“I’d be better able to cope if we weren’t flying around inside a freaking tornado,” she shouted, finally losing the edges of calm. “Get me out of here!”
He nodded, and the glimmering oval of the portal appeared underneath them just before he dropped her. She screamed all the way down.
Chapter 7
An island in the Bermuda Triangle
After Alaric had calmed the storm and dispersed the tornado so none of the humans would be harmed, he followed Quinn through the portal to the beach on the other side, but prudently walked ten or so paces away, to give her a moment to recover from the fall. Now that he had time to consider the matter, it seemed that dropping her the five or six feet to the beach like that had perhaps not been the wisest course of action. After all, the woman was armed and definitely dangerous.
Dawn was breaking, and Quinn was so fierce and beautiful in the golden light of morning that he found himself almost unable to breathe at the sight of her, until she looked up and scowled at him. She sat, face like one of Poseidon’s darkest thunderstorms, in about six inches of water. Waves broke against her and splashed on the glistening white sand around her, and she was completely drenched.
“You are a total slime ball, you know that? A . . . a scumbucket, useless pile of—”
“Perhaps you should carefully consider your words,” he said, cutting her off before she had the opportunity to more fully demonstrate her command of insults. “I didn’t have a lot of time to control the portal, since you wanted me to protect your humans from the storm.”
“The storm you created,” she snapped.
He couldn’t help it. He started laughing. She resembled nothing more than a kitten caught in a rainstorm, snarling and spitting her dismay.
She narrowed her eyes, scrambled to her feet, and started toward him, moving fast. He watched, expecting her to stop before she reached him.
She did not.
Instead, she hit him at a full-on run, and knocked him backward so hard that he fell flat on his ass in the surf and sat there, sputtering seawater out of his mouth and staring up at her in total shock.
Quinn’s narrowed-eye stare all but dared him to stand up again. “Do not ever, ever laugh at me after you throw a tornado at me, drop me from way too high up in the sky—without a parachute, I might add—and scare me half to death. Do you hear me?”
“The situation has little likelihood of coming up again,” he said cautiously.
“You are so frustrating,” she shouted at him, kicking more water on him. “Why couldn’t you find some other tough rebel chick to drive out of her mind? Why did it have to be me?”
He shoved his dripping wet hair out of his face and, relief finally overwhelming him, grinned up at her. “World-bending kisses,” he smugly reminded her.
Her mouth fell open, and she stood there gaping at him for several long moments before she shook her head and started laughing. “You are insane, you know that, right? Totally, entirely insane.”
“The thought has often occurred to me,” he admitted. “May I stand now, or do you plan to knock me over again?”
She tilted her head, as if considering her options. “Just stay there,” she advised. Then she turned and walked away from him until she was about twenty feet from the surf line, where she sat down and stared out at the waves.
He waited another few minutes before he stood up. Just in case.
Clearly, he wasn’t the only one on the beach who was balancing on the crumbling edge of sanity. He’d gone mad when he’d believed her to have been kidnapped or worse. Now that he knew she was safe, she could kick water on him all day long. He smiled again, and sent a fervent prayer to whatever gods were listening—although quite pointedly not to Poseidon—that he could continue to keep her safe.
No matter what the cost.
As the sun rose over the horizon, Quinn stared out at the waves and tried to let the beauty and serenity of the island sweep through her. The pure, salty scent of the ocean surrounded her as the breeze of the water played with the damp ends of her hair. The gentle roar of the tide all but demanded that she relax and let nature’s peace calm her raging thoughts. She could pretend she was on a vacation. Tourists would pay a fortune to visit this unspoiled beach, and it was all hers.
Well. All hers, if she didn’t count him.
She was trying to ignore him. That would teach him. Probably nobody ever ignored Alaric, Mr. High Priest Arrogant Son of a . . . Actually, she didn’t know whose son he was. She didn’t know anything about his family. Did Atlantean high priests even have mothers? Did they spring, full-grown, from some kind of whale egg?
It would never work between them. Yes, they had some insane animal attraction between them, but what did they even know about each other? She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and then almost laughed as the most terrifying warrior and most powerful magic-wielder she’d ever known sat in the water, waiting for her permission to stand up. She counted down under her breath, “. . . three, two—”
He stood up before she got to one, as expected, and it ticked her off even more that he rose up out of the water with his usual elegance. Alaric moved with the grace of a predator stalking prey, and too often lately she’d felt like the bunny rabbit to his wolf. His natural arrogance and belief he was in charge of every situation and every person he encountered wouldn’t allow him to understand her: her fear of losing herself to his dominating nature; her fear that if she gave in, even once, to passion with him, she’d never be able to resist him again.
As he walked out of the water and onto dry sand, a brief shimmer of blue-green magic glowed around him. When the light dissipated, his clothes were completely dry. She wished she knew how to perform that handy trick, since her jeans were soaked and sand was sticking to them.
Alaric waved a hand in her direction, and her clothes also dried in a shimmer of light, as if he’d been reading her mind again. She didn’t like it. Not one bit.
She pitched her voice to carry over the crashing surf. “Can you read my mind?”
He raised one dark eyebrow and smiled. “No, I have told you I cannot. It does not take thought-mining to anticipate that you would wish to be dry, however.”
“Right. Can you guess what I’m thinking now?” she asked sweetly, as he approached. What lovely broad shoulders you have, she thought, and then felt her face burning.
He studied her face, and his smile slowly faded. “Ah. I cannot imagine it is anything complimentary.”
She forced her mind back to the issue at hand, and away from how well his hard-muscled body filled out his clothes. “Let’s talk about how you might have gotten some of those people in the cars back there killed.”
“I would rather discuss kissing you,” he said solemnly, and she nearly laughed but fought it down.
“This isn’t funny.”
“No, it isn’t funny.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “You are right. I could have caused people to die. This displeases you, so I will not allow it to happen again. It’s a simple solution.”
She blinked. “Alaric, we’re the good guys. We wear the white hats. It should matter to us that people don’t die just because they get in our way.”
He made a complicated gesture with one hand, and a dolphin shot up out of the air in a graceful pirouette, rising to at least twenty feet in the air, before wafting back down to the waves at a gentle pace that clearly was not governed by the laws of gravity. It was a beautiful and terrifying display of restraint and power.