Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

god-ruler who had arbitrarily cursed one of his warriors for a tragedy that wasn’t even his fault. Corelia had been the architect of that decision, leaving Brennan no options. He hadn’t even known about the baby. To Tiernan, that was the worst punishment of all: to find out that you were a father and find out that you were not, all in the same breath.
    Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    An unpleasant thought struck her like a lightning bolt to her stomach: had he been? Corelia didn’t sound like she’d been the most faithful of women. What if the child hadn’t been Brennan’s at all? Unfortunately, that led to unanswerable questions: Could a god really know these things? Did Poseidon have some sort of super DNA tester abilities or had he merely been guessing? She groaned at the barrage of questions—ones she could never ask Brennan without hurting him even further.
    Brennan had been telling her the truth. He believed he would not harm her; that he would die to protect her. She only had to worry about a recurrence of the strange fit he’d gone into when the curse had struck, and that was easy enough to handle. All she had to do was escape long enough for all of the terms of the curse to apply. “Out of sight, out of mind” took on a whole new meaning. If he couldn’t see her, he wouldn’t remember her, and she’d be free to get on with her mission.
    Alone.
    Alone was better, anyway. So there was no reason the prospect of Brennan forgetting her very existence should cause a hollow feeling in her stomach. She kicked herself out of her mental wanderings as Brennan wheeled around and strode toward her so swiftly that he’d already halted, only inches away from her, before she could think, move, or even breathe. Staring into her eyes, his own narrowed as if daring her to stop him, he put an arm around her waist and pulled her even closer, until her breasts were pressed into the hard heat of his chest. Just when she thought he’d kiss her, he simply rested his face on the top of her head and inhaled deeply, like he was breathing her in. Memorizing her scent.
    Every nerve ending she had went from zero to sixty at the feel of his hot, hard body against hers, and she had to struggle against a wicked and entirely abnormal impulse to snuggle even closer. It had been months, no, more than a year, since she’d had any kind of intimate relationship, and her body was crying out that enough was enough of the enforced abstinence, already.
    It was more than that, though. The heat sizzling through her limbs was about way more than lack of sex. This was personal—it was about Brennan. The way he looked at her, as if he’d like to strip her bare and take her up against the wall, not to mention the things he’d said to her . . .
    Well. That had been enough to set the most restrained woman’s sexual urges on fire, and she’d never been one for restraint.
    He turned his head so she felt his warm breath against her ear, and her traitorous body trembled a little. Her cheeks instantly burned with embarrassment. It was one thing to have the hots for the crazy ancient cursed guy in your hotel room; it was quite another to let him know it.
    “I, who have spent so very long being entirely rational, find that any semblance of calm or logic has deserted me, simply from the sight of your innocent touch on that man’s arm,” he murmured. “I have become a Neanderthal, lacking only a cave to which I might drag you and a Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    club with which to beat off the occasional stray woolly mammoth.”
    He’d surprised a laugh out of her, in spite of the danger of the situation. “The sight of billionaire businessman Mr. Brennan in an animal-skin loincloth is just not one I can picture at all,” she said, relaxing against him.
    He pulled her even closer and pressed a kiss into the curve of her neck, making her shiver in his arms. She put her hands on his chest, realizing in a dim and hazy corner of her mind that this was dangerous. He was dangerous. Right now, she so didn’t care.
    “The sound of your laughter is like a symphony heralding spring to the long, barren winter of my existence,” he said, his voice husky. “I cannot think why I am fighting this tidal wave of emotion. Did not my lack of feeling anything at all for so many years constitute sufficient punishment?”
    Tiernan felt like she had been captured in a silken web of pure