“Don’t think I’m offering this out of duty or anything half as noble. You know I’m a selfish bastard who demands things go his way. I don’t settle for anything less than what I want. And what I want right now, forever, is you.” His eyes glowed bright with tender emotion. He held her face in his hands, searching her gaze with an intensity that made her blood heat beneath her skin. “I’m offering my bond because I love you. Because I need you, Jordana, and I don’t want to know what life without you will feel like ever again.”
He kissed her hard and deep, so passionately she lost herself to the overwhelming power of the moment, unaware that Zael was even still in the room until the Atlantean awkwardly cleared his throat.
Nathan released her, only to utter a growl and take her mouth again in another hungered, but brief, kiss. She was laughing as they separated and both turned to face Zael.
While they’d been caught up in passion, he’d collected the soldiers’ remains and now belted their sheathed blades around his waist. “I must go,” he said. The crystal at his wrist was starting to glow. “I’ll take the dead with me and scatter them far enough away from here or Boston to throw anyone else off their trail. Whoever Selene sends next will have to start all over again. And if you’re blood-bonded by then—”
“She will be.” The dark confidence in Nathan’s voice sent a jolt of fire through Jordana’s veins.
Zael smiled. He held out his hand to Jordana. In his palm was a leather thong like the one he wore. One of the dead guards was missing his. “For you, should you ever need it. If you’re ever in trouble, it will take you anywhere you can picture in your mind.”
“But only me,” she said, recalling that he’d explained the crystal would only transport those of Atlantean blood. She glanced up at Nathan, before looking back to Zael and giving a shake of her head. “There’s nowhere I’ll ever need to go if not with Nathan.”
She reached for Zael’s strong golden fingers and curled them around the gift she wouldn’t accept. “Thank you for being a friend to my father Cassianus. And to me.”
Zael bowed his head low, reverently. “Godspeed and a very happy, long life to you, Princess Jordana.”
Zael held out his hand to Nathan. The two immense males—one golden and godlike, one dark and dangerous as night itself—clasped each other’s hands in a solid, if unspoken, gesture of friendship.
With that, Zael strode over to the fallen Atlanteans and knelt down beside the bodies. He took the wrist of each one in his hands as the crystal on his bracelet glowed brighter and brighter still.
Light exploded from it in all directions—a lightning-quick blast of pure energy.
When it went out an instant later, Zael and Selene’s dead guards were gone.
28
NATHAN HELD ON TO JORDANA AS THE VILLA WENT QUIET IN THE wake of Zael’s departure, leaving the two of them alone with the weight of all they’d just seen and done and heard.
The battle with the two immortal guards had been harrowing, hard won. Zael’s many revelations before and after the fight had been astonishing, even mind-blowing.
But nothing had leveled Nathan so much as Jordana’s declaration that she loved him.
That she would have given up a guaranteed asylum to return to Boston—return to him—even before he’d come to find her was a sacrifice he could hardly fathom.
Then again, yes, he could.
Because as he held her under the circle of his arm in that moment, he knew with a certainty deep down into his marrow that there was nothing he wouldn’t give up if it meant forever with Jordana.
When he might have held her against him even longer, content simply to feel her beside him, Jordana drew back. “Your wound, Nathan.” She glanced down at her hand, which had been resting against his abdomen. The palm was stained red. “It’s still bleeding. Let me take care of you now.”
The injury was already healing. He knew it would mend soon enough on its own, but he didn’t resist as she took him by the hand and led him through the villa, into a lavish bathroom adjoining the large master bedroom suite.
“Sit there.” She pointed to the white marble edge of a deep soaking tub. As he obeyed her soft command, she went about gathering a supply of clean washcloths and towels. When she returned, she set them down next to him, then carefully untucked his body-hugging black shirt from his pants. “Can you lift your arms?”
He did as she asked, realizing only now that this was the first time in his life that anyone had cared for him in such a way.
The only time he’d ever permitted anyone to care for him like this.
Or wanted it so fervently.
A dark memory tried to push through his subconscious as Jordana gently drew his ruined shirt away from the sticky mess of his injury. Her hands were so tender, so light on him after she laid the shirt aside and knelt down to inspect the wound.
She ran water onto one of the washcloths from the tub faucet, then wiped away the worst of the blood with aching care. The cloth was cool against his torn flesh, a balm almost as soothing as her sweet attention.
Yet in the back of his mind, Nathan felt the bite of a lash. He heard the clamor of chains. Smelled the oily stench of blood-soaked metal and stone.
He had to battle every instinct he had not to shove her touch away.
Jordana must have sensed the tension in him. Glancing up now, her lovely face was pinched with concern. “Am I hurting you?”
“No.” The word came out strangled, thick with restraint.
She went back to her careful ministrations, hesitantly now. She watched him too closely. She had to feel the rigidity of his muscles, the torment in all of his senses, as he struggled to hold back the ugliness of his past while she touched him so lovingly.