Vampire in Atlantis

It was for the best.
    So why did the mere thought of it make him want to kill someone?
    “I don’t know you anymore,” she said. “It’s neither excuse nor apology, but I don’t know the man you’ve become, and I don’t know what violence you’re capable of doing in a moment’s anger. I had little contact with nightwalkers—my only experience, in fact, was with the master of your smithy and the fact that he didn’t eat me when we were trapped in that hole in the ground.”
    “I need to hear it. All of it. What happened that day. Why you left me. Why you agreed to this stasis.” He stopped and wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close to his body in the sweet darkness of newly fallen night. “I know now is not the time, but when this is over and you’re safe, I need to hear it. I need to know.”
    She looked up at him and solemnly nodded. “I know. We have much to tell before we can decide . . . many things. Soon.”
    Her voice was calm and controlled, but he was a vampire and could hear her heart racing in her chest. Not from fear. He hoped it wasn’t fear. Could he dare believe it might be attraction? Even after all these years? Before he could doubt himself, he claimed what he’d wanted to steal from her since the day she first walked into his shop back in Atlantis. He leaned down and captured her lips with his own, tasting her sweetness. Sinking into her warmth.
    And the world shattered.
    Heat that surely would melt his flesh from his bones shot through him, and he tightened his arms around her until she could never escape. She kissed him back—at first an innocent brush of her lips and then an ardent and enthusiastic return of his passion. When her tongue hesitantly touched his own, he groaned deep in his throat and was lost. She twined her arms around his neck and tangled her hands in his hair, just as he wanted to do to hers, but he contented himself with wrapping her braid in his fist, another way to hold her, capture her, claim her. She made a tiny sound, a moan or a purr, and his cock hardened to a degree that shamed the rock surrounding them.
    He pulled away for an unbearable moment, long enough to tell her, to explain his aggression. “I need you, my beautiful one. By all the gods, I need you.”
    She blinked, her eyes enormous in her pale face, and tried to talk, but nothing but a whisper of sound emerged from her perfect lips. Not a protest, surely not, anything but that. Acceptance, agreement, acquiescence; he would brook nothing else.
    She tried again. “Jack,” she managed to say.
    Jack. Jack? Another man’s name was not what he wanted to hear from his woman. A red haze of fury washed over his vision, and he contemplated how much joy he would gain from ripping the tiger to tiny shreds. Or using his skin for a rug.
    “Jack,” she repeated, but this time she was pointing. “He’s calling us, and he’s right there.”
    The meaning behind her words finally sank in, and the berserker rage subsided. She didn’t want Jack. Jack was calling them. From right behind Daniel. Serai’s hands, he suddenly realized, were still twined in his hair.
    His lips curved in a slow, dangerous smile, and she gasped a little. “If ever a kiss were worth waiting eleven thousand years for, that was it, my lady,” he murmured in her perfect, shell-like ear. “I will make sure it is not nearly so long a period until the next one.”
    Even in the dim light from the lanterns, he could see her face flush a hot red, and she pushed against his chest until he let her go.
    “You presume too much,” she said, but her haughty words were ruined a little by her breathlessness.
    “Yep.” He took her hand again and headed toward the damn grinning tiger shifter and his lantern. He was almost to the cave when he realized he was whistling.
    Life was suddenly looking up.
    When they entered the cave, the atmosphere was noticeably chilly, and it had nothing to do with the weather. The positioning of the inhabitants told the whole story in a glance. Alaric leaned against a wall, scowling at Reisen, who stood as far as possible from the priest. Quinn stood, seemingly relaxed, in the center of the space. Only the stress in her eyes and her slightly increased heartbeat told Daniel that she wasn’t nearly as calm as she liked to project. A slender, not very tall human woman with blond-and-blue hair and a wicked grin sat on the floor near Quinn, a computer on her lap. She kept shooting glances at Reisen,