Atlantis Unleashed (18 page)

Instead her gaze locked onto a vision from an entirely different kind of dream. The kind of dream that ended up with her tangled in damp sheets, aching and unfulfilled, because the primal male warriors she'd sometimes seen in her visions, when she'd touched certain artifacts from ancient civilizations, simply didn't exist in modern times. They certainly didn't show up in the academic offices at Ohio State.

But she wasn't in Ohio anymore. The hard, muscled male proof of it was climbing out of the water, stark naked and dripping wet, not a dozen feet away from her. Keely had never thought of water as an aphrodisiac before, but the drops that clung lovingly to Justice's body might qualify. They caressed him in all the places she suddenly found herself wanting to touch.

With her tongue.

She closed her eyes for a moment at her own stupidity. Now she was attracted to her kidnapper? But he'd been so careful with her yesterday, and she'd seen his bitter grief over the man's sacrifice . . . Surely he couldn't be . . .

She opened her eyes, unable to resist another peek. He'd lifted his arms to push the heavy weight of his wet, unbraided hair away from his face, and the movement did things to the lines of his body that should be illegal. Justice was so long and elegantly lean and muscled that it made the bodybuilders she'd seen working out in the gym at OSU seem like squat trolls in comparison. His powerful arms, the right with an intricate yet simple tattoo high up on the bicep; his strong legs; the thickly muscled chest that tapered down to lean hips and . . . oh.

Oh
.

She tried to swallow through a throat gone dry as the dust in an unopened pyramid. Either Atlanteans walked around in a perpetual state of intense arousal or Justice was seriously glad to see her.

A bolt of pure, sizzling heat flashed through her, turning her good sense to a silvery coil of liquid lust in exactly the place she'd like to . . .
Oh. Dear. God.

He'd caught her watching him.

Frozen, she stared into his eyes, feeling the embarrassment burn in her cheeks. Common sense and self-preservation overruled zinging hormones, though, and she shot to her feet. “Stay away from me, okay? Just . . . put on some clothes, and let's talk like civilized human beings, er, Atlantean and human beings, now that we've gotten some rest and you're, um, clean.”

He never moved or made any threatening motion, but suddenly she felt a thrill of trepidation shiver through her. Some nameless emotion burned in his eyes, changing them from darkest midnight to fiery sapphire blue. Slowly, ever so slowly, his gaze traveled from her face, down to her chest, where it lingered before continuing its perusal all the way down to her toes. The masculine arrogance and blatant possession in his gaze had her poised to run, even as her nipples swelled and throbbed in the lace cups of her bra.

No way would she respond to him. Nothing in her background or her fiercely independent personality would make her the type to be turned on by some naked, alpha-male throwback to the days when men were men and women were possessions.

Even as she told herself that, her body was turning traitor, evidently tired of lonely nights. As his gaze swept slowly back up her body, her skin tingled—oversensitized and desperate for his touch.

That tingling sensation, finally, was what snapped her out of the sensual trance he'd somehow put her in and back to logic, caution, and a little damn sense.

“Cut it out,” she snapped. “Stop staring at me like I'm the spoils of your own personal war, and get dressed. We need to talk about how we're getting out of here, okay? Where is the exit? Where is the passageway, or the tunnel, or the super-magical Atlantean elevator that will get us the heck
out
of here?”

He held his hands out to the sides, palms up, as if to show her that he meant no threat. Unfortunately, the movement only highlighted the strength in his muscled arms and made her realize that, her years of self-defense classes notwithstanding, and even though he was naked and unarmed, she would be no match for him.

Well, he was naked.
Not so sure about unarmed
, said the previously silent evil-seductress side of her nature.
That's a pretty big weapon he's got there.

Great. She picked
now
to go all multiple personality.

The sane side of her went right back to its personal agenda of scared, terrified, and pretty darn frightened, if the goose bumps traveling up her arms were any indication.

“Keely, please be calm,” he said quietly, as if soothing a wounded animal.

“I'll be calm when you get me out of here,” she pointed out, proud of how reasonable her voice sounded, when her heart was thumping in her chest. “Not the way we got here, either. None of that ‘beam me up, Scotty,' crap. A nice, normal tunnel. Or stairs. Stairs would be good.”

“But—”

“And get dressed!” she shouted, out of patience. “I don't care if you look like some kind of Greek statue come to life. I want you to put your clothes back on!”

That slow, dangerous smile of his—it ought to be registered as a lethal weapon, really—spread across his face. “You think I look like a statue?”

Keely scowled at him. “Clothes. Now.”

Still smiling, he sauntered over to a pile of clothing and, not nearly quickly enough for her peace of mind, pulled on a shirt and pants. Her view of his tightly muscled behind, as he stepped into the pants, nearly made her groan out loud.

She was going to get years' worth of fantasies out of this experience, if she happened to live through it.

“Okay, fine. Now you're dressed. So you can lead me to the up arrow.”

He shook his head as he crossed the mosaic tile toward her in a few long strides. “I would like to believe that I would release you if I were able, in spite of the dark desires of the Other inside me, Keely. But I'm not entirely sure how we got here, since the power of transport has never been one at my command until now.”

