by Lara Adrian
He needed to find the bastard and bring him down.
Before Savannah ended up any further into the crossfire.
They couldn’t stay here forever. Wherever they were. Tegan had never mentioned this place before. Even though the warrior had offered the old house up to Gideon, he had no misconceptions that Tegan meant it to be a very temporary shelter. Frankly, Gideon had to agree with Savannah that the place felt more like a neglected tomb than a home.
As much as Gideon hated to admit it, she needed to be moved to a more suitable, more permanent, arrangement. And unless he had lost his mind and meant to defy Lucan Thorne’s edict for a second time in so many days, he couldn’t very well bring Savannah to the compound. Gideon could just imagine how the Order’s unyielding Gen One leader would react to a civilian being brought there against long-standing Order protocol.
But if she went there as Gideon’s mate?
The notion hit him hard. Not because it was a fucking crazy, bad idea. But because of how sane and right it felt to him.
Savannah at his side, bonded together in blood and life for somewhere close to forever.
Take all that you want, Gideon.
Savannah, his Breedmate.
Holy hell . . . .
The thought opened up something hot and deep in his chest. A longing. A yearning so total, it rendered him motionless, unbreathing.
Ah, Christ.
The bloody last thing he needed was to let himself fall in love with Savannah.
He cursed roundly, making a vicious stab at the air with the long dagger he’d used to gut the Rogue who’d gone after Savannah. Pivoting on his bare heel, he lunged into another mock strike, this one intended for the unknown enemy he was determined to unmask--right before he would force that Breed male to swallow the same steel that killed his Rogue errand boy.
It was at that moment Gideon heard a soft stirring in the other room.
Savannah was out of bed. She drifted into the open doorway of the adjacent room where he stood, the long dagger gripped in his hand, his motion suspended in the stance of a man poised to kill.
“Savannah.”
She stared at him, her big brown eyes still drowsy, her beautiful, lithe body utterly naked. So stunning.
Gideon drank in the sight of her with a greedy gaze, his pulse kicking with swift, fierce arousal.
But she wasn’t looking at him the same way.
She seemed stricken somehow. Wooden with silent shock.
“Oh, my God,” she murmured after a moment. Her voice was small and breathless, though not from sleep or desire. She gaped at him in a mix of shock and hurt, her pretty face twisted with confusion. “Oh, my God...I knew you looked familiar. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before--”
“Savannah, what’s wrong?” He set the blade down on the fireplace mantel and headed toward her.
“No.” She shook her head, held out a hand as if to bar him from getting any closer. “I saw you before, Gideon. When I held the old sword, I saw the murder of those two little boys all those years ago...but I also saw you.”
His blood ran cold in the face of her fear. “Savannah--”
“I saw you, like this, with a blade in your hand--the way you looked just now,” she said, talking over him. “Except it wasn’t you. It couldn’t be you.”
He didn’t speak, couldn’t refute what she was saying. What she saw with her Breedmate’s gift.
“I mean, how could it be you, right?” she pressed, a raw edge to her words. “The man I saw should be a couple of centuries dead by now.”
“I can explain,” he offered lamely.
He stepped closer toward her, but she flinched away. She crossed her arms over herself as if she were naked in front of a stranger now. “You’re not human,” she murmured. “You can’t be.”
He cursed softly. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Savannah. If you would just hear me out now--”
“Oh, God.” She barked out a sharp laugh. “You’re not even going to try to deny it?”
He felt a tendon tick heavily in his jaw. “I wanted to explain everything to you, but not while you were upset. You said yourself tonight you weren’t ready to hear more.”
She staggered back a pace, shaking her head in mute denial. Her stare had gone distant, turning inward. He was losing her. She was pulling away from him as something to be mistrusted, feared. Maybe even reviled. “I have to get out of here,” she murmured flatly. “I have to go home. I have to call my sister. She was expecting me to be on the bus tonight, and I...”
