Atlantis Betrayed

Chapter 18

Fiona felt like events were swirling around her that she hadn’t a clue how to decipher, and she didn’t like the feeling. At all.

“Are you insane? You can’t threaten my friends. They’re going to call the police any minute!”

“They won’t. They’re Fae. They want nothing to do with the human police,” he said flatly. “Also, stay away from her. Don’t accept any favors from her, ever. Don’t even say thank you. In fact, don’t even say hello.”

“Look, partner, you can’t dictate to me what I do or do not do with my friends,” she said. “I—”

“Let me guess. She told you to stay away from me. That I’m not human, right?”

That stopped her dead. “She did, actually. Why would she say that?”

He shook his head. “She said it because it’s true. The better question is how would she know that, if she were human herself? Did she explain that?”

“No she didn’t,” she said slowly, revisiting her conversation with Maeve. Her eyebrows drew together. “I never knew Fairsby was Maeve’s cousin, either. There are an awful lot of Fairsbys running around. Also, stop dragging me. I’m getting a little tired of being pulled all over the Great Court.”

“Cousin. That’s one way to put it,” he said grimly, maneuvering them out onto the space cleared for a dance floor. A small orchestra was playing something light and with a down-tempo beat suitable mostly for ninety-year-old dancers. She and Christophe must be the youngest on the floor. Or maybe not. Several things he’d said and done suddenly presented themselves in a new light.

“Just how old are you?”

He threw back his head and laughed, causing several heads to turn their way. “I quit counting at three hundred.”

“Three . . . hundred? You—wait. This is like Atlantis, right? I believe it or not? You don’t have any actual proof?”

“I don’t have a birth certificate, if that’s what you mean.” He twirled her gracefully around an elderly couple she thought she recognized. The Hadley-Radfords, perhaps.

“I believe a record of my birth exists in the scrolls in Atlantis.”

She sighed. “Of course it does. Is that where you learned to dance like this? I expected you to be stepping on my toes long before this.”

“I learned it from my dance tutor, in the palace. It was required training for all warriors. Not all battles are fought on battlefields, Princess. Some are played out in ballrooms.”

He smiled down at her and—for just an instant—Fiona gave herself permission to believe she was on a date. A first date with a fierce, unflinching warrior who seemed to be willing to protect her from all danger. It didn’t make sense.

She didn’t care.

“What did he want with you? Lord Fairsby?”

“Lord Fairsby, as he’s calling himself now, and his cousin are Unseelie Court Fae. Very powerful, very bad news. The Unseelie Court is the dark side of the Fae, not that the Seelie Court is all flowers and little woodland creatures playing flutes. He has something to do with Vanquish disappearing, I’d put coin on it.”

His arms tightened around her. “He is very, very powerful, Princess. Magically powerful, and with his official Scotland Yard position, he has the weight of human bureaucracy behind him. He could make things difficult for you.”

“The British have been making things difficult, as you call it, for the Scots for a very long time.” She lifted her chin. “I’m not the first in my family, and won’t be the last, to kick their arses.”

He grinned down at her. “It makes me hot when you talk tough, did I mention that?”

Her pulse sped up, but she managed a shrug. “Everything makes you hot.”

“When you’re wearing that dress, yep. There go Fairsby and Maeve, heading out. We’ll give them a few minutes before we leave. I don’t want to give them a chance to get near you again.”

He twirled her in a quick loop and then bent her down into a dip. Several of the people standing nearby started clapping, and she could hear the murmurs.

“Isn’t that Lady Fiona Campbell? The book author?”

“Making a spectacle of herself—”

“That’s the man who was on TV with her this afternoon—”

She pulled away from Christophe and walked off the dance floor, her head held high, smiling distantly over the heads of the nosy gossipmongers. He caught up to her in two strides of his impossibly long, hard-muscled legs and pulled her hand into his.

“Thanks for the dance, Princess. It’s been a while.”

“Really? Last year? Last month? When was the last time you treated anyone to your dance prowess?” She heard the sarcasm in her voice, but it was one of her defense mechanisms when she was embarrassed.

