Atlantis Redeemed (22 page)

“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.

 

 

 

 

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.

“You fell asleep?” she asked, and there was something unexpected in her voice. Not curiosity or lazy satisfaction or even petulant demand.

No. It was anxiety—or even fear.

“Perhaps I was well sated, my lady,” he said, smiling in spite of himself at her beauty. He had chosen well, even in his obviously drunken state. And yet—

She bolted upright and he realized what had been niggling at him. She was fully dressed, in what looked like a set of his sparring clothes. He glanced down at himself and realized he, too, wore a pair of the soft trousers.

Her eyes widened until he could see white all the way around her irises. “Did you just say well sated? Wait—and call me your
lady
?”

He sat up as well, feeling at a distinct disadvantage, and examined her again, as if repeated viewing could bring her name or circumstances to mind. Her tousled dark hair shone in the morning light from the window, and her soft curves were very apparent, even under the loose fit of his sparring top.

“Brennan? Did you forget me? The curse—did you fall asleep and forget?” She grabbed his arm and the contact sizzled heat lightning through him like a summer storm at sea. His body arched backward from the jolt and his head slammed into the carved wooden headboard of the bed.

“Brennan!” She jumped back and away from him and scrambled off the bed. “It’s me. Tiernan. Please tell me you remember, and you’re not going to have another attack.”

“Attack? What attack? Did I hurt you?” A horrible . . . memory? premonition? was itching at the back of his brain. Had he hurt this woman?

The pain merely from the idea of it smashed into him with the force of a body blow. He could not have hurt her. Not such a woman.

But how did he know what kind of woman she was?

She stared at him, and fear battled determination on her very expressive face. Finally, coming to a decision, she climbed back on the bed and put her hands on each side of his face. “Brennan, it’s me. Tiernan Butler. I know you’ve forgotten me, because you’re cursed to forget your true mate whenever she’s out of your sight, and you seem to think that she’s me, but you have to remember. I need you. We need to finish this mission, and I don’t know how I’ll do it without you. Please, please remember.”

“The curse,” he whispered. “How did you know the terms of the curse?”

She closed her eyes, grimacing in despair, and then her eyelids snapped back open. “You’re no Sleeping Beauty, but this is all I’ve got,” she said, and it was his only warning before she leaned forward and kissed him.

She kissed him—oh, gods, it was her, it was Tiernan, and she was kissing him—and the world shattered around him.

Emotion, piercingly vivid, burned through him. Fire and ice and lightning bolts shot through him as if aimed from Poseidon’s trident itself. She kissed him, and his soul gathered its fractured pieces and remade itself in her image.

Tiernan’s image.

Emotions flooded through him in a torrent, a perfect storm, and the waves of emotion carried flotsam of a most unexpected kind: his memories. Memories of her, of them, of the past day and a half—by all the gods, so short a time?

His hands tangled in her hair and he pulled her closer and kissed her back. A kiss of gratitude for saving him, for finding him, for redeeming him from a life of bleak loneliness and despair.

She finally pulled away, breathless, and smiled tremulously. “You’d better remember me, buddy. Because if you kiss every strange woman you find in your bed like that, you and I are going to have a long talk.”

“You, Tiernan Butler, are the only strange woman I will ever kiss again,” he said, serious as a vow, and he did not understand why she laughed.

“Oh, Brennan, do you really remember me? The curse didn’t take over?”

“It did. But perhaps sleep does not affect a permanent forgetting?” He pulled her into his arms, onto his lap, unable to bear even a moment more of separation from her. He was shaking, his body shuddering with his fear that he might have lost her forever.

“I need you. Now,” he said, barely able to force out the words between his gritted teeth. “If I cannot be inside your body, I may not survive this emotion.”

She stared into his eyes for so long he was sure she would deny him, but then she smiled and, in one swift motion, pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it to the side. “I need you, too. So what are you going to do about it?”

Tiernan couldn’t believe she’d done it. Thrown her shirt and her caution aside; probably her common sense, too. But relief and passion and something far stronger than both pushed her toward this. Toward him.

He tried to be a gentleman about it, she could tell, but it was hard for him since he was staring at her breasts like heaven had opened up and dumped a load of angel dust in his lap.

She grinned at him. “Men. You’re all the same. Human or Atlantean, you’re all helpless in the face of naked boobs.”

He dragged his gaze up to her face, and his eyes had an expression of such savage intent in them that she shivered, suddenly just the smallest bit afraid.

“You understand what you are offering me,” he said, his voice barely above a growl. “There is no going back from this. You will be my woman in every way.”

She shivered again and started to cross her arms over her breasts, but he caught her hands in his, still staring deeply into her eyes.

“I wasn’t planning to sign a contract,” she said, attempting a chuckle. “I just wanted—”