He looked back to the array of images and Gabrielle
felt herself frown slightly at his careful, yet indifferent re-
sponse. “They’re just something I’m playing around with
right now—nothing I’m ready to exhibit yet.”
He grunted, still considering the photographs in si-
lence.
Gabrielle moved closer, trying to get a better handle on
his reaction, or lack thereof. “I do a lot of commissioned
work around the city. In fact, I’ll probably be taking some
pictures of the governor’s place on the Vineyard later this
month.”
Shut up, she admonished herself. Why was she trying to im-
press this guy?
Detective Thorne didn’t seem overly impressed. Saying
nothing, he reached out, and with fingers entirely too ele-
gant for his profession, gently rearranged two of the im-
ages on the table. Inexplicably, Gabrielle found herself
imagining those long, deft fingers touching her bare skin,
splaying into her hair, cupping the back of her skul . . .
guiding her head back until it rested on his strong arm and
his cool gray eyes drank her in.
“So,” she said, snapping herself back to reality. “I’ll bet
you’d rather have a look at the pictures I took outside the
club Saturday night.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she walked to the
kitchen and grabbed her cell phone off the counter. She
flipped it open, brought up an image, and held the device
out to Detective Thorne.
“That’s the first shot I took. My hands were shaking, so
it’s a little blurry. And the light from the flash washed out a
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lot of the detail. But if you look closely, you’ll see six dark
shapes huddled low to the ground. That’s them—the
killers. Their victim is that lump they’re tearing at in front
of them. They were . . . biting him. Like animals.”
Thorne’s eyes held fast to the image; his expression re-
mained grim, unchanging. Gabrielle clicked to the next
photograph.
“The flash startled them. I don’t know—I think it
might have blinded them or something. When I clicked
these next few shots, some of them stopped to look at me. I
can’t really make out features, but that’s the face of one of
them. Those weird slits of light are the reflection of his
eyes.” She shuddered, recalling the yellow glow of vicious,
inhuman eyes. “He was looking right at me.”
More silence from the detective. He took the cell phone
from Gabrielle’s fingers and clicked through the remaining
pictures.
“What do you think?” she asked, hoping for confirma-
tion. “You can see it, too, can’t you?”
“I see . . . something, yes.”
“Thank God. Your buddies at the precinct tried to
make me think I was crazy, or that I was some drugged-out
loser who didn’t know what I was talking about. Not even
my friends believed me when I told them what I saw that
night.”
“Your friends,” he said with careful deliberation. “Do
you mean someone other than the man you were with at
the station—your lover?”
“My lover?” She laughed at that. “Jamie is not my
lover.”
Thorne looked up from the cell phone’s image display
to meet her gaze. “He spent the past two nights with you
alone, here in this apartment.”
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How did he know that? Gabrielle felt a jolt of outrage at
the prospect of being spied on by anyone, including the
police, who probably would have done so more out of sus-
picion than as a means of protecting her. But as she stood
beside Detective Lucan Thorne in her living room, some
of that anger seeped out of her, replaced by a feeling of
calm acceptance. Of subtle, languid cooperation. Strange,
she thought, but found herself fairly unfazed by the idea.
“Jamie stayed with me for a couple of nights because
he was concerned about me after what happened this
weekend. He’s my friend, that’s all.”
Good.
Thorne’s mouth didn’t move, but Gabrielle felt certain
she had heard his reply. His unspoken voice, his pleasure at
her denial of a lover, seemed to echo from somewhere
deep inside of her. Wishful thinking, maybe. It had been a
long time since she’d had anything close to a boyfriend,
and merely being in the presence of Lucan Thorne was
doing strange things to her head. Or rather, her body.
As he stared at her, Gabrielle felt a pleasant knot of
warmth begin to pool in her belly. His gaze penetrated like
heat itself, physical and intimate. A picture suddenly
formed in her mind: she and him, naked and writhing to-
gether in the moonlit dark of her bedroom. An instant
blast of heat flooded her. She could feel his hard muscles
beneath her fingertips, his firm body moving over her . . .
his thick shaft filling her, stretching her, exploding deep
within her.
Oh, yes, she thought, practically squirming where she
stood. Jamie was right. She really had been celibate for too long.
