Heart Of Atlantis

with metaphors of the sea made her smile, press her face into his shirt, and breathe deeply of the scent of sea and salt and sun that was so uniquely Alaric.
    “And yet you are so quick to defend me and so fierce about it,” Alaric murmured, stroking her back. “The warriors and I fight together, but never in all the years of my existence has someone tried to protect me the way you have. I do not deserve it, and I am humbled by it.”
    She pressed even closer to him and suddenly noticed the very hard bulge pressing against her abdomen. Her cheeks flamed hot, and she tried to move back, but he tightened his arms.
    “No. Not yet. I cannot bear to let you go until I can truly believe you are safe.”
    He lifted her into his arms and moved to the bed, where he sat carefully on the edge with her in his lap and told her everything that had happened with Poseidon and also what Christophe had reported.
    She gave him a reproachful look when he told her about the tsunami, but she didn’t say a word. Perhaps she was beyond words. He needed to know, though. She owed him that.
    “Now it’s your turn. I want to know everything, Quinn. Can you bear to tell it?”
    She shook her head. “Not yet. I need a few minutes.”
    After warding the room with his strongest magics, Alaric left Quinn to gather her thoughts. He only went as far as the bathroom, where he sped through a quick shower, but every instinct he had urged him to
hurry, hurry, hurry
.
    After he cleaned and dried his clothes with Atlantean water magic in the space of a few seconds, he returned to sit silently next to her on the bed. When she raised her tearstained face to him, he asked her again.
    “Can you bear to tell it?”
    She nodded and fisted her hands in the fabric of her sweater. As she told him all of it, from the press conference to the murder, he grew more and more furious, but at her first mention of Anubisa, he glowed nearly incandescent with rage.
    Literally.
    She had to shield her eyes.
    “Hey, you’re going to need to tone it down for the human,” she said gently.
    He instantly dimmed the energy so she could bear to look at him again.
    “My apologies. I am holding so much power, channeling it to support Christophe and Serai in stabilizing the dome and the Trident, that it takes little to push me over the edge.”
    “I understand, but if you want to hear all of it, you’re going to need to calm down a little. I don’t want to cause your brain to explode.”
    He nodded, but she could tell from the way the muscles in his jaw clenched that he was gritting his teeth very hard. She told him the rest of it, right up to the point where he’d arrived to rescue her.
    “He told you he wanted to impregnate you,” Alaric said.
    She could tell from the way he so carefully enunciated that he was on the verge of going berserk.
    “He said it, but he didn’t touch me. Not like last time,” she said softly, almost too softly to be heard.
    His entire body tensed beneath her, as if steeling for a blow. “Last time?”
    She bowed her head and told him something she never, ever talked about anymore. “Six years ago. When that murderous bastard of a vampire kept me as his plaything and—worst of all—I let him. Alaric, I know you think you want me, but you’d be far better off without me.”
    Silence. Utter, complete silence. It took a while for her to gather the courage to look up at him, but when she did, the revulsion and rejection she’d expected were nowhere in sight. Instead, a far more powerful emotion blazed forth from those beautiful emerald eyes, and he kissed her so thoroughly that she’d nearly forgotten her own name by the time he lifted his head.
    “There is nothing you could ever do that would make me think less of you,
mi amara
,” he said. “There is no deed, no matter how horrific you may have found it, in your past that could compete with the grace and courage of your soul. Tell me, if you will, or do not tell me, if you would rather never speak of it. Know this, though: I will fight everyone on this planet—even
you
, if it must be—who attempts to make me give you up.”

Chapter 22
    Alaric watched Quinn carefully as a yawning chasm of insanity beckoned at the edges of his consciousness. He fought it back in the toughest battle he’d ever waged. This was absolutely, in no way, about him.
    His rage for what some monster had done to her.
    His anguish that she had been violated.
    None of it—not
any
of it—was about him. If he