by Alyssa Day
“You fell asleep?” she asked, and there was something unexpected in her voice. Not curiosity or lazy satisfaction or even petulant demand.
No. It was anxiety—or even fear.
“Perhaps I was well sated, my lady,” he said, smiling in spite of himself at her beauty. He had chosen well, even in his obviously drunken state. And yet—
She bolted upright and he realized what had been niggling at him. She was fully dressed, in what looked like a set of his sparring clothes. He glanced down at himself and realized he, too, wore a pair of the soft trousers.
Her eyes widened until he could see white all the way around her irises. “Did you just say well sated? Wait—and call me your lady?”
He sat up as well, feeling at a distinct disadvantage, and examined her again, as if repeated viewing could bring her name or circumstances to mind. Her tousled dark hair shone in the morning light from the window, and her soft curves were very 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.
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.”
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 this. You will be my woman in every way.”
She shivered again and started to cross her arms over her breasts, but he caught her hands in his, still staring deeply into her eyes.
“I wasn’t planning to sign a contract,” she said, attempting a chuckle. “I just wanted—”
“Mine,” he repeated. “I’m going to claim you now. This is your last chance to change your mind.”
She lifted her chin. “I could say the same for you. I’m not changing my mind, but I’m getting kind of cold, so if you’re done talking . . .”
He pounced. There was no other word for it, no finesse, no smooth seduction. He pounced on her, and in seconds she was on her back, her pants, too, stripped off her body and tossed aside, and he was staring down at her with such exquisitely blissed-out happiness on his face that she laughed out loud.
He blinked, as if drawn out of a trance by the sound, and then a dangerously seductive smile spread across his face. “I love the sound of your laughter, Tiernan Butler.”
“I love the sight of that sexy smile of yours, Brennan of Atlantis,” she replied. “Now, can we quit talking and maybe you can kiss me?”
“I will kiss every inch of your body, and take hours in the doing, but now I find I cannot wait.” He took her mouth, captured it, captured her, and, catching her wrists in his hands, pulled them up and over her head. He kissed her mouth and her neck and bit down on the sensitive curve of her neck, and heat sizzled through her, a delicious fullness and tingling invading her limbs and making her writhe underneath him, seeking more.
“More, more,” she demanded. “Now.”
He shouted out a laugh, and then his hands were on her and it was she making the noise, moaning as his fingers touched her, spreading her, testing her.
“You are so wet for me,” he said, his voice rough with need, and she wanted to bite him. Put her mouth all over him and taste him, but most of all she needed—she needed.
He stood up and yanked his own pants down and his erection was enormous, jutting out in front of him, and he didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, but leapt back onto the bed, on top of her, clearly intent on only one goal. He spread her thighs with his big hands and entered her with one powerful thrust, as deep as he could go, until she cried out from the pressure and fullness and the ecstasy of having what she wanted so badly, what she needed so much, exactly where she needed him.
“Mine,” he said, withdrawing and thrusting into her again and again. Long, powerful strokes. Claiming strokes, dominance and possession in every movement of his body. “Mine, and mine, forever and ever.”
She wrapped her legs around him, digging her heels into the hard muscles of his thighs, and he lapsed into Atlantean again, murmuring endearments or offering promises, and oh, oh, she’d never felt anything s
o wonderful. The truth of whatever he was saying rang in her head, a symphony of bells, so no matter that she didn’t understand the language, she heard and understood his truth.
“More,” she cried out, delirious with need, poised on the edge of some marvelous fulfillment. “More and more, and don’t forget you’re mine, too,” she cried out, and then she was gone, flying up and over into the stars themselves, or through the dome into the ocean over Atlantis, flying free fall into ecstasy and release.
Her orgasm must have triggered his, because he drove into her, one final time, deeper and farther than ever before, and then his big body shuddered over her as he poured himself into her.
She had a moment for sanity and common sense to return, and thoughts of pregnancy, before all of that vanished under an onslaught of pure sensation and unbearably beautiful light and color. She was falling, but somehow falling . . . up? Sideways? No.
