Atlantis Unleashed (36 page)

But his nearness played havoc with her wits, and she didn't really catch the meaning of his words, just stood there staring up at him wishing foolish things. Wishing her life hadn't turned into an adventure novel. Wishing he would just kiss her.

Wishing she was the type of woman brave enough to just kiss him.

“I . . . you . . . what?”

“Sorry. We Atlanteans tend to drop back into formal speak in tense situations,” he said wryly. “Translation: I'm an idiot. We should've stopped sooner. There seems to be some shade up ahead under that overhang.”

Keely gave herself a mental slap and nodded briskly. “Right. Shade. Ahead. Great.” She took off at a determined march, and he fell into step beside her.

A grin quirked at the edges of those beautifully sculpted lips of his. “Is there any reason you seem to have lost the use of verbs?”

The low, husky tone of his voice sizzled across her nerve endings, and suddenly the jungle was a whole lot hotter than before. “I have a strict ‘no verbs in jungles' policy, of course. If we stay here much longer, adjectives will go by the wayside next,” she said, flashing an innocent smile. The kind of smile that said “nobody here wants to rip your shirt off and lick your bare chest.”

She hoped.

What was wrong with her? It must be some weird kind of jungle pheromones. Mix one Atlantean with one crushingly hot jungle and you get mad sexual desire. Of course it didn't hurt that he was the hottest man she'd ever seen in her life. The memory of Justice in the cavern, naked and dripping wet, flashed into her mind, and her mouth dried out even further than mere lack of water had caused.

Great. She'd die in the Guatemalan jungle of dehydration brought on by sexual fantasies. Wonder how they'd word
that
on her tombstone.

She reached the overhang a few paces ahead of him. It was a niche carved into the side of a small hill, and it smelled a little musky, like animals had made it a home over the years. It didn't seem to hold any now, but it stretched farther back into the hill than she'd expected and she couldn't see all that far back into the darkened interior.

Justice put a restraining hand on her arm. “I'll enter first and ensure that no animals are inside and jealous of their territory.”

She swept her arm out in a “go ahead” gesture. “Be my guest, sword guy. I'll just wait here at the side, in case something comes barreling out.”

He grinned at her and suddenly bent down and pressed a kiss on her lips. “You continually surprise me. Every time I expect you to disagree with me, you say something practical. Every time I expect you to go along without question, you tell me why I'm wrong. Life will never be boring with you, will it, Dr. Keely McDermott?”

With that, he entered the small cave, leaving her to stand there, fingers pressed to her lips, wondering how a future life with her had become such a firm assumption in his mind.

Wondering why the idea of it didn't scare her one bit.

“It's clear, but there's an opening back here and you're going to want to take a look,” he called out to her. “I'd say we made a discovery, but it's obvious that somebody was in here before.”

She bent a little to enter the cave, and was relieved to find that it opened up into a room with a fairly high ceiling. Looking around, she discovered something else.

It was no cave.

The walls were just that—walls—made of stone. They'd found an ancient building of some kind, possibly even a Mayan temple or pyramid, considering the height of the small hill.

The familiar chill raced up her spine. A piece of history that very few had seen in perhaps thousands of years lay before her.
This
was what she lived for—what she needed as much as she needed water to drink. She automatically reached for her pack, only to remember that it was safely ensconced in her room back in Atlantis.

Where it didn't do her a damn bit of good.

Biting off a few choice words, she followed the wall to a doorway carved into the back of the room. A faint blue-green glow emanated from the doorway.

“Justice? Is that you?”

“I've recovered enough of my strength to give us a little light, Keely. You're going to want to see this.”

She followed the light and the sound of his voice into the chamber and stopped, stunned. Three of the four walls were uncovered from the dirt and vegetation that covered the fourth, clearly the product of centuries of neglect. On each of the three walls, a mural spread in vivid, dramatic colors.

“This isn't San Bartolo, but this is definitely another rendering of the
Popol Wuh
,” she said. “Oh, Justice, why wasn't this reported? This is such an important find!”

He crossed to stand next to her and she realized the light came from a glowing sphere that floated over the palm of his hand. He held it up like a lantern and leaned in to study the first wall with her. “The
Popol Wuh
?”

“It's the Mayan creation myth. Their creator, K'ucumatz, the mother and father of all life, first fashioned men from clay or mud. But they were weak and dissolved in water, like this. Do you see this first image of the man figure dissolving in the river?”

He nodded and pointed to the next image, sounding almost as excited as she was by the discovery. “And this? The tree being carved into a man?”

She nodded, her hand reaching of its own volition to touch her fish carving. “Yes, K'ucumatz tried next to make men out of wood, but they had no hearts or minds, so they couldn't praise their creator. That never flies with gods, you know.”

She smiled at him, but he was lost in contemplation of the image. “I have sometimes carved figures that almost seemed as if they could step out of my hand and fly or swim or run away,” he murmured. “But of course they had no hearts or minds, either.”

Keely thought of all the tough times that her carving, and the visions of Justice, had helped her through over the years. “I've seen your carvings, and I wouldn't be so sure of that.”

He turned to face her, holding the energy sphere up. She could see every detail of his features in the softly glowing light and realized that somehow, in such a short time, her heart had memorized his face. She caught her breath, afraid of what her own expression might reveal to him.

He studied her for a moment, then shook his head. “I don't understand. How can you have seen my carvings? I give them away as soon as I finish them.”

Her hand tightened on the fish. She wanted to tell him, wanted to let him know how much he'd meant to her over the years. But something stopped her. Some remnant of rational Keely before she'd fallen through the looking glass.

They needed to find water. They needed to find the Star of Artemis and use it in whatever way they could to help Justice heal his fractured mind.

