Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

watching her, holding back laughter. He was toying with her, and it was driving her nuts.
     
    Worse, whatever crazy plan he had—whatever he was trying to accomplish with the constant touching—it was working. She was distracted beyond any coherent thought of strategy and reduced to hacking away at him like a novice.
     
    Lunge and he would parry, then riposte. Feint, and he would block, circle around, and touch her again. Kiss her neck. Touch her hair.
     
    She was breathing harder than she ever had in a real sword fight, and he wasn‟t even winded. It was him. All him.
     
    He took advantage of her distraction and feinted left again. She blocked him easily but the feint itself had been a trick. He moved faster than her eyes could track and suddenly he was yanking her up against him, her breasts crushed into his chest, his sword falling to the ground as he used his free hand to unfasten her hair. The heavy braid fell out of its twist and he pulled the tie from the end of it.
     
    “Why do you hide this hair?” He asked, his voice low and husky. A bedroom voice. She tried to answer, but her mouth had gone dry and words weren‟t coming.
     
    He lowered his other hand to her bottom and pulled her even closer until she felt the unmistakable hardness of his erection pressing against her. She felt him doing something to her hair but it barely registered until he pulled the long length of it, freed from its braid, between them and curled it around his hand.
     
    “Do you know that I have fantasized about your hair? More vividly and more sensually than any fantasies I‟ve ever had? Waking dreams of your hair spread on my pillows, these lovely dark waves silhouetted on Atlantean silk. Of long curls falling on my chest Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
    Page 102 of 314
    while you straddled my naked body. Of burying my hands in it while I take you from behind. Do you have any idea what you‟re doing to me?”
     
    He bent his head to the curve of her neck and inhaled deeply, and the feel of his breath on her skin was so arousing that her knees weakened and the sword dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers.
     
    “You—I—” But she couldn‟t think. Couldn‟t form coherent thoughts in order to speak them. All she could do was moan when he opened his mouth and gently bit down right where her neck curved into her shoulder.
     
    Her arms reached up, almost without her own volition, and twined around his neck. She pressed herself even closer to him until there was nothing between his chest and her hard, aching nipples but the thin cloth of her cotton bra and T-shirt.
     
    Even that was too much. She wanted him naked. She wanted herself naked.
     
    She finally gave into the secret desire she‟d had since she first saw him walk into the room in St. Louis. She put her hands in all that gorgeous golden hair, and the tactile sensations from the silken mass of waves nearly made her moan. His hair was so many colors that simply calling it gold didn‟t do it justice. It was champagne and sunlight; gold and bronze and copper. It was lush fantasies of a wild jungle cat who only she could tame.
     
    A wild Atlantean only she could tame.
     
    If only it were true.
     
    “You‟re so beautiful,” she whispered.
     
    Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
    Page 103 of 314
    He lifted his head and stared down at her, something dark and forbidding in his expression. For once, he made no attempt to hide the viciously scarred left side of his face. “So I have been told, many times, before this damage was done to me. My appearance meant nothing to me then. A way to divest women of their skirts, perhaps.”
     
    His arms tightened around her almost until it hurt, but she said nothing, sensing that he was on the brink of a revelation that she was afraid to hear, but needed to know.
     
    “Then there were those who spoke of beauty to me, but they were talking about pain.
    My pain. I was captured, Grace,” he confessed, the words rough as though she‟d ripped them from his throat. “Captured while trying to save my prince, but he was captured, too. They were Algolagnia, the vampire goddess Anubisa‟s cult of pain worshippers.
    They only find beauty and sexual release in their own agony and that of others. For so long—so unbearably long—they tortured and defiled and corrupted me until I, too, almost began to believe that beauty was only found in blood, pain, and despair.”
     
    A wave of mingled sympathy,