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“This has never happened to me in three centuries,” she said, visibly trembling. “Alaric’s mental pathway is shut down. I cannot reach him. For good or ill, I cannot return to Atlantis.”
Marie sat alone in the vast, gleaming steel and stone kitchen, toying with the remains of a sandwich. She’d eaten nothing all day, but worry and concern had robbed her of what little appetite she’d been able to muster. The mug of hot tea failed to soothe her, as well. The abyss gnawing at her insides had nothing to do with food or drink but everything to do with her inability to contact Alaric or Bastien. Granted, her mental reach did not extend far enough to contact Bastien if they were more than a few hundred landwalker miles apart. But Alaric was so powerful that even the suggestion of contact from a fellow Atlantean was sufficient for him to receive the message.
Always in the past the high priest had immediately opened the pathway between them at her call. Now there was nothing. No sense of being blocked, simply nothing at all. As if…
As if Alaric no longer existed.
But she refused to even countenance that thought.
Ethan’s voice came from the doorway in that lazy drawl that he turned on and off seemingly at will. The mere sound of it shot liquid lightning through her.
“You hold that mug any tighter, and you’re going to break it.”
She refused to look at him, afraid her face would betray her reaction to him. “Then I will go to the mug store and purchase you a new mug. Conlan made sure I had some of your currency before I left Atlantis,” she said lightly.
“Really? How much do you think a special mug like that would go for?” He walked over to where she sat on a high stool, not stopping until she could feel his breath in her hair. “That’s a unique, genuine Miami Vice commemorative mug from 1985. Probably irreplaceable.”
She lifted the mug and examined it. “Who are these men with the oddly laquered hair? Are they heroes among your people?”
He threw his head back and laughed, and Marie watched him, fascinated. “Do you know that I have not seen you laugh like that before now? You become a different person when you laugh so freely,” she said, lifting a hand to touch the dimple that had appeared on his cheek.
The smile faded from his face. “I haven’t had much to laugh about, beautiful. I think, under different circumstances, being around you might change that.”
The room closed in on her, making the simple act of breathing difficult, but she decided to be bold, no matter the consequences. She would soon leave, never to return, more than likely. Her duties would not allow frequent or extended absences.
“I would enjoy the opportunity to bring you laughter. Under different circumstances, as you say,” she whispered.
Calling on the Goddess for quite a different kind of courage, Marie stood and took his face between her hands and drew it down to her own. “I’m going to kiss you now,” she said.
“I’m going to let you,” he replied.
Then she lifted her face and kissed him, but it was vastly different from the kisses they’d shared before. She touched her lips gently to his, coaxing and then persuading his response. He stood rigidly in her grasp, hands clenched at his sides, as though afraid to touch her and break the moment.
She reveled in the power of taking the lead in their caress and lightly licked the seam of his lips. He groaned in the back of his throat and immediately opened his mouth, tilting his head to more fully meld his lips to hers. She twined her fingers in his thick, silky hair and pulled him even closer, making a quiet humming sound of contentment as the kiss deepened.
The tiny sound seemed to unleash something in Ethan, because he burst into fervent motion, clasping her waist with his hands and lifting her back onto the edge of the kitchen table. He thrust one muscled thigh forward to part her legs, then moved so that he was wedged between them, all the while still kissing her. One of his big hands shifted down to her bottom and pulled her still closer so that her dress rolled up and he pressed firmly against the heat at the juncture of her thighs, nothing but his trousers and the silk of her underclothes between them.
She put her arms around his neck and murmured some sound that meant, Yes, definitely yes, oh please yes, and he wrapped his other hand around the nape of her neck and deepened the kiss.
When they finally broke free to catch their breath, Ethan wore the same shocked expression he’d had before when they kissed, and she hiccupped a little as her laughter fought its way out past her gasping breaths. “You look like I feel, shape-shifter. Did the world tilt on its axis a little for you, too? Or does my penchant for drama, as my brothers call it, overtake me?”
His sensual lips curved into a smile, and she tried to stop thinking about how she’d like to feel those lips all over her body. She had to focus. They were in crisis from all sides, and thinking about how good all that lean muscle would look—totally nude—was not helping.
Heat rus
hed through her at the thought, and her body convulsively jerked against him. He literally growled, like the panther that he was. “You need to stop doing that, or I’m going to take you right here on this table, ocean girl. And drama, hell. The world didn’t just tilt, it bounced clear off the damn axis.”
She flashed a seductive smile at him, filling it with the promise of everything she wanted to do to him. She knew the timing was bad. She knew the adrenaline response might be responsible for his reaction to her.
She wanted him anyway.
“If circumstances were different, as you say, I might take you right here on the table,” she whispered.
His eyes gleamed, then narrowed, and his hands tightened on her. “Just what am I? Some kind of vacation fling?”
She blinked, dumbfounded, then began laughing helplessly. “Vacation fling? What does that even mean? This is the first occasion on which I have ever left Atlantis in the more than four centuries of my existence, so that would not say much for my powers of attraction, would it?”
His jaw dropped open. “Four centuries? You’re more than four hundred years old?”
