by Alyssa Day
Cyclone force.
Her body trembled and she arched into him, the softness of her curves enticing, but it was the touch of her mind that drove him toward madness. His body hardened beyond any need he'd ever known, aggressive, dominating, until his clothing was surely going to burst from the pressure.
He drove his tongue in and out of her mouth, thrusting and retreating in a cadence older than time. Wanting to climb inside of the warmth of her mouth and the haven of her body all at once.
Sanity tried to rise in his mind and push past his fierce need. Riley. Her name is Riley. She's human.
This is wrong.
She touched his face.
Sanity never had a fucking chance.
Even as he pulled her against the hardness of his body, Riley knew she must be dreaming. Nothing, nothing, had ever felt like this. Power surged through her, heat melding her to him.
She wanted to climb on him, climb inside of him, feel his body rubbing against her, pounding inside of her. The intensity of it shocked her even as she moaned for more, more, more, all reason lost in the tempest of wanting.
Needing.
She clutched at his rock-hard biceps, trying to hold herself upright. Maybe trying to pull him closer. She mindlessly moved her hands, put them on his chest, down to his hard, flat, stomach, up to his neck. Drove her fingers into his hair. Closer, closer. She heard a moaning sound, and it was her, her. She was whimpering. If his tongue hadn't been in her mouth, she'd be begging him to pull her even closer.
She stopped breathing, focused on his emotions, pulled the colors of them inside her. The blues and greens and the sparkling crystalline passion swirling around, and she was lost in it, lost in him.
Lost.
The idea of losing herself snapped her to a brief rationality. She fought to push back from him, reaching for sanity, battling with ravenous desire.
Sanity surrendered.
She made a tiny moaning sound inside of his mouth, and Conlan was lost, too, wanting, craving, needing. Only her. Only her. Now.
He tried to concentrate on her thoughts to keep from tearing at her clothes like an animal. He sent his mind inside of hers—inside of her soul—and was captivated by her innate goodness, selflessness, and light.
The epiphany of her purity slammed into him with a force beyond reason. He was paralyzed.
He was destroyed.
She wanted him, too.
Consumed by the twin revelations of her spirit and desire, flaming heat flashed to volcanic intensity inside of him. The passion and elemental energy in the air snapped and crackled around their bodies, incinerating him from the inside out.
His body went up in flames, and he wanted more.
His need turned voracious. Just one touch. A single taste.
A taste that went on forever.
His hands caressed her spine, pulled her hips closer to his heat—his need. His mind and body screamed for this one moment when passion, not obligation or duty, was allowed to rule his actions.
Her scent, the silk of her hair, the warmth of her skin next to the sea-spray chill of his own all combined to blast duty out of his mind.
He wanted, no, needed to carry her down to the sand and take her body, over and over, pounding into her warmth with the relentless fury of the surf. His heightened senses scented her desire, rising to match his own, even as she clutched at his shoulders. His hands shaped her curves, touched her softness, molded her body to his own so tightly that she must surrender to his claim.
Something primitive—feral—raised its head inside of him and demanded that he do just that.
Stake his claim.
Leave his mark on her.
His mark. The flames. Suddenly, he realized the mark of Poseidon on his chest was burning into his flesh almost as it had the day he'd sworn his oath. A reminder? He tried to think, to study the sensation, but his body was drowning in raw need.
Lost in the miracle of her mind and her body, he kissed her, claiming her with his mouth. His hands tightened on her until she cried out a little. The tiny whimper wrenched him out of his mindlessness and he stilled, sanity trying to resurface.
She pulled her head back, eyes dazed and lips swollen. "You're hurting me," she whispered.
He released her instantly, hands trembling, cursing himself for having caused her pain. "I'm sorry—damn it. I'm—there is no excuse."
He bowed his head, breathing hard. Self-loathing iced over any remnants of passion. He bowed deeply and then raised his gaze to hers. "Please accept my apologies. I have never—no. I'm as much of a brutish asshole as the scum that just ran away from here."
