Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

in the black maelstrom of anguish.
    No.
    Not her. He could never cause her pain.
    When she touched his arm, he realized that pain and loss were not the only forfeited emotions returning to him. Oh, no. There were others.
    Desire. Need. Pure, driving lust.
    Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
    Page 29 of 232
    Hunger.
    He wanted her with the power of a fierce ocean storm, with a primal need so dark and desperate that it was as if thousands of years of abstinence had all caught up with him at once, demanding to be sated.
    Demanding her. Now.
    He snapped up into a crouch, catching her wrist in a vise-like grip. Tried to find the words to make her understand. “Tiernan, I have need of you. My body and soul ache for you.”
    Emotions raced across her expressive face, and he watched her anger battle her fear and conquer it. Good. She should never fear him. Especially not when he needed so badly to touch her creamy skin. Bury his face in the long dark waves of her hair. Remove every bit of her clothing to discover if her skin could possibly be as silky soft on every inch of her body as he expected it to be. If the tips of her breasts would flush and harden at the touch of his fingers.
    His lips. His tongue.
    His cock hardened to the point of physical pain, and some distant part of his mind that still retained the tiniest bit of rationality wondered at the feeling. Hot, pure desire, after centuries—no, millennia—of none.
    “Your body and soul can just let go of me and step back, my friend, or I’ll kick you right in your Atlantean nuts,” she threatened, yanking her arm away from his grasp.
    He allowed her to escape, because he realized that yet another emotion was bubbling up inside him in the face of her defiance. Joy. It swirled like a waterspout, filling in the parched and corroded corners of his heart and soul with light and music. Happiness.
    A sound worked its way up through his chest and burst from his throat. Laughter. Rusty, after so long unused, but definitely laughter. Joy sliced through Brennan, sharp as the blades of his daggers, honed on the sharpening stone of absence and abandonment. It was bliss, it was joy, it was ecstasy beyond the hopes of the gods themselves. All of the elation he should have experienced over thousands of moments during the course of his emotionally barren existence sprang to life inside him all at once.
    Joy, so much joy, thousands of years of experiences that should have brought him delight, but had not. Those lost moments cascaded through him, image after image, speeding up until he was delirious from the panorama of memories that crashed through his mind, filtered through the emotion pounding on every inch of his body; nerve, bone, and sinew.
    This, then, was the devious nature of the curse. He would regain his emotions, and they would drive him insane. But he lost the clarity of that realization as she opened her lovely, lovely mouth to speak.
    “Brennan,” she said again, his name and something else, and her voice was cool water to a Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
    Page 30 of 232
    parched warrior who’d battled long and hard in the desert wastes of Persia; warmth and softness to one who’d survived weeks hunting vampire warlords in the frozen heights of Siberia. Her voice was joy made into sound, but her words were meaningless.
    He needed her. Only Tiernan could ride the torrent of emotion with him and help him tame it.
    She was his, and he was hers, and he had waited for her for all the long years of his life. If only he could climb inside the cool, serene center of her, he would be restored. She had to understand. He had to make her understand.
    He pushed himself off the floor in a sudden, explosive movement and caught her silken hair in his rough and calloused hands. Warriors’ hands. Hands that had no right . . . But the thought disappeared, crushed under the spiking drive of need. He had to make her understand. She was his life and sanity.
    She was his everything.
    He pulled her to him, ripping at the clothing that formed a barrier between them, desperate to feel her skin, her radiant, translucent, beautiful skin. Closer, closer. She struggled and the pain stabbed at him, joy turning to despair. Would she really try to leave him? Abandon him to a barren existence yet again?
    Poseidon’s curse roared through his memory. Cursed to forget her. No. Never. The idea of it drove him to a panic that clutched him in its sharpened claws and ate at