Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

eyes promising delights like none he‟d ever known.
     
    Just when he thought he‟d go off in his pants like a green youngling, another thought made him laugh and eased some of the pressure: knowing Grace, she was more likely to offer to spar him over who got to be on top.
     
    The gods help him, he may have finally met a woman whose mind intrigued him more than her body. The image in his mind shifted, transformed. Now it was Grace laughing, Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
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    as she sometimes did with her friend Michelle, those lovely golden brown eyes alight with her generous sense of humor.
     
    Grace serious, offering good counsel on matters of strategy.
     
    Grace stern, arms set like stone as she braced her bow for target practice or battle.
     
    Grace determined—selfless—courageous—as on more than one occasion when he‟d seen her throw herself into harm‟s path to protect another.
     
    Dozens of images whirled through his mind, tumbling around and around like the funnel of a treacherous sea spout.
     
    Grace, Grace, always Grace. And, sadly, not even naked.
     
    It was going to be an interesting mission.
     
    Fort Castillo de San Marcos, later that morning
     
    “Grace, they‟re here.”
     
    Grace looked up from her computer to see Sam standing in the doorway. Good old Sam. She‟d known him for a while; he came and went as needed. Sort of a troubleshooter for rebel groups. He‟d gotten in before dawn one day from Georgia, told her Quinn sent him to be Grace‟s go-to guy. Second in command, she guessed, came closest to a description, not that she even now was used to her new title. Commander. It was almost laughable.
     
    It might have helped if she‟d had any military training. Thank goodness Sam did. Rumor was that a few of the new recruits had been in the army, too, back in the days before all military actions in the United States fell under the direct command of the over-sec def.
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    The over-secretary of defense, appointed by the president but only with the advice and consent of the Primus, was a vampire, by law. The vampires had argued, convincingly enough to carry the vote, that with centuries of experience in military campaigns, it only made sense that their representative was in charge of all matters military.
     
    Plus there was the threat of foreign campaigns conducted by vampires—no human could know how to combat that. Or so they‟d claimed. And they‟d won that argument, too. Back before any of the rebels had mobilized. Before quiet stirrings of unrest had solidified into fear, and then concern, and finally defiance.
     
    “Grace?” Sam‟s bushy white eyebrows drew together in a look of concern she‟d seen from him far too often lately. “Penny for ‟em?”
     
    She smiled and shut the cover of her Dell. Time enough later to figure out encrypted messages about supply chains.
     
    “My thoughts aren‟t even worth a penny, not that we have one,” she said, grimacing as she unbent her long legs from underneath the small desk. “Funny how you never think about revolutions needing money. In the movies, the good guys just seem to have a constant supply of shiny new guns and ammo, and they never actually have to eat.”
     
    She walked to the doorway of her cramped office space, part of the officers‟ quarters of the old fort. When they‟d requisitioned the fort for “theater group practice,” the city of St.
    Augustine had been glad enough to turn it over for a monthly fee. Ever since the vampires had shut the fort down as a tourist attraction—apparently it was politically incorrect to celebrate a fort where the Spaniards had once held mass vampire burnings; bet you never saw that in your Florida history books—the city had been operating in the red.
     
    Kind of like the rebels.
     
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    “They never need to take a dump, either. Didja notice that?” Sam asked as he ambled along beside her. “Nobody in movies ever has to go to the bathroom unless it‟s some sort of girly bubble-bath thing.”
     
    He snorted, whether at the idea of not taking a dump or bubble baths, she didn‟t know.
    Probably both. Sam looked and acted like an uneducated redneck when it suited him, but he‟d been a colonel in the army Special Forces back before a new “undead bloodsucker of an ass-wipe general” had railroaded Sam out of the service for