Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

Something smashed into her shoulder, and she turned her head to see a red metal tricycle, its handlebars caught in the tangles of her wet hair. Faltering, she wrenched her head to the side to release herself, and the tricycle fell behind. She turned back toward the shore she couldn‟t yet see but knew was there, and the toy wagon gently bumped against her nose, as if nudging her to take it.
    “But I don‟t have a pocket that you‟ll fit in,” she said helplessly, and—instantly—she was awake and gasping for air, bolting upright and staring around her.
    Out of a dream and into a nightmare.
    Memory came flooding back in waves unpleasantly reminiscent of the dream, buffeting her with the events of the previous day. Atlantis. Warriors. The dead creature . . . who‟d turned out to be a man from the time of Alexander.
    Justice .
    She scrambled to her knees, trying to stay low and inconspicuous while searching the cavern for the wild man from yesterday‟s waking nightmare. Or maybe, something whispered wistfully inside her mind, the warrior from her vision?
    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