Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

hard for you, and our mission is far more important than my stupid feelings, but, oh, Brennan.”
    She stopped and scrubbed tears from her eyes before they could slide down her cheeks to the silken pillowcase. “I don’t want you to forget me.”
    He froze, going so still that for a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her, and then his hand tightened on hers and he pulled her slowly, inexorably, across the wide expanse of bed until she was nestled against his side. His chest was bare, so her face rested on smooth, warm skin that covered rock-hard muscle, but he’d pulled on a pair of the soft sparring pants, probably for her sake.
    She wished he hadn’t.
    “I could never forget you completely,” he murmured against her hair. “No matter the curse, no matter how powerful the god who commanded it. You are the lost part of my soul, Tiernan Butler, and I only wish for years and years and years to prove it to you.”
    She stiffened a little in his arms, and he pulled her a little closer into the heat of his body, but she shook her head. “I don’t want your feelings to be the result of a god’s curse. I want to have time to get to know you, to explore these feelings between us. If you forget me every time you go to sleep, it’s going to be very tough. Maybe impossible.”
    He raised a hand and stroked her hair back from her forehead, then kissed her there. “You said feelings between us, did you not?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Did a god curse you to care about me?”
    She knew where he was going, but answered him honestly. “No, of course not.”
    “And yet you admit you have feelings for me, even a little?”
    “More than a little,” she admitted. “It’s kind of crazy, but there it is.”
    “Kindly grant me the right to the same feelings, then, leaving out whatever a god may have encouraged,” he said, his voice gone deep and husky, resonating in very private places in her body.
    “I want you to kiss me, Brennan, but we don’t seem to be able to stop at kissing, and I’m so Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    tired, and so afraid of the curse kicking in when we’re asleep, and so worried that everything I’ve worked for is falling apart around my ears.”
    “Just let me hold you. I’ll stay awake as long as I can, which will be no hardship with you in my arms,” he said, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face.
    “Huh. Lucky you,” she muttered darkly, wondering if she had the energy to go for a very cold shower. “Also, that was a lie.”
    He laughed and leaned over to kiss her nose. “Yes, it was a lie, my beautiful truth teller. Holding you is, in fact, very hard.”
    She laughed in spite of herself. “Very, very hard?”
    He caught her hand and pressed it against his erection and then released it so quickly that she was caught off guard, with her hand hovering uncertainly above his very impressive and, definitely, very hard penis.
    “It’s a constant state since I met you,” he confessed, looking pained at the admission.
    A little niggle of guilt scratched at her. After all, in the forest it had been all about her. Shouldn’t she reciprocate?
    “Talk to me,” he commanded, surprising her yet again. “Tell me about growing up with your Gift. Just for a little while, until you fall asleep.” He turned to her, his pain and worry naked on his face. “Please?”
    That please got to her in a way that commands never would have.
    “It was hard,” she began, then laughed a little at the unintentional use of the word. “No, let’s go with ‘difficult,’ okay?”
    “Difficult. I can see how that would be so. Were there never any compensations?” He twined his fingers through hers and rested their joined hands on his hard abdomen.
    “Never? No, I can’t say never,” she said, forcing herself to sift through long-buried memories. “I saved a boy from being falsely accused of stealing a teacher’s purse once. His family was really poor so everyone thought he’d taken it for the money. He was telling the truth, and I asked a few questions of a few of the other students, pretty impressed with my mad Nancy Drew skills, and found out that the principal’s son actually stole it. Acting out to get attention from Daddy, who was kind of a jerk, I think.”
    “Were you pleased? To be able to help?”
    Her smile faded as the rest of the memory surfaced. “I was. For a while. The boy who’d been falsely accused even gave me my first