laugh out of her, in spite of the danger of the situation. “The sight of billionaire businessman Mr. Brennan in an animal-skin loincloth is just not one I can picture at all,” she said, relaxing against him.

He pulled her even closer and pressed a kiss into the curve of her neck, making her shiver in his arms. She put her hands on his chest, realizing in a dim and hazy corner of her mind that this was dangerous.
He
was dangerous. Right now, she so didn’t care.

“The sound of your laughter is like a symphony heralding spring to the long, barren winter of my existence,” he said, his voice husky. “I cannot think why I am fighting this tidal wave of emotion. Did not my lack of feeling anything at all for so many years constitute sufficient punishment?”

Tiernan felt like she had been captured in a silken web of pure sensuality. The sound of his voice and the feel of his breath sent bursts of heat and driving need pulsing through her body. In spite of the many journalistic awards she’d won for her words, she couldn’t seem to find a single one with which to tell him to let her go.

His lips traveled up the side of her neck and then his teeth bit down gently on her earlobe, and she cried out at the sharp bolt of lust that shot through her body, hardening her nipples and causing her thighs to clench together.

“I want you now, Tiernan,” he said in that sexy voice that should have been against the law in all seven—okay, eight now—continents. His voice when he spoke the truth was a sonata. Musical, deep, and darkly seductive, the sound of it in her ear was almost enough to make her start yanking at his clothes until she could put her hands and her mouth on hot, male skin.

And
that
scared her enough that she jerked away from him. His arms tensed for a fraction of a second, just enough to let her know that there was no way she would have been able to escape the strength in those steel-banded muscles if he hadn’t allowed her to. The thought that he’d let her go both comforted and annoyed her.

“No. No wanting,” she said, hating the way her words came out all soft and husky. “We have a job to do here. We have to get ready for the reception.”

She backed away, and he watched her with the intent gaze of a predator stalking its next meal. The thought of lying on the bed, chocolate sauce and whipped cream decorating a few key body parts, flashed through her mind, and her body temperature rose about a thousand degrees.

“What reception?” he said absently as he approached her again, his eyes hot. “Society’s rules and rational thought are, in the end, meaningless. I am pleased to discover this after so many centuries of following rules and guidelines of propriety so strictly. There is no reason on earth valid enough to explain why we should not enjoy each other’s bodies if you desire me, and your reaction just now gives me some hope.”

Tiernan backed up, holding her hands up in front of her. “Oh, I can think of a lot of reasons, Brennan. I need to discover what’s going on with these scientists and call my boss back before he fires me, and you need to go back to Atlantis and maybe get checked out. Do you even have shrinks down there?”

“Those are not options that tempt me,” he said, stopping only inches in front of her and beginning to unbutton his shirt, one button by one torturous button, baring an exquisite expanse of very masculine chest. “I have spent the last two millennia of my life doing what is right, and rational, and reasonable. Now I have the ability to feel again, for only Poseidon knows how long, and I want to wrap myself in every moment of it. I want to wrap myself in
you
.”

“I don’t—We don’t—” Tiernan suddenly couldn’t find a good reason to disagree with him, and her resolve weakened further with every button. After all, they could just have one teensy little hour of wild, sweaty sex, and then get back to work, right?

Sanity popped its ugly head up in her conscience, and she groaned. “No, no, no. I can’t just get naked with somebody I barely know. It’s really out of my comfort zone, not to mention the curse and who knows what might happen, and why am I even having this conversation?”

He pulled his shirt off in one sudden movement and dropped it to the floor. “I agree. Conversation is unnecessary now. You can speak when you are naked.” He reached up and captured a long strand of her hair, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it. “You should remove your shirt so I can kiss your lovely, perfect breasts and taste every inch of your body until you are so hot and wet that you want me inside you as much as I want to be there.”

“I—I—” Her mind shut down for a few seconds at the thought of it, her hormones doing a few cartwheels. Then she blew out a breath and tried again.

“Trust me, it wouldn’t take long,” she muttered, tightening her legs together against the liquid heat she could feel building at his bold words. “But I can’t. We can’t. I just—No. We don’t know each other, and you’re under one hell of a curse, and I just—no.”

He rasped in a long breath, and then stepped away from her and inclined his head. “Thrice said and done. It is Fae law, not Atlantean, but however desperately my need for you burns inside of me, I will not take you while you have the slightest doubt.”

He clenched his hands into fists at his sides and then released them as a shudder raced through his body, and the thought that his reaction was due to suppressed need—for her—almost made Tiernan change her mind.
Almost
. She searched for something to say that could bring the tension in the room down a notch, but before she could come up with anything, her phone rang again. Thank goodness for Rick and his inability to be ignored.

She offered Brennan a tentative smile. “I’d better get that.”

He nodded, then bent to retrieve his shirt. As she pulled her phone out of her pocket and opened it, she watched him cover up that glorious chest and didn’t even try to pretend that her primary reaction was not relief but regret.

“Tiernan?” Rick’s voice barked in her ear, reminding her that she was supposed to be answering her phone. “Are you there? What the hell is going on there? Have you seen CNN? There was another attack tonight, right there in Yellowstone. The victim’s girlfriend is blaming it on wolf shifters, and it looks like it might get ugly for your contact Lucas.”