She broke away then, turning to rush back into the bedroom. She made a frantic circuit of the room, started retrieving her clothing.
Gideon followed her. “Savannah, you can’t run away from this. You’re in too deep now. We both are.”
She didn’t respond. She grabbed her panties off the floor and hastily stepped into them, flashing the dark thatch of silk between her legs and giving him an intimate glimpse of her long, satiny thighs and creamy mocha skin.
Skin he’d tasted everywhere and longed to savor again.
Without speaking to him or looking at him, she searched for her bra. Her small breasts swayed with her movements as she shrugged into the little scrap of lace.
Arousal stirred inside Gideon, too powerful for him to hold back. He couldn’t curb his swift physical reaction to the sight of her, so pretty and disheveled from his lovemaking of a few hours ago. His glyphs started to churn to life on his skin. His gums tingled with the awakening of his fangs.
Hastily, she grabbed up her sweater and jeans, holding them to her as she rushed past him, head-down, out of the bedroom.
He followed swiftly, stalking behind her.
“Savannah, you can’t leave. I can’t let you go home now. It’s too late.” His voice was gravel, roughened by his rising desire and the fierce need to make her understand the full truth now.
He flashed over to where she stood, faster than she could possibly track him. He put his hand on her shoulder where the small scarlet teardrop-and-crescent-moon Breedmate mark stamped her flawless skin. “Damn it, stop shutting me out. Listen to me.”
She whirled around, her eyes wide. His own gaze felt hot in his skull, must have blazed back at her in that moment as bright as lit coals. By some miracle of deception and desperate will, he’d been able to conceal his transformation from her earlier tonight, but not now. Nor did he try.
“Oh, my God,” she moaned, fear bleeding into her voice. She struggled in his hold, turned her head askance on a strangled gasp of horror.
Gideon took her chin and gently guided her face back toward his. “Savannah, look at me. See me. Trust me. You said you did.”
Her eyes fell slowly to his open mouth and the tips of his fangs, which stretched longer every second. After a long moment, she looked back up into his fiery stare. “You’re one of them. You’re a monster, just like them. A Rogue--”
“No,” he denied firmly. “Not Rogue, Savannah. But I am Breed, like they are. Like they were, before they lost themselves to Bloodlust.”
“A vampire,” she clarified, maybe needing to say the word out loud. Her voice dropped to something less than a whisper. “Are you undead?”
“No.” He resisted the urge to laugh off the crude misconception as ridiculous, but only because she was so obviously horrified at the thought. “I’m not undead, Savannah. That’s where myth and reality differ the most when it comes to my kind. The Breed is otherworldly in origin. Big difference.”
She gaped at him now, studying him. He didn’t mind her blatant inspection, since the longer he stood still before her, the calmer she seemed to become. “You have nothing to fear from me,” he told her, speaking the words as a promise. A solemn vow. “You need never fear me, Savannah..”
She swallowed hard, her gaze flicking over every inch of his face, his mouth, his dermaglyph-covered chest and shoulders.
When she hesitantly lifted her hand then dropped it back to her side again, Gideon took her finger
s in a loose grasp and gently brought her palm to his mouth. He kissed its warm center, giving her none of his sharp edges, only the soft, warm heat of his mouth. Then he guided her hand to his chest, resting it over the heavy beat of his heart. “Feel me, Savannah. I’m flesh and blood and bone, just like you. And I will never harm you.”
She kept her hand there, even after he let go. “Tell me how any of this is possible,” she murmured. “How can any of this be real?”
Gideon smoothed his fingers along her cheek, then down along the pulse point of her carotid, that fluttered like a caged bird against the pad of his thumb. “Get dressed first,” he instructed her tenderly, more for his own good than hers. “Then sit down and we’ll talk.”
She glanced over at the lone wooden chair in the living room of Tegan’s desolate house. To Gideon’s relief, she looked back at him not in terror or revulsion, but with the arch wisdom and keen wit of a woman better than twice her young age. “Time for me to risk my own Seat Perilous?”
