Heart Of Atlantis by Alyssa Day Page A

Quinn, you would not want the world to try to survive my insanity if I lose you.”
    Quinn drew upon reserves deep within herself to remain calm as she found herself swirling counterclockwise in the heart of a tornado, somehow protected by Alaric’s strength and magic.
    “You can’t do this, ever again. You cannot hold innocent lives hostage against my cooperation. That makes you no better than the murderers—human, shifter, or vampire—who kill people every day. The ones I’ve spent ten years fighting,” she said, her mouth close to his ear so the wind didn’t snatch her words away.
    He shuddered against her, as if fighting a tidal wave of emotion. “I know. Don’t you think I know? I, who pride myself on my logical, rational state of existence? I don’t know what to do, Quinn. You must help me.”
    “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