Into. She was falling into Brennan’s soul, and it scared her to death.
Brennan roared out his pleasure, a vast and unimaginable sweet, sweet madness, as release took him and his seed poured into her. His, only his, always his. She must acknowledge it, must agree, or he’d lose his grip on sanity. He must tell her, make her understand.
“Tiernan,” he said, but he managed only that word, her name, before it took him. The soul-meld. He stepped out into the abyss and willingly, so willingly, dove into her soul.
Her childhood, so alone, so different. She was so frail and thin, never eating enough, not hungry, afraid to come out of her room too often, afraid to hear the lies her parents told each other over and over again.
Her friendships, ruined, one after another, from casual lies or careless deceit. Deliberate cruelties that stabbed all the deeper for being so unexpected, until she couldn’t trust, couldn’t love, couldn’t let anyone in. Not ever.
The pain of it nearly crushed him, burying him under an onslaught of emotion for which he was spectacularly unprepared. She’d been so alone, for so long, a mere span of years compared to his own, but a lifetime was a lifetime and she’d been isolated for as much of hers as he’d been in his.
“Never again,” he swore. “You will never be alone again.”
She shivered in his arms, and he realized she was still crushed underneath him, bearing his full weight. He rolled over, feeling an instant sense of loss when his cock slipped from the warmth of her body.
“I’m sorry, mi amara,” he said, stroking her hair away from her face. “I was lost to reason for a moment—”
She raised her head and her eyes were wild, almost mad, as if she were lost in the wilderness of insanity. The soul-meld should never have caused that.
“Tiernan?”
She didn’t answer him, and he grasped her shoulders and shook her a little, terrified by the utter blankness of her face, a chilling counterpoint to the crazed look in her eyes.
“Tiernan. Answer me,” he demanded. “Come back to me now, mi amara. I need you.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said, and the edge of madness had migrated to her voice. “Mi amara. I know what it means. Don’t call me that. I am not your beloved, and I never, ever can be.”
His hands slipped away from her as she threw herself off the side of the bed and crouched down, yanking the sheet off the bed to cover herself. Pain sliced through him to think he had caused that look of utter terror on her face.
“Tiernan, what has happened? What did I do? Did I hurt you? I am a fool,” he said bitterly. “I should have been more gentle, I should have waited—”
“You were gentle,” she interrupted, her face softening for an instant, even as she backed away from the bed. Away from him. “You . . . It was wonderful. But we can never, ever be together like that again.”
He’d had swords slice into his gut and cause him less pain than those few words. He doubled over from the body blow, shaking his head in denial. “No. No, you can’t mean that. Why would you—What have I done? What—”
A terrible thought occurred to him. “What did you see? In my soul? Is it so blackened and beyond hope of redemption as to earn me this rejection?”
She paused, then resumed her steps, backing away from him. From any hope of a future. “I can’t, Brennan.” Tears streamed steadily down her face, but there wasn’t a hint of indecision in her eyes. “I can’t.”
Anguish was choking him, killing him, and he only hoped it would be a fast death. It was far, far too late to be a merciful one.
A knock sounded at the door, and Tiernan rushed toward it even as he shouted at whoever it was to go away. He had no need of witnesses. Not now.
Tiernan cast one last anguished glance at him, then pulled open the door, either uncaring that she was nude but for the sheet, or else so desperate to escape him that she would display herself to all and sundry.
He heard the housekeeper’s voice, muffled as if she were speaking from the bottom of the deepest chasm in the ocean floor. Words. Meaningless words. Tiernan had rejected him, so what else could have value?
He almost didn’t hear Tiernan close the door, but then she was standing in front of him, holding, ridiculously enough, a tray of coffee, juice, and pastries.
She put the tray down on a table and simply stood, staring down at him, twisting her hands together. The hands that had so recently been touching his body. Holding him.