Then she could tell him amusing stories about a small wooden fish and be careful not to let on just how pathetic she was that she'd let a simple carving and visions of a long-ago warrior take on such importance in her life.

She forced her fingers to release the carving and dropped it beneath the neck of her shirt again. “I don't know. I'm just hot and tired and probably remembering something Liam said to me about carvings,” she said, forcing a laugh. “Anyway, look at this. The final, and successful, attempt was when K'ucumatz mixed white and yellow maize—corn—to make the flesh and blood of humans. This time it worked. One of the most important figures in the Mayan culture is the maize god, which you see on that wall.”

He studied the second wall, luckily distracted from her remarks about his carvings. “This is similar to the maize god you told us about in the mural with Anubisa in it?”

“Yes! Yes, it's clearly from the same artist or group of artists. I'm almost sure of it. Of course, without side-by-side comparison of photographs, I can't be—” She swayed a little, suddenly overcome by a wave of dizziness, and started panting, unable to catch her breath.

He caught her with one strong arm around her waist. “Keely? You are unwell?”

She pushed her hair away from her face and tried to breathe, but the heat and dehydration, probably combined with the events of the past few days, had taken their toll. He released the energy sphere, lifted her into his arms, and moved them both out of the chamber and back to the mouth of the cave, where the outside air was much fresher.

She leaned over, pulling in slow, steady breaths, until the dizziness and hyperventilation passed. “I'm fine,” she said finally. “Just really could use some water.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Although the Nereid still hides from me, or is recovering from the use of so much power, I find that my Atlantean gifts are returning. If water is what you want, my Keely, then water you shall have.”

He strode outside and stopped in the middle of the clearing, legs braced apart and arms held up in the air. The sunlight shone down on him as if he were some primitive god himself, returned to his people and ready to accept their worshipful homage. He was beautiful and stern and primal, and something deep inside her stirred, shaken and moved by the sight of him. Her breasts tingled and her nipples hardened, craving his touch, and her thighs tightened as liquid heat pooled in her center, readying her for him like some ancient virgin to be sacrificed to a lusty god.

Her face flamed at the thought and she tried to remind herself of the biological imperative that caused women to be attracted to powerful men in dangerous situations. She was a scientist. She of all women couldn't fall prey to something so primal.

Even as she tried to resist the siren call of his intense sexuality, he lowered his gaze from the sky and stared straight into her eyes. His own had darkened to black with blue-green flames dancing in the exact centers of his pupils. “Poseidon, hear me,” he called out in a voice filled with tempest-tossed waves and gale-force winds, never taking his gaze from her. “Bring water to me that it may give life and health to my woman.”

“I'm not your woman,” she whispered, but this time even she didn't believe it. At that moment, with winds circling Justice like a typhoon, whipping through the clearing to center on him, energy crackling around him like miniature lightning bolts in shades of silver, blue, and green, she could deny him nothing.

“For Poseidon,” he roared, throwing back his head. Somehow his braid had loosened, and long strands of hair whipped around his face and shoulders; blues all the spectrum of possibility caught in the strands of his hair flew in the wind as it danced to his call.

She looked up, following his gaze, unable to doubt him for even an instant. He had called for water, so it would come. She knew it, and when the swirling, twirling coils of crystal-clear water tumbled through the air toward him, she laughed with delighted joy.

“Come to me, Keely,” he said, and the heat in his eyes seared through her until she wanted to tear off her clothes and throw herself on the ground in front of him, a pagan offering to be taken right there in the downpour that he had created. But instead she stumbled forward, hands clenched at her sides, until she stood a mere breath away from him.

He laughed down at her and shouted out another word, a beautiful word, a word she did not know. The water turned into a spring shower, falling onto them and into their open mouths and down their necks and soaking into their filthy clothes.

Keely closed her eyes and turned her face up to the rain and laughed, drinking in as much of the clean, sweet-tasting water as she could. It was the purest water she'd ever tasted. Purer than mountain spring water, purer than the most expensive bottled water.

She swallowed as fast as the rain fell into her mouth and then, finally sated, she opened her eyes and smiled up at him, raindrops clinging to her eyelashes. “That was amazing! You can do that whenever you want? Wow, that would solve so many—” She fell silent, her torrent of words failing at the intent way he stared at her mouth, as if he must taste her or die.

His mouth came down on hers, and he pulled her so tightly against him that the heat of his body steamed against her through their wet clothes. There was nothing gentle in it; it was a kiss of claiming, desperate wanting, and need. She murmured a sound, lost in his mouth, and his hands clenched on her skin, pulling her tighter, still. His muscular body shuddered violently against hers and she drew back, alarmed, and looked up at him.

He clenched his jaw shut and tightened his grip on her even more, until it seemed that every inch of her body was touching his. “I need you, Keely. I have to have you right now. Please,” he said in a low and guttural voice that shook with the force of the passion behind it. Then he loosened his hold a fraction and dropped his head, inhaling deep gulps of air. “No. We can't. I'm afraid that the Nereid will take over. You must tell me no.”

The lightning began to shoot through the air again, lighting up the still-falling rain with its thunderous cracks and silvery blue glow. Behind and above the rain, she could see the sun, still shining brightly in a clear sky. No cloud had anything to do with this downpour, and no other woman had anything to do with his desperate need.

It was all for her. Only for her. The realization and the heat flamed through her, making her womb clench and her knees buckle. He was holding her so tightly that it didn't matter, though. She couldn't fall. He was there for her.

Still waiting for an answer. A desperate plea in his eyes, but whether it was for her to say yes or no she couldn't tell.

“Yes,” she said, jumping into the abyss. “I want you, too. Together we'll tame your other half.”

He lifted her into the air and shouted out his joy, swinging her around in the middle of the raging Atlantean storm. Then he pulled her close again and bent his head until his lips were a breath away from hers.