Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

kiss.”
    Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
    Page 109 of 232
    Brennan growled, the sound and vibration of it startling beneath their joined hands. “I don’t need to hear about you kissing anyone else.”
    She laughed. “We were twelve. This is not exactly a threat to your manhood, so calm down, wild thing.”
    “I can’t imagine you twelve. Or maybe I can. Your daughter will look exactly like you, one day.”
    She turned to look up at him, startled by something in his voice, only to find that his eyes were glowing that hot green again. “My daughter?” she said faintly.
    “I felt it premature to say ‘our’ daughter.”
    She heard the smile in his voice and grinned a little. “You think? Well, anyway, the boy I’d rescued wanted to know how I knew, and I thought I could trust him with the truth about me.”
    Brennan’s muscles tightened as his body went stiff again. “Did he betray your trust?”
    “Not exactly. It was more that . . . he thought I was cool. You know? He was a twelve-year-old boy and suddenly he had a walking, talking lie detector. He wanted to experiment, and for a while, I was glad enough to play along.”
    “Just to have someone to play with. A friend,” Brennan ventured.
    She sighed. “I guess so. Close enough. But I couldn’t do it for long. I was a freak, a curiosity to him more than a friend.” A tiny pang of sadness struck, and she realized to her surprise that it still hurt.
    After all these years.
    What would it do to her if she lost Brennan?
    In a swift motion, he rolled over so that he was facing her, both of them on their sides, and he still cradled her in his arms. “I am your friend. No matter what else, I will always be so.”
    The simple truth of it took her breath away, as did the heat in his now-black eyes, with their centers of blue-green flame.
    “I . . . thank you. I am your friend, too,” she whispered.
    “Later? When you were older? Adults spend much of each day engaged in deception. How painful is that for you?”
    His clear perception of what life had been like with her Gift offered a calm that soothed her, and she relaxed against him a little.
    “It was—it is—easier to be alone. Alone so often that sometimes I forget what it means to be Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
    Page 110 of 232
    anything else.” The painful admission caused her eyes to burn, but she refused to let the tears fall. Not here. Not with him.
    She’d cried enough tears in her life.
    “Shh, mi amara, shh. Please. You don’t need to tell me any of this when it brings you such pain.”
    He stroked her hair and her back, making shushing noises, murmuring gentle words in a musical language that must have been Atlantean. “Hush, please, my beautiful one. You don’t need to share any of this with me.”
    But she found, to her surprise, that she wanted to share it. Wanted to unburden herself of some of the years of pain. “It was hard when I was a kid, but the teenage years, wow. Talk about torture.”
    She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, remembering high school. Johnny.
    Kim. Prom.
    “My boyfriend in high school didn’t lie to me. At least that’s what I thought. He never gave me the slightest reason for suspicion. Nothing he told me ever pinged my truth senses. Even when he was never available to go out on Friday nights.”
    She rolled her eyes. “He was studying. Or visiting his sick grandmother. Can you believe I was so stupid?”
    Brennan propped his head up on his hand. “He was lying to you?”
    “He was lying to me. He was dating my best friend at the same time he was dating me. Except she knew about it, because he acted like my boyfriend at school. She was acting really odd, but she said she was stressed-out about college applications, and she was careful never to actually lie to me.”
    She laughed and shot a cynical glance at Brennan. “Of course, I never came out and asked her, ‘Are you sleeping with my boyfriend?’ either.”
    “This man,” Brennan began, then stopped to take a deep breath. “This boy. You were . . .
    intimate with him, too?”
    Alerted by something in his tone, Tiernan whipped her head around to stare into his eyes, which had gone icy green again. “No, and even if I had been, you can’t possibly be jealous of a seventeen-year-old boy.”
    “Jealousy is not it, exactly, but he hurt you, and I find myself wanting to beat some sense into him,” he growled. “He is not seventeen