She smiled a little, the edge of fear receding from her eyes but still present in her mind. She was trembling. Maybe as much from fear as passion, now.
He was lower than scum.
She tried to speak, breath coming rapidly and clearly trying for calm. "I don't… I can't… you can't…"
She heaved in a deep breath and backed away from him. "What the hell was that? I don't do things like that. I mean, I just did, so you must think—but I don't. Oh, stop babbling, Riley."
She gave him another shaky smile, still breathing hard. "Since you probably saved my life and all, you're forgiven for, well, practically assaulting me right here on the beach. Not that I wasn't cooperative, or whatever. But I have to leave." Riley backed carefully away from him, seeming not to realize that he lingered in her mind.
Honesty. Even embarrassed by what she thought of as her own wanton behavior, she was honest enough to admit to him that she'd felt the same raging desire. His respect for her bravery increased, even as he had to fight his body's demands that he sweep her back to his palace and hold her captive for a year.
Or two.
Preferably naked at all times.
Conlan felt the fierce smile spread across his face. She was courageous, and beautiful beyond belief, and she was aknasha.
It was his duty to study her. To spend a great deal of time with her.
To rationalize the hell out of the fact that I want to get her naked and underneath me. In my bed. Here on the sand. Anywhere. Just soon.
Now.
He sucked in a deep breath, fighting for control. The Trident. He had to find the Trident. He'd tuck her safely away in Atlantis in the meantime.
He thought of the warriors standing guard, training—hell, just the thought of other males walking around anywhere near Riley—and his breathing tightened in his chest.
Okay, so she could stay in the temple.
With the priests. The celibate priests.
Away from Alaric, oath of celibacy or no.
Riley took another step back, and he still could sense her confusion. She doubted her sanity. Exhaustion was overwhelming her. The night's events had battered her—he'd battered her.
He couldn't regret touching her. Kissing her. But he regretted pushing her already stretched resources even further. An alien sense of tenderness washed through him. He wanted to protect her.
Even from himself.
He smiled down at her, but it wasn't enough to reassure her. Riley nearly stumbled in her haste to get away from him. "I have to go home. It's late. The curfew and all. I have to—good-bye."
As he moved to follow her, he sensed that Ven and the Seven had finally broken through the waves, and that Alaric was close behind. He knew that he could track her from a distance. He'd scanned the area to confirm that the attackers were long gone.
But it took everything in him to stand still and let her go.
Just long enough for her to reach her home. She'd want to pack some of her things.
He didn't know how long he'd keep her in Atlantis.
Something deep inside him protested at ever letting her go.
Not for long, this time at least. I'll be at her side in less than an hour. The rest—the rest I'll have to figure out later.
He refused to think of his duty. Of his intended queen he'd never met.
As he watched her run from him, his mind suppli
ed her name, almost caressing the syllables. He whispered it aloud. "Riley."
When his body hardened even further at the mere sound of her name, a stark truth slammed into him. She was no mere empath.
She was his.
Conlan shook his head. Stupid. Futile. His duty was clear. Noble lineage. Destined royal breeding program.
His lip curled. Royal stud farm.
His gaze went back to Riley, spotlighted on the edge of the beach where she'd turned to stare back at him. Tentatively, her mind reached out to his. Good-bye, Conlan. Thank you.
You're welcome, Riley. But there's no way that it's good-bye.
As she disappeared into the night, he raised his arms and hurled a wave of fierce joy into the sea, and a family of passing dolphins threw themselves into the air in celebration—an arabesque of shared delight. The air resonated with the vibrations of Poseidon's power.
Then, without warning, weakness and dizziness crashed through him. Conlan stumbled backward and then fell to the sand.
And fear for Riley shot through him.
He shook his head back and forth, trying to clear it. He hated the idea, but he had to do it.
He had to call for aid.
