Atlantis Unleashed (23 page)

With his mouth. With his hands.

Yes. Yes,
the Nereid whispered.
She is ours. Take her. Take her now.

Justice leaned forward, caught almost hypnotically in a web of heated desire. Keely's eyes widened, but she didn't protest or try to evade him. Instead, her lips parted slightly on an indrawn gasp of air.

Lust coiled inside him, sharp-edged and raw. His cock hardened so painfully that he thought the pressure would drive him mad. He needed her.

He
must
have her.

He lifted his hands and finally,
finally
wrapped them in that glorious hair, and she sighed in either relief or surrender. He didn't know which. Didn't care.

As long as she let him taste her.

Both sides of his fractured soul merged into a single, driving need. “Keely,” he groaned, pushed almost beyond bearing it. “Please let me kiss you. Just . . . just once,” he said, even knowing it for a lie. He could never take just one taste of her lips.

Never.

She hesitated, and the blackness of an abyss yawned before him. If she denied him, would he be able to accept her wishes? Or would he lose himself and his very soul to the blackness of his hungers and take her, force her, plunder this woman he needed so very much?

She continued to hesitate and, though screaming pain sliced through him, he stopped himself. He stopped both of his selves. He pulled away, even though the Nereid howled in gnashing rage inside him.

Before he could untangle her hair from his fingers, she placed her own hands over his. Stared into his eyes. Parted her lips and nervously moistened them with her tongue.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. Just once.”

Then she lifted her head and touched her lips, ever so tentatively, to his.

And he was lost.

Flame and longing and soaring ecstasy ripped through him, just from the first gentle taste of her lips. He shuddered and tried to remain still, tried not to frighten her, but she trembled under his hands and leaned into him, and all hope of sanity fled.

He roughly pulled her into his lap as they knelt on the floor, and he captured her gasp in his mouth, his tongue sweeping in to claim, to capture, to conquer. He wrapped one hand, still tangled in her hair, around the back of her head to pull her even closer, and his other hand caressed her back from her nape all the way down to her lovely, firm ass, settling her more fully against him.

The pressure of her weight on his cock made him groan deep in the back of his throat and her answering moan inflamed him beyond all reason. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back—she
kissed him back
—and he lost all sense and logic, falling into shining waves of pure desire.

Justice kissed her as he'd never kissed anyone before, and reality parted before him as he hurled into fantasy at rocket speed. She tasted like honey and fruit and the finest wine.

She tasted like salvation.

Need pulsed through him, and he kissed her. It was everything, and yet it somehow wasn't enough. He needed her naked. He needed her naked, warm, and willing underneath him. He needed to drive himself into the wet warmth of her body. He needed to taste every inch of her skin until he was imprinted on her like a brand.

He tore his mouth away from hers, panting, unable to catch his breath, no thought in his head but to rip the clothes from her body. She stared up at him, eyes wide, dazed. Her lips were swollen from his kisses and her hair was tangled around her in wild clouds of flame. She looked as though she'd been tumbled in his bed during a long night of wild lovemaking.

By all the gods, that's what he was going to give her.

He grasped the two sides of her shirt, some hazy thought of ripping it off her pounding through his mind, but a strange noise penetrated his thoughts.

A strange, growling noise. He blinked and noticed a pale pink stain flush across Keely's cheeks.

“Um, that was me,” she said, biting her lip. “Actually, that was my stomach. Growling. I'm starving.”

She sat there on his lap, blushing, warm and flushed and eminently desirable. Suddenly shy. A strange and unfamiliar feeling rippled its way through him and burst out of him as a harsh, rusty sound. It took him a moment to recognize it as laughter. Real laughter, his first in a very long time.

She ducked her head a little, smiling. “Pretty mundane, right? You kiss me in a ‘knock the universe off its foundation' kind of way, and all I can think about is my stomach. But I am really hungry.” Her smile faded, and she looked around. “Not to mention, in spite of this very lovely little bout of trauma-induced insanity, we're still trapped in here and we have to figure out a way to escape.”

The Nereid's howls of frustration rocked through Justice's brain, but he kept the smile on his face so she wouldn't see it. Wouldn't guess that his mind was splitting in two, or discover that one half of him was violent and unstable.

Justice closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating fiercely on sealing his mind against the Nereid again. It was harder this time, but he finally accomplished it.

When he opened his eyes, she was still there. Not a dream, then, but reality far more exquisite than he could ever deserve. “Thank you.”

Confusion shadowed her lovely green eyes. “Thank me for what?”

“Thank you for telling me that I was not the only one affected by that kiss,” he said and watched her cheeks turn faintly pink again. “And thank you for reminding me of our priorities. Food and escape. Or escape and food. Either way, the discussion we must have is best put off until later.”

“The discussion?”

“In solving one mystery for me, you have opened another, Keely. I had forgotten the Nereid vision quest and all of its ramifications. Certainly I had never considered it to apply to me. But there is no other reason that I would have seen your face when I was lost in the Void. You are part of my own personal vision quest.”

Smiling a little, he forced out the words he knew she would not want to hear. “I'm glad it was a ‘knock the universe off its foundation' kind of kiss, because you are my destined mate.”

Atlantis, the cavern

Keely paced the edges of the cavern, staying as far from the crazy “you're my mate” man as possible. Justice was doing something at one of the walls; she wasn't sure what. After the “mate” announcement, she'd fallen into a shocked silence and then backed away from him, muttering speculations about his need for a nice round of electroshock therapy.