“I doubt there’s ever been anyone more worthy,” he replied.
And if he wasn’t already half in love with her, Gideon reckoned he fell a little harder in that moment.
CHAPTER 12
Gideon had paced in front of her the entire time he spoke.
Now that he had finished, he finally paused, watching her with an expectant, oddly endearing kind of silence as Savannah worked to absorb everything she’d just heard.
“Are you all right?” he asked carefully, when the weight of her new education rendered her speechless. “Still with me, Savannah?”
She nodded, trying to make all the pieces fit together in her mind.
The whole incredible history of his kind and where they came from, how they lived in secret alongside humans for thousands of years. And how Gideon and a small number of like-minded, courageous Breed males--modern-day, dark knights, from the sound of it--worked together as a unit right there in Boston to keep the city safe from the violence of Rogues.
It was all pretty mind-boggling.
But she believed him.
She trusted him at his word that the fantastical tale he’d just told her was the truth.
It was, whether she was prepared to accept it or not, her new reality.
A reality that seemed a little less terrifying having Gideon in it with her.
She glanced up at him. “Vampires from outer space, huh?”
He smiled wryly. “The Ancients were otherworlders, not little green men. Deadly predators unlike this planet has ever seen. The very top of the food chain.”
“Right. But their offspring--”
“The Breed.”
“The Breed,” she said, still testing everything out in her mind. “They’re part human?”
“Hybrid progeny of the Ancients and Breedmates, females like you,” he clarified.
Savannah reached up to her left shoulder blade, where a small birthmark declared her the other half of Gideon’s kind. She exhaled a soft laugh and shook her head. “Mama used to say it was a faerie’s kiss.”
Gideon stepped toward her where she sat on the old wooden chair. He gave a mild shrug. “Something made you and those others born with that mark different from other women. Who’s to say it wasn’t faeries?” His mouth curved in a tender, intimate smile. “It makes you very special, Savannah. Extraordinary. But you would be both those things and more, even without your mark.”
Their eyes met and held for a long moment. Savannah watched, mesmerized, as the fiery sparks in his bright blue irises glittered like stars. His pupils had thinned to slender, vertical slits--inhuman, like a cat’s eye. Maybe she should have been alarmed or repulsed; instead she was transfixed, astonished to see the change coming over him in so many intriguing, fantastical ways.
She reached out to him, invited him closer. He stepped between her knees and sank down on his haunches. His big body radiated a palpable heat. Where her knees and thighs touched him, she could feel the hard hammer of his pulse. Her own heartbeat seemed to answer it, falling into his rhythm as though they were one and the same being.
Savannah couldn’t resist touching him.
His bare chest, shoulders, and powerful, muscled arms were alive with a tangle of intricate arcs and swirls that covered him, just a shade darker than his golden skin.
Dermaglyphs, he’d explained, along with the rest of what he’d told her.
She traced one of the patterns over his firm pectoral with her fingertip and marveled at how its color deepened at her touch. She followed the graceful swell and dip of the glyph, watching it come to life and flood from tawny gold to dark jewel tones.
“They’re beautiful,” she said, and heard his low rumble of approval deep in his chest as she teased more color into other places on his velvety skin. He had fascinated her from the moment she first met him under the Abbey murals at the library. But she was curious about him in a new way now. She wanted to know him better, wanted to know everything about her lover who was something much more than a man. “I could play with your dermaglyphs all day,” she admitted, unable to hide her wonder and delight. “I love how the colors change to wine and indigo when I touch them.”
“Desire,” he rasped thickly. “That’s what those colors mean.”
She glanced up and saw a growing hunger in his handsome face, heard it in his low, rough-edged voice. “Your eyes,” she said, noticing how the sparks had multiplied, now more of an amber glow, slowly swamping the blue of his irises. “When we made love earlier, I felt the heat of your gaze. I saw there was a fire coming to life in your eyes. This kind of fire. You hid it from me.”
