Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

Lucas replied, inclining his head. Then his gaze arrowed in on Grace, and a slow smile spread across his face. “This is
    a surprise. How did you get a woman that lovely to have anything to do with you?”
    The honey-colored wolf sitting at Lucas’s right side bared her teeth and snapped at his leg.
    Lucas threw back his head and laughed.
    “Perhaps your mate does not care for your compliments to another man’s woman,” Alexios said, bowing deeply to the wolf.
    A shimmering glow surrounded the animal for several seconds, and then a woman stood where the wolf had been. Her long wavy hair was the same shade of gold as the wolf’s fur. She wore simple clothes—an unremarkable dark shirt over blue jeans—but her beauty glowed like a fine Atlantean gemstone in the moonlit night.
    Grace stepped forward, next to Alexios, and elbowed him in the side. From the “oof” noise he made, Brennan assumed the gesture had not been gentle.
    “Remember, we talked about this ‘my woman’ stuff?” she muttered. Then she looked at Lucas and his mate and inclined her head. “Thank you for the welcome. I’m Grace, and he’s still learning.”
    The female shifter laughed. “I’m Honey, and good luck with that. Starting the day he found out I was pregnant, Lucas tried to treat me like I was a fragile, delicate little thing. Now that the babies are here, he still hasn’t let up.” She started to take a step forward, but Lucas stopped her with a hand on her arm.
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    “Maybe we should be sure that this really is Alexios and Brennan before we go any further,”
    Lucas said, his dark brows drawing together.
    A wave of understanding washed over Brennan. “The chameleon shifters. Yes, we have heard of that phenomenon. Perhaps you might ask us something that only we would know?”
    Lucas was obviously ready for the prompt, because he spoke with no hesitation. “What kind of dance did Christophe tell us he hated?”
    Brennan simply stared at the alpha, having absolutely no idea to what he was referring, but Alexios started laughing. “He’s no fan of line dancing, if I remember rightly.”
    The memory of another meeting with Lucas, that one marred by a vicious attack from enthralled wolves, flashed into Brennan’s mind, and he curved his lips in a perfunctory smile.
    Though he could not feel pleasure or amusement, he’d long since learned that it made others more comfortable around him if he at least made an attempt to mimic the appearance of emotion. “I mentioned my fondness for a good waltz, I believe.”
    Lucas grinned. “Only you, Brennan. Only you would go all nostalgic for a waltz. I bet you and Johann Strauss were buddies.”
    “I never had the privilege of meeting Johann, the elder. But I did, on occasion, take a meal with the younger, and offered my sincere admiration at his progress on ‘An der schönen blauen Donau.’”
    Honey smiled. “‘The Blue Danube’? We played that at our wedding reception for our first waltz.”
    Brennan glanced at Lucas. “You, too, waltz?”
    Lucas put a proprietary arm around his mate and shrugged. “Honey wanted me to waltz, I waltzed. You just wait, Brennan. Someday a woman will bulldoze right over that walled-off heart of yours, and you’ll be doing the tango, the waltz, or the freaking Macarena if she asks you.”
    That was impossible, of course, given the curse, but something dark and dangerous in Brennan’s soul twisted at the idea. Tiernan. If she were the one, if only she could break through . . . But if and when she did, his returning emotions were cursed to destroy him, or—worse, far worse—her.
    Only when she is dead—her heart stopped and her soul flown. . .
    The hated words of the curse echoed through his mind, yet again, and the image of Tiernan’s face in that newspaper photograph appeared in his memory. If only he could remember the way she’d looked as he’d held her in his arms. He closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it.
    When he opened his eyes again, an awkward silence had fallen.
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    “Lucas’s feet are really way too big to go in his mouth so often,” Honey said gently, stepping forward to put a hand on Brennan’s arm.
    Brennan found it took quite a great deal of forbearance to refrain from jerking away from her.
    “I have taken no offense,” he said, again forcing that artificial smile. “But perhaps we could