Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

apparent, even under the loose fit of his sparring top.
    “Brennan? Did you forget me? The curse—did you fall asleep and forget?” She grabbed his arm and the contact sizzled heat lightning through him like a summer storm at sea. His body arched backward from the jolt and his head slammed into the carved wooden headboard of the bed.
    “Brennan!” She jumped back and away from him and scrambled off the bed. “It’s me. Tiernan.
    Please tell me you remember, and you’re not going to have another attack.”
    “Attack? What attack? Did I hurt you?” A horrible . . . memory? premonition? was itching at the back of his brain. Had he hurt this woman?
    The pain merely from the idea of it smashed into him with the force of a body blow. He could not have hurt her. Not such a woman.
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    But how did he know what kind of woman she was?
    She stared at him, and fear battled determination on her very expressive face. Finally, coming to a decision, she climbed back on the bed and put her hands on each side of his face.
    “Brennan, it’s me. Tiernan Butler. I know you’ve forgotten me, because you’re cursed to forget your true mate whenever she’s out of your sight, and you seem to think that she’s me, but you have to remember. I need you. We need to finish this mission, and I don’t know how I’ll do it without you. Please, please remember.”
    “The curse,” he whispered. “How did you know the terms of the curse?”
    She closed her eyes, grimacing in despair, and then her eyelids snapped back open. “You’re no Sleeping Beauty, but this is all I’ve got,” she said, and it was his only warning before she leaned forward and kissed him.
    She kissed him—oh, gods, it was her, it was Tiernan, and she was kissing him—and the world shattered around him.
    Emotion, piercingly vivid, burned through him. Fire and ice and lightning bolts shot through him as if aimed from Poseidon’s trident itself. She kissed him, and his soul gathered its fractured pieces and remade itself in her image.
    Tiernan’s image.
    Emotions flooded through him in a torrent, a perfect storm, and the waves of emotion carried flotsam of a most unexpected kind: his memories. Memories of her, of them, of the past day and a half—by all the gods, so short a time?
    His hands tangled in her hair and he pulled her closer and kissed her back. A kiss of gratitude for saving him, for finding him, for redeeming him from a life of bleak loneliness and despair.
    She finally pulled away, breathless, and smiled tremulously. “You’d better remember me, buddy. Because if you kiss every strange woman you find in your bed like that, you and I are going to have a long talk.”
    “You, Tiernan Butler, are the only strange woman I will ever kiss again,” he said, serious as a vow, and he did not understand why she laughed.
    “Oh, Brennan, do you really remember me? The curse didn’t take over?”
    “It did. But perhaps sleep does not affect a permanent forgetting?” He pulled her into his arms, onto his lap, unable to bear even a moment more of separation from her. He was shaking, his body shuddering with his fear that he might have lost her forever.
    “I need you. Now,” he said, barely able to force out the words between his gritted teeth. “If I cannot be inside your body, I may not survive this emotion.”
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    She stared into his eyes for so long he was sure she would deny him, but then she smiled and, in one swift motion, pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it to the side. “I need you, too. So what are you going to do about it?”
    Tiernan couldn’t believe she’d done it. Thrown her shirt and her caution aside; probably her common sense, too. But relief and passion and something far stronger than both pushed her toward this. Toward him.
    He tried to be a gentleman about it, she could tell, but it was hard for him since he was staring at her breasts like heaven had opened up and dumped a load of angel dust in his lap.
    She grinned at him. “Men. You’re all the same. Human or Atlantean, you’re all helpless in the face of naked boobs.”
    He dragged his gaze up to her face, and his eyes had an expression of such savage intent in them that she shivered, suddenly just the smallest bit afraid.
    “You understand what you are offering me,” he said, his voice barely above a growl. “There is no going back from