Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

attack. He needed someone to hit. Maybe Tiny would be up for a little sparring.
     
    But then he heard it. Her voice, behind him. And she didn‟t sound happy.
     
    “Alexios, slow down right now or I‟m going to get my bow.” Her sharp command rang through the stone corridor, and he found his steps slowing in spite of himself.
     
    He turned, folding his arms across his chest, and glared at her as she approached.
    Trying not to feel his heart thumping painfully. Trying not to notice how unbelievably beautiful she was with sleep-tousled hair and the rosy pink flush of anger riding high in her cheekbones.
     
    “Oh, save it, buster,” she snapped. “You can‟t go from having your mouth on my boob one minute to storming off the next.”
     
    He blinked, taken aback. Sometimes he forgot how direct women could be in this century.
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    “I‟d have to agree with that one, partner,” Tiny said from somewhere behind Alexios, adding a layer of joy to his day. “Sorry about overhearing, by the way. I was just on my way out for some breakfast. I can bring you some back, if you like, Alexios. You must be hungry after patrolling with us all night. Oh, and you, too, Grace, of course,” he added hastily.
     
    The flush in Grace‟s cheeks burned even hotter, but she responded politely enough.
    “Thank you, Tiny, but Alexios and I are going out to breakfast by ourselves.”
     
    “We are?”
     
    She jammed her hands on her hips and gave him back a glare as good as any he‟d ever given. “Yes. We are. If you don‟t have any more stupid objections or stupid opinions, like your stupid idea that I‟m stupid enough to want you only for a stupid roll in the sack.”
     
    By the third “stupid,” he was grinning. “I‟m guessing what you‟re really trying to say is that I‟m stupid.”
     
    She narrowed her eyes. “Bingo. Got it in one.”
     
    Alexios glanced behind him, but Tiny was gone. Smart man. “So. Breakfast. You and me,” he repeated. Stupidly, in fact. The realization made him laugh.
     
    She marched up to him and grabbed a fistful of his shirt and yanked him down toward her. “I don‟t do that,” she said, slowly and carefully. “I need for you to hear and understand me. I don‟t let people in, and I don‟t open my heart up. So when I do, I don‟t expect to be treated like I‟m only using you as some kind of boy toy. Got it? I care about you. You mean something important to me.”
     
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    “Boy toy?” His mind raced with the implications and pure, primal male satisfaction warmed every inch of him. “But what if I want you to use me like that?”
     
    She made a strange growling noise in her throat that reminded him of the panther shifter who‟d claimed that she should be his consort. But before he had time to even think about being jealous, she put her hands on his face, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, hard.
     
    “My beloved, remember? You don‟t get to call me that and then back away from me.”
     
    It finally sank in. She was demanding that he stay with her. That he not run away. She wasn‟t trying to escape. She wasn‟t telling him “thanks, it‟s been fun.” She wanted him.
    She wanted to keep him .
     
    He caught her around the waist, carefully putting his hands underneath the bottom edge of her healing injury, and lifted her as high as he could without bumping her head on the stone ceiling of the corridor. Then he slowly and carefully lowered her until her face was level with his, and he kissed her.
     
    “Perhaps I should not jump to conclusions based on faulty evidence,” he admitted.
    “However, I am having a hard time believing that I‟m good enough for you.”
     
    “I think,” she said, between kisses, “you should let me spend the next twenty or fifty years convincing you.” But he noticed a quick shadow crossed her face as she said it, and he tucked it away to ask her about later.
     
    Much later.
     
    “Breakfast, then?”
     
    “Breakfast,” she said, smiling.
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Chapter 24
    Daytona Beach, Vonos’s mansion
     
    “The humans call a room like this a panic room,” Prevacek observed, gesturing to the stark gray walls and steel-reinforced doors of the five-hundred-square-foot room.
     
    Vonos ignored him, or at least gave the appearance of ignoring him. Prevacek