Atlantis Unmasked (33 page)

“Your breasts are so beautiful,” he said, staring at them so intently that heat flushed through the skin of her chest and up to her face. “I can't look at them without needing to touch them and taste them.”

And then he proceeded to do just that, drawing her nipple into his mouth and gently sucking on it, the pressure just enough to make her moan with frustrated longing as her hips bucked restlessly underneath the blanket.

Then, still holding her hands, he released her breast and lay his head on her chest, right over her heart. The tenderness of the gesture took her breath away for a second, and her heart stuttered and skipped a beat or two.

“I could listen to your heartbeat forever, do you realize that?” he asked her, his voice a quiet rumble, his breath warm against her skin.

“Forever is a long time,” she said, suddenly chilled by the impossibility of his statement. “I'm cold. May I have the blanket, please?”

He sat up instantly, tucking the blanket up and around her shoulders, a look of concern on his beautiful face. She tentatively lifted her hand to touch the scarred left side, hesitant at first. Afraid she'd offend him. He flinched a little, but then held still under her touch.

“Is it so repulsive to you? My face?” He lowered his eyelids, but not before she'd seen the flash of pain darken his eyes to a stormy green.

The words themselves took a moment longer to penetrate, perhaps because they were so much the opposite of what she'd been thinking. “Are you—what? How can you even ask me that? You are the most beautiful man I've ever seen in my life, and a flaw only makes beauty more poignant.”

She leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss on his scarred face, and he seemed to stop breathing. “Did you know that some master artisans purposely put a flaw in their art so that God will not be offended by perfection?”

He laughed, and the sound was bitter. “That's a pretty story, but the analogy rings false. There is a huge difference between an artist deliberately pulling a thread in a tapestry and Anubisa calling Hellfire to burn my face.”

His muscles tensed, and she could tell he was on the verge of pulling away from her. It was a constant dance between them, pushing and pulling, moving apart and coming together. A strange waltz between two hopeful but almost unwilling participants.

“Tell me about it. What is Hellfire?” The question was blunt, but she didn't know any other way to ask it. She sat up in bed, pulling the blankets around her.

“It's exactly what it sounds like. It's fire channeled from the lowest of the nine hells, and Anubisa, as goddess of Chaos and Night, is mistress over it. She can channel it to her purpose or for her unholy pleasure.”

He shrugged and then jumped up to pace the floor. “Evidently one day ruining my face happened to be her pleasure.”

Grace didn't even know she was crying until she tasted the hot tears as they ran down her face and touched her lips. She scrubbed at her face but never took her eyes off him. “How could you stand it? How could you be so incredibly brave as to survive?”

He whirled around and glared at her. “Don't you mean to ask why I was such a coward that I didn't take my own life to escape? I tried. Believe me, I tried. But there was always someone there watching me. Keeping me from inflicting any pain on myself.” He stopped pacing and laughed bitterly. “Evidently only
they
were allowed to cause me pain.”

The memory of the flames from her vision—the whips and torture—burned through her mind like a brand. She shook her head back and forth, denying the vision. Denying his words.

“No, that's not what I meant to ask at all. I know you're not a coward. I've seen your amazing courage. It was much braver to survive that horror than to take the easy way out.” She hung her head, ashamed to look at him. “Trust me, I know. And my reasons for wanting to take that final way out are pathetically unimportant compared to what you endured.”

She watched as his boots walked into her field of vision. But he didn't touch her. Simply stood there for a long moment. Then he finally spoke, and ice and pain mingled in his voice. “Strange, then, that we found each other. That I finally found the one reason—the one
person
—who could save me from an eternity of wanting to take that final step, and she wants nothing more permanent of me than a brief moment of physical comfort. Believe me, the torture of that knowledge is more than anything Anubisa and her minions could have done to me.”

Before she could recover from her shock at his words, he was gone, the door slamming shut behind him.

She sat in the bed, stunned, clutching the sheets to her chest as the enormity of what he had said sank in. He thought
she
was the one not wanting any permanent commitments with him. He thought
she
was the one who only wanted a physical relationship.

She threw off the blankets and jumped up to get dressed. This was one misconception she was going to clear up immediately. She had given herself to him, finally daring to take a risk, body, heart, and soul. She wasn't going to back down now, even if she had to beat some sense into an Atlantean warrior.

Alexios stormed through the fort, almost wishing that someone would attack. He needed someone to hit. Maybe Tiny would be up for a little sparring.

But then he heard it. Her voice, behind him. And she didn't sound happy.

“Alexios, slow down right now or I'm going to get my bow.” Her sharp command rang through the stone corridor, and he found his steps slowing in spite of himself.

He turned, folding his arms across his chest, and glared at her as she approached. Trying not to feel his heart thumping painfully. Trying not to notice how unbelievably beautiful she was with sleep-tousled hair and the rosy pink flush of anger riding high in her cheekbones.