Ven! I need… 7 need your help.
Chapter 7
Some hundreds of miles away, the Lord High Vampire Barrabas raised his head, scenting the air. Something—what! Just for an instant, he'd felt a disturbance in the elements beyond anything…
"But, Senator Barnes, as leader of the Primus, you must—" the human said, cringing.
Barrabas hissed at him, hating the false name. Barnes. A pathetic excuse for a name.
He knew, however, the ill-advised nature of claiming his legacy. Many still remembered his history-cursed name, and the events that Pontius Pilate had set in motion that day.
Soon. Soon he would come into his own, and then the name of Barrabas would be hated and feared with such magnitude as to make what went before seem as nothing to these sheep.
The sheep in front of him prostrated himself right there on the concrete floor of the Primus's central underground chamber.
"As leader of the Primus, I must do whatever I want to do," he sneered. "The other two houses of Congress will do exactly what I tell them, won't they?"
The human groveled and crawled backward out of the room, probably considering himself lucky, given what he'd witnessed.
The vampire's gaze flicked to the congressman from Iowa and the senator from Michigan who had been causing such problems. They dangled, feet off the floor, arms threaded through the shackles bolted into the wall.
The females of his blood pride flitted around them, slicing delicately into the skin of the chained men and sucking at the blood running down their naked forms. The Iowan still moaned, though the other had long since gone silent.
Barrabas considered and discarded conclusions regarding the relative strength of their party affiliations based upon their stamina, and then he flung himself into his thronelike chair. Eyes narrowing, he focused on the disturbance he'd felt in the elements.
"What could have such power?" he muttered, fingers drumming on the arm of the chair.
The door to the chamber slammed open and his second, Drakos, soared into the room. "Did you feel it, Barrabas?"
Barrabas nodded, a nearly imperceptible movement of his head. "I felt it. What was it?"
Drakos floated down to the ground, silvery hair settling around his shoulders. Barrabas was not unaware of more than a few of his women sneaking avid gazes at his general.
Something will have to be done about Drakos. He grows nearly powerful enough to challenge me. Perhaps it is time for a new second.
But aloud he only replied to the spoken question. "Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Send out the vanguard. We cannot afford to be distracted now."
"Anubisa?"
Barely, just barely, Barrabas contained the shudder. "She has been… unavailable as of late. Not that she ever tells us anything of what she knows."
"Still, if we defy her—" Drakos clenched his jaw.
"Enough," Barrabas roared. "Do as I say."
"As you command, so it will be done," Drakos responded, averting his gaze and bowing low. "I will lead them."
"No. I need you here," Barrabas said. "Send another. Send Terminus."
Drakos raised one eyebrow, but otherwise his face was entirely unreadable. Unsurprising for a more than nine-hundred-year-old vampire, but inconvenient nonetheless.
Barrabas stood up in a movement of pure blurred speed that might have terrified the chained Iowan, if one of the women hadn't just sliced through his jugular.
"Good politicians are so hard to find these days," Barrabas observed. "They all lack a certain endurance."
Stepping around the spray of blood and inhaling the thick, coppery smell with pleasure, Barrabas waved a hand to his general. "I have a more important task for you, my second. I need another telepath. I was, perhaps, oversolicitous in my affections with my last one."
He thought back to the lump of inanimate flesh he'd left on the floor of his bedchamber, with more than a little regret.
Drakos spoke emotionlessly. "Telepaths are few and far between, my lord, and growing ever more difficult to locate. I had hoped this one would—"
Barrabas cut him off. "You question me, Drakos?"
Though he had been unusually hard on telepaths this past year. His lusts for blood and flesh were rising, not abating, as he grew older and stronger, and something about hearing his victim's tormented thoughts through the telepathic link was unbearably succulent.
If only empaths still existed. To actually feel the sheep's pain as he inflicted it… he shuddered in simple ecstasy at the thought.