“Not hardly. The last time I danced like that was in those dance classes I told you about. The palace housekeeper’s daughter took pity on us and rounded up some girls so we didn’t have to dance with each other. I can tell you that even as a kid, Bastien—one of my fellow warriors—was huge and the gods know that he had at least three left feet.” His shudder at the memory was so heartfelt that she laughed in spite of herself.

“These stories are very entertaining, whether they’re true or not.”

“They’re true. I’ll prove it to you soon, but part of me is hoping you come to believe me without needing evidence,” he said.

She glanced up at him and his face had hardened into an expressionless mask. He’d put up his defenses again, and she knew the time for dancing and joking, brief as it had been, was over.

“Let’s go and talk to some vampires, then,” she said, changing direction to make for the exit. “I’ve already written my check to the hosting organization.”

He tightened his grip on her arm. “There is no we. You are going home and Denal is going to babysit while I do some investigating. That Fae, and if I’m not very badly mistaken he’s a Fae lord, which is even worse news, just warned us off of Vanquish. The last thing you need is to be caught anywhere near this investigation.”

She yanked her hand away from his, stuck on a single word. “Did you say babysit? Do you think of me as a baby?” She kept the smile pasted on her face for the benefit of anyone watching, but fury was burning a hole in her throat. “Babysit?”

He put his arm around her shoulders again and herded her over to the Reading Room, where a bored-looking museum employee was standing guard.

“Sorry, no guests tonight, renovation,” he recited in a monotone.

Quicker than thought, Christophe grabbed the man’s chin with one hand. “We’re going in,” he said gently.

“You’re going in,” the man repeated, staring wide-eyed up at Christophe.

“Nobody else comes in.”

“Nobody else.”

“You never saw us.”

“Never saw you.”

Christophe released the man, who continued to stare straight ahead as if dazed or in a trance. Christophe pulled Fiona into the room and turned left until they were out of the line of sight of the doorway.

“What was that? You have mind control, too?”

He shrugged, but the faint glow still reflecting light from his eyes was all the confirmation she needed.

“Is that what you did to me? Put some kind of mind control on me to make me go along with your crazy schemes? To . . . to get me into bed?”

All amusement drained from his face. An expression that almost looked like hurt flashed in his eyes, and then was gone. “Is that what I did, Princess? Be honest with yourself and with me. Which one of us cast the spell on the other? Because I can’t seem to get through five minutes without wanting to kiss you. To strip you naked and taste your skin. Right now I’d bend you over that table and drive my cock into your perfect body if I thought you would let me, so tell me, Fiona. Who is in control here?”

He stood apart from her, his hands clenched at his sides, and didn’t make a move to touch her. “Just go if you want to go. Hells, I’m used to it. I still plan to find the Siren and I’ll give you Vanquish when I retrieve it. But you never have to see me again.”

He meant it, too. She knew this man, somehow. He stood, shoulders hunched as if in defeat, waiting for her to leave. People had let him down before. Betrayed him. She could see the signs of it—the same signs that she’d seen in her father before he died, betrayed by his own father.

She’d always regretted that she hadn’t been old enough to help her father. This time, with this man, she could do something about it.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered. “Let’s figure this out together.”

He raised his head, his eyes widening with disbelief or wonder. “Are you sure? I won’t offer you an out again. I’m finding I like having you around.”

She tried out her best seductive smile. “You may like me even more when I tell you I’ve absolutely nothing on underneath this dress. How long will that mind control hold over the guard?”

Christophe almost fell over. She wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t abandoning him, although she wasn’t sure how to believe him about Atlantis or even his age. No, instead, she was walking toward him, smiling a wicked little smile, all but asking him to take her.

Who was he to turn down a lady?

He pounced on her, lifting her off her feet and into a fierce embrace. He found her mouth and devoured it, kissing her with all the relief and hunger he felt. A stark, implacable knowledge had risen deep inside him and was consuming him with forbidden flames.