Half an hour later, she was still mumbling under her breath. From the narrow-eyed glances he'd shot her way, he probably had an idea that her remarks were far from flattering. He'd stayed well away, even when she'd washed up as best as she could in the pool and she'd caught him staring at her as if he wanted to devour her.

At least he hadn't tried to jump her. She wasn't sure how far he was likely to try to go with the “mate” thing. For now, they needed to solve the problem at hand.

“We've got to get out of here,” she said for probably the twentieth time, but loudly enough to be sure he heard her. “We're
going
to get out of here.”

Justice didn't bother to answer, which didn't offend her, since he'd responded the first dozen or so times she'd made the same statement. He was undoubtedly as tired of hearing her as she was tired of saying it. Still, she carefully stayed at least ten feet from him at all times, wary of being in reach after that kiss.

That kiss.

That rock-the-universe, blow-fireworks-through-the-sky kiss. He'd set off the aurora borealis inside her skull, and she'd responded with a growling stomach.

Perfect. Just perfect. Although she'd always been a girl too practical for fairy tales, so meeting a fairy-tale prince didn't change anything. Not even when he was a prince who had the most amazingly beautiful hair she'd ever seen on a man.

Hey, maybe he was insane, Mr. I'm Your Destiny and all, but at least he was gorgeous. Considering what he'd been through in his life, he deserved to be a little nuts. A tendril of sympathy whispered inside her mind as the memory of her vision surfaced. It's a wonder he was anywhere in the same zip code as sanity.

Speaking of which, how many people had thought she was crazy? Nobody knew better than she did that sanity was a spectrum of relativity. Anyway, it had been so long since she'd been naked with a man that maybe she needed to lower her standards. Crazy? No problem, so long as he had great hair.

She sighed and snuck a glance at him from under her lashes. His hair was dry now. Silky, glossy, and gorgeous; it flowed in waves of blue down his back, clear to the top of the finest butt in the history of mankind. Or Atlantean kind. Or whatever.

He wasn't Prince Charming; he was Prince Tall, Dark, and Deadly. Justice was no perfect, plastic prince, but a very real man with a very damaged psyche.

However, she, as she kept reminding herself, was no shrink. So maybe she should keep her distance, regardless of her hormones playing marching band.

He finally spoke up from where he was prying at one of the gem-encrusted walls. “I thought this was a hidden door to another passageway, but it's nothing. Just another secret compartment that's full of a whole lot of nothing helpful.”

He held something up in his hand, and the light from the lanterns flashed off it like paparazzi flashbulbs on Swarovski crystals. She couldn't help herself. She was an archaeologist, after all, and professional curiosity was killing her.

“What is it?”

“More gems. Everywhere we turn in here, it's more and more and more worthless gemstones,” he said, hurling them on the ground.

She walked over, careful not to get too close. “I'm not sure
worthless
is the word I'd use,” she said, bending down to select a sapphire the size of her palm from among the gems littering the floor. “I feel a little bit like Indiana Jones discovering an ancient treasure. This rock alone is probably worth more than a year's salary for me.”

He shrugged carelessly. “Your salary is no longer important, as we will be sure you have everything you need. Take the sapphire if you want to. Take all the gems you want. To us they're only stones, as you say. At best, instruments of healing now that we have a gem singer.”

A bitter taste like rotten grapefruit soured the back of her mouth. He thought she wanted his gemstones. He thought she would raid the most incredible archaeological site she'd ever set foot on.

He didn't know her very well.

She decided to take the high road and ignore the comment, and she held the gem up to the light, examining it. “This reminds me of the one that Liam sabotaged me with back in my office. The companion stone to the Star of Artemis that Nereus was talking about.”

Justice reacted as though she'd shot an electric current through him. “What? The Star of Artemis? Nereus? Tell me everything, and I will give you every gem you could possibly want in a dozen lifetimes.”

Okay, that did it. Again with the buying her off with gems. She knelt down and very carefully placed the sapphire on the floor next to the other gems. Then she stood up and folded her arms across her ever-more-loudly growling stomach, lifted her chin, and put pure defiance into her stare. “I don't want your stupid gems. What I want is a pizza. Or a plate piled high with pancakes, dripping butter and hot, sticky syrup. I'm not sure what you think you mean by telling me my salary is no longer important to me, but guess what? I'm trying not to be offended. I'm going to pretend I don't even care about any of this right now. All I want is to get out of here and find something to eat.”

Almost before she finished her sentence, he leapt across the space between them and clasped her wrists in his hands. A wild excitement burned in his eyes and he smiled down at her. “Say it again. Say it again, just like that. Except add more descriptive terminology.”

“What are you talking about? I don't want your hard, blue, shiny gemstones.”

He shouted out a laugh. “No, Keely. My beautiful, brilliant Keely. The pancakes. Describe the pancakes again. With butter and syrup and the smell and the sight and the taste.”

She sighed, shaking her head. “You've gone over the deep end, haven't you? It's sad, too, after everything you've gone through in your life, that the simple description of pancakes was the final straw.”

He laughed again, then leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “No, I'm not insane. Breakfast food has not driven me over the deep end, as you call it. I'm discovering the scope of my Nereid powers, and I think I found one that's related to the transport power that brought us here. I'm as hungry as you are, Keely, and when you described the pancakes, I could almost smell them.”