“I didn’t want to frighten you.” A flat, unabashed admission.
“I’m not afraid now, Gideon. I want to know.” She reached out to him, cupped his rigid jaw in her palm. “I want to understand.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then growled her name and covered her mouth in a long, slow kiss.
Savannah melted into him, swept up in the heat and pleasure of his lips on hers. She hungered for a deeper taste, testing the seam of his mouth with her tongue. He didn’t give way to her at first, groaning as if to refuse her.
She wouldn’t let him hide from her. Not now. Not again, not ever when they were together.
She scooted to the edge of the chair and wrapped her hands around the back of his head, spearing her fingers into the silk of his short hair. She traced her tongue along his mouth, insistent, pressing her body to his.
He gave up with a low curse and she pushed inside, thrilling to the feel of his hungered mouth. The sharp tips of his fangs scraped her tongue as she kissed him deeper. When she could hardly take it any longer, she drew back to look him full in the face.
There was little left to confuse him with a mortal man. His eyes were blazing, fangs enormous and razor-sharp. His dermaglyphs were livid with dark color, churning like living things on his skin.
He was magnificent.
And she felt no fear as she drank in his full transformation.
“Take me to bed, Gideon. Make love to me again, now, like this. I want to be with you just the way you are.”
With an otherworldly snarl of agreement, he swept her roughly off the seat and into his strong arms.
Then he rose and carried her into the bedroom as she’d commanded.
~ ~ ~
Gideon had never seen anything lovelier than the look of pleasure on Savannah’s face as she climbed toward orgasm, her dark eyes locked on his gaze while she rode him in an unrushed, but slowly increasing, tempo.
They’d left the bed sometime before morning had dawned outside the sealed-up townhouse. Now, they sat face to face in a tub of warm bathwater, Savannah straddling him, his cock buried deep inside her tight sheath, her breasts dancing in tantalizing motion in front of his thirsting eyes and hungry mouth. He couldn’t resist pulling one of the pert brown nipples between his teeth, rolling his tongue over the tight little peak and gently grazing the tip of his fangs along the supple curve of her fle
sh.
She drew in a sharp, shivery breath when he closed his mouth down on her a bit harder, just enough to remind her what he was and to torment himself with the want he felt to take things further with her--to make her his in every way.
Making love to her openly, without fear or concealment of his true nature, had been amazing. Mind-blowingly good. They had exhausted each other last night, sleeping for a short while in each other’s arms before waking more than once to kiss and caress and make love all over again.
Gideon knew he should have broken away at some point to report in to the compound, but he hadn’t been able to find the will to leave the bed he’d shared with Savannah. The way things were going this morning, he might never make it back. Savannah rocked on him, their eyes locked, her face aglow with the amber light of his pleasured gaze.
He stroked her face and throat as she moved on him in a deeper, faster rhythm. The bathwater lapped around them noisily, the sound of their lovemaking wet and erotic. She started to come then, soft moans slipping through her parted lips.
Gideon gripped her ass in a firmer hold and moved his pelvis in time with her undulations. His cock felt like hot steel inside the tight clutch of her body, pressure building to a fever pitch at the base of his spine. His fangs filled his mouth. His gums throbbed with the urge to taste the graceful column of Savannah’s neck as she threw her head back and cried out with her climax.
Gideon followed her over the edge a moment later, his orgasm racking him in a full-body heave and a coarse shout of release. He shuddered inside her, wave after wave of scalding heat shooting out of him. He swore her name, prayer or curse, he didn’t know.
She smiled as he filled her, her dark eyes drinking him in, even though he knew he must look savage and unearthly. She didn’t shrink away. Not his Savannah, not now.
She slumped against him, limp and satiated. Gideon held her close, smoothing his hands along her back. Her breath was warm against the side of his neck, her lips soft and moist on the pulse point where she rested, making his carotid jump and pound in response.