Thorne blinked slowly, his thick black lashes shuttering
stormy silver eyes. Like a cool breeze skating over flushed
bare skin, Gabrielle felt some of the tightness in her limbs
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dissipate. Her heart was still pounding; the room still
seemed oddly warm.
He turned his head away from her, and her eyes were
drawn to the base of his scalp, where his hair met the col-
lar of his tailored shirt. He had a tattoo on his neck—at
least, she thought it was a tattoo. Intricate swirls and
geometric-looking symbols rendered in ink just a few
shades darker than his skin came up the back of his neck
and around the side, disappearing beneath the thick
growth of his dark hair. She wondered what the rest of it
looked like, and if there was some special meaning to the
beautiful pattern.
She had an almost irrepressible urge to trace the inter-
esting markings with her fingertip. Maybe her tongue.
“Tell me what you told your friends about the attack
you witnessed at the club.”
She swallowed on a dry throat, shaking her head to
bring herself back to the conversation. “Yes. Right.”
God, what was wrong with her? Gabrielle dismissed the pe-
culiar race of her pulse and focused on the events of the
other night. She recounted the story for the detective, as
she had for the other officers, and, later, her friends. She
told him every horrific detail, and he listened carefully, let-
ting her relay it all uninterrupted.
Under the cool accep-
tance of his gaze, Gabrielle’s memory of the slaying
seemed more precise now, as if the lens of her recollection
had been sharpened, the details magnified.
When she finished, she found Thorne clicking through
the pictures on her cell phone once more. The line of his
mouth had gone from grim to grave.
“What exactly do you think these images show, Miss
Maxwell?”
She glanced up and met his look, those wise, piercing
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eyes of his boring into her. In that instant, a word skated
through Gabrielle’s head—incredible, laughable, terrify-
ingly clear.
Vampire.
“I don’t know,” she said lamely, speaking over the rising
whisper in her head. “I mean, I’m not sure what to think.”
If the detective didn’t suspect she was nuts yet, he
would if she blurted out the word that was now swimming
through her mind, chilling her to the bone. It was the only
explanation she had for the gruesome slaying she wit-
nessed that night.
Vampires?
Christ Jesus. She really was crazy.
“I’ll need to take this device, Miss Maxwell.”
“Gabrielle,” she offered. Her smile felt awkward. “Do
you think forensics, or whoever does that sort of thing, will
be able to clean up the images?”
He gave her a slight incline of his head, not quite a
nod, then pocketed her cell phone. “I will return it to you
tomorrow evening. You will be home?”
“Sure.” How was it he could make a simple question sound more
like an order? “I appreciate you coming by, Detective
Thorne. It’s been a rough few days.”
“Lucan,” he said, studying her for a moment. “Call me
Lucan.”
Heat seemed to reach out to her from his eyes, along
with a stoic understanding, as if this man had seen more
horrors than she could ever comprehend. She could not
name the emotion that passed through her in that mo-
ment, but it sped her pulse and made the room feel sapped
of all its air. He was still looking at her, waiting, as if ex-
pecting her to comply at once with his request to speak his
name.
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“All right . . . Lucan.”
“Gabrielle,” he replied, and the sound of her name on
his lips sent a quiver of awareness shooting through her
veins.
Something on the wall behind her caught his attention.
He glanced to where one of Gabrielle’s most acclaimed
photographs hung. His mouth pursed slightly, a sensual
quirk of his lips that hinted at amusement, perhaps sur-
prise. Gabrielle pivoted to look at the image of an inner
city park that was frozen and desolate beneath a blanket of
thick December snow.
“You don’t like my work,” she guessed.
He mildly shook his dark head. “I find it . . . intriguing.”
She was curious now. “How so?”
“You find beauty in the most unlikely of places,” he
said after a long moment, his attention focused now on her.
“Your pictures are full of passion. . . .”
“But?”
To her bewilderment, he reached out, stroked a finger
along the line of her jaw. “There are no people in them,
Gabrielle.”
“Of course there . . .”
She started to blurt out a denial, but before the words
reached her tongue, she realized that he was right. Her
gaze lit on each framed photograph she kept in her apart-
ment, her memory touching on all the others that hung in
galleries and museums and private collections around the
city.
He was right. The images, no matter their subjects
were all empty places, lonely places.
Not one of them contained a single face or even a
shadow of human life.
