by Alyssa Day
And his soul was reaching out to her; he could feel it. He’d heard talk of the soul-meld—the earth-shatteringly intense bond that a warrior who was very, very lucky could form with his mate. He’d just never expected to feel it himself. Not with his past. Not with his family.
Every time he touched her, though, and especially when she kissed him, he could almost feel it. A silvery brilliance, spiraling inside him like water magic, reaching out to connect. He’d caught the barest glimpse in her memories of her cold and lonely childhood, and he’d instantly retreated, knowing she’d see it as intrusion. As violation.
But even that glimpse had shown him enough to help him understand. Her need to stand for herself; to be strong.
He only admired her more for it.
They’d talked for hours about nothing and everything. Sometimes he’d just watched the curve of her lips as she spoke. It wouldn’t be long now before the sun rose to take her place in the sky, and he wanted to stand up and howl at the moon to stay for just a while longer.
Just another night.
Morning would bring breakfast, and other people, and commitments. It would bring him one day closer to the day she was scheduled to leave Atlantis.
“I want you to meet my family,” he blurted out.
She turned to look at him, her eyes huge. “What? But you said you never wanted any woman around your family.”
“I want you to know me. They’re part of who I am,” he admitted reluctantly.
“I’d be honored to meet them, then.” She shivered, and he pushed the basket out of the way and pulled her back to sit against him, her back to his front and her legs between his, and then he wrapped his arms loosely around her waist.
She leaned back against him and sighed, the scent of her hair teasing his senses. “I could stay here forever.”
“Then do it.”
“I don’t…I have to go back. My business, my apartment, my life—it’s all in Chicago,” she said, but he caught the note of wistfulness in her voice, and it ignited a small flame of hope in him.
“You could plan parties here. I’ll tell everyone I know to have a party,” he said, energized. “You’ll be the busiest party planner on Atlantis.”
“I’d be the only party planner on Atlantis, she said dryly. But then she snuggled back against him, and he tightened his arms around her, knowing that he wasn’t ready to let her go.
Knowing that he had no right to ask her to stay.
Fair enough. It was his move—literally.
“Then I’ll move to Chicago. I’ll find some way to do it. Surely Poseidon will release me from my vow”
She twisted in his arms so she could look at him. “What? Move? You can’t leave Atlantis for Chicago. It’s so beautiful here, and we’re going into the freezing-wind, icy-snow season up north. You’d hate it. I hate it.”
“Then why go?”
“I don’t have a choice. Please, let’s not talk about it now. Just hold me, and let’s watch the sun come up.”
He pulled her into his lap bent his head to hers. “I’ll hold you, but let’s not watch the sun come up. I don’t ever want the sun to come up, if it means this night ends and you leave me.”
“Liam--"
“Kiss me, Jaime,” he said roughly. “Just kiss me.”
When she reached for him, Liam made a silent vow that she wouldn’t leave without him. He could fulfill his duty to Poseidon by protecting the humanity of Chicago.
First, though, he kept his promise to Jaime. Neither of them even noticed the sun when it finally rose.
12
The wind played with Jaime’s hair, tickling her face until she opened her eyes to a new day, a new month, and the realization that she didn’t want to leave Atlantis.
More than that—the determination to fight for the chance to stay.
“Screw a letter of reference. I’m going for official palace party planner.”
A rich, deep laugh rumbled in her ear, and she curled even closer to Liam’s very warm body and took a deep breath of fresh sea air. She’d never spent the night on a beach before, and she kind of loved it.
“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Also, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever woken up with a woman and both of us were fully dressed.”
She sat up and mock-glared at him. “Dating tip: Don’t talk to the woman you wake up with about the other women in your life, unless you want her to return the favor.”
His eyes widened. “There are other women you’ve slept with? You may be too adventurous for me.”
That made her laugh. “I probably am, but you’ll just have to get used to it. Also, just kissing is so amazing between the two of us that we might spontaneously combust when we get to the naked part.”
Liam’s eyes immediately glazed over.
“Naked part,” he said reverently, and she shook her head, still smiling.
“Later. We need at least a few official dates first. Now, come on. Let’s get cleaned up, so we can talk Riley into creating a job for me.”
He pounced, instead, and rolled on top of her. “How about you kiss me again, first, for an hour or two, and then we go talk to the queen?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” She put her arms around his neck, but when she tried to pull him down to her, he paused.
“Jaime, I have a confession to make,” he said, and she groaned.
“Now?”
“Now. It’s kind of strange, but I thought you’d like to know.”
“What is it, Liam?”
He smiled that slow, dangerous smile that he only ever gave to her. “I want to have jack-o-lanterns at our wedding.”