“But—”

“I don't know how to use it again.” He stopped, mere inches away from her, and stared down into her eyes, his own spiraling with vivid blue-green flames. “Unfortunately, the staircase that leads from the Temple to this cavern was blocked by rock and dirt in a cave-in some years ago. There is no way out.”

Keely had never suffered from claustrophobia, thankfully, even after some of the more outrageous treatments various shrinks had subjected her to in childhood, such as the sensory-deprivation tank that only lasted one session.

They hadn't known an eight-year-old could scream that loudly.

But the news that she was trapped with Justice in an underground cavern—underground in
Atlantis
, and no
way
did she want to even think about the possibility that the whole shebang could spring a leak or something—took her to a whole new level of psychosis.

Her breathing sped up to hyperventilation, and she started trembling, fluctuating with each shuddering breath between fury and panic. “You . . . you . . . Are you insane? You brought me to a
cave—underground—
with no idea of how to get back out again?”

He raised one dark eyebrow. “Most caves are underground.”

“I know that! I'm an archaeologist, you—”

Ignoring her sputtered words, Justice lifted a hand as if to touch her. Oh, no. Not going to happen, whether he was sex on a stick or not. She jumped back out of his reach, clutching her head in her hands and inhaling deeply. Tried to calm down, so she could think rationally about a plan. A plan, that's what she needed.

Not random, useless terror about what the archaeologists of the future would think when they found her crumbling bones lying beside a pair of gloves, another skeleton, and a damn sword.

She belatedly realized that her fingers were twined in her hair. Her
bare
fingers. “My gloves! What did you do with my gloves?” Her breathing sped up again until her lungs burned inside her chest.

He silently pointed to the floor near the pallet where she'd slept. She backed away from him and bent down to snatch them up, but he moved with that eerie, inhuman speed and caught her wrist before she could pull the first glove over her hand.

“Why, Keely? Why the gloves? Do you feel they offer you some protection?” A grimace twisted his face. “Am I so terrifying to you?”

He released her wrist and crouched down, then stood up with his sheathed sword in his hands. Before she could protest, deflect, or take any evasive action at all, he shoved it into her arms.

“Take this, then. Take the sword I've worn for so long it is a part of myself, and use it against me if you fear me so much,” he said, his dark eyes and roughened voice coated with ice. “To kill a man, press the pointed end here.” He placed his palm flat on his chest, over his heart, but it was too late, too late.

The hilt of the sword fitted itself into her hand as though it were seeking her. Seeking her knowledge of it. She had a fanciful notion that it was laying claim to her mind, even as Justice had laid claim to the rest of her when he'd brought her here.

Soon there was no room for thought as the weight of ages crushed the whimsy, crushed her defenses. Ages of time and eons of violence. Violent, bloody death splashing through the unprotected corridors of her mind.

“No,” she tried to protest, even as the resonance of the sword's history beat her into submission. “No, no, no. Too much, too much. I can't . . . my gloves . . . I can't—”

“Keely!” He called out to her, but the sound was muted. Muffled. Yet again, he caught her.

Held her.

But it was too late. She fell, screaming soundlessly, into the blackness of her own personal void. As she fell, she looked into his eyes and managed one final sentence.

“I can't survive it.”

Keely smashed into the reality of the vision with actual physical pain. A great wrenching and tearing of the fabric of her existence manifested itself in the searing pain of broken and bleeding flesh, oddly focused on her face and throat.

She gasped and fell back, her attention captured by the floor—a very different floor than the one in the cavern. This floor was brilliantly white marble, inlaid with designs of gold and copper and another metal, similar to copper, but sparkling and almost gem-like. The wrenching pain began again, and she realized she might not survive the vision. Pain like nothing she'd ever felt wrapped around her throat as though it had been crushed. She gasped, wheezing in a breath, but a moaning cry came from farther into the room and she looked up to try to find the source.

It was a dark-haired woman, kneeling on the floor, clutching at her belly. Her enormous, rippling, pregnant belly. The woman was clearly in labor, and the agony of it made Keely rethink any random yearnings she'd ever had for children. She cried out again. It must be contractions. If they came this quickly, one on top of the other, didn't that mean something?

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. The woman was about to have a baby—right there on the floor. Keely started to call out, but the sharp, searing pain that sliced through her throat told her that the woman she'd become in her vision wasn't going to be talking anytime soon. What had happened to her? She gingerly felt her neck and flinched from the sting of torn flesh. Her fingertips traced the wound and discovered a long slice in her skin; it seemed to be shallow but was bleeding quite a bit.

From the way the side of her face hurt, someone had struck her quite recently, but her questing fingertips couldn't find any cuts on her cheek or near her eye, where the pain centered.

She wore a simple cotton dress and sandals. No jewelry or adornment. She was probably seeing the room through the eyes of a servant girl, then. But why a servant girl? Usually the visions took her to someone who had a close personal connection or deeply emotional connection to the object she touched. Would a servant girl ever . . . ?