“I still need you, Brennan,” she said, giving him a glimmer of hope, but crushing it with her next words. “I can’t finish this mission without you.”
A layer of polar ice settled around him, shielding his reborn emotions from any further devastation, almost as if an ice god had seen his pain and pitied him. He raised his gaze to meet hers and the ice gave him a desperately needed calm.
“I shall assist you in this mission, and then you need never see me again,” he said, only mildly interested to note that the ice had slipped from his soul to settle in his voice, as well. “We should prepare to brief the prince and then return to Yellowstone, should we not?”
Tears still streamed from her eyes, but her face hardened and she nodded once, sharply, and turned away from him, whispering something under her breath that he knew she had not wanted him to hear. Unfortunately for both of them, his hearing was superb, so every heartbreaking word imprinted itself on his heart.
“I didn’t think it would be so easy for you to let me go,” she’d said, and though her back was to him, he could tell from the way her shoulders shook that she was crying. He wanted to go to her, but the ice was there to comfort him.
To stop him from yet again risking her rebuff.
After all, ice was a form of water, and he was Atlantean. Ice should come to his call; answer his need. And so it did.
She cried, and he turned away.
Chapter 20
Tiernan silently followed Brennan down the corridor to the room where she’d met with the princes—Conlan and Ven—the one other time she’d been to Atlantis. They had to report, he’d said. She hoped he planned to be the one doing the reporting, because she was caught in a bizarre haze of shock and regret that seemed to have put her brain on pause.
The soul-meld, he’d called it. The name fit perfectly that sensation she’d had of very nearly losing herself inside of his memories. More than memories, really. The experiences that had made him who he was, over so many centuries that her all-too-human mind could barely comprehend the passage of time. It had been like flash-forward photography in a surrealistic film; colors and images and experiences had barraged her, swamped her, until she’d felt actual, physical pain.
But the pain was nothing. She’d been hurt worse playing in the newspaper softball league. It was the future that had devastated her. The image of what Brennan’s future would be if they continued to care about each other. Brennan would suffer the most, and his hold on reality would shrink and diminish until he was lost in the madness of the curse.
She’d seen it in front of her as if she’d already lived it: Brennan, waking up over and over and ov
er, day after day after day, with a strange woman in his bed. Growing to love her but never remembering it for longer than the space of a day. In her visions of him, trapped inside his soul, he’d become nothing but a man-shaped whirlwind of rage and confusion. Even pushing her away, eventually. Rejecting her in order to save them both from yet another repeat of the “Who’s Tiernan?” game.
That was bad enough, but she’d almost have been willing to take her chances with that. Risk a desperate future in hopes she could change it. He was worth the risk.
But their baby—oh, no. She would never risk that final scene becoming reality. She’d seen herself, resting in the same bed where they’d made love so wildly, holding a tiny, bundled baby in her arms. She’d looked tired but she was glowing with joy, and the baby had been so small. It had to have been a vision of herself just after giving birth.
Her heart had turned over with so much love at the sight of her potential son or daughter, but then Brennan had entered the vision, bursting through the door from the hallway. He’d been flushed with excitement, and the Tiernan in the vision had smiled and held the baby up for him to see.
Brennan had stopped dead, nearly skidding to a halt, and stared at Tiernan and the baby in his bed, his mouth slowly dropping open in shock. Then, finally, after such a very long time, he’d spoken.
“Who are you, madam, and why are you and that child in my bed?”
That had been all it took. She’d wrenched herself away from the vision Brennan and the real Brennan, although it took tremendous force of will to escape the waking nightmare. The soul-meld.
She would risk a lot for a man like Brennan, but she would never, ever risk their child.
He glanced back at her, that horrible icy sheen coating the dark green of his eyes, almost as if he’d picked up on her thoughts. Before she could think of anything at all to say, he turned away from her and sped up his pace. Trying to get away from her, probably. For a man who’d made such extravagant claims of devotion, he’d been easy enough to deny.