Jaime’s heart skipped a beat or two or three. She’d walked into a fairy tale, and she’d found her happily-ever-after. Finally, finally she’d found her someone.
“Liam, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
THANK YOU!
Thanks so much for reading Halloween in Atlantis. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
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Try my other books! You can find excerpts of all of my books at http://alyssaday.com/books.html. Read on for an excerpt from the first in my new sexy and funny Cardinal Witches series, Alejandro’s Sorceress.
EXCERPT: ALEJANDRO’S SORCERESS BY ALYSSA DAY
Poe’s Avenue, Virginia, FBI Paranormal Operations Division HQ
Alejandro cocked his shotgun and followed his teammate into the burnt and jagged opening in the side of the building, hoping that—for once—there weren’t any trolls.
He hated trolls.
“Clear,” Mac, already moving through the narrow hallway, called back to him. It was Mac’s turn to go first. They kept score.
Lately he’d been keeping score on a lot of things. Like time. The year, two weeks, and five days since he’d seen the sunlight outside of the academy, for instance.
Not that he was counting.
Anyway, the course at the FBI’s sister division, P-Ops, had kept him plenty busy.
“Shotgun! You coming or scratching your ass back there?”
“No, my friend, I was just thinking of asking your sister to scratch it for me,” Alejandro said, grinning at the nickname he’d won for obvious reasons. “She reaches all the itchy parts so well.”
“I will kick your ass if you get any of your itchy parts anywhere near my sister. Or
she’d kick it for you. Jenny scares even me.”
The sound of Mac’s Glock firing three shots in rapid succession caused Alejandro to break into a run as he slapped his night-vision goggles in place.
“On my way,” he called, not bothering to try to be stealthy. “Save some for me.”
He caught the shifting glimmer of light in the corner of one eye and whirled around, aiming and firing in one smooth motion. Whatever it was, he missed. Too short to be a troll, so there was one mercy. If he were the type to have nightmares, he’d still be having them about the last one’s breath. Green, moss-covered teeth. What the hell was that about? Toothpaste was cheap.
“Shotgun! Could use a little help here!” Mac sounded just the slightest bit out of breath, which was unusual for the man who’d beat the all-time speed record for the FBI’s obstacle course at Quantico in an inter-agency competition. Alejandro had won a hundred bucks on that one.
He took off running, cocking the Remington as he moved. The vampire who jumped him five feet down the hall took a blast to the head. Alejandro vaulted over the disintegrating body, not wanting the acidic slime of decomposing vamp on his new shoes.
A high-pitched scream warned him of the approach from overhead of a deadly Mngwa, but he had a silver throwing knife at hand. One lethal toss later, a couple hundred pounds of mutant killer cat lay on the floor, blood gurgling out of its throat.
He skidded to a stop at the end of the corridor, not willing to rush headlong into a blind turn, and Mac called out to him again, his deep voice rough and strained. “Alejandro, if you’re coming, now would be a really good time.”
Alejandro instantly switched from student-taking-his-final-exam mode to deadly-predator mode. They had a code between them, he and Mac. They were only Alejandro and Maxwell to each other in the event of a dire emergency. Whatever faced Mac around that corner was no training-ground obstacle. Somebody had set a trap, and Mac was caught in it.
Alejandro was going to kick somebody’s ass for this one.
He dove for the floor, rolling to the side to protect the Remington, and did a modified army crawl around the corner. The natural expectation was to look for an enemy at man-height, not on the floor or the ceiling. It’s why the vampires and other supes who could climb down a building or fly always had the advantage. Nobody would expect a P-Ops rookie to come in at ankle-height.
Alejandro was far, far more than a rookie.
His first glance assessed the situation and told him everything he needed to know. A trio of wolf shifters surrounded Mac, and one of them had gotten in either a good swipe of his claws or a bite—Alejandro hoped it was only claws—and Mac was down and bleeding, his gun a crushed hunk of metal on the floor.
“Come out, come out, little human,” snarled the shifter who stood with one claw-tipped foot on Mac’s head.
Another was on all fours, his massive head hanging down near Mac’s struggling form. As Alejandro watched, that one’s long tongue snaked out as he licked blood off the side of Mac’s face.
“Yummy,” the shifter said in his garbled voice, and then he laughed.
It was the laugh that put Alejandro over the edge. Cool, clear-headed, Paranormal Operations training flew out the window. Hot, primal rage from years of battling murderous vampires in San Bartolo took over. He triangulated his shots in his head a split-second before he took them.
A couple of heartbeats later, three werewolves lay dead on the ground.
“Glad you talked me into that silver shot,” he said mildly, as if his partner hadn’t almost died and wasn’t now in danger of becoming a shifter himself.
