rapid succession are anything to judge by,” he said. His voice was a rumble in his chest against her side and made her want to rub her face against him like a kitten.
“I was thinking about last night. The vampires. And the shower, and the museum, to be honest,” she confessed, her cheeks flaming again. Evidently whatever caused her to blush had not yet caught on that she was a grown woman.
“Ah, yes, the museum. One of my favorite memories of all time,” he said, chuckling. “And yet waking up here with you counts as its equal.”
She turned to look into his eyes. “Why? You must have woken up with many women before.” She didn’t want to think about it, but she had to face facts, especially if he really had seen more than three hundred birthdays. Even one or two encounters a year and that added up to . . . insanity.
She couldn’t think about that now or her brain would catch fire.
“Never, in fact.” He pulled her even closer and kissed her nose. “I don’t sleep with women.”
“Right. So you’re a monk?”
“I have had sexual encounters, but I have never slept with a woman before this night. I’ve never met a woman I trusted enough to let down my guard that much.” Sincerity and something else was in his gaze. A little embarrassment of his own, maybe?
She stared at him, fascinated. “Never? In all those years?”
“Never.”
“I—I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. “I feel honored.”
“You’re the one who honors me, Princess,” he said solemnly, but then a wickedly evil grin lit up his face. “If you want to honor me again, right now, you can climb on top of me and—”
“I get it, I get it.” She leaned in to kiss him and took her time about it. When she pulled back, she took a deep, shaky breath. “You do amazing things to me, Mr. Atlantean warrior.”
“Wait. Sean!” She pushed away from him and sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest. “I can’t believe I haven’t checked in on Sean.”
“He is doing well,” Christophe said. “I have already communicated with Denal. Sean’s wound has begun to heal, perhaps due to the liberal application of blessed water so quickly applied.”
She leaned back against the pillows. “That’s good. I guess I can wait a bit to check on him in person.”
“He, Denal, and Declan were planning a marathon battle of some video game after lunch,” Christophe informed her, leaning over to kiss the top of her breast. “I think we can safely skip that.”
“But Hopkins—”
“Let Hopkins get his own date.” He pulled her over and on top of him and proceeded to make love to her thoroughly for the next couple of hours, until they were lying in a tangle of rumpled sheets and bliss.
She traced a finger around the curves and lines of the tattoo on the upper left side of his back. “What does this mean?”
“That’s the mark signifying my oath as a warrior. Poseidon brands us with it when we’ve completed our training to be a Warrior of Poseidon. A sort of graduation gift.”
She caught the bitterness underneath the sarcasm. “You don’t like it?”
“Would you want to be branded?” He sat up, pushing his dark hair away from his face. “It implies ownership. I have never wanted to be owned.”
“What does it mean? The circle and the triangle and this symbol?”
“It’s a symbol representing our duty. Poseidon’s Trident bisects the circle representing all the peoples of the world. The triangle is for the pyramid of knowledge. All of Poseidon’s warriors wear this mark as a sort of proof of service. It means we’ve sworn an oath to serve Poseidon and accepted the responsibility of protecting humanity.”
“But you don’t? Want the responsibility of protecting us from our own stupidity, I’m guessing?”
He glanced at her, clearly surprised. “You are very perceptive for a ninja, Princess. Let’s just say I never did, before I met you. Now I’m starting to enjoy the job.”
She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m not a job.”
“No, you, my beauty, are a privilege and a fantasy. I fear I might wake up from this dream and be bereft of your presence.”
“Bereft. Nice. Poetic, even,” she said. “Did you know an eft is a kind of salamander, like a newt? Witches in the old days—or the poor women who were accused of being witches, at least—used to boil their tails in potions.”
He started laughing. “Wonderful. I try to be romantic for the first time in my life, and you start talking about lizards. My poor ego may die a hideous death.”
“But you’re not,” she said, serious now. “You’re not a romantic. You’re a warrior.”
“Does that bother you?” His eyes cooled to green ice, but she recognized it for one of his many self- protective techniques.
“No. I’m still dealing with the fact that I killed those two vampires. I used blessed water to deliberately harm them and it caused their death. That was me. I am now a murderer.” Her hands started to shake and she clenched them together.
“They were vampires.”
“Vampires have rights as citizens now.”
“They were trying to murder you. All of us. Self-defense and defense of others is still permitted, even in the screwed up new world you landwalkers are creating,” he said, rolling over to sit up and stare down at her. “Don’t ever think that you are bad or wrong for preventing them from killing Sean or yourself.”
“You scared me a little,” she admitted. “I’d heard you say the word—warrior. But I didn’t have context. I didn’t know how to believe it. Out there you were deadly beyond anything I’ve ever seen. So many of them and you were everywhere with your blades and your magic.”
“Are you still afraid of me?” His eyes were shuttered again, and his jaw clenched as if against her response.
“Did I just act like I was afraid of you? When I had my lips around your penis, for example?” He stretched blissfully in reaction to her question, and she laughed but then grew serious again. “No, oddly enough, you make me feel safe. You have so much danger inside you, but you put your own life on the line for me and Sean. There’s no way he killed six vampires, either, is there?”
“Let him think it, Fiona. He needs to be a white knight, especially after you threw yourself into the fray to save him.” Christophe lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a lingering kiss into her palm. “He’s not the one who swore an oath, after all, which makes his courage all the more impressive.”
“Do you want to tell me the words? The oath. I’d like to hear it, if it’s not too private.”
“The language is archaic. If you didn’t like me being romantic, you probably won’t like this, either.”
“Please? But only if you want to.” She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she wanted to hear it. She only knew that she did. Knew that if this man were capable of swearing an oath of one sort and following through on it, he was also capable of another kind of commitment. The
The kind that suddenly mattered to her a very great deal.
He shrugged. “If you like. It goes like this: We will wait. And watch. And protect. And serve as first warning on the eve of humanity’s destruction. Then, and only then, Atlantis will rise. For we are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the mark of the Trident we bear serves as witness to our sacred duty to safeguard mankind.”
A thrumming sense of power rang through the room, resonating in the air and in her bones, under her skin and blood and individual nerve endings.
“That’s beautiful,” she whispered. Even she, with so little magic, felt the magic in the words. “But you don’t like it?”
“It’s not the words I don’t care for, it’s their meaning. Why should I care anything about safeguarding mankind?” His face twisted with a rage so intense she flinched away from him. “
