Free Wild Hearts in Atlantis by Alyssa Day Page A

smiled and lifted her legs to clasp around his back. “I need you, too, my poet warrior. And remember that I’m not the only one surrendering, here.”
    He moved his hand to guide the head of his cock against the slick wetness of her opening, and then he put his hands on the bed on either side of her as he bent to kiss her yet again. “Gladly do I surrender, Kat Fiero,” he whispered, and then he threw back his head and roared his possession as he drove into her with one stroke, not stopping until the base of his cock thrust against her pelvis.
    She arched up and into his body and screamed, an eerie sound that had as much of panther in it as woman, and then she dug her nails into his back and clung to him, thrusting into him in time with his movements. “Oh, yes, please, now,” she said, more demand than plea.
    “Yes,
mi amara
, I am pleased to comply,” he said, voice rough with the effort of forming coherent speech. He drove into her, harder and faster, gone partly mad with hunger and a desperate, terrible passion.
    Knowing he would defy Poseidon himself for this woman.
    He felt the moment she approached the precipice; her entire body tightened around his own. He thrust, impossibly hardening beyond any limits his body had ever known.
    As he drove her up and over the edge into the abyss, she looked into his eyes, into his soul, and uttered a single word. His name.
    “Bastien,” she murmured, and he was lost.
    The stars that surely had shone upon Atlantis in its glory days exploded behind his eyes and in his blood and—for a moment, a long moment, an incalculable moment—hefelt her inside him as jewels burst in his brain to color his world.
    A rift opened in the fabric of his universe, a fissure in his bleak solitude, and she slid in, warm and silken as a summer rain on the ocean waves. Her essence opened itself to him as the unfurling of a bed of sea stars, and it tempered the bleakness of his hardened soul. Hopefulness met grim resolve, compassion met implacable duty. Her kindness entwined itself in the dark, crabbed spaces of his black soul and somehow lighted the path to absolution.
    He was lost, and yet she had found him, and he would never, ever be the same.

Ten

    “What just happened?” Kat lay—okay, she was collapsed, in fact—halfway on top of Bastien with her legs hanging over the edge of the bed. She was trying not to admit to herself that she was entirely freaked out. Basically, this was the first time she’d made love, since a few ineffectual fumblings in college. Oh, yeah, and the sky had exploded in her brain.
    Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an unbelievably passionate interlude with a four-hundred-year-old warrior from the lost continent of Atlantis.
    Bastien’s voice rumbled in his chest, under her head. “That, my lady, was a passion unmatched in my history.”
    He sounded as exhausted as she felt. Kat smiled, fiercely glad of it. “Truly?” She turned to look at him. “There had to be a lot of women in so much history.”
    He raised an eyebrow and reached to pull her up so that her head rested on his shoulder and she fit snug against his side, her leg resting on his thigh. “Not nearly as many as you might think. When one is bound by inexorable duty and mission, one loses the taste for dalliance.”
    She tried to pull away from him, but his arm tightened around her. “Is that all I am? A dalliance?” She hated the note of uncertaintyin her voice even as she heard the words tumble out, so she tried to laugh it off. “Well, that was a pretty terrific dalliance. That should hold us both for a while, until we find somebody else to dally with, right?”
    He sat up abruptly, drawing her to sit beside him. “If that is what you think, you are utterly mistaken,” he said flatly. “There will be no other dalliance,
mi amara
, for either of us. Please do not speak of it again.”
    She blinked. “Okay,
that
was unexpected. After your brave words in front of Ethan, are you now