by Lara Adrian
Jamie had generously stayed over the past two nights, just to make sure Gabrielle was all right. He was worried about her, as protective as a big brother she never had. When he left that morning, he had offered to come by again, but Gabrielle had insisted she would be fine by herself. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoyance that she might not have any alone time tonight, either.
“Be right there,” she called from inside the apartment’s foyer.
Habit made her check the peephole, but instead of seeing Jamie’s blond sweep of hair, Gabrielle found the dark head and striking features of an unfamiliar man waiting on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the sidewalk just off her front steps. The soft yellow glow wrapped itself around the man like a golden cloak draped over night itself. There was something ominous, yet compelling, about his pale gray eyes, which were staring straight into the narrow cylinder of glass as if he could see her on the other side, too.
She opened the door, but thought it best not to remove the chain lock. The man stepped in front of the wedge of open space and glanced at the tight chain length that stretched taut between them. When his eyes met Gabrielle’s again, he gave her a vague smile, as if he thought it amusing she would expect to bar him so easily if he truly wanted in.
“Miss Maxwell?” His voice stroked her senses like rich, dark velvet.
“Yes?”
“My name is Lucan Thorne.” The words rolled past his lips in a smooth, measured timbre that eased some of her anxiety at once. When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “I understand you had some difficulty a couple of nights ago at the police station. I wanted to come by and make sure you were all right.”
She nodded.
Evidently the police hadn’t completely blown her off after all. Since it had been a couple of days with no word from them, Gabrielle had not expected to see anyone from the department, despite the promise to send a patrol out to look in on her. Not that she could be certain this guy, with his sleekly styled black hair and chiseled features, was a cop.
He looked grim enough, she supposed, and apart from his dark, dangerous good looks, he didn’t seem intent on causing her any harm. Still, after what she’d been through, Gabrielle thought it wise to err on the side of caution.
“Have you got ID?”
“Of course.”
With deliberate, almost sensual movements, he opened a thin leather billfold and held it up to the crack of space at the door. It was nearly dark outside, which was likely why it took a second for Gabrielle’s eyes to focus on the shiny policeman’s badge and the picture identification card next to it, bearing his name.
“Okay. Come in, Detective.”
She freed the chain lock, then opened the door and let him enter, watching as his broad shoulders filled the doorway. His presence seemed to fill the entire foyer, in fact. He was a large man, tall and thickly hewn beneath the drape of his black overcoat, his dark clothes and silky jet hair absorbed the soft light of the pendant lamp overhead. He had a confident, almost regal bearing about him, his expression gravely serious, as if he would be better suited to commanding a legion of armored knights than schlepping out to Beacon Hill to handhold a hallucinatory female.
“I didn’t think anyone was going to come. After the reception I got down at the station this weekend, I figured Boston’s finest had written me off as a nutcase.”
He didn’t acknowledge or deny it, merely strode into her living room in silence and let his gaze roam freely over the place. He paused at her worktable, where the roughs of some of her latest images had been arranged. Gabrielle trailed after him across the room, casually watching for his reaction to her work. One dark brow quirked as he perused the photographs.
“Yours?” he asked, turning his pale, piercing eyes on her.
“Yes,” Gabrielle replied. “They’re part of a collection I’m calling Urban Renewal.”
“Interesting.”
He looked back to the array of images and Gabrielle felt herself frown slightly at his careful, yet indifferent response. “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 silence.
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 impress this guy?
Detective Thorne didn’t seem overly impressed. Saying nothing, he reached out, and with fingers entirely too elegant for his profession, gently rearranged two of the images 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 skull … 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 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 remained 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 confirmation. “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.”
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 suspicion 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 together 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 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 collar 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 interesting 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 peculiar 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, letting her relay it all uninterrupted. Under the cool acceptance 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 eyes of his boring into her. In that instant, a word skated through Gabrielle’s head—incredible, laughable, terrifyingly 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 witnessed 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 moment, but it sped her pulse and made the room feel sapped of all its air. He was still looking at her, waiting, as if expecting her to comply at once with his request to speak his name.
“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 surprise. 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 apartment, 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.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, stunned at the revelation.
In just a few moments, this man had defined her work as no one ever had before. Not even she had seen the obvious 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 perfume. 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, which lurched into an erratic beat as the dark head lingered 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 startled 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 detective’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 unlocked. 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 surprised, 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.
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 unreadable, but damning just the same. He needed to secure the images, before she had a chance to show them to anyone 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 shotgun around the city with Dante, Rio, Conlan, and the others as they hunted down more of their diseased brethren. And so he would be, once he finished this last bit of business with lovely Gabrielle Maxwell.
Lucan slipped inside the old brick building on Willow Street and closed the door behind him. Gabrielle’s tantalizing 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.