She was his.

He put her lovely ass down on the nearest table and pulled her legs around him as he stepped into the cradle of her thighs.

“Really? Isn’t that terribly decadent behavior for a princess?” He kissed his way down the side of her neck, kissed her delicate collarbones, and then kissed the rounded tops of her breasts. “Do you know, I’ve wanted to pop you out of this all evening?”

He proceeded to do just that, encouraged by her indrawn breath and the flush rising on her pearly skin. He scooped first her left, then her right breast out of the fabric of the dress and sighed in utter satisfaction at the sight of her rosy nipples hardening and pointing at him. “Like tiny little Atlantean blushberries,” he murmured. “Just begging me to suck on them.”

He pulled gently, them more firmly, on her nipple with his tongue and lips, his cock hard as tempered steel and growing harder by the second as she whimpered and pulled his head toward her with her hands.

“Oh, that’s so good—oh, wait. Someone could walk in any moment,” she whispered urgently.

“And that’s even more exciting for you, isn’t it?” He stood and stared into her eyes, while he slid his hands up from her ankles to her knees, pulling her knees farther apart, and then from her knees to her inner thighs, which were trembling. “We could be caught by any one of those aristocratic ninnies.”

Her breath caught. “What about Fairsby?”

“They’re gone, remember? Oh, what’s this?” His fingers found liquid heat. “Are you wet for me, Lady Fiona?”

She trembled in his arms. “All the time, it seems,” she confessed in a whisper. “If not mind control, what have you done to me?”

“The same thing you’ve done to me, I hope. And I plan to do it again, right now. Right here.” He kissed her again, then unfastened his pants and released his straining cock. “I’m going to fuck you right here in the middle of the British Museum, and you’re going to love it.”

She caught his face between her hands. “You’re going to love it, too,” she said fiercely.

He centered his cock and plunged into her, and was rewarded by her tiny cry. “Oh, yeah.”

She stopped him. “Condom?”

“Fiona, I swear to you on my oath as a warrior that we are safe.”

She looked deeply into his eyes for a long moment, an eternity of a moment, and he had all but resigned himself to calling up an icy cold shower when she nodded.

“Yes. I believe you.”

“Thank you,” he said fervently, but then he didn’t talk for a while, because he was too busy kissing her. He kissed her while he drove his cock into her warm, wet center; plunging deeper and deeper into her, answering every lift of her hips with another thrust. He couldn’t get enough of her—he wanted her over and over, in every way possible.

He wanted her for always. The thought made him thrust deeper.

Her sheath tightened around him and she dug her fingers into his shoulders. “I’m—oh, I’m coming, Christophe. Please, harder. Faster.”

“Anything for a lady,” he said, his breath coming in harsh, rapid pants. He grabbed her hips and lifted her up and off the table, so her full weight was supported in his arms, and thrust harder, deeper, and faster, until she tightened around him and started bucking in his arms. He captured her cry with his mouth and thrust again, releasing his own seed, spurting long and hard into her welcoming heat.

When they both finally quit coming, he rested her back on the table and carefully, regretfully, withdrew. They were both breathing too hard to talk, so he removed from his pocket the handkerchief Hopkins had so thoughtfully provided and offered it to her.

“Thanks. I think I saw some napkins over there,” she whispered, her cheeks blushing again. She was such a fascinating contradiction of wanton and innocent, his woman.

His woman. He was beginning to like the sound of that.

Maybe he was bewitched—but if so, it was the normal enchantment between a man and a woman. One he’d thought he would never experience. Far more than mere sex.

He filed the thought away to consider later. They cleaned up and he kissed her again. A long, slow, gentle kiss.

She took a deep breath. “Are you ready to go pub hopping?”

“I can’t talk you out of this?”

“No. We’re partners, remember?”

He took her hand. “You can never, ever leave my side. And if I tell you to run, you do it. Understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“Okay, let’s do this. And, Fiona?”

“Yes?”

“This is my new favorite museum.”

She blushed all the way to the car.