“Oh, save it, buster,” she snapped. “You can't go from having your mouth on my boob one minute to storming off the next.”

He blinked, taken aback. Sometimes he forgot how direct women could be in this century.

“I'd have to agree with that one, partner,” Tiny said from somewhere behind Alexios, adding a layer of joy to his day. “Sorry about overhearing, by the way. I was just on my way out for some breakfast. I can bring you some back, if you like, Alexios. You must be hungry after patrolling with us all night. Oh, and you, too, Grace, of course,” he added hastily.

The flush in Grace's cheeks burned even hotter, but she responded politely enough. “Thank you, Tiny, but Alexios and I are going out to breakfast by ourselves.”

“We are?”

She jammed her hands on her hips and gave him back a glare as good as any he'd ever given. “Yes. We are. If you don't have any more stupid objections or stupid opinions, like your stupid idea that I'm stupid enough to want you only for a stupid roll in the sack.”

By the third “stupid,” he was grinning. “I'm guessing what you're really trying to say is that I'm stupid.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Bingo. Got it in one.”

Alexios glanced behind him, but Tiny was gone. Smart man. “So. Breakfast. You and me,” he repeated. Stupidly, in fact. The realization made him laugh.

She marched up to him and grabbed a fistful of his shirt and yanked him down toward her. “I don't do that,” she said, slowly and carefully. “I need for you to hear and understand me. I don't let people in, and I don't open my heart up. So when I do, I don't expect to be treated like I'm only using you as some kind of boy toy. Got it? I care about you. You mean something important to me.”

“Boy toy?” His mind raced with the implications and pure, primal male satisfaction warmed every inch of him. “But what if I want you to use me like that?”

She made a strange growling noise in her throat that reminded him of the panther shifter who'd claimed that she should be his consort. But before he had time to even think about being jealous, she put her hands on his face, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him, hard.

“My beloved, remember? You don't get to call me that and then back away from me.”

It finally sank in. She was demanding that he stay with her. That he not run away. She wasn't trying to escape. She wasn't telling him “thanks, it's been fun.” She wanted him. She wanted to keep
him
.

He caught her around the waist, carefully putting his hands underneath the bottom edge of her healing injury, and lifted her as high as he could without bumping her head on the stone ceiling of the corridor. Then he slowly and carefully lowered her until her face was level with his, and he kissed her.

“Perhaps I should not jump to conclusions based on faulty evidence,” he admitted. “However, I am having a hard time believing that I'm good enough for you.”

“I think,” she said, between kisses, “you should let me spend the next twenty or fifty years convincing you.” But he noticed a quick shadow crossed her face as she said it, and he tucked it away to ask her about later.

Much later.

“Breakfast, then?”

“Breakfast,” she said, smiling.

“The humans call a room like this a panic room,” Prevacek observed, gesturing to the stark gray walls and steel-reinforced doors of the five-hundred-square-foot room.

Vonos ignored him, or at least gave the appearance of ignoring him. Prevacek did an excellent job as second-in-command in the Florida region. He was top-notch at security, as well. But he had an unfortunate habit of talking too much.

Vonos scanned the room in question, then nodded in satisfaction. The renovations had proceeded quickly, after a visit to the contractor's wife had convinced the recalcitrant human that an estimate of completion date did not mean that the work would be finished two weeks
after
that date.

Or even one week.

Or even one day.

He smiled, reminiscing about that visit. The woman had been singularly unattractive, her tanned and leathery skin almost too thick for his fangs to penetrate.

Almost.

He'd only drained a mere fraction of her blood before her husband “saw the light,” as it were, and moved every one of his crews, available or not, onto Vonos's renovation project.

He wasn't an evil man, Vonos mused. Simply one who preferred
order
and organization in all things.

“Of course, we needed a room where no sunlight could possibly enter. Those double default doors were brilliant,” the general rattled on, his Russian accent thickening as it usually did in times of stress, until he sounded almost like a caricature of himself. Not that any ancient Russian mafioso didn't sound like caricature, given what Hollywood had done to them.

Addendum. Prevacek talked too much
and
he was a suck-up. Vonos could never fully trust a man who was either, let alone both. But that worked out fine for him, as he never intended to trust anyone. He had done so before and been betrayed, just like so many others had been betrayed.

Drakos.
The name burned through his mind as if the sunlight had managed to find the inner recesses of his skull.

“Explain this to me. This theater troupe.” He drummed his fingernails on the slate desktop. He'd ordered the furniture from Pottery Barn, simply because the irony of it amused him. “Why exactly would you order an unscheduled attack, potentially destroying months of my careful planning, merely to go after a group of amateur actors, may I ask?”

“They were flaunting their disrespect, Primator,” Prevacek said, bowing low. “They were using the fort as a venue, even after we made it clear that the anti-vampire history of the fort was horrific to us.”

“And you didn't think that this open display of aggression might provoke closer attention to our experiments with shifter enthrallment than I either wanted or needed at this stage?”