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“Oh, my God,” she whispered, stunned at the reve-
lation.
In just a few moments, this man had defined her work
as no one ever had before. Not even she had seen the obvi-
ous truth in her art, but Lucan Thorne had inexplicably
opened her eyes. It was as if he had peered into her very
soul.
“I must go now,” he said, already making his way to the
door.
Gabrielle followed him, wishing he would stay longer.
Maybe he would come back later. She nearly asked him to,
but forced herself into maintaining at least a modicum of
cool control. Thorne was halfway out the door when he
abruptly paused on the threshold. He turned toward her,
too close in the cramped space of the foyer. His large body
crowded her, but Gabrielle didn’t mind. She didn’t so
much as breathe.
“Is something wrong?”
His fine nostrils flared almost imperceptibly. “What
kind of perfume are you wearing?”
The question flustered her. It was so unexpected, so
personal. She felt heat rise to her cheeks, though why she
should be embarrassed she had no idea. “I don’t wear per-
fume. I can’t. I’m allergic.”
“Really.”
His mouth curved into a harsh smile, as if his teeth had
suddenly become too full for his mouth. He leaned toward
her, slowly bending his head down until it was hovering at
her neck. Gabrielle heard the soft rasp of his breath—felt
it caress her skin in coolness then in warmth—as he drew
her scent into his lungs and released it through his lips.
Heat seared her throat, and she could have sworn she felt
the swift pressure of his mouth brushing over her pulse,
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which lurched into an erratic beat as the dark head lin-
gered so intimately close to her. She heard a low growl
rumble near her ear, something very near a curse.
Thorne came away at once, and did not meet her star-
tled gaze. He didn’t offer any excuse or apology for his
strange behavior, either.
“You smell like jasmine,” was all he said.
And then, without looking at her, he stepped out the
door and strode into the darkened street outside.
It was wrong to pursue the woman.
Lucan knew this, even as he had waited on Gabrielle
Maxwell’s apartment steps that evening, showing her a de-
tective’s badge and photo ID card. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t
real, in fact, only a hypnotic manipulation that made her
human mind believe he was who he had presented himself
to be.
A simple trick for elders of his kind, like himself, but
one he seldom stooped to use.
Yet now, here he was again, some time past midnight,
stretching his slim personal code of honor even thinner
as he tried the latch on her front door and found it un-
locked. He knew it would be; he’d given her the suggestion
while he had talked with her that evening, when he had
shown her what he wanted to do with her and read the sur-
prised, but receptive, response in her soft brown eyes.
He could have taken her then. She would have Hosted
him willingly, he was certain, and knowing the intense
pleasure they would have shared in the process had nearly
been his undoing. But Lucan’s first duty was to his Breed
and the warriors who had banded together with him to
combat the growing problem of the Rogues.
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Bad enough that Gabrielle had witnessed the nightclub
slaying and reported it to the police and her friends before
her memory of the event could be erased, but she had also
managed to take pictures. They were grainy, almost un-
readable, but damning just the same. He needed to secure
the images, before she had a chance to show them to any-
one else. He’d made good on that, at least. By rights, he
should be back at the tech lab with Gideon, IDing the
Rogue who had escaped outside La Notte, or riding shot-
gun around the city with Dante, Rio, Conlan, and the oth-
ers as they hunted down more of their diseased brethren.
And so he would be, once he finished this last bit of busi-
ness with lovely Gabrielle Maxwell.
Lucan slipped inside the old brick building on Willow
Street and closed the door behind him. Gabrielle’s tanta-
lizing scent filled his nostrils, leading him to her now as it
had the night outside the club and at the police station
downtown. He silently navigated her apartment, through
the main level and up the stairs to her bedroom loft.
Skylights in the vaulted ceiling summoned the moon’s pale
glow, which played softly over Gabrielle’s graceful curves.
She slept nude, as though awaiting his arrival, her long legs
wrapped in twisted sheets, her hair spread out around her
head on the pillow in luxurious waves of burnt gold.
Her scent enveloped him, sweet and sultry, making his
teeth ache.
Jasmine, he thought, curling back his lips in a smile of
wry appreciation. An exotic flower that opens its fragrant
petals only under the coaxing of night.
Open for me now, Gabrielle.
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