No other had survived as long as he—there was none Barrabas could ask to learn if he would face even more ravenous hungers as more time passed. Perhaps he was destined to become more of an animal than the shape-shifters he planned to destroy.
Shaking off his black thoughts, he led Drakos out of the chamber, glancing back at his women, who were frantically lapping at the congressional fountain of blood. "And get my secretary. I have a new proposal to make in regard to that last bill that got filibustered. I think the rest of the Congress may find it more… palatable… now."
He stopped at the door and jerked his head toward the remains of his most determined opponents on the Hill. "Then get someone to take out the trash."
Chapter 8
Conlan inhaled a deep breath, sure that Riley's scent lingered in the air surrounding him. He could taste her in his mouth—her warmth and sweetness. Still feel the imprint of her silken skin on his hands, on his hardened and aching body. He could still sense the emotions she was broadcasting so loudly.
Everything in him demanded that he go after her. Need bordering on obsession swamped him, but centuries of training rose to override his instincts. He must face and analyze the threat. He'd never experienced anything like that wave of weakness. It had passed in minutes, but who knew if it could come back?
Also, what the hells had caused it? Was it from sharing her emotions?
By Poseidon's balls, it was like nothing he'd ever heard about in all of the histories of his people. Nothing he'd ever been warned against.
He needed to identify the cause of the weakness, so that he could prevent it. Defeat it. As Alaric loved to proclaim, knowledge is power.
He reached out for his brother on their shared mind path.
Ven?
The voice came immediately in his head, ringing with fury and—better hidden but still evident—concern. Nearly there, my brother.
The duty ingrained in him after so many years battled to regain control of his mind. His duty was to recover the Trident. Finally ascend to the throne that he'd avoided thinking about for the past two centuries. Lead his people.
A future king didn't abandon his duty to follow a woman.
He laughed, humorless. Yeah, duty. Because just what Atlantis needs sitting on the throne after
my father's half millennium of perfect rule is a fucked-up head case who couldn't even escape from a vamp.
His jaw tightened, and he paced circles in the sand. Not that Riley—or any woman—deserved to be burdened with him, either.
His thoughts flashed to Anubisa. What if pain had ruined him? What if sex for him would now always be tainted, twisted?
Wrong?
What did he have to offer any woman? He must be rational.
Right. Except rationality was fucking impossible. His body tightened further, painfully, just at the thought of Riley's hair slipping through his hands like the finest Atlantean silk. She hadn't felt wrong. Nothing about her, about them together, had felt anything but right.
Too right. How could it be so right to hold a woman he'd just met?
A human!
Closing his eyes, Conlan breathed slowly in through his nose and called on the discipline of his training to dampen his raging need. He was high prince, and he knew his duty.
Yeah, well, screw duty. Ven has five minutes, and then I'm going after her. I'm going to make sure she's safe before I go recover the Trident.
A swirling fountain of water shot up into the air, carrying Alaric to the sand. Dramatic as always.
The priest's midnight-black hair swirled around his shoulders, reminding Conlan of the stories told about him. Alaric as the dark guardian of Poseidon's rages. The people invoked the high priest's name to terrify children into minding their parents.
Conlan scowled, for the first time wondering how Alaric felt about being made into the stuff of nightmares. The glimmer of sympathy vanished, though, when the priest started laughing.
"My patience is damn near at an end, so laugh at your own risk," he snarled, feeling like a fool, trying for dignity when he'd recently been sprawled in the dirt.
Knowing that Alaric knew it.
Alaric grinned at him. "You don't appreciate my fun, Conlan? I spend so little time on land, I deserve to enjoy it, don't I?" He strode forward and held out a hand. Wearing form-fitting black pants and a black silk shirt nearly identical to Conlan's own, Alaric could have been his twin.
His evil twin.
Still, Conlan didn't have time for childish sulking. He grasped the outstretched hand, knowing Alaric would read him more easily through touch.