Mac forced out a laugh and hauled himself up off the ground. “Damn wolves. I was so focused on the possibility of big, bad, and ugly that I missed the pitter-patter of little feet.”
“Brownies?”
“Leprechauns. Bastards tripped me up, and the wolves jumped me when I was down.”
Alejandro shook his head and then blasted a hole in the side of the building. Welcome sunlight poured in, and he stepped over the bodies of the shifters to reach his friend. “Let’s move.”
Mac nodded, but shrugged off Alejandro’s hand. “Thanks, but screw that. We’re going to walk out of here like it was no problem, and then we’ll get me to the infirmary after. I don’t want any of those punks laughing at us.”
“There are worse things than laughter,” Alejandro said, eyeing Mac’s wounds. Looked like claws. He hoped.
“Yeah. Fucking leprechauns.” Mac bared in his teeth in a grim imitation of a smile. “At least one of them won’t be tripping anybody else, ever again.”
He jerked his head to indicate the far corner, and Alejandro could just make out a small green shoe pointing at the ceiling.
Alejandro headed for the hole in the wall. He needed to get Mac to the infirmary before anything worse showed up.
“Could have been worse. Could have been trolls.”
Alejandro ducked his head to exit the building, so the huge wooden club smashed into the wall instead of his skull.
“Fee, fie, foe fucking fum, little Mayan,” the attacker growled in a voice deeper than the interior of a volcano and just as hot.
Alejandro hit the floor and swept a foot at the troll’s ankles, sending it crashing to the ground with a resounding thud. With anything that big, the trick was to go for the feet, ankles, or knees. Before he could cock the shotgun, Mac pointed his Glock at the troll’s head and shot it through one eye.
Alejandro stood up and nodded his thanks.
“I owed you one,” Mac said, but he was now noticeably leaning to the right, and the blood dripping out of his wounds wasn’t showing any signs of stopping.
Alejandro sighed. “Why is it always trolls?”
Buy Alejandro’s Sorceress HERE.
OTHER BOOKS BY ALYSSA – FIND MORE INFORMATION HERE.
THE WARRIORS OF POSEIDON SERIES:
Atlantis Rising
Wild Hearts in Atlantis (a novella; originally in the WILD THING anthology)
Atlantis Awakening
Shifter’s Lady (a novella; originally in the SHIFTER anthology)
Atlantis Unleashed
Atlantis Unmasked
Atlantis Redeemed
Atlantis Betrayed
Vampire in Atlantis
Heart of Atlantis
Alejandro’s Sorceress (a related novella)
Halloween in Atlantis
THE TIGER’S EYE MYSTERY SERIES:
Dead Eye
Private Eye
Travelling Eye (a short story, soon to be available as a stand-alone)
Evil Eye (coming in 2017)
THE CARDINAL WITCHES SERIES:
Alejandro’s Sorceress (a novella)
Denal’s Enchantress (coming in November, 2016)
William’s Witch (a short story in the Taming the Vampire anthology, soon to be available as a stand-alone)
THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK SWAN SERIES:
The Cursed
The Curse of the Black Swan (a novella; originally in the ENTHRALLED anthology)
SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Random
NONFICTION
Email to the Front
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alyssa Day is the pen name (and dark and tortured alter ego) of Alesia Holliday. As Alyssa, she writes the New York Times and USA Today best-selling Warriors of Poseidon paranormal romance series, Tiger’s Eye Mysteries paranormal mystery/urban fantasy series and the Cardinal Witches paranormal romance series. She has won many awards, including the RT BookClub Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Paranormal Romance novel of 2012.
As Alesia, she also has won many awards, including Romance Writers of America’s coveted RITA award for excellence in romance fiction. Alesia writes comedies that make readers snort things out of their noses, and is the author of the award-winning memoir about military families during war-time deployments: EMAIL TO THE FRONT.
She’s a diehard Buckeye who graduated summa cum laude from Cap
ital University Law School and practiced as a trial lawyer in multi-million-dollar litigation for several years before coming to her senses and letting the voices in her head loose on paper. She lives somewhere near an ocean with her Navy Guy husband, two kids, and any number of rescue dogs. Please visit Alyssa at her website, follow her on Twitter (she’s very chatty there!), or like her on Facebook (warning: dog photos regularly appear).
For more information
@alyssa_day
AuthorAlyssaDay
www.alyssaday.com
[email protected]
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
Halloween in Atlantis Copyright © 2016 by Alesia Holliday
Cover design by Syd Gill Designs – www.sydgill.com
Alejandro’s Sorceress Copyright © 2014 by Alesia Holliday
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, or for foreign rights inquiries, please contact the author.
Author contact info:
Website: http://alyssaday.com/home.html
Email: [email protected]
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Alyssa Day
The